Critical Studies
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Title: Critical Studies
Author: Ouida
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Language: English
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CRITICAL STUDIES
BY OUIDA
_SECOND IMPRESSION_
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1900
[_All Rights reserved_]
PREFATORY NOTE
With exception of one, that on the poems of Mr Blunt, all these essays
have previously appeared in _The Fortnightly Review_, _The Nineteenth
Century Review_, or the _Nuova Antologia_. The two published in _The
Nuova Antologia_ were written by me in Italian. I have now turned them
into English myself. The article on D'Annunzio, in the _Fortnightly_,
was the first ever printed in English on a writer who is now well known
to all. I do not think that he has, since it was published, created
anything equal to the _Trionfo_. The character of his genius is not
adapted to the theatre, to which he now chiefly devotes himself. It will
be interesting to see if it can be adapted to political life, which has
lately tempted him. Perhaps he may become a new Rienzi. One is greatly
needed in Italy.
OUIDA.
CONTENTS
I. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO
II. GEORGES DARIEN
III. THE ITALIAN NOVELS OF MARION CRAWFORD
IV. LE SECRET DU PRECEPTEUR
V. L'IMPERIEUSE BONTE
VI. WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
VII. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN
VIII. UNWRITTEN LITERARY LAWS
IX. AUBERON HERBERT
X. THE UGLINESS OF MODERN LIFE
XI. THE QUALITY OF MERCY
XII. THE DECADENCE OF LATIN RACES
XIII. ALMA VENIESIA
CRITICAL STUDIES
I
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO
In the world of letters the name of Gabriele d'Annunzio is now famous.
There is no cultured society which does not know something at least of
the author of the _Innocente_ and the _Trionfo_, and is not aware that,
in him, one of the ablest and most delicate of living critics believes
that he has seen the personification of a renascence of Latin genius.
Imprisoned as his novels were in the limits of a language which, however
great its beauty, is but little known except in its own land, he has
been extraordinarily fortunate in finding such sponsors in the outside
world as he has obtained in M. Herelle, in Rene Doumic, and in the
Vicomte de Voguee. Never has any romance been so admirably heralded as
the _Trionfo_ in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and never certainly, since
lyre was strung or laurels were woven, was any praise ever heard so
dulcet and so lavish as that with which he, who has been called the
second Chateaubriand, has welcomed and introduced the new Boccaccio.
The grace and beauty of the style of the Vicomte de Voguee, and the
culture of his intelligence, have gained him in literature this name of
the second Chateaubriand. They are both incontestable. But they are apt
to lead his readers away from the consideration of the value of his
literary judgments. He is a critic of exquisite delicacy and fineness,
but also of great enthusiasms, and these enthusiasms are at times much
stronger than his judgment and overpower it. What he admires he admires
_toto corde_, and is apt to lose in this generous ardour his power of
selection, his accuracy of appraisement.
This fact has been always conspicuous in all his writings on Pasteur,
and it has been equally conspicuous in the unmeasured idolatry with
which he has dipped his pen in all the honey of Hymettus to sing the
praises of the man he loves. But this adoption of D'Annunzio into French
literature has, with its incontestable advantages, equal penalties and
disadvantages for the author; for one reader outside Italy who will read
him in the original text, ten thousand will know him only in the French
version, and twenty thousand will accept De Voguee's description of his
works without attempting to judge those for themselves. In the French
version the romances gain in certain points; their excessive detail is
abridged, their crudities are softened down, their wearisome analyses
and too frequent obscenities are omitted. The translations of M. Herelle
are, as all must know, admirable in grace and elegance, but, though as
perfect as translations which are guilty of continual excisions can be,
they fail to render the genius of D'Annunzio as it is to be seen and
felt by those who read the works in the original tongue. In the French
version they are much milder, much more tempered, much less unbridled,
and much less cynically nude; but they are also much less vigorous,
virile, impassioned, and furiously scornful. Many fine passages have
been esteemed _longueurs_, and have been omitted altogether, and entire
chapters have been sacrificed to the exigencies of taste or of space.
In the French edition of the _Trionfo_, nearly the whole book, entitled
_La Vita Nuova_, containing the pilgrimage to Casalbordino is omitted.
