certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led him to Norway in quest of this fervent soul? The instincts of genius are unfathomable; but he who has known the white northern women with their pure spiritual eyes, will aver that instinct led him aright. I have known one, one whom I used to call Seraphita; Coppee knew her too, and that exquisite volume, “L’Exile,” so Seraphita-like in the keen blond passion of its verse, was written to her, and each poem was sent to her as it was written. Where is she now, that flower of northern snow, once seen for a season in Paris? Has she returned to her native northern solitudes, great gulfs of sea water, mountain rock, and pine?
Balzac’s genius is in his titles as heaven is in its stars: “Melmoth Reconcilie,” “Jesus-Christ en Flandres,” “Le Revers d’un Grand Homme,” “La Cousine Bette.” I read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was the greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pascal. Of Pascal’s claim to be a great thinker I confess I cannot judge. No man is greater than the age he lives in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the legitimate children of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the existence of God strikes us in just the same light as the logical proof of the existence of Jupiter Ammon. “Les Pensees” could appear to me only as infinitely childish; the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and sterile to one of such modern and exotic taste as myself. Still, I accept thankfully, in its sense of two hundred years, the compliment paid to Balzac; but I would add that personally he seems to me to have shown greater wings of mind than any artist that ever lived. I am aware that this last statement will make many cry “fool” and hiss “Shakespeare!” But I am not putting forward these criticisms axiomatically, but only as the expressions of an individual taste, and interesting so far as they reveal to the reader the different developments and the progress of my mind. It might prove a little tiresome, but it would no doubt “look well,” in the sense that going to church “looks well,” if I were to write in here ten pages of praise of our national bard. I must, however, resist the temptation to “look well;” a confession is interesting in proportion to the amount of truth it contains, and I will, therefore, state frankly I never derived any profit whatsoever, and very little pleasure from the reading of the great plays. The beauty of the verse! Yes; he who loved Shelley so well as I could not fail to hear the melody of–
“Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.”
Is not such music as this enough? Of course but I am a sensualist in literature. I may see perfectly well that this or that book is a work of genius, but if it doesn’t “fetch me,” it doesn’t concern me, and I forget its very existence. What leaves me cold to-day will madden me to-morrow. With me literature is a question of sense, intellectual sense if you will, but sense all the same, and ruled by the same caprices–those of the flesh? Now we enter on very subtle distinctions. No doubt that there is the brain-judgment and the sense-judgment of a work of art. And it will be noticed that these two forces of discrimination exist sometimes almost independently of each other, in rare and radiant instances confounded and blended in one immense and unique love. Who has not been, unless perhaps some dusty old pedant, thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action of a book that penetrates to and speaks to you of your most present and most intimate emotions. This is of course pure sensualism; but to take a less marked stage. Why should Marlowe enchant me? why should he delight and awake enthusiasm in me, while Shakespeare leaves me cold? The mind that can understand one can understand the other, but there are affinities in literature corresponding to, and very analogous to, sexual affinities–the same unreasoned attractions, the same pleasures, the same lassitudes. Those we have loved most we are most indifferent to. Shelley, Gautier, Zola, Flaubert, Goncourt! how I have loved you all; and now I could not, would not, read you again. How womanly, how capricious; but even a capricious woman is constant, if not faithful to her _amant de coeur_. And so with me; of those I have loved deeply there is but one that still may thrill me with the old passion, with the first ecstacy–it is Balzac. Upon that rock I built my church, and his great and valid talent saved me often from destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new aestheticisms, the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and sickly surf of the symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit and not the flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and sublimity of Balzac’s thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest heights, and his range is limitless; there is no passion he has not touched, and what is more marvellous, he has given to each in art a place equivalent to the place it occupies in nature; his intense and penetrating sympathy for human life and all that concerns it enabled him to surround the humblest subjects with awe and crown them with the light of tragedy. There are some, particularly those who are capable of understanding neither and can read but one, who will object to any comparison being drawn between the Dramatist and the Novelist; but I confess that I–if the inherent superiority of verse over prose, which I admit unhesitatingly, be waived–that I fail, utterly fail to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the poet’s thought is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be greater than the novelist’s. On these points we will cry quits, and come at once to the vital question–the creation. Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet? Is Eugenie Grandet inferior to Desdemona? Is her father inferior to Shylock? Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin? Can it be said that the apothecary in the “Cousine Bette,” or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine Bette herself is inferior to anything the brain of man has ever conceived? And it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist seems to me richer than that of the dramatist. Who shall forget those terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house? Speaking of Vautrin she says, “His look frightens me as if he put his hand on my dress;” and another epigram from the same book, “Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.” Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes more incisively to the truth of things. One more; here I can give the exact words: “_La gloire est le soleil des morts._” It would be easy to compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all “Maximes” and “Pensees,” even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and shallow.
Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the “Comedie Humaine.” I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any important or lasting impression upon my mind. The rest was like walnuts and wine, an agreeable aftertaste.
But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship of any kind; for save life I could never learn anything correctly. I am a student only of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude,–study as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the composition of my unfortunate “Roses of Midnight.”
Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces! conversation, oh the magic of it! It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can carry. Two old ladies discussing the peerage? Much may be learned, it is gold; poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into jewels, and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the diamond and the glow of the ruby.
I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to the “Nouvelle Athenes.” What is the “Nouvelle Athenes”? He who would know anything of my life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. Not the official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the _cafe_. The “Nouvelle Athenes” is a _cafe_ on the Place Pigale. Ah! the morning idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer illusion, the grey moonlights on the Place where we used to stand on the pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to separate, thinking of what we had left said, and how much better we might have enforced our arguments. Dead and scattered are all those who used to assemble there, and those years and our home, for it was our home, live only in a few pictures and a few pages of prose. The same old story, the vanquished only are victorious; and though unacknowledged, though unknown, the influence of the “Nouvelle Athenes” is inveterate in the artistic thought of the nineteenth century.
How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth. With what strange, almost unnatural clearness do I see and hear,–see the white face of that _cafe_, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of those two streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass-door of the _cafe_ grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o’clock the fragrant odour of absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer. A partition, rising a few feet or more over the hats, separates the glass front from the main body of the _cafe_. The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticised till two o’clock in the morning. But who is that man? he whose prominent eyes flash with excitement. That is Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The last or the supposed last of the great family. He is telling that girl a story–that fair girl with heavy eyelids, stupid and sensual. She is, however, genuinely astonished and interested, and he is striving to play upon her ignorance. Listen to him. “Spain–the night is fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the orange trees, you know–a midnight of stars and dreams. Now and then the silence is broken by the sentries challenging–that is all. But not in Spanish but in French are the challenges given; the town is in the hands of the French; it is under martial law. But now an officer passes down a certain garden, a Spaniard disguised as a French officer; from the balcony the family–one of the most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a thousand years, long before the conquest of the Moors–watches him. Well then”–Villiers sweeps with a white feminine hand the long hair that is falling over his face–he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in the opening of the story, and he is striving in English to “scamp,” in French to _escamoter_. “The family are watching, death if he is caught, if he fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague sound attracts the sentry, he turns; all is lost. The Spaniard is seized. Martial law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French general is a man of iron.” (Villiers laughs, a short hesitating laugh that is characteristic of him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain way), “man of iron; not only he declares that the spy must be beheaded, but also the entire family–a man of iron that, ha, ha; and then, no you cannot, it is impossible for you to understand the enormity of the calamity–a thousand years before the conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard alone could–there is no one here, ha, ha, I was forgetting–the utter extinction of a great family of the name, the oldest and noblest of all the families in Spain, it is not easy to understand that, no, not easy here in the ‘Nouvelle Athenes’–ha, ha, one must belong to a great family to understand, ha, ha.
“The father beseeches; he begs that one member may be spared to continue the name–the youngest son–that is all; if he could be saved, the rest what matter; death is nothing to a Spaniard; the family, the name, a thousand years of name is everything. The general is, you know, a ‘man of iron.’ ‘Yes, one member of your family shall be respited, but on one condition.’ To the agonised family conditions are as nothing. But they don’t know the man of iron is determined to make a terrible example, and they cry, ‘Any conditions.’ ‘He who is respited must serve as executioner to the others.’ Great is the doom; you understand; but after all the name must be saved. Then in the family council the father goes to his youngest son and says, ‘I have been a good father to you, my son; I have always been a kind father, have I not? answer me; I have never refused you anything. Now you will not fail us, you will prove yourself worthy of the great name you bear. Remember your great ancestor who defeated the Moors, remember.'” (Villiers strives to get in a little local colour, but his knowledge of Spanish names and history is limited, and he in a certain sense fails.) “Then the mother comes to her son and says, ‘My son, I have been a good mother, I have always loved you; say you will not desert us in this hour of our great need.’ Then the little sister comes, and the whole family kneels down and appeals to the horror-stricken boy….
“‘He will not prove himself unworthy of our name,’ cries the father. ‘Now, my son, courage, take the axe firmly, do what I ask you, courage, strike straight.’ The father’s head falls into the sawdust, the blood all over the white beard; then comes the elder brother, and then another brother; and then, oh, the little sister was almost more than he could bear, and the mother had to whisper, ‘Remember your promise to your father, to your dead father.’ The mother laid her head on the block, but he could not strike. ‘Be not the first coward of our name, strike; remember your promise to us all,’ and her head was struck off.”
“And the son,” the girl asks, “what became of him?”
“He never was seen, save at night, walking, a solitary man, beneath the walls of his castle in Granada.”
“And whom did he marry?”
“He never married.”
Then after a long silence some one said,–
“Whose story is that?”
“Balzac’s.”
At that moment the glass door of the _cafe_ grated upon the sanded floor, and Manet entered. Although by birth and by art essentially Parisian, there was something in his appearance and manner of speaking that often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it was his dress–his clean-cut clothes and figure. That figure! those square shoulders that swaggered as he went across a room and the thin waist; and that face, the beard and nose, satyr-like shall I say? No, for I would evoke an idea of beauty of line united to that of intellectual expression–frank words, frank passion in his convictions, loyal and simple phrases, clear as well-water, sometimes a little hard, sometimes, as they flowed away, bitter, but at the fountain head sweet and full of light. He sits next to Degas, that round-shouldered man in suit of pepper and salt. There is nothing very trenchantly French about him either, except the large necktie; his eyes are small and his words are sharp, ironical, cynical. These two men are the leaders of the impressionist school. Their friendship has been jarred by inevitable rivalry. “Degas was painting ‘Semiramis’ when I was painting ‘Modern Paris,'” says Manet. “Manet is in despair because he cannot paint atrocious pictures like Durant, and be feted and decorated; he is an artist, not by inclination, but by force. He is as a galley slave chained to the oar,” says Degas. Different too are their methods of work. Manet paints his whole picture from nature, trusting his instinct to lead him aright through the devious labyrinth of selection. Nor does his instinct ever fail him, there is a vision in his eyes which he calls nature, and which he paints unconsciously as he digests his food, thinking and declaring vehemently that the artist should not seek a synthesis, but should paint merely what he sees. This extraordinary oneness of nature and artistic vision does not exist in Degas, and even his portraits are composed from drawings and notes. About midnight Catulle Mendes will drop in, when he has corrected his proofs. He will come with his fine paradoxes and his strained eloquence. He will lean towards you, he will take you by the arm, and his presence is a nervous pleasure. And when the _cafe_ is closed, when the last bock has been drunk, we shall walk about the great moonlight of the Place Pigale, and through the dark shadows of the streets, talking of the last book published, he hanging on to my arm, speaking in that high febrile voice of his, every phrase luminous, aerial, even as the soaring moon and the fitful clouds. Duranty, an unknown Stendal, will come in for an hour or so; he will talk little and go away quietly; he knows, and his whole manner shows that he knows that he is a defeated man; and if you ask him why he does not write another novel, he will say, “What’s the good, it would not be read; no one read the others, and I mightn’t do even as well if I tried again.” Paul Alexis, Leon Diex, Pissarro, Cabaner, are also frequently seen in the “Nouvelle Athenes.”
Cabaner! the world knows not the names of those who scorn the world: somewhere in one of the great populous churchyards of Paris there is a forgotten grave, and there lies Cabaner. Cabaner! since the beginning there have been, till the end of time there shall be Cabaners; and they shall live miserably and they shall die miserable, and shall be forgotten; and there shall never arise a novelist great enough to make live in art that eternal spirit of devotion, disinterestedness, and aspiration, which in each generation incarnates itself in one heroic soul. Better than those who stepped to opulence and fame upon thee fallen thou wert; better, loftier-minded, purer; thy destiny was to fall that others might rise upon thee, thou wert one of the noble legion of the conquered; let praise be given to the conquered, for the brunt of victory lies with the conquered. Child of the pavement, of strange sonnets and stranger music, I remember thee; I remember the silk shirts, the four sous of Italian cheese, the roll of bread, and the glass of milk;–the streets were thy dining-room. And the five-mile walk daily to the suburban music hall where five francs were earned by playing the accompaniments of comic songs. And the wonderful room on the fifth floor, which was furnished when that celebrated heritage of two thousand francs was paid. I remember the fountain that was bought for a wardrobe, and the American organ with all the instruments of the orchestra, and the plaster casts under which the homeless ones that were never denied a refuge and a crust by thee slept. I remember all, and the buying of the life-size “Venus de Milo.” Something extraordinary would be done with it, I knew, but the result exceeded my wildest expectation. The head must needs be struck off, so that the rapture of thy admiration should be secure from all jarring reminiscence of the streets.
Then the wonderful story of the tenor, the pork butcher, who was heard giving out such a volume of sound that the sausages were set in motion above him; he was fed, clothed, and educated on the five francs a day earned in the music hall in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet; and when he made his _debut_ at the Theatre Lyrique, thou wert in the last stage of consumption and too ill to go to hear thy pupil’s success. He was immediately engaged by Mapleson and taken to America.
I remember thy face, Cabaner; I can see it now–that long sallow face ending in a brown beard, and the hollow eyes, the meagre arms covered with a silk shirt, contrasting strangely with the rest of the dress. In all thy privation and poverty, thou didst never forego thy silk shirt. I remember the paradoxes and the aphorisms, if not the exact words, the glamour and the sentiment of a humour that was all thy own. Never didst thou laugh; no, not even when in discussing how silence might be rendered in music, thou didst say, with thy extraordinary Pyrenean accent, “_Pour rendre le silence en music il me faudrait trois orchestres militaires._” And when I did show thee some poor verses of mine, French verses, for at this time I hated and had partly forgotten my native language–
“My dear Dayne, you always write about love, the subject is nauseating.”
“So it is, so it is; but after all Baudelaire wrote about love and lovers; his best poem….”
“_C’est vrai, mais il s’agissait d’une charogne et cela releve beaucoup la chose._”
I remember, too, a few stray snatches of thy extraordinary music, “music that might be considered by Wagner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not fail to understand;” also thy settings of sonnets where the _melody_ was continued uninterruptedly from the first line to the last; and that still more marvellous feat, thy setting, likewise with unbroken melody, of Villon’s ballade “Les Dames du Temps Jadis;” and that Out-Cabanering of Cabaner, the putting to music of Cros’s “Hareng Saur.”
And why didst thou remain ever poor and unknown? Because of something too much, or something too little? Because of something too much! so I think, at least; thy heart was too full of too pure an ideal, too far removed from all possible contagion with the base crowd.
But, Cabaner, thou didst not labour in vain; thy destiny, though obscure, was a valiant and fruitful one; and, as in life, thou didst live for others so now in death thou dost live in others. Thou wert in an hour of wonder and strange splendour when the last tints and lovelinesses of romance lingered in the deepening west; when out of the clear east rose with a mighty effulgence of colour and lawless light Realism; when showing aloft in the dead pallor of the zenith, like a white flag fluttering faintly, Symbolists and Decadents appeared. Never before was there so sudden a flux and conflux of artistic desire, such aspiration in the soul of man, such rage of passion, such fainting fever, such cerebral erethism. The roar and dust of the daily battle of the Realists was continued under the flush of the sunset, the arms of the Romantics glittered, the pale spiritual Symbolists watched and waited, none knowing yet of their presence. In such an hour of artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wert, and thou wert a magnificent rallying point for all comers; it was thou who didst theorise our confused aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from all base commercialism, from all hateful prostitution; thou wert ever our high priest, and from thy high altar turned to us the white host, the ideal, the true and living God of all men.
Cabaner, I see you now entering the “Nouvelle Athenes;” you are a little tired after your long weary walk, but you lament not and you never cry out against the public that will accept neither your music nor your poetry. But though you are tired and footsore, you are ready to aestheticise till the _cafe_ closes; for you the homeless ones are waiting: there they are, some three or four, and you will take them to your strange room, furnished with the American organ, the fountain, and the decapitated Venus, and you give them a crust each and cover them with what clothes you have; and, when clothes are lacking, with plaster casts, and though you will take but a glass of milk yourself, you will find a few sous to give them _lager_ to cool their thirsty throats. So you have ever lived–a blameless life is yours, no base thought has ever entered there, not even a woman’s love; art and friends, that is all.
Reader, do you know of anything more angelic? If you do you are more fortunate than I have been.
CHAPTER VII
THE SYNTHESIS OF THE NOUVELLE ATHENES
Two dominant notes in my character–an original hatred of my native country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in. All the aspects of my native country are violently disagreeable to me, and I cannot think of the place I was born in without a sensation akin to nausea. These feelings are inherent and inveterate in me. I am instinctively averse to my own countrymen; they are at once remote and repulsive; but with Frenchmen I am conscious of a sense of nearness; I am one with them in their ideas and aspirations, and when I am with them, I am alive with a keen and penetrating sense of intimacy. Shall I explain this by atavism? Was there a French man or woman in my family some half dozen generations ago? I have not inquired. The English I love, and with a love that is foolish–mad, limitless; I love them better than the French, but I am not so near to them. Dear, sweet Protestant England, the red tiles of the farmhouse, the elms, the great hedgerows, and all the rich fields adorned with spreading trees, and the weald and the wold, the very words are passionately beautiful … southern England, not the north–there is something Celtic in the north,–southern England, with its quiet, steadfast faces;–a smock frock is to me one of the most delightful things in the world; it is so absolutely English. The villages clustered round the greens, the spires of the churches pointing between the elm trees…. This is congenial to me; and this is Protestantism. England is Protestantism, Protestantism is England. Protestantism is strong, clean, and westernly, Catholicism is eunuch-like, dirty, and Oriental…. Yes, Oriental; there is something even Chinese about it. What made England great was Protestantism, and when she ceases to be Protestant she will fall…. Look at the nations that have clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incense silence of the Vatican. Let us be Protestant, and revere Cromwell.
* * * * *
_Garcon, un bock!_ I write to please myself, just as I order my dinner; if my books sell I cannot help it–it is an accident.
But you live by writing.
Yes, but life is only an accident–art is eternal.
* * * * *
What I reproach Zola with is that he has no style; there is nothing you won’t find in Zola from Chateaubriand to the reporting in the _Figaro_.
He seeks immortality in an exact description of a linendraper’s shop; if the shop conferred immortality it should be upon the linendraper who created the shop, and not on the novelist who described it.
And his last novel “l’Oeuvre,” how terribly spun out, and for a franc a line in the “Gil Blas.” Not a single new or even exact observation. And that terrible phrase repeated over and over again–“La Conquete de Paris.” What does it mean? I never knew any one who thought of conquering Paris;–no one ever spoke of conquering Paris except, perhaps, two or three provincials.
* * * * *
You must have rules in poetry, if it is only for the pleasure of breaking them, just as you must have women dressed, if it is only for the pleasure of imagining them as Venuses.
* * * * *
Fancy, a banquet was given to Julien by his pupils! He made a speech in favour of Lefevre, and hoped that every one there would vote for Lefevre. Julien was very eloquent. He spoke of _Le grand art, le nu_, and Lefevre’s unswerving fidelity to _le nu_ … elegance, refinement, an echo of ancient Greece: and then,–what do you think? when he had exhausted all the reasons why the medal of honour should be accorded to Lefevre, he said, “I ask you to remember, gentlemen, that he has a wife and eight children.” Is it not monstrous?
* * * * *
But it is you who are monstrous, you who expect to fashion the whole world in conformity with your aestheticisms … a vain dream, and if realised it would result in an impossible world. A wife and children are the basis of existence, and it is folly to cry out because an appeal to such interests as these meet with response … it will be so till the end of time.
* * * * *
And these great interests that are to continue to the end of time began two years ago, when your pictures were not praised in the _Figaro_ as much as you thought they should be.
* * * * *
Marriage–what an abomination! Love–yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood–transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife–you know all about her–who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the _au dela_? There is none. I say in marriage an _au dela_ is impossible … the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomises the ennui and the prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there–only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal…. Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an _au dela_.