But without perusal of this marvellous reproduction of a scene of
Italian fanaticism and frenzy, and of similar portions of his works, it
is impossible to estimate fully the real D'Annunzio, and judge of his
magnificent powers of observation and description, as well as of his
incessant search for what is loathsome, his cruel exultation in his
examination of physical diseases and moral leprosies.
I know not why this pilgrimage was rejected, for it is not more indecent
than other portions of the book, and it is singularly true to certain
phases of Italian life, in which all the Paganism bred in the blood and
bone of the people is displayed, mixed with the ferocity of Christian
bigotry. Let me here translate the opening of it:--
'It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unexpected, unlike
any other assemblage of men and things, composed of mixtures so
diverse, cruel and strange, that it eclipsed the most dreadful
visions of a nightmare. All the hideousness of the eternal
idiot, all the filthiness of vice and its stupidities, all the
spasms and deformities of baptized flesh, all the tears of
penitence, all the laughter of license; the mania, the
cupidity, the craft, the lust, the fraud, the imbecility, the
silent desperation, the sacred choruses, the howls of the
possessed, the shouts of the ambulatory vendors, the clanging
of the bells, the squeal of the trumpets, the lowing, the
neighing, the bleating; the fires crackling under the
cauldrons, the heaps of fruits and sweetmeats, the display of
utensils, of stuffs, of arms, of jewels, of rosaries; the
obscene capers of the dancers, the convulsions of the
epileptic, the blows of the quarrelsome, the rush of flying,
frightened thieves through the crowd; the supreme froth of
corruption poured forth from the filthy lanes of remote cities,
and showered out on to an ignorant and astounded multitude,
like horseflies on the flanks of beasts, shoals of parasites
descended on a compact mass incapable of defending itself, all
the base temptations of brutal appetites, all the treacheries
playing on simplicity and stupidity, all the charlatanisms and
the effronteries bared in full daylight; all the opposing
contrasts were there, boiling and effervescing, around the
House of the Virgin.'
What strength is here? What admirable choice of descriptive phrase, and
truth of design, as in a Callot or Hogarth! what sense conveyed of
press, of haste, of noise, of confusion, of stench, of uproar! We live
in this crowd as we read.
De Voguee asserts that the indecency of D'Annunzio is never 'polisonne ou
grivoise'; that it is never vulgar, although it is unbridled. He admits
the preference for the unclean, which almost amounts, indeed, to an
hallucination, but he urges that in D'Annunzio it is always redeemed by
art.
'A Rabelais, a Boccaccio, a Loti, or a D'Annunzio, give expression to a
certain temperament, with the artistic resources which that temperament
imposes on them,' writes De Voguee, in his celebrated criticism,[1] 'they
have nothing in common with tradesmen, who painfully produce the filth
demanded by a publisher and a certain public. An abyss separates the
former from the latter writers. This difference between them which our
judgment perceives, we do not show by critical demonstration; our taste
is conscious of it as our eyes distinguish a flower, venomous perhaps,
but natural, from an artificial flower coloured by poisonous dyes.'
[Footnote 1: _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1^re janvier 1895.]
Now, in this passage there is much truth, but it is not equally true
that D'Annunzio is at no time to be placed in the lower class. There is
too frequently in his indecency a strain, an effort, a mannerism, an
extravagance, sought, and unnecessary. The reader, if he desires to
understand what I mean by this, can turn to page 320 in the _Trionfo_,
or to Chapter X., in the _Piacere_ (Italian version), in which there are
ingenuities of indecency introduced which have no relation whatever to
the narrative, nor any obligation to appear.
What is, I think, more offensive to taste, and more injurious to art
than any sensual excess in description, is mere nastiness, mere filth;
and of this D'Annunzio is as guilty as Zola is, and as Zola has been,
always.
De Voguee may pour out his scorn as he will on the _industriel_ who
composed _La Bete Humaine_, and may cover with the roses and lilies of
his exquisite garlands of praise the creator of the _Trionfo_, the fact
remains that the Satyr shows his cloven hoof as much in one as in the
other; and the motives which move either of the writers we have no right
to condemn or to appraise, for the entrance into personal motive is
surely an intrusion which should never be attempted.