* * * * *
Good heavens! and the world still believes in education, in teaching people the “grammar of art.” Education is fatal to any one with a spark of artistic feeling. Education should be confined to clerks, and even them it drives to drink. Will the world learn that we never learn anything that we did not know before? The artist, the poet, painter, musician, and novelist go straight to the food they want, guided by an unerring and ineffable instinct; to teach them is to destroy the nerve of the artistic instinct, it is fatal. But above all in painting … “correct drawing,” “solid painting.” Is it impossible to teach people, to force it into their heads that there is no such thing as correct drawing, and that if drawing were correct it would be wrong? Solid painting; good heavens! Do they suppose that there is one sort of painting that is better than all others, and that there is a receipt for making it as for making chocolate! Art is not mathematics, it is individuality. It does not matter how badly you paint, so long as you don’t paint badly like other people. Education destroys individuality. That great studio of Julien’s is a sphinx, and all the poor folk that go there for artistic education are devoured. After two years they all paint and draw alike, every one; that vile execution,–they call it execution,–_la paet, la peinture au premier coup_. I was over in England last year, and I saw some portraits by a man called Richmond. They were horrible, but I liked them because they weren’t like painting. Stott and Sargent are clever fellows enough; I like Stott the best. If they had remained at home and hadn’t been taught, they might have developed a personal art, but the trail of the serpent is over all they do–that vile French painting, _le morceau_, etc. Stott is getting over it by degrees. He exhibited a nymph this year. I know what he meant; it was an interesting intention. I liked his little landscapes better … simplified into nothing, into a couple of primitive tints, wonderful clearness, light. But I doubt if he will find a public to understand all that.
* * * * *
Democratic art! Art is the direct antithesis to democracy…. Athens! a few thousand citizens who owned many thousand slaves, call that democracy! No! what I am speaking of is modern democracy–the mass. The mass can only appreciate simple and _naive_ emotions, puerile prettiness, above all conventionalities. See the Americans that come over here; what do they admire? Is it Degas or Manet they admire? No, Bouguereau and Lefevre. What was most admired at the International Exhibition?–The Dirty Boy. And if the medal of honour had been decided by a _plebiscite_, the dirty boy would have had an overwhelming majority. What is the literature of the people? The idiotic stories of the _Petit Journal_. Don’t talk of Shakespeare, Moliere, and the masters; they are accepted on the authority of the centuries. If the people could understand _Hamlet_, the people would not read the _Petit Journal_; if the people could understand Michel Angelo, they would not look at our Bouguereau or your Bouguereau, Sir F. Leighton. For the last hundred years we have been going rapidly towards democracy, and what is the result? The destruction of the handicrafts. That there are still good pictures painted and good poems written proves nothing, there will always be found men to sacrifice their lives for a picture or a poem. But the decorative arts which are executed in collaboration, and depend for support on the general taste of a large number, have ceased to exist. Explain that if you can. I’ll give you five thousand, ten thousand francs to buy a beautiful clock that is not a copy and is not ancient, and you can’t do it. Such a thing does not exist. Look here; I was going up the staircase of the Louvre the other day. They were putting up a mosaic; it was horrible; every one knows it is horrible. Well, I asked who had given the order for this mosaic, and I could not find out; no one knew. An order is passed from bureau to bureau, and no one is responsible; and it will be always so in a republic, and the more republican you are the worse it will be.
* * * * *
The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilisation; man will have to rise against it sooner or later…. Capital, unpaid labour, wage-slaves, and all the rest–stuff…. Look at these plates; they were painted by machinery; they are abominable. Look at them. In old times plates were painted by the hand, and the supply was necessarily limited to the demand, and a china in which there was always something more or less pretty, was turned out; but now thousands, millions of plates are made more than we want, and there is a commercial crisis; the thing is inevitable. I say the great and the reasonable revolution will be when mankind rises in revolt, and smashes the machinery and restores the handicrafts.
* * * * *
Goncourt is not an artist, notwithstanding all his affectation and outcries; he is not an artist. _Il me fait l’effet_ of an old woman shrieking after immortality and striving to beat down some fragment of it with a broom. Once it was a duet, now it is a solo. They wrote novels, history, plays, they collected _bric-a-brac_–they wrote about their _bric-a-brac_; they painted in water-colours, they etched–they wrote about their water-colours and etchings; they have made a will settling that the _bric-a-brac_ is to be sold at their death, and the proceeds applied to founding a prize for the best essay or novel, I forget which it is. They wrote about the prize they are going to found; they kept a diary, they wrote down everything they heard, felt, or saw, _radotage de vieille femme_; nothing must escape, not the slightest word; it might be that very word that might confer on them immortality; everything they heard, or said, must be of value, of inestimable value. A real artist does not trouble himself about immortality, about everything he hears, feels, and says; he treats ideas and sensations as so much clay wherewith to create.
And then the famous collaboration; how it was talked about, written about, prayed about; and when Jules died, what a subject for talk for articles; it all went into pot. Hugo’s vanity was Titanic, Goncourt’s is puerile.
And Daudet?
Oh, Daudet, _c’est de la bouillabaisse_.
* * * * *
Whistler, of all artists, is the least impressionist; the idea people have of his being an impressionist only proves once again the absolute inability of the public to understand the merits or the demerits of artistic work. Whistler’s art is absolutely classical; he thinks of nature, but he does not see nature; he is guided by his mind, and not by his eyes; and the best of it is he says so. Oh, he knows it well enough! Any one who knows him must have heard him say, “Painting is absolutely scientific; it is an exact science.” And his work is in accord with his theory; he risks nothing, all is brought down, arranged, balanced, and made one,–a well-determined mental conception, I admire his work; I am merely showing how he is misunderstood, even by those who think they understand. Does he ever seek a pose that is characteristic of the model, a pose that the model repeats oftener than any other?–Never. He advances the foot, puts the hand on the hip, etc., with a view to rendering his _idea_. Take his portrait of Duret. Did he ever see Duret in dress clothes? Probably not. Did he ever see Duret with a lady’s opera cloak?–I am sure he never did. Is Duret in the habit of going to the theatre with ladies? No; he is a _litterateur_ who is always in men’s society, rarely in ladies’. But these facts mattered nothing to Whistler as they matter to Degas, or to Manet. Whistler took Duret out of his environment, dressed him up, thought out a scheme–in a word, painted his idea without concerning himself in the least with the model. Mark you, I deny that I am urging any fault or flaw; I am merely contending that Whistler’s art is not modern art, but classic art–yes, and severely classical, far more classical than Titian’s or Velasquez;–from an opposite pole as classical as Ingres. No Greek dramatist ever sought the synthesis of things more uncompromisingly than Whistler. And he is right. Art is not nature. Art is nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement. Zola and Goncourt cannot, or will not understand that the artistic stomach must be allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion. If a man is really an artist he will remember what is necessary, forget what is useless; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the elegant rhythm of the synthesis.
* * * * *
I am sick of synthetical art; we want observation direct and unreasoned. What I reproach Millet with is that it is always the same thing, the same peasant, the same _sabot_, the same sentiment. You must admit that it is somewhat stereotyped.
* * * * *
What does that matter; what is more stereotyped than Japanese art? But that does not prevent it from being always beautiful.
* * * * *
People talk of Manet’s originality; that is just what I can’t see. What he has got, and what you can’t take away from him, is a magnificent execution. A piece of still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in the world; vividness of colour, breadth, simplicity, and directness of touch–marvellous!
* * * * *
French translation is the only translation; in England you still continue to translate poetry into poetry, instead of into prose. We used to do the same, but we have long ago renounced such follies. Either of two things–if the translator is a good poet, he substitutes his verse for that of the original;–I don’t want his verse, I want the original;–if he is a bad poet, he gives us bad verse, which is intolerable. Where the original poet put an effect of caesura, the translator puts an effect of rhyme; where the original poet puts an effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of caesura. Take Longfellow’s “Dante.” Does it give as good an idea of the original as our prose translation? Is it as interesting reading? Take Bayard Taylor’s translation of “Goethe.” Is it readable? Not to any one with an ear for verse. Will any one say that Taylor’s would be read if the original did not exist. The fragment translated by Shelley is beautiful, but then it is Shelley. Look at Swinburne’s translations of Villon. They are beautiful poems by Swinburne, that is all; he makes Villon speak of a “splendid kissing mouth.” Villon could not have done this unless he had read Swinburne. “Heine,” translated by James Thomson, is not different from Thomson’s original poems; “Heine,” translated by Sir Theodore Martin, is doggerel.
* * * * *
But in English blank verse you can translate quite as literally as you could into prose?
* * * * *
I doubt it, but even so, the rhythm of the blank line would carry your mind away from that of the original.
* * * * *
But if you don’t know the original?
The rhythm of the original can be suggested in prose judiciously used; even if it isn’t, your mind is at least free, whereas the English rhythm must destroy the sensation of something foreign. There is no translation except a word-for-word translation. Baudelaire’s translation of Poe, and Hugo’s translation of Shakespeare, are marvellous in this respect; a pun or joke that is untranslatable is explained in a note.
* * * * *
But that is the way young ladies translate–word for word!
* * * * *
No; ’tis just what they don’t do; they think they are translating word for word, but they aren’t. All the proper names, no matter how unpronounceable, must be rigidly adhered to; you must never transpose versts into kilometres, or roubles into francs;–I don’t know what a verst is or what a rouble is, but when I see the words I am in Russia. Every proverb must be rendered literally, even if it doesn’t make very good sense; if it doesn’t make sense at all, it must be explained in a note. For example, there is a proverb in German: “_Quand le cheval est selle il faut le monter_;” in French there is a proverb: “_Quand le vin est tire il faut le boire._” Well, a translator who would translate _quand le cheval_, etc., by _quand le vin_, etc., is an ass, and does not know his business. In translation, only a strictly classical language should be used; no word of slang, or even word of modern origin should be employed; the translator’s aim should be never to dissipate the illusion of an exotic. If I were translating the “Assommoir” into English, I should strive after a strong, flexible, but colourless language, something–what shall I say?–a sort of a modern Addison.
* * * * *
What, don’t you know the story about Mendes?–when _Chose_ wanted to marry his sister? _Chose’s_ mother, it appears, went to live with a priest. The poor fellow was dreadfully cut up; he was brokenhearted; and he went to Mendes, his heart swollen with grief, determined to make a clean breast of it, let the worst come to the worst. After a great deal of beating about the bush, and apologising, he got it out. You know Mendes, you can see him smiling a little; and looking at _Chose_ with that white cameo face of his he said, “_Avec quel meilleur homme voulez-vous que votre mere se fit? vous n’avez donc, jeune homme, aucun sentiment religieux._”
* * * * *
Victor Hugo, he is a painter on porcelain; his verse is mere decoration, long tendrils and flowers; and the same thing over and over again.
* * * * *
How to be happy!–not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the _Nouvelle Athenes_, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the _bourgeois_ over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense consciousness of life,–to live in a sleepy country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy;–and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw these people out of the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them passions! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times.
CHAPTER VIII
EXTRACT FROM A LETTER
Why did you not send a letter? We have all been writing to you for the last six months, but no answer–none. Had you written one word I would have saved all. The poor concierge was in despair; she said the _proprietaire_ would wait if you had only said when you were coming back, or if you only had let us know what you wished to be done. Three quarters rent was due, and no news could be obtained of you, so an auction had to be called. It nearly broke my heart to see those horrid men tramping over the delicate carpets, their coarse faces set against the sweet colour of that beautiful English cretonne…. And all the while the pastel by Manet, the great hat set like an aureole about the face–‘the eyes deep set in crimson shadow,’ ‘the fan widespread across the bosom’ (you see I am quoting your own words), looking down, the mistress of that little paradise of tapestry. She seemed to resent the intrusion. I looked once or twice half expecting those eyes ‘deep set in crimson shadow’ to fill with tears. But nothing altered her great dignity; she seemed to see all, but as a Buddha she remained impenetrable….
“I was there the night before the sale. I looked through the hooks, taking notes of those I intended to buy–those which we used to read together when the snow lay high about the legs of the poor faun in _terre cuite_, that laughed amid the frosty _boulingrins_. I found a large packet of letters which I instantly destroyed. You should not be so careless; I wonder how it is that men are always careless about their letters.
“The sale was announced for one o’clock. I wore a thick veil, for I did not wish to be recognised; the concierge of course knew me, but she can be depended upon. The poor old woman was in tears, so sorry was she to see all your pretty things sold up. You left owing her a hundred francs, but I have paid her; and talking of you we waited till the auctioneer arrived. Everything had been pulled down; the tapestry from the walls, the picture, the two vases I gave you were on the table waiting the stroke of the hammer. And then the men, all the _marchands de meubles_ in the _quartier_, came upstairs, spitting and talking coarsely–their foul voices went through me. They stamped, spat, pulled the things about, nothing escaped them. One of them held up the Japanese dressing-gown and made some horrible jokes; and the auctioneer, who was a humorist, answered, “If there are any ladies’ men present, we shall have some spirited bidding.” The pastel I bought, and I shall keep it and try to find some excuse to satisfy my husband, but I send you the miniature, and I hope you will not let it be sold again. There were many other things I should have liked to have bought but I did not dare–the organ that you used to play hymns on and I waltzes on, the Turkish lamp which we could never agree about … but when I saw the satin shoes which I gave you to carry the night of that adorable ball, and which you would not give back, but nailed up on the wall on either side of your bed and put matches in, I was seized with an almost invincible desire to steal them. I don’t know why, _un caprice de femme_. No one but you would have ever thought of converting satin shoes into match boxes. I wore them at that delicious ball; we danced all night together, and you had an explanation with my husband (I was a little afraid for a moment, but it came out all right), and we went and sat on the balcony in the soft warm moonlight; we watched the glitter of epaulets and gas, the satin of the bodices, the whiteness of passing shoulders; we dreamed the massy darknesses of the park, the fairy light along the lawny spaces, the heavy perfume of the flowers, the pink of the camellias; and you quoted something: ‘_les camelias du balcon ressemblent a des desirs mourants._’ It was horrid of you: but you always had a knack of rubbing one up the wrong way. Then do you not remember how we danced in one room, while the servants set the other out with little tables? That supper was fascinating! I suppose it was these pleasant remembrances which made me wish for the shoes, but I could not summon up courage enough to buy them, and the horrid people were comparing me with the pastel; I suppose I did look a little mysterious with a double veil bound across my face. The shoes went with a lot of other things–and oh, to whom?
“So now that pretty little retreat in the _Rue de la Tour des Dames_ is ended for ever for you and me. We shall not see the faun in _terre cuite_ again; I was thinking of going to see him the other day, but the street is so steep; my coachman advised me to spare the horse’s hind legs. I believe it is the steepest street in Paris. And your luncheon parties, how I did enjoy them, and how Fay did enjoy them too; and what I risked, shortsighted as I am, picking my way from the tramcar down to that out-of-the-way little street! Men never appreciate the risks women run for them. But to leave my letters lying about–I cannot forgive that. When I told Fay she said, ‘What can you expect? I warned you against flirting with boys.’ I never did before–never.
“Paris is now just as it was when you used to sit on the balcony and I read you Browning. You never liked his poetry, and I cannot understand why. I have found a new poem which I am sure would convert you; you should be here. There are lilacs in the room and the _Mont Valerien_ is beautiful upon a great lemon sky, and the long avenue is merging into violet vapour.
“We have already begun to think of where we shall go to this year. Last year we went to P—-, an enchanting place, quite rustic, but within easy distance of a casino. I had vowed not to dance, for I had been out every night during the season, but the temptation proved irresistible, and I gave way. There were two young men here, one the Count of B—-, the other the Marquis of G—-, one of the best families in France, a distant cousin of my husband. He has written a book which every one says is one of the most amusing things that has appeared for years, _c’est surtout tres Parisien_. He paid me great attentions, and made my husband wildly jealous. I used to go out and sit with him amid the rocks, and it was perhaps very lucky for me that he went away. We may return there this year; if so, I wish you would come and spend a month; there is an excellent hotel where you would be very comfortable. We have decided nothing as yet. The Duchesse de —- is giving a costume ball; they say it is going to be a most wonderful affair. I don’t know what money is not going to be spent upon the cotillion. I have just got home a fascinating toilette. I am going as a _Pierrotte_; you know, a short skirt and a little cap. The Marquise gave a ball some few days ago. I danced the cotillion with L—-, who, as you know, dances divinely; _il m’a fait la cour_, but it is of course no use, you know that.
“The other night we went to see the _Maitre-Forges_, a fascinating play, and I am reading the book; I don’t know which I like the best. I think the play, but the book is very good too. Now that is what I call a novel; and I am a judge, for I have read all novels. But I must not talk literature, or you will say something stupid. I wish you would not make foolish remarks about men that _tout-Paris_ considers the cleverest. It does not matter so much with me, I know you, but then people laugh at you behind your back, and that is not nice for me. The _marquise_ was here the other day, and she said she almost wished you would not come on her ‘days,’ so extraordinary were the remarks you made. And by the way, the _marquise_ has written a book. I have not seen it, but I hear that it is really too _decollete_. She is _une femme d’esprit_, but the way she affiche’s herself is too much for any one. She never goes anywhere now without _le petit_ D—-. It is a great pity.
“And now, my dear friend, write me a nice letter, and tell me when you are coming back to Paris. I am sure you cannot amuse yourself in that hateful London; the nicest thing about you was that you were really _tres_ Parisien. Come back and take a nice apartment on the Champs Elysees. You might come back for the Duchesse’s ball. I will get an invitation for you, and will keep the cotillion for you. The idea of running away as you did, and never telling any one where you were going to. I always said you were a little cracked. And letting all your things be sold! If you had only told me! I should like so much to have had that Turkish lamp. Yours–”
How like her that letter is;–egotistical, vain, foolish; no, not foolish–narrow, limited, but not foolish; worldly, oh, how worldly! and yet not repulsively so, for there always was in her a certain intensity of feeling that saved her from the commonplace, and gave her an inexpressible charm. Yes, she is a woman who can feel, and she has lived her life and felt it very acutely, very sincerely–sincerely?… like a moth caught in a gauze curtain! Well, would that preclude sincerity? Sincerity seems to convey an idea of depth, and she was not very deep, that is quite certain. I never could understand her;–a little brain that span rapidly and hummed a pretty humming tune. But no, there was something more in her than that. She often said things that I thought clever, things that I did not forget, things, that I should like to put into books. But it was not brain power; it was only intensity of feeling–nervous feeling. I don’t know … perhaps…. She has lived her life … yes, within certain limits she has lived her life. None of us do more than that. True. I remember the first time I saw her. Sharp, little, and merry–a changeable little sprite. I thought she had ugly hands; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her hands before I had known her a month. It is now seven years ago. How time passes! I was very young then. What battles we have had, what quarrels! Still we had good times together. She never lost sight of me, but no intrusion; far too clever for that. I never got the better of her but once … once I did, _enfin_! She soon made up for lost ground. I wonder what the charm was. I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever; that I know…. I never knew if she cared for me, never. There were moments when…. Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely subtle, subtle in everything, in her sensations subtle; I suppose that was her charm, subtleness. I never knew if she cared for me, I never knew if she hated her husband,–one never knew her,–I never knew how she would receive me. The last time I saw her … that stupid American would take her downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding behind one of the pillars in the Rue de Rivoli, my hand on the cab door. However, she could not blame me that time–and all the stories she used to invent of my indiscretions; I believe she used to get them up for the sake of the excitement. She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got her into a certain line; that marriage, that title, and she used to think of it night and day. I shall never forget when she went into mourning for the Count de Chambord. And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois they were! That salon; the flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard St. Germain, the cabinets, brass work, the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of comfort; a little grotesque no doubt;–the mechanical admiration for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere, the _Figaro_, that is to say Albert Wolf, _l’homme le plus spirituel de Paris, c’est-a-dire, dans le monde_, the success of Georges Ohnet and the talent of Gustave Dore. But with all this vulgarity of taste certain appreciations, certain ebullitions of sentiment, within the radius of sentiment certain elevations and depravities,–depravities in the legitimate sense of the word, that is to say, a revolt against the commonplace….
Ha, ha, ha! how I have been dreaming. I wish I had not been awoke from my reverie, it was pleasant.
The letter just read indicates, if it does not clearly tell, the changes that have taken place in my life; and it is only necessary to say that one morning, a few months ago, when my servant brought me some summer honey and a glass of milk to my bedside, she handed me an unpleasant letter. My agent’s handwriting, even when I knew the envelope contained a cheque, has never quite failed to produce a sensation of repugnance in me;–so hateful is any sort of account, that I avoid as much as possible even knowing how I stand at my banker’s. Therefore the odour of honey and milk, so evocative of fresh flowers and fields, was spoilt that morning for me; and it was some time before I slipped on that beautiful Japanese dressing-gown, which I shall never see again, and read the odious epistle.
That some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to starve, that I may not be deprived of my _demi-tasse_ at _Tortoni’s_; that I may not be forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my cat and my python–monstrous. And these wretched creatures will find moral support in England; they will find pity!
Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me. The great pagan world I love knew it not. Now the world proposes to interrupt the terrible austere laws of nature which ordain that the weak shall be trampled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the strong shall be really strong,–that the strong shall be glorious, sublime. A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of right, cry the moderns.