We may, nevertheless, suggest as probable that, however dissimilar be
their atmosphere and circumstances, both Zola and D'Annunzio have been
moved to study chiefly what is called immoral, and prurient, by a
sincere desire to reach to the very depths of human nature, to shrink
from no investigation, to deny no evidence, and to protest against the
hypocrisy with which literary art has so frequently covered its eyes and
turned away from the truth. 'Let us study life alone,' says D'Annunzio,
as Zola said it; and if he seek life in its corruption, coming upon the
corpse of putrid pleasure as the gay riders in the Campo Santo of Pisa
check their startled steeds before the open biers, he does no more, and
no less, offend art than Zola offends it in _Nana_.
Indeed, so little is De Voguee's statement in this matter justified, that
almost every Italian who has read D'Annunzio's works will, in speaking
of him, regret his incessant recurrence to obscenity. Not from prudery,
for Italians are never prudes, but from an artistic sense, that this
perpetually intruded indecency is an error in taste, and becomes quite
as tiresome as any other form of perpetual repetition.
The most conspicuous error of modern literature is, beyond doubt, its
verbiage. It has completely forgotten the great canon of 'Ars est celare
artem'; the supreme ability of conveying immeasurable suggestion in a
mere word, in concentrating all the music of the soul in one brief note.
All the arts err at this epoch in the same manner; literature has the
common malady; it is prolix. The indecencies of D'Annunzio, like his
other descriptions, are prolix; and the prolixity is not redeemed by the
indecency, nor the indecency by the prolixity.
This tendency of redundancy is not his fault alone; it is that of his
time. The enormous canvases and numerous figures of modern paintings,
the crowded groups and tortured attitudes of modern sculpture, the
elaborate scenic effects, and mechanical appliances, and endless acts,
of modern opera and drama, are all forms of the same malady of
repetition; of ignorance of how, and when, to break the laurel bough
before it withers; of lack of skill to master the subtleties of
concentration and suggestion. The descriptions of the modern writer are
frequently mere inventories; they are painfully minute; they are like a
mosaic, in which millions of little cubes are grouped to make a whole.
As before a modern painting we are often unimpressed by the whole, but
struck by the dexterity of the brush-work, so in modern literature we
are little interested in the conception, but allured by the dexterity of
the treatment. Too frequently, unappily, this multiplicity of words
covers a sad poverty of ideas. But in D'Annunzio's works there is not a
page without ideas; ideas which may displease or may disgust the reader
at times, but which are, nevertheless, always worthy to arrest
attention, even when they are only studies of depravity.
D'Annunzio is a greater writer than Zola, not because he has emulated or
surpassed Zola's indecencies, but because he is what Zola never was--a
scholar and a poet. His culture is of the most varied and classical
kind, profound as well as brilliant; and his poetic powers were shown in
his sonnets and lyrics before he wrote his romances. Zola is no scholar,
and is not, either in temperament or expression, a poet. It would be
impossible to conceive him creating such a poem as the _Villa Chigi_ or
the _Riccordi di Ripetta_ of D'Annunzio. There are passages in Zola's
works, notably in _La Terre_, which are, I think, as great as it is
possible for prose to be, but they are never touched by any poetry of
phrase or feeling.
Also, when De Voguee states that the indecency of D'Annunzio is not
indecency because the Italian language is never indecent, and alleges
that what would be insupportable in any other tongue is possible in
Italian, because Italian enjoys the privilege which pertained to its
mother, Latin, _i.e._, to say with grace and impunity what in any other
tongue would disgust the hearer, he says what is absolutely untrue; and
one can only wonder if he knows anything of the Italian of the streets,
of the fields, of the wine-houses, of the popular theatres. In this
affirmation, as in others, he has imagined what he says to be the fact,
and founded on the fabrications of his imagination a positive statement.
It is a frequent habit with him, and makes the weakness of his arguments
in many instances, on other themes than this.
We know that Italian is heard only occasionally by him during his visits
to Italy, and is then heard by him only in its polished speech. To those
by whom it is heard every day, as spoken by all classes, it certainly
possesses nothing of this privilege which he claims for it. It can be,
on the contrary, very coarse and crude; it has none of the subtleties
and graces, and delicate gradations of French: it calls a spade a spade
with the rudest frankness; and its curses are of an appalling ferocity
and filthiness.