Hither the world has been drifting since the coming of the pale socialist of Galilee; and this is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity. His divinity is falling, it is evanescent in sight of the goal He dreamed; again He is denied by His disciples. Poor fallen God! I, who hold nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands and feet, Thy hanging body; Thou at least art picturesque, and in a way beautiful in the midst of the sombre mediocrity, towards which Thou hast drifted for two thousand years, a flag; and in which Thou shalt find Thy doom as I mine, I, who will not adore Thee and cannot curse Thee now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been greater, stranger and more Divine than any man’s has been. The chosen people, the garden, the betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful story, not of Mary, but of Magdalen. The God descending to the harlot! Even the great pagan world of marble and pomp and lust and cruelty, that my soul goes out to and hails as the grandest, has not so sublime a contrast to show us as this.
Come to me, ye who are weak. The Word went forth, the terrible disastrous Word, and before it fell the ancient gods, and the vices that they represent, and which I revere, are outcast now in the world of men; the Word went forth, and the world interpreted the Word, blindly, ignorantly, savagely, for two thousand years, but nevertheless nearing every day the end–the end that Thou in Thy divine intelligence foresaw, that finds its voice to-day (enormous though the antithesis may be, I will say it) in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. What fate has been like Thine? Betrayed by Judas in the garden, denied by Peter before the cock crew, crucified between thieves, and mourned for by a harlot, and then sent bound and bare, nothing changed, nothing altered, in Thy ignominious plight, forthward in the world’s van the glory and symbol of a man’s new idea–Pity. Thy day is closing in, but the heavens are now wider aflame with Thy light than ever before–Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing on the last verge of the old world, declare to be darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the twentieth century. The bearers have relinquished Thy cross, they leave Thee in the hour of Thy universal triumph, Thy crown of thorns is falling, Thy face is buffeted with blows, and not even a reed is placed in Thy hand for sceptre; only I and mine are by Thee, we who shall perish with Thee, in the ruin Thou hast created.
Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice. Hail, therefore, to the thrice glorious virtue injustice! What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh’s lash or Egypt’s sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died? What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maiden was the price paid for Ingres’ _La Source_? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital, is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have _La Source_, that exquisite dream of innocence, to think of till my soul is sick with delight of the painter’s holy vision. Nay more, the knowledge that a wrong was done–that millions of Israelites died in torments, that a girl, or a thousand girls, died in the hospital for that one virginal thing, is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies; to see the great gladiators pass, to hear them cry the famous “Ave Caesar,” to hold the thumb down, to see the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the agonies of poisoned slaves! Oh, for excess, for crime! I would give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire; for the hymn, “_A la tres-chere, a la tres-belle, qui remplit mon coeur de clarte_,” let the first-born in every house in Europe be slain; and in all sincerity I profess my readiness to decapitate all the Japanese in Japan and elsewhere, to save from destruction one drawing by Hokee. Again I say that all we deem sublime in the world’s history are acts, of injustice; and it is certain that if mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism. England was great and glorious, because England was unjust, and England’s greatest son was the personification of injustice–Cromwell.
But the old world of heroes is over now. The skies above us are dark with sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are running with streaming canvas upon ruin; all ideals have gone; nothing remains to us for worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Mass; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and rushes about us–we, the great ship that has floated up from the antique world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain passion, its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plaintive blast, and the forest where the whiteness of the nymph was seen escaping! We are weary of pity, we are weary of being good; we are weary of tears and effusion, and our refuge–the British Museum–is the wide sea shore and the wind of the ocean. There, there is real joy in the flesh; our statues are naked, but we are ashamed, and our nakedness is indecency: a fair, frank soul is mirrored in those fauns and nymphs; and how strangely enigmatic is the soul of the antique world, the bare, barbarous soul of beauty and of might!
CHAPTER IX
But neither Apollo nor Buddha could help or save me. One in his exquisite balance of body, a skylark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing; the other sat sombrously contemplating, calm as a beautiful evening. I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the pastel–the beautiful pastel that seemed to fill with a real presence the rich autumnal leaves where the jays darted and screamed. The twisted columns of the bed rose, burdened with great weight of fringes and curtains, the python devoured a guinea pig, the last I gave him; the great white cat came to me. I said all this must go, must henceforth be to me an abandoned dream, a something, not more real than a summer meditation. So be it, and, as was characteristic of me, I broke with Paris suddenly, without warning anyone. I knew in my heart of hearts that I should never return, but no word was spoken, and I continued a pleasant delusion with myself; I told my _concierge_ that I would return in a month, and I left all to be sold, brutally sold by auction, as the letter I read in the last chapter charmingly and touchingly describes.
Not even to Marshall did I confide my foreboding that Paris would pass out of my life, that it would henceforth be with me a beautiful memory, but never more a practical delight. He and I were no longer living together; we had parted a second time, but this time without bitterness of any kind; he had learnt to feel that I wanted to live alone, and had moved away into the Latin quarter, whither I made occasional expeditions. I accompanied him once to the old haunts, but various terms of penal servitude had scattered our friends, and I could not interest myself in the new. Nor did Marshall himself interest me as he had once done. To my eager taste, he had grown just a little trite. My affection for him was as deep and sincere as ever; were I to meet him now I would grasp his hand and hail him with firm, loyal friendship; but I had made friends in the Nouvelle Athenes who interested me passionately, and my thoughts were absorbed by and set on new ideals, which Marshall had failed to find sympathy for, or even to understand. I had introduced him to Degas and Manet, but he had spoken of Jules Lefevre and Bouguereau, and generally shown himself incapable of any higher education; he could not enter where I had entered, and this was alienation. We could no longer even talk of the same people; when I spoke of a certain _marquise_, he answered with an indifferent “Do you really think so?” and proceeded to drag me away from my glitter of satin to the dinginess of print dresses. It was more than alienation, it was almost separation; but he was still my friend, he was the man, and he always will be, to whom my youth, with all its aspirations, was most closely united. So I turned to say good-bye to him and to my past life. Rap–rap–rap!
“Who’s there?”
“I–Dayne.”
“I’ve got a model.”
“Never mind your model. Open the door. How are you? what are you painting?”
“This; what do you think of it?”
“It is prettily composed. I think it will come out all right. I am going to England; come to say good-bye.”
“Going to England! What will you do in England?”
“I have to go about money matters; very tiresome. I had really begun to forget there was such a place.”
“But you are not going to stay there?”
“Oh, no!”
“You will be just in time to see the Academy.”
The conversation turned on art, and we aestheticised for an hour. At last Marshall said, “I am really sorry, old chap, but I must send you away; there’s that model.”
The girl sat waiting, her pale hair hanging down her back, a very picture of discontent.
“Send her away.”
“I asked her to come out to dinner.”
“D—-n her … Well, never mind, I must spend this last evening with you; you shall both dine with me. _Je quitte Paris demain matin, peut-etre pour longtemps; je voudrais passer ma derniere soiree avec mon ami; alors si vous voulez bien me permettre, mademoiselle, je vous invite tous les deux a diner; nous passerons la soiree ensemble si cela vous est agreable?_”
“_Je veux bien, monsieur._”
Poor Marie! Marshall and I were absorbed in each other and art. It was always so. We dined in a gargotte, and afterwards we went to a students’ hall; and it seems like yesterday. I can see the moon sailing through a clear sky, and on the pavement’s edge Marshall’s beautiful, slim, manly figure, and Marie’s exquisite gracefulness. She was Lefevre’s Chloe; so every one sees her now. Her end was a tragic one. She invited her friends to dinner, and with the few pence that remained she bought some boxes of matches, boiled them, and drank the water. No one knew why; some said it was love.
I went to London in an exuberant necktie, a tiny hat; I wore large trousers and a Capoul beard; and I looked, I believe, as unlike an Englishman as a drawing by Grevin. In the smoking-room of Morley’s Hotel I met my agent, an immense nose, and a wisp of hair drawn over a bald skull. He explained, after some hesitation, that I owed him a few thousands, and that the accounts were in his portmanteau. I suggested taking them to a solicitor to have them examined. The solicitor advised me strongly to contest them. I did not take the advice, but raised some money instead, and so the matter ended so far as the immediate future was concerned. The years the most impressionable, from twenty to thirty, when the senses and the mind are the widest awake, I, the most impressionable of human beings, had spent in France, not among English residents, but among that which is the quintessence of the nation; I, not an indifferent spectator, but an enthusiast, striving heart and soul to identify himself with his environment, to shake himself free from race and language and to recreate himself as it were in the womb of a new nationality, assuming its ideals, its morals, and its modes of thought, and I had succeeded strangely well, and when I returned home England was a new country to me; I had, as it were, forgotten everything. Every aspect of street and suburban garden was new to me; of the manner of life of Londoners I knew nothing. This sounds incredible, but it is so; I saw, but I could realise nothing. I went into a drawing-room, but everything seemed far away–a dream, a presentment, nothing more; I was in touch with nothing; of the thoughts and feelings of those I met I could understand nothing, nor could I sympathise with them: an Englishman was at that time as much out of my mental reach as an Esquimaux would be now. Women were nearer to me than men, and I will take this opportunity to note my observation, for I am not aware that any one else has observed that the difference between the two races is found in the men, not in the women. French and English women are psychologically very similar; the standpoint from which they, see life is the same, the same thoughts interest and amuse them; but the attitude of a Frenchman’s mind is absolutely opposed to that of an Englishman; they stand on either side of a vast abyss, two animals different in colour, form, and temperament;–two ideas destined to remain irrevocably separate and distinct. I have heard of writing and speaking two languages equally well: this was impossible to me, and I am convinced that if I had remained two more years in France I should never have been able to identify my thoughts with the language I am now writing in, and I should have written it as an alien. As it was I only just escaped this detestable fate. And it was in the last two years, when I began to write French verse and occasional _chroniques_ in the papers, that the great damage was done. I remember very well indeed one day, while arranging an act of a play I was writing with a friend, finding suddenly to my surprise that I could think more easily and rapidly in French than in English; but with all this I did not learn French. I chattered, and I felt intensely at home in it; yes, I could write a sonnet or a ballade almost without a slip, but my prose required a good deal of alteration, for a greater command of language is required to write in prose than in verse. I found this in French and also in English. For when I returned from Paris, my English terribly corrupt with French ideas and forms of thought, I could write acceptable English verse, but even ordinary newspaper prose was beyond my reach, and an attempt I made to write a novel drifted into a miserable failure; but the following poems opened to me the doors of a first-class London newspaper, and I was at once entrusted with some important critical work:
THE SWEETNESS OF THE PAST
As sailors watch from their prison
For the faint grey line of the coasts, I look to the past re-arisen,
And joys come over in hosts
Like the white sea birds from their roosts.
I love not the indelicate present,
The future’s unknown to our quest, To-day is the life of the peasant,
But the past is a haven of rest– The things of the past are the best.