Nor can it be said that D'Annunzio ever tries to give it delicacy or
veiled suggestion; his language is as broad and as gross as that of Ovid
or Catullus. He never allows the smallest doubt about his meaning to
exist at any time; and he is most especially explicit when treating of
those subjects which in modern literature are generally considered
forbidden. Indeed, this anxiety to paint the brothel and the madhouse as
carefully and minutely as the miniaturist paints on the ivory, leads to
his great defect, over-elaboration. He does not trust enough to the
power of suggestion, which is so strong in a great writer over the mind
of a reader. He does not remember that half a chord may fill the ear
with melody, and that a hint may rouse the senses to nausea or to
desire.
Paradoxical as it may appear to say so, I think his wide culture has
injured his style. I think he would have been a greater Italian writer
if he had known no language save Italian and, of course, Latin and
Greek.
The extreme culture and over-variety of modern education tends to
destroy, or at least disturb, originality; it encumbers the mind under
too vast a load of riches, it enlightens, but it also obstructs; if
Shakespeare had been less ignorant he might, perhaps, have been also
less great.
Foreign influence is not beneficial to the Italian. It makes him unreal;
it makes him lose his charming natural grace and abandonment, it renders
him artificial; he never really becomes what is implied by the word
cosmopolitan (such a cosmopolitan as Lord Dufferin or the late Prince
Lobanoff), and he does lose much of his own national qualities. It is
very rarely that an Italian can, like the late lamented scholar Enrico
Nencioni, steep his mind deeply in all the riches of foreign literature
without in the least losing his own Italian individuality. D'Annunzio,
on the contrary, allows himself to be absorbed and assimilated by
foreign influences, to be dominated by them, to so great an extent
indeed that his style is frequently bastardised by them, and many of his
sentences read as though they were translations from foreign sources. He
claims to have greatly embellished and amplified the Italian language;
he has certainly rendered it more colloquial and more copious; but he
has often grafted foreign idioms upon it, and he has perhaps robbed it
of some of its dignity and grace. He considers that the artist should
always remodel the instrument he uses; but the figure will not hold good
in other arts, for Sarasate does not carve the shell of his violin,
Clausen does not weave the canvas he uses, Bartolome does not blast the
marble out of the hill-side. The writer should use the language he
writes in as it comes pure from its natural springs; he will but
contaminate it if he pour into it alien streams.
D'Annunzio would probably protest that the patchwork effects of the
foreign languages he introduces, do but correctly represent the mixture
of tongues common in our days in those phases of life which pass under
the generic name of society. In such protest there would, no doubt, be
truth; but it could only apply to certain social scenes in the
_Piacere_, and my objection is less to the introduction of foreign
phrases directly than it is to the foreign complexion and contour which
he so frequently gives to his own language; a fault never before him
known in an Italian writer. Many of his phrases are of foreign
construction. But he is not on that account a plagiarist, as has been
said of him; he is never a plagiarist, but is a too highly educated, and
a too sensitively susceptible, mental organisation. The mean charge of
plagiarism is one so easy to bring and so difficult to refute, that it
is cast by envy and inferiority at all those whose genius, like that of
D'Annunzio, is proud, passionate, and defiant of criticism. That which
has in it the elements of true greatness has always these pellets of mud
thrown at it. In some ways, on the contrary, he seems to seek an
exaggeration of original idiosyncrasies, and to no writer would
conscious imitation be more odious or impossible.
There is unhappily, in all his works, an absolute absence of wit, of
mirth, of humour. There is not a laugh, scarcely even a smile, in any
of his pages; if we except the cruel laughter of a lover at his
mistress's physical defects. Over all his genius there broods that
'green melancholy,' which is the too-common hue of modern thought, that
dull greyness of death which has spread from the laboratories of science
over all the worlds of literature. Not only is no joyous laugh ever
heard, there is not even the indulgent smile which relieves melancholy
and bitterness in many writers whose views of life are gloomy. Nowhere
is this more seen than in the almost savage cruelty with which the poor
old _devote_, Gioconda Aurispa, is drawn; the merciless description of
her senile love of sweetmeats, of her disappointment when her nephew
forgets to bring them, of her expectant eyes, 'almost impudent in their
entreaty,' of her short breath with its foetid odour, of her tottering
steps amongst her flowers; all is cruel, merciless, without a grain of
pity or of sympathy to redeem its biting satire of so feeble and
harmless a creature.
Compare with such treatment the exquisite tenderness of Pierre Loti's
Tante Claire, think with how gentle a respect Thackeray drew the death
of an old man, remember the touch with which Maupassant makes us akin
even to poor Boule de Suiffe. Tragedy is not necessarily cruelty, nor
accuracy necessarily brutality. Shakespeare makes us indignant for Lear
and sharers in his sorrows; but D'Annunzio would concentrate our
thoughts only on his ridiculous thin hair blown by the winter winds, the
tremor of his toothless jaws, and palsy of his bent, unsteady limbs. In
the highest art there is always pity because there is always
comprehension. D'Annunzio has as yet no more pity than the demonstrator
in a physiological amphitheatre. But it is not impossible that such pity
may come to him later on, for pity is rarely a passion of youth; it is
usually the fruit of reflection, comparison, realisation of what is
alien and impersonal. That sense which he already feels of the inner
life of all things cannot leave him for ever insensible to the
sufferings of that life.
At present he is absorbed in the sensual ecstasies of early manhood, and
the fumes of voluptuous delights obscure his sight to much else which
surrounds him, and which finds him callous and negligent of it. De Voguee
sees in him the leader of a new school, but there is as yet little that
is new in his manner of judging life. It is the manner of _Le Disciple_,
though touched with warmer tones, and placed in richer landscapes, and
vibrating with stronger passions, because Italian in scene and in
temper.
If ever there be a true Latin renascence, which is scarcely to be hoped
for, it will come, not from a writer who is saturated with French,
Russian, German, and English influences, but one who has the Latin
genius, the Latin temper, unalloyed. But does this now exist anywhere?
If it do, it is in remote mountain sides and by lonely lake waters, not
in clubhouses and on racecourses. Such a writer will more probably come,
if he come at all, from the extreme south than from the north, perhaps
even from the great and almost virgin island of the west. In the dense
cork woods and on the desolate shores of Sardinia, a Salvator Rosa of
literature might well be begotten, for there is also there a companion
whom the Muses fear not--Misery.
I imagine that De Voguee does not know much of the popular songs of the
south and the west of Italy. I venture to think that in those
_stornelli_, _cantileni_ _rispetti_, and the rest, there is more of the
genuine spirit of the Italian soil than in any of the works hitherto
written by D'Annunzio, because, despite their intensity of passion, they
are full of a pure poetical beauty and an idealised tenderness, which in
his pictures of love are absent.
Even in the views which De Voguee holds of the characters of these
romances, there seems frequently a curious misconstruction of their
salient points. For instance, he sees in the tragedy, with which the
_Trionfo_ closes, the fact that Aurispa loved so intensely that he felt
impelled to destroy what he possessed, as the only absolute means of
fully possessing it. But I do not see this. I see in Aurispa a young man
habitually self-indulgent and constitutionally feeble; who gradually
passes from frantic adoration of a woman possessed, to the nausea which
so frequently follows on such possession. The proof of this lies in the
cruel cynical criticism with which he discovers and enumerates her
physical and mental defects, with which he views the deformity of her
feet as they push the warm sand of the beach to and fro, and with which
he realises the growing disgust which she awakes in him physically and
morally. He feels that he can neither live with her, nor live without
her; that she will be his destroyer in one way or the other; it is in a
frenzy of hatred and of impotence that he seizes her in his last
embrace, and plunges with her over the cliff, into the starlit depths of
the sea below. To ignore this is to miss the whole meaning of the final
act, and the absolute veracity of the whole work.
I have seen such physical jealousy in the man of feeble health of the
vigorous strength of the woman whom he loved, and there is no form of
jealousy more cruel or more incurable, and it is likely to become
frequent in modern life, which develops the physical strength and social
liberties of the female to so vast an extent. This is a painful fact,
but it is one which cannot be disputed. Go wherever a crowd of both
sexes congregate, and there you will see an Ippolita in all her splendid
vitality and magnificent growth, and beside her, nine times out of ten,
there will be a Giorgio Aurispa, small, frail, half-blind, pallid,
bloodless, beardless, sickly, and prematurely decrepit.
I should myself have preferred to trace the destroying influence of
sensual passion eating its way gradually into the health and strength of
a complete masculine sanity, and of a robust masculine health, like
aquafortis biting into a copper plate. Aurispa is already mentally
diseased before the fateful day on which he sees Ippolita in the dusk of
the chapel in Rome. He views all things animate and inanimate, human and
animal, real and ideal, through that distorted medium which the mentally
deformed habitually see through as through a convex and smoked glass. He
is more than feeble, he is not sane. If he had not sought death on
account of his mistress, he would have done so because Demetrius Aurispa
had died before by his own hand; or for some other reason which in his
cerebral condition would have seemed to him imperative and irresistible,
as imaginary conditions do seem to those not sane.