The rose of the past is better
Than the rose we ravish to-day,
‘Tis holier, purer, and fitter
To place on the shrine where we pray For the secret thoughts we obey.
There are there no deceptions or changes, And there all is lovely and still;
No grief nor fate that estranges, Nor hope that no life can fulfil,
But ethereal shelter from ill.
The coarser delights of the hour
Tempt, and debauch, and deprave, And we joy in a poisonous flower,
Knowing that nothing can save
Our flesh from the fate of the grave.
But sooner or later returning
In grief to the well-loved nest, Our souls filled with infinite yearning, We cry, in the past there is rest,
There is peace, its joys are the best.
NOSTALGIA
Fair were the dreamful days of old, When in the summer’s sleepy shade,
Beneath the beeches on the wold,
The shepherds lay and gently played Music to maidens, who, afraid,
Drew all together rapturously,
Their white soft hands like white leaves laid, In the old dear days of Arcady.
Men were not then as they are now
Haunted and terrified by creeds, They sought not then, nor cared to know The end that as a magnet leads,
Nor told with austere fingers beads, Nor reasoned with their grief and glee, But rioted in pleasant meads
In the old dear days of Arcady.
The future may be wrong or right,
The present is distinctly wrong, For life and love have lost delight,
And bitter even is our song;
And year by year grey doubt grows strong, And death is all that seems to dree.
Wherefore with weary hearts we long For the old dear days of Arcady.
ENVOI
Glories and triumphs ne’er shall cease, But men may sound the heavens and sea, One thing is lost for aye–the peace
Of the old dear days of Arcady.
And so it was that I came to settle down in a Strand lodging-house, determined to devote myself to literature, and to accept the hardships of a literary life. I had been playing long enough, and now I was resolved to see what I could do in the world of work. I was anxious for proof, peremptory proof, of my capacity or incapacity. A book! No. I required an immediate answer, and journalism alone could give me that. So I reasoned in the Strand lodging-house. And what led me to that house? Chance, or a friend’s recommendation? I forget. It was uncomfortable, hideous, and not very clean: but curious, as all things are curious when examined closely. Let me tell you about my rooms. The sitting-room was a good deal longer than it was wide; it was panelled with deal, and the deal was painted a light brown; behind it there was a large bedroom: the floor was covered with a ragged carpet, and a big bed stood in the middle of the floor. But next to the sitting-room was a small bedroom which was let for ten shillings a week; and the partition wall was so thin that I could hear every movement the occupant made. This proximity was intolerable, and eventually I decided on adding ten shillings to my rent, and I became the possessor of the entire flat. In the room above me lived a pretty young woman, an actress at the Savoy Theatre. She had a piano, and she used to play and sing in the mornings, and in the afternoon, friends–girls from the theatre–used to come and see her; and Emma, the maid-of-all-work, used to take them up their tea; and, oh! the chattering and the laughter. Poor Miss L—-; she had only two pounds a week to live on, but she was always in high spirits except when she could not pay the hire of her piano; and I am sure that she now looks back with pleasure and thinks of those days as very happy ones.
She was a tall girl, a thin figure, and she had large brown eyes; she liked young men, and she hoped that Mr. Gilbert would give her a line or two in his next opera. Often have I come out on the landing to meet her; we used to sit on those stairs talking, long after midnight, of what?–of our landlady, of the theatre, of the most suitable ways of enjoying ourselves in life. One night she told me she was married; it was a solemn moment. I asked in a sympathetic voice why she was not living with her husband. She told me, but the reason of the separation I have forgotten in the many similar reasons for separations and partings which have since been confided to me. The landlady bitterly resented our intimacy, and I believe Miss L—- was charged indirectly for her conversations with me in the bill. On the first floor there was a large sitting-room and bedroom, solitary rooms that were nearly always unlet. The landlady’s parlour was on the ground floor, her bedroom was next to it, and further on was the entrance to the kitchen stairs, whence ascended Mrs. S—-‘s brood of children, and Emma, the awful servant, with tea things, many various smells, that of ham and eggs predominating.
Emma, I remember you–you are not to be forgotten–up at five o’clock every morning, scouring, washing, cooking, dressing those infamous children; seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-four at the beck and call of landlady, lodgers, and quarrelling children; seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-four drudging in that horrible kitchen, running up stairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water; down on your knees before a grate, pulling out the cinders with those hands–can I call them hands? The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that recognised that you were akin to us, only the pity that might be extended to a dog. And I used to ask you all sorts of cruel questions, I was curious to know the depth of animalism you had sunk to, or rather out of which you had never been raised. And you generally answered innocently and naively enough. But sometimes my words were too crude, and they struck through the thick hide into the quick, into the human, and you winced a little; but this was rarely, for you were very nearly, oh, very nearly an animal: your temperament and intelligence was just that of a dog that has picked up a master, not a real master, but a makeshift master who may turn it out at any moment. Dickens would sentimentalise or laugh over you; I do neither. I merely recognise you as one of the facts of civilisation. You looked–well, to be candid,–you looked neither young nor old; hard work had obliterated the delicate markings of the years, and left you in round numbers something over thirty. Your hair was reddish brown, and your face wore that plain honest look that is so essentially English. The rest of you was a mass of stuffy clothes, and when you rushed up stairs I saw something that did not look like legs; a horrible rush that was of yours, a sort of cart-horse like bound. I have spoken angrily to you; I have heard others speak angrily to you, but never did that sweet face of yours, for it was a sweet face–that sweet, natural goodness that is so sublime–lose its expression of perfect and unfailing kindness. Words convey little sense of the real horrors of the reality. Life in your case meant this: to be born in a slum, and to leave it to work seventeen hours a day in a lodging-house; to be a Londoner, but to know only the slum in which you were born and the few shops in the Strand at which the landlady dealt. To know nothing of London meant in your case not to know that it was not England; England and London! you could not distinguish between them. Was England an island or a mountain? you had no notion. I remember when you heard that Miss L—- was going to America, you asked me, and the question was sublime: “Is she going to travel all night?” You had heard people speak of travelling all night, and that was all you knew of travel or any place that was not the Strand. I asked you if you went to church, and you said “No, it makes my eyes bad.” I said, “But you don’t read; you can’t read.” “No, but I have to look at the book.” I asked you if you had heard of God; you hadn’t; but when I pressed you on the point you suspected I was laughing at you, and you would not answer, and when I tried you again on the subject I could see that the landlady had been telling you what to say. But you had not understood, and your conscious ignorance, grown conscious within the last couple of days, was even more pitiful than your unconscious ignorance when you answered that you couldn’t go to church because it made your eyes bad. It is a strange thing to know nothing; for instance, to live in London and to have no notion of the House of Commons, nor indeed of the Queen, except perhaps that she is a rich lady; the police–yes, you knew what a policeman was because you used to be sent to fetch one to make an organ-man or a Christy minstrel move on. To know of nothing but a dark kitchen, grates, eggs and bacon, dirty children; to work seventeen hours a day and to get cheated out of your wages; to answer, when asked, why you did not get your wages or leave if you weren’t paid, that you “didn’t know how Mrs. S—- would get on without me.”
This woman owed you forty pounds, I think, so I calculated it from what you told me; and yet you did not like to leave her because you did not know how she would get on without you. Sublime stupidity! At this point your intelligence stopped. I remember you once spoke of a half-holiday; I questioned you, and I found your idea of a half-holiday was to take the children for a walk and buy them some sweets. I told my brother of this and he said–Emma out for a half-holiday! why, you might as well give a mule a holiday. The phrase was brutal, but it was admirably descriptive of you. Yes, you are a mule, there is no sense in you; you are a beast of burden, a drudge too horrible for anything but work; and I suppose, all things considered, that the fat landlady with a dozen children did well to work you seventeen hours a day, and cheat you out of your miserable wages. You had no friends; you could not have a friend unless it were some forlorn cat or dog; but you once spoke to me of your brother, who worked in a potato store, and I was astonished, and I wondered if he were as awful as you. Poor Emma! I shall never forget your kind heart and your unfailing good humour; you were born beautifully good as a rose is born with perfect perfume; you were as unconscious of your goodness as the rose of its perfume. And you were taken by this fat landlady as ‘Arry takes a rose and sticks it in his tobacco-reeking coat; and you will be thrown away, shut out of doors when health fails you, or when, overcome by base usage, you take to drink. There is no hope for you; even if you were treated better and paid your wages there would be no hope. That forty pounds even, if they were given to you, would bring you no good fortune. They would bring the idle loafer, who scorns you now as something too low for even his kisses, hanging about your heels and whispering in your ears. And his whispering would drive you mad, for your kind heart longs for kind words; and then when he had spent your money and cast you off in despair, the gin shop and the river would do the rest. Providence is very wise after all, and your best destiny is your present one. We cannot add a pain, nor can we take away a pain; we may alter, but we cannot subtract nor even alleviate. But what truisms are these; who believes in philanthropy nowadays?
* * * * *
“Come in.”
“Oh, it is you, Emma!”
“Are you going to dine at home to-day, sir?”
“What can I have?”
“Well, yer can ‘ave a chop or a steak.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, yer can ‘ave a steak, or a chop, or–”
“Oh yes, I know; well then, I’ll have a chop. And now tell me, Emma, how is your young man? I hear you have got one, you went out with him the other night.”
“Who told yer that?”
“Ah, never mind; I hear everything.”
“I know, from Miss L—-.”
“Well, tell me, how did you meet him, who introduced him?”
“I met ‘im as I was a-coming from the public ‘ouse with the beer for missus’ dinner.”
“And what did he say?”
“He asked me if I was engaged; I said no. And he come round down the lane that evening.”
“And he took you out?”
“Yes.”
“And where did you go?”
“We went for a walk on the Embankment.”
“And when is he coming for you again?”
“He said he was coming last evening, but he didn’t.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“I dunno; I suppose because I haven’t time to go out with him. So it was Miss L—- that told you; well, you do ‘ave chats on the stairs. I suppose you likes talking to ‘er.”
“I like talking to everybody, Emma; I like talking to you.”
“Yes, but not as you talks to ‘er; I ‘ears you jes do ‘ave fine times. She said this morning that she had not seen you for this last two nights–that you had forgotten ‘er, and I was to tell yer.”
“Very well, I’ll come out to-night and speak to her.”
“And missus is so wild about it, and she daren’t say nothing ’cause she thinks yer might go.”