We are told throughout the book to realise this extreme weakness,
physical and moral, which ultimately drives him to destroy himself and
her.
'"You love life?" he murmured, with a veiled bitterness.
'"Yes, life delights me," she answered, almost with vehemence.
'She had, in her voice, in her attitude, in all her person, a
brightness of unusual joy and pleasure. She had in her whole
aspect that satisfaction which the living creature only feels
in those hours when life runs harmoniously in all its currents,
in which there is a perfect balance in all the vital forces in
accord with the favour and fairness of all surrounding
circumstances. As in other similar moments, her whole being
seemed to unclose in the freshness of the sea air, in the
coolness of the summer evening, like one of those magnificent
night-blooming flowers which only open the heart of their
petals as the sun passes and sets.'
This is one of the innumerable beautiful images in which D'Annunzio
excels, and nothing can surely be finer of its kind than the whole
passage which I have quoted. But it clearly proves, especially if
compared with its context, that the passion which Aurispa once felt for
her had now become a furious envy of her more abounding life, of her
perennial and indestructible capacity of enjoyment.
And that night, indeed, he kills her, not from excess of love, but from
envy of her exultant and exuberant vitality and hatred of its contrast
to his own impotence; from the sense, as I have said, that he could
neither live with her nor without her. In this, D'Annunzio has linked
cause and effect with excellent precision. Every minutia of feeling
described is correctly described, and such feeling is made to arise from
a natural source, precisely as dislike follows on satiety in real life.
But very frequently there is no such natural connection in his treatment
of circumstance and character.
The _Trionfo_ is admirably balanced from its opening to its closing
pages; and the tragedy on the Pincio, with which the work opens,
fittingly and perfectly strikes the keynote of the whole, and the
_motif_ of the opera is suggested in the overture. But in the other
romances there is too often a want of unison between the action
described and its motives or sources. There is, at times, even an
absolute lack of any rational cause at all; so that, in some degree, all
his characters have in them more or less of the irresponsibility and
unconnectedness of the insane. He leaves too much unexplained; too many
actions motiveless; too many portraits floating indistinct like the
night and river studies of Whistler. It is curious that this vagueness,
this uncertainty and obscurity, should exist in one who is on the other
hand so frequently and wearisomely minute in microscopic details. He
constantly calls on us to believe what he gives us no data for
believing. Even in the _Trionfo_ he constantly introduces persons and
incidents having no connection with the narrative. The whole family of
Giorgio, the whole action passing at Guardiagrele, so elaborately
painted, lead to nothing; we neither see nor hear of them again; neither
they nor Guardiagrele ever enter his pages any more; and the momentous
scene with Giorgio's father leads to nothing, but ends in a blind alley.
Now this is a great fault in composition, and one which disappoints and
irritates the reader. Of Demetrius Aurispa, again, much is made, but
nothing is explained or continued; and his long exposition of one of
Tennyson's poems is as unnecessary as the long disquisition upon Wagner
further on in the book.
D'Annunzio is so profoundly engrossed in the psychology of his
characters, that he frequently forgets to make their antecedents and
actions consistent or credible. For instance, few women have been drawn
in fiction more lovable, more real, more refined, more profoundly
interesting, or more truly feminine, than Giuliana Hermil, in the
_Innocente_. There is nothing in her character or in her circumstances
which can render it the least probable to us that such a woman as she is
described to be, would have been led into the half-unconscious sensual
impulse which makes her unfaithful to her conjugal vows without the
smallest excuse of passion or temptation. Nor is it conceivable for an
instant that Tullio Hermil, on hearing her confession of this
_inconsapevole_ adultery, would serenely submit to remain in ignorance
of the name of this lover of an hour, merely suspecting who it was from
an inscription found in a novel, and would merely answer with gentle
irony to her apology that the soul had had no share in her undoing!
'_Povera anima!_' he murmurs with an indulgent smile!
I will not say that this is impossible, for nothing is so in the
relations of the sexes; but it is certainly improbable and incongruous,
since Giuliana is throughout described as the gentlest, most timid, and,
despite the infidelity in which we are asked to believe, the purest of
her sex, submissive to desertion as Griselda, and incapable of an impure
thought. It is contrary to all truth to human nature to make such a
woman err in so common, stupid, and unintelligible a manner, and to make
Tullio Hermil continue under such circumstances to live in the same
house with her until the time of her delivery.
D'Annunzio has also a total lack of perception when the ridiculous mars
the pathetic. This is a very common defect in his countrymen, and is one
frequently traceable to a want of the humorous faculty. There is
something ridiculous, which goes far to spoil all which is intended to
be tragic in the motive or action of the _Innocente_, in the details
accompanying and explaining its culminating act. The idea of this act is
fine, and the hatred of the man for the child is natural, whilst the
conception and carrying out of the semi-crime are subtle and original.
But the filthy description of the infant (almost identical with that of
the new-born babe in Zola's _Joie de Vivre_) and the perpetual
references to its swaddling clothes, and the tedious profusion of
details with which the subject is elaborated, destroy in the mind of the
reader all sense of pity for the victim, and all blame for the act which
sends it to its grave. One feels that the little squalling, dribbling,
shapeless creature, with its scabby head and cat-like miawling, is much
better destroyed, and this is not the sensation which the author desires
to arouse; he would wish us to feel at once horror at, and compassion
for, Tullio Hermil, but we can feel nothing except a vague contempt for
this helpless young man. Had the semi-murder of it followed immediately
on its birth, or had it been found by him after absence a fair
two-year-old child, with all the rosebud loveliness of that age, this
bathos would have been avoided; and the stealthy sin of its effacement
would have carried in it the force of a powerful tragedy undiminished,
as it actually is, by gross and comic images, which may be realism but
are none the less bathos. It is perfectly natural that Tullio Hermil's
abhorrence of this spurious offspring should grow with every day until
the desire to destroy it becomes at last an over-mastering impulse; but
to make this act tragic, and to awaken that sympathy for the victim
which all true tragedy excites, the latter should be so described that
the heart of the reader should bleed for it when exposed to the icy air
which kills it, and that its martyred infancy should seem fitly lamented
by those echoes of the distant _Novena_, which at the supreme moment
float through all the silent house.
The _Innocente_ has many passages in its pages of perfect beauty like
this episode of the _Novena_; its defects are due to its author's
incapacity to perceive where the ludicrous damages the pathetic and
destroys the terrible. The writer's artistic instinct moved him to
create a situation unique, and full of the keenest interest, abounding
in opportunity for the analysis of temptations and emotions; and of such
analysis he is a master, if too prolix in his expositions of it. But a
want of the perception which warns us off the line of demarcation
dividing the dramatic from the grotesque, has allowed him to pass this
line, and merge the dramatic in a flood of trivial and commonplace
minutiae. Nor is it natural that, loathing this new-born bastard as
Tullio Hermil does, he should accompany his brother to invite an old
peasant to be its sponsor. The beauty and simplicity of this passage are
great, but they cannot reconcile us to the improbability of such an
errand.
'As we drew near the place where Giovanni de Scordio dwelt, my
brother saw in the field the tall figure of the old man.
'"Look! There he is. He is sowing. We bring our invitation in a
solemn hour."
'We approached. I trembled within myself as though I were about
to commit a profanation. I did indeed profane a thing in itself
sacred and beautiful. I went to solicit the spiritual paternity
of a venerable life for an adulterous creature.
'"Look at his height," exclaimed Frederigo, pointing to the
sower. "He is no taller than other men, and yet he looks a
giant."
'We paused under a tree, and watched the labourer from a
distance. Giovanni had not perceived us.
'He came straightway towards us up the field with measured
slowness. He wore a woollen cap, black and green, with two
wings which covered his ears in the ancient fashion. A white
sack hung by a leathern strap from throat to waist, the sack
being full of grain. With his left hand he held the sack open,
with the right he took the grain and scattered it. His gesture
was large, easy, sweeping, moderated to a serene rhythm. The
corn, flying from his hand, shone in the sun like gold dust,
falling with regularity upon the wet furrows. He advanced
slowly, his feet sinking in the moist soil, his head sometimes
lifted to the holiness of the light; all his attitude was
simple, noble, grand.
* * * * *
'We entered the glebe.