* * * * *
A young man in a house full of women must be almost supernaturally unpleasant if he does not occupy a great deal of their attention. Certain at least it is that I was the point of interest in that house; and I found there that the practice of virtue is not so disagreeable as many young men think it. The fat landlady hovered round my doors, and I obtained perfectly fresh eggs by merely keeping her at her distance; the pretty actress, with whom I used to sympathise with on the stairs at midnight, loved me better, and our intimacy was more strange and subtle, because it was pure, and it was not quite unpleasant to know that the awful servant dreamed of me as she might of a star, or something equally unattainable; but the landlady’s daughter, a nasty girl of fifteen, annoyed me with her ogling, which was a little revolting, but the rest was, and I speak quite candidly, not wholly unpleasant. It was not aristocratic, it is true, but, I repeat, it was not unpleasant, nor do I believe that any young man, however refined, would have found it unpleasant.
But if I was offered a choice between a chop and steak in the evening, in the morning I had to decide between eggs and bacon and bacon and eggs. A knocking at the door, “Nine o’clock, sir; ‘ot water sir; what will you have for breakfast?” “What can I have?” “Anything you like, sir. You can have bacon and eggs, or–” “Anything else?”–Pause.–“Well, sir, you can have eggs and bacon, or–” “Well, I’ll have eggs and bacon.”
The streets seemed to me like rat holes, dark and wandering as chance directed, with just an occasional rift of sky, seen as if through an occasional crevice, so different from the boulevards widening out into bright space with fountains and clouds of green foliage. The modes of life were so essentially opposed. I am thinking now of intellectual rather than physical comforts. I could put up with even lodging-house food, but I found it difficult to forego the glitter and artistic enthusiasm of the cafe. The tavern, I had heard of the tavern.
Some seventy years ago the Club superseded the Tavern, and since then all literary intercourse has ceased in London. Literary clubs have been founded, and their leather arm-chairs have begotten Mr. Gosse; but the tavern gave the world Villon and Marlowe. Nor is this to be wondered at. What is wanted is enthusiasm and devil-may-careism; and the very aspect of a tavern is a snort of defiance at the hearth, the leather arm-chairs are so many salaams to it. I ask, Did any one ever see a gay club room? Can any one imagine such a thing? You can’t have a club room without mahogany tables, you can’t have mahogany tables without magazines–_Longmans_, with a serial by Rider Haggard, the _Nineteenth Century_, with an article, “The Rehabilitation of the Pimp in Modern Society,” by W.E. Gladstone–a dulness that’s a purge to good spirits, an aperient to enthusiasm; in a word, a dulness that’s worth a thousand a year. You can’t have a club without a waiter in red plush and silver salver in his hand; then you can’t bring a lady to a club, and you have to get into a corner to talk about them. Therefore I say a club is dull.
As the hearth and home grew all-powerful it became impossible for the husband to tell his wife that he was going to the tavern; everyone can go to the tavern, and no place in England where everyone can go is considered respectable. This is the genesis of the Club–out of the Housewife by Respectability. Nowadays every one is respectable–jockeys, betting-men, actors, and even actresses. Mrs. Kendal takes her children to visit a duchess, and has naughty chorus girls to tea, and tells them of the joy of respectability. There is only one class left that is not respectable, and that will succumb before long; how the transformation will be effected I can’t say, but I know an editor or two who would be glad of an article on the subject.
Respectability!–a suburban villa, a piano in the drawing-room, and going home to dinner. Such things are no doubt very excellent, but they do not promote intensity of feeling, fervour of mind; and as art is in itself an outcry against the animality of human existence, it would be well that the life of the artist should be a practical protest against the so-called decencies of life; and he can best protest by frequenting a tavern and cutting his club. In the past the artist has always been an outcast; it is only latterly he has become domesticated, and judging by results, it is clear that if Bohemianism is not a necessity it is at least an adjuvant. For if long locks and general dissoluteness were not an aid and a way to pure thought, why have they been so long his characteristics? If lovers were not necessary for the development of poet, novelist, and actress, why have they always had lovers–Sappho, George Eliot, George Sand, Rachel, Sara? Mrs. Kendal nurses children all day and strives to play Rosalind at night. What infatuation, what ridiculous endeavour! To realise the beautiful woodland passion and the idea of the transformation, a woman must have sinned, for only through sin may we learn the charm of innocence. To play Rosalind a woman must have had more than one lover, and if she has been made to wait in the rain and has been beaten she will have done a great deal to qualify herself for the part. The ecstatic Sara makes no pretence to virtue, she introduces her son to an English duchess, and throws over a nation for the love of Richepein, she can, therefore, say as none other–
“Ce n’est plus qu’une ardeur dans mes veines cachee, C’est Venus tout entiere a sa proie attachee.”
Swinburne, when he dodged about London, a lively young dog, wrote “Poems and Ballads,” and “Chastelard,” since he has gone to live at Putney, he has contributed to the _Nineteenth Century_, and published an interesting little volume entitled, “A Century of Rondels,” in which he continues his plaint about his mother the sea.
Respectability is sweeping the picturesque out of life; national costumes are disappearing. The kilt is going or gone in the highlands, and the smock in the southlands, even the Japanese are becoming Christian and respectable; in another quarter of a century silk hats and pianos will be found in every house in Jeddo. Too true that universal uniformity is the future of the world; and when Mr. Morris speaks of the democratic art to be when the world is socialistic, I ask, whence will the unfortunates draw their inspiration? To-day our plight is pitiable enough–the duke, the jockey-boy, and the artist are exactly alike; they are dressed by the same tailor, they dine at the same clubs, they swear the same oaths, they speak equally bad English, they love the same women. Such a state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante’s lowest circle of hell. The spectre of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are mild and gracious symbols compared with that menacing figure, Universal Education, with which we are threatened, which has already eunuched the genius of the last five-and-twenty years of the nineteenth century, and produced a limitless abortion in that of future time. Education, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The cruelties of Nero, of Caligula, what were they?–a few crunched limbs in the amphitheatre; but thine, O Education, are the yearning of souls sick of life, of maddening discontent, of all the fearsome and fathomless sufferings of the mind. When Goethe said “More light,” he said the wickedest and most infamous words that human lips ever spoke. In old days, when a people became too highly civilised the barbarians came down from the north and regenerated that nation with darkness; but now there are no more barbarians, and sooner or later I am convinced that we shall have to end the evil by summary edicts–the obstruction no doubt will be severe, the equivalents of Gladstone and Morley will stop at nothing to defeat the Bill; but it will nevertheless be carried by patriotic Conservative and Unionist majorities, and it will be written in the Statute Book that not more than one child in a hundred shall be taught to read, and no more than one in ten thousand shall learn the piano.
Such will be the end of Respectability, but the end is still far distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart; the snob is now the ark that floats triumphant over the democratic wave; the faith of the old world reposes in his breast, and he shall proclaim it when the waters have subsided.
In the meanwhile Respectability, having destroyed the Tavern, and created the Club, continues to exercise a meretricious and enervating influence on literature. All audacity of thought and expression has been stamped out, and the conventionalities are rigorously respected. It has been said a thousand times that an art is only a reflection of a certain age; quite so, only certain ages are more interesting than others, and consequently produce better art, just as certain seasons produce better crops. We heard in the Nouvelle Athenes how the Democratic movement, in other words, Respectability, in other words, Education, has extinguished the handicrafts; it was admitted that in the more individual arts–painting and poetry–men would be always found to sacrifice their lives for a picture or a poem: but no man is, after all, so immeasurably superior to the age he lives in as to be able to resist it wholly; he must draw sustenance from some quarter, and the contemplation of the past will not suffice. Then the pressure on him from without is as water upon the diver; and sooner or later he grows fatigued and comes to the surface to breathe; he is as a flying-fish pursued by sharks below and cruel birds above; and he neither dives as deeply nor flies as high as his freer and stronger ancestry. A daring spirit in the nineteenth century would have been but a timid nursery soul indeed in the sixteenth. We want tumult and war to give us forgetfulness, sublime moments of peace to enjoy a kiss in; but we are expected to be home to dinner at seven, and to say and do nothing that might shock the neighbours. Respectability has wound itself about society, a sort of octopus, and nowhere are you quite free from one of its horrible suckers. The power of the villa residence is supreme: art, science, politics, religion, it has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa goes to the Academy, the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the meanness of a Frith–not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading naturalism of a coloured photograph. To my mind there is no sadder spectacle of artistic debauchery than a London theatre; the overfed inhabitants of the villa in the stalls hoping for gross excitement to assist them through their hesitating digestions; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting the miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of the sentimentality of the back stairs. Were other ages as coarse and as common as ours? It is difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than those that applaud Mr. Pettit’s plays. Impossible that an audience that could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in such sinks of literary infamies as _In the Ranks_ and _Harbour Lights_. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled–the miser in the old castle counting his gold by night, the dishevelled woman whom he keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be waived. We must not quarrel with the ingredients. The miser and the old castle are as true, and not one jot more true, than the million events which go to make up the phenomena of human existence. Not at these things considered separately do I take umbrage, but at the miserable use that is made of them, the vulgarity of the complications evolved from them, and the poverty of beauty in the dialogue.
Not the thing itself, but the idea of the thing evokes the idea. Schopenhauer was right; we do not want the thing, but the idea of the thing. The thing itself is worthless; and the moral writers who embellish it with pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola, who embellishes it with erotic arabesques. You want the idea drawn out of obscuring matter, this can best be done by the symbol. The symbol, or the thing itself, that is the great artistic question. In earlier ages it was the symbol; a name, a plume, sufficed to evoke the idea; now we evoke nothing, for we give everything; the imagination of the spectator is no longer called into play. In Shakespeare’s days to create wealth in a theatre it was only necessary to write upon a board, “A magnificent apartment in a palace.” This was no doubt primitive and not a little barbarous, but it was better by far than by dint of anxious archaeology to construct the Doge’s palace upon the stage. By one rich pillar, by some projecting balustrade taken in conjunction with a moored gondola, we should strive to evoke the soul of the city of Veronese: by the magical and unequalled selection of a subtle and unexpected feature of a thought or aspect of a landscape, and not by the up-piling of extraneous detail, are all great poetic effects achieved.
“By the tideless dolorous inland sea, In a land of sand, of ruin, and gold.”
And, better example still,
“Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois,”
that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de Vigny ever wrote; and being a great poet Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously observed more faithfully than any other poet these principles of art; and, as is characteristic of the present day, nowhere do we find these principles so grossly violated as in the representation of his plays. I had painful proof of this some few nights after my arrival in London. I had never seen Shakespeare acted, and I went to the Lyceum and there I saw that exquisite love song–for _Romeo and Juliet_ is no more than a love song in dialogue–tricked out in silks and carpets and illuminated building, a vulgar bawd suited to the gross passion of an ignorant public. I hated all that with the hatred of a passionate heart, and I longed for a simple stage, a few simple indications, and the simple recitation of that story of the sacrifice of the two white souls for the reconciliation of two great families. My hatred did not reach to the age of the man who played the boy-lover, but to the offensiveness with which he thrust his individuality upon me, longing to realize the poet’s divine imagination: and the woman, too, I wished with my whole soul away, subtle and strange though she was, and I yearned for her part to be played by a youth as in old time: a youth cunningly disguised, would be a symbol; and my mind would be free to imagine the divine Juliet of the poet, whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes and delicate mien and motion of the woman who had thrust herself between me and it.
But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore a little more refined, or, should I say? depraved, in its taste. The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always will exist so long as our present social system holds together. It is the basis of life, and more important than the tavern. Agreed: but that does not say that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved impotent to replace it, the club being no more than the correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa through each modern feature. I will pass on at once to the circulating library, at once the symbol and glory of villaism.
The subject is not unfamiliar to me; I come to it like the son to his father, like the bird to its nest. (Singularly inappropriate comparison, but I am in such excellent humour to-day; humour is everything. It is said that the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb! Let us play.) We have the villa well in our mind. The father who goes to the city in the morning, the grown-up girls waiting to be married, the big drawing-room where they play waltz music, and talk of dancing parties. But waltzes will not entirely suffice, nor even tennis; the girls must read. Mother cannot keep a censor (it is as much as she can do to keep a cook, housemaid, and page-boy), besides the expense would be enormous, even if nothing but shilling and two-shilling novels were purchased. Out of such circumstances the circulating library was hatched.
The villa made known its want, and art fell on its knees. Pressure was put on the publishers, and books were published at 31s. 6d.; the dirty, outside public was got rid of, and the villa paid its yearly subscription, and had nice large handsome books that none but the _elite_ could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a footing of equality with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that nothing would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they might not read, and all for two guineas a year. English fiction became pure, and the garlic and assafoetida with which Byron, Fielding, and Ben Jonson so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature. English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to be heard no more, were no longer procurable. But at this point human nature intervened; poor human nature! when you pinch it in in one place it bulges out in another, after the fashion of a lady’s figure. Human nature has from the earliest time shown a liking for dirty stories; dirty stories have formed a substantial part of every literature (I employ the words “dirty stories” in the circulating library sense); therefore a taste for dirty stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal. Call it a disease if you will–an incurable disease–which, if it is driven inwards, will break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with redoubled virulence. This is exactly what has happened. Actuated by the most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our rations of dirty stories, and for forty years we were apparently the most moral people on the face of the earth. It was confidently asserted that an English woman of sixty would not read what would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a maiden of any other nation. But humiliation and sorrow were awaiting Mudie. True it is that we still continued to subscribe to his library, true it is that we still continued to go to church, true it is that we turned our faces away when _Mdlle. de Maupin_ or the _Assommoir_ was spoken of; to all appearance we were as good and chaste as even Mudie might wish us; and no doubt he looked back upon his forty years of effort with pride; no doubt he beat his manly breast and said, “I have scorched the evil one out of the villa; the head of the serpent is crushed for evermore;” but lo, suddenly, with all the horror of an earthquake, the slumbrous law courts awoke, and the burning cinders of fornication and the blinding and suffocating smoke of adultery were poured upon and hung over the land. Through the mighty columns of our newspapers the terrible lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream the villa, with all its beautiful illusions, tumbled and disappeared.
An awful and terrifying proof of the futility of human effort, that there is neither bad work nor good work to do, nothing but to await the coming of the Nirvana.
I have written much against the circulating library, and I have read a feeble defence or two; but I have not seen the argument that might be legitimately put forward in its favour. It seems to me this: the circulating library is conservatism, art is always conservative; the circulating library lifts the writer out of the precariousness and noise of the wild street of popular fancy into a quiet place where passion is more restrained and there is more reflection. The young and unknown writer is placed at once in a place of comparative security, and he is not forced to employ vile and degrading methods of attracting attention; the known writer, having a certain market for his work, is enabled to think more of it and less of the immediate acclamation of the crowd; but all these possible advantages are destroyed and rendered _nil_ by the veracious censorship exercised by the librarian.
* * * * *
There is one thing in England that is free, that is spontaneous, that reminds me of the blitheness and nationalness of the Continent;–but there is nothing French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of Elizabethan England–I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the vulgarity of an English hall–I will not say the Pavilion, which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there–for preference let us say the Royal. I shall not easily forget my first evening there, when I saw for the time a living house–the dissolute paragraphists, the elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), the stolid, good-humoured costers, the cheerful lights o’ love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what communality of wit; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other’s presence; in a word, there was life. Then there were no cascades of real water, nor London docks, nor offensively rich furniture, with hotel lifts down which some one will certainly be thrown, but one scene representing a street; a man comes on–not, mind you, in a real smock-frock, but in something that suggests one–and sings of how he came up to London, and was “cleaned out” by thieves. Simple, you will say; yes, but better than a _fricassee_ of _Faust_, garnished with hags, imps, and blue flame; better, far better than a drawing-room set at the St. James’s, with an exhibition of passion by Mrs. and Mr. Kendal; better, a million times better than the cheap popularity of Wilson Barrett–an elderly man posturing in a low-necked dress to some poor slut in the gallery; nor is there in the hall any affectation of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a broken-winded barrel-organ playing _a, che la morte_, bad enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse awful and shocking in its more than natural deformity–but bright quips and cracks fresh from the back-yard of the slum where the linen is drying, or the “pub” where the unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will last her a week. That inimitable artist, Bessie Bellwood, whose native wit is so curiously accentuated that it is sublimated, that it is no longer repellent vulgarity but art, choice and rare–see, here she comes with “What cheer, Rea; Rea’s on the job.” The sketch is slight, but is welcome and refreshing after the eternal drawing-room and Mrs. Kendal’s cumbrous domesticity; it is curious, quaint, perverted, and are not these the _aions_ and the attributes of art? Now see that perfect comedian, Arthur Roberts, superior to Irving because he is working with living material; how trim and saucy he is! and how he evokes the soul, the brandy-and-soda soul, of the young men, delightful and elegant in black and white, who are so vociferously cheering him, “Will you stand me a cab-fare, ducky, I am feeling so awfully queer?” The soul, the spirit, the entity of Piccadilly Circus is in the words, and the scene the comedian’s eyes–each look is full of suggestion; it is irritating, it is magnetic, it is symbolic, it is art.
Not art, but a sign, a presentiment of an art, that may grow from the present seeds, that may rise into some stately and unpremeditated efflorescence, as the rhapsodist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play rose through Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous summer of Shakespeare, to die later on in the mist and yellow and brown of the autumn of Crowes and Davenants. I have seen music-hall sketches, comic interludes that in their unexpectedness and naive naturalness remind me of the comic passages in Marlowe’s _Faustus_, I waited (I admit in vain) for some beautiful phantom to appear, and to hear an enthusiastic worshipper cry out in his agony:–
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies! Come, Helen, come; give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.”
And then the astonishing change of key:–
“I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wurtemberg be sacked,” etc.
The hall is at least a protest against the wearisome stories concerning wills, misers in old castles, lost heirs, and the woeful solutions of such things–she who has been kept in the castle cellar for twenty years restored to the delights of hair-pins and a mauve dress, the _ingenue_ to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a protest against Mrs. Kendal’s marital tendernesses and the abortive platitudes of Messrs. Pettit and Sims; the music-hall is a protest against Sardou and the immense drawing-room sets, rich hangings, velvet sofas, etc., so different from the movement of the English comedy with its constant change of scene. The music-hall is a protest against the villa, the circulating library, the club, and for this the “‘all” is inexpressibly dear to me.
But in the interests of those illiterate institutions called theatres it is not permissible for several characters to narrate events in which there is a sequel, by means of dialogue, in a music-hall. If this vexatious restriction were removed it is possible, if it is not certain, that while some halls remained faithful to comic songs and jugglers others would gradually learn to cater for more intellectual and subtle audiences, and that out of obscurity and disorder new dramatic forms, coloured and permeated by the thought and feeling of to-day, might be definitely evolved. It is our only chance of again possessing a dramatic literature.
CHAPTER X
It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton’s death perpetuated this legend. But when I, Edward Dayne, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person. Let this be waived. I was as covered with “fads” as a distinguished foreigner with stars. Naturalism I wore round my neck, Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on an emergency. I do not judge whether I was charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found all–actors, managers, editors, publishers, docile and ready to listen to me. The world may be wicked, cruel, and stupid, but it is patient; on this point I will not be gainsaid, it is patient; I know what I am talking about; I maintain that the world is patient. If it were not, what would have happened? I should have been murdered by the editors of (I will suppress names), torn in pieces by the sub-editors, and devoured by the office boys. There was no wild theory which I did not assail them with, there was no strange plan for the instant extermination of the Philistine, which I did not press upon them, and (here I must whisper), with a fair amount of success, not complete success I am glad to say–that would have meant for the editors a change from their arm-chairs to the benches of the Union and the plank beds of Holloway. The actress when she returned home from the theatre, suggested I had an enemy, a vindictive enemy, who dogged my steps; but her stage experience led her astray. I had no enemy except myself; or to put it scientifically, no enemy except the logical consequences of my past life and education, and these caused me a great and real inconvenience. French wit was in my brain, French sentiment was in my heart; of the English soul I knew nothing, and I could not remember old sympathies, it was like seeking forgotten words, and if I were writing a short story, I had to return in thought to Montmartre or the Champs Elysees for my characters. That I should have forgotten so much in ten years seems incredible, and it will be deemed impossible by many, but that is because few are aware of how little they know of the details of life, even of their own, and are incapable of appreciating the influence of their past upon their present. The visible world is visible only to a few, the moral world is a closed book to nearly all. I was full of France, and France had to be got rid of, or pushed out of sight before I could understand England; I was like a snake striving to slough its skin.
Handicapped as I was with dangerous ideas, and an impossible style, defeat was inevitable. My English was rotten with French idiom; it was like an ill-built wall overpowered by huge masses of ivy; the weak foundations had given way beneath the weight of the parasite; and the ideas I sought to give expression to were green, sour, and immature as apples in August.
Therefore before long the leading journal that had printed two poems and some seven or eight critical articles, ceased to send me books for review, and I fell back upon obscure society papers. Fortunately it was not incumbent on me to live by my pen; so I talked, and watched, and waited till I grew akin to those around me, and my thoughts blended with, and took root in my environment. I wrote a play or two, I translated a French opera, which had a run of six nights, I dramatized a novel, I wrote short stories, and I read a good deal of contemporary fiction.
The first book that came under my hand was “A Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. Each scene is developed with complete foresight and certainty of touch. What Mr. James wants to do he does. I will admit that an artist may