'"Good health, Giovanni," said Frederigo, going up to the old
man. "Be your seed blessed. Be blessed your bread of the
future."
'"Good health to you," I repeated.
'The peasant left off work; he uncovered his head.
'"Cover yourself, Giovanni, or we also must stand with bare
heads in the sun," said my brother.
'The old man put on his cap, confused, almost shy, smiling.
'He asked humbly, "Why so much honour?"
'I said with a voice which vainly strove to be steady, "I am
come to beg you to hold my son at the baptismal font."
'The peasant looked at me astounded, then at my brother. His
embarrassment increased. He murmured:
'"Why to me so much honour?"
'"What do you reply?" I asked.
'"I am thy servant; God render the grace for the honour thou
dost me to-day, and God be praised for the joy that He gives
to my old age. All the benedictions of Heaven rest on thy
son."'
Nothing can be finer, simpler, more effective than this scene, but when
we are conscious that the son thus spoken of is the spurious offspring
which Tullio Hermil loathes, our sympathies are turned aside by a sense
of incongruity and disgust. We are conscious that the young man would
never have gone on such an errand, never have consecrated by such
expressions the spawn of his wife's incomprehensible and unexplained
amour. It is impossible to bring one's self to believe in any part of
the story of the _Innocente_, strong as the treatment is in realism of a
certain kind, and seductive as is the admirable ease and limpidity of
the narrative, which for smoothness of recital, and wonderful semblance
of being a true narrative of real events, is not surpassed by any
novelist and has been equalled by very few writers indeed.
In all his works D'Annunzio draws women with exquisite veracity and
skill; and a rare intuition into the workings of their minds and the
beatings of their hearts. Of men he has as yet only drawn one type,
whatever they are called, Sperelli, Aurispa, Cantelmi, Hermil, they are
always the same person: 'touched to fine issues,' steeped in
scholarship, refined, susceptible, voluptuous, but all sick with the
_maladie du siecle_; all infirm from the neurasthenia of too early and
too unbridled self-indulgence. But his women are infinitely more varied
and more intricate. They are wondrous presentments of breathing life.
All the contradictions of feminine nature are portrayed with marvellous
exactitude in the vicious, cruel, and frenzied sensualism of Ippolita,
of which we watch the gradual growth as we watch Vesuvius on a summer
night pass from slumber into fury. With what inimitable dexterity he
makes us conscious of the plebeian grossness underlying her physical
sorcery, the commonness of her base birth seen here and there through
the dazzling sorcery of her attractions; and how natural she is in her
buoyant spirits, in her gay sportiveness, in her rapid changes of mood
and humour, in her mingling of cruelty and compassion! Equally does he
convey to the reader the consciousness of the perfect high breeding in
the _Virgine delle Rocce_, of the three sisters of sorrow, so alike yet
so dissimilar; three figures stepped down from the canvas of the
Veronese, but dimmed by solitude and long neglect. Not less admirably
has he given the delicate distinction and infinite sweetness of the
Siennese, Maria Ferres (although she is indeed an almost exact
reproduction of Giuliana Hermil), whilst that patrician courtesan Donna
Elena Muti, shameless, lascivious, and conscienceless, is nevertheless
always a high-bred woman. He has incarnated the incomparable charm of
the Italian woman, the most graceful, the most impassioned, the most
seductive woman on earth, although also perhaps the most imperious,
pitiless, and fiercely exacting in her passions. Even Ippolita, vicious
as she is, is 'l'adorable Ippolita,' as De Voguee calls her, and her
portrait is surely one which will become as precious to future
generations as that of Manon Lescaut is to us.
I much fear that the only work of his which will become known to the
English public in general will be the _Virgine delle Rocce_, because
(as far as it has gone) it is not indecent. The other works could not be
reproduced in English; and the _Virgine delle Rocce_ unhappily gives no
just measure of the talent and strength of the writer. At present it is
but the first of a triune romance of which the two latter parts are as
yet unpublished. It is the cleanest, the simplest, and the most romantic
of his works, but it will probably be caviare to the crowd, and it
wholly lacks the great qualities of its predecessors. It is not
well-constructed like the _Innocente_, it is not daring and intense like
the _Trionfo_; it is not brilliant like _Il Piacere_; it is rambling,
and vague, and shadowy, and it is difficult to collect the threads of
the narrative. It is published in a fragment, which is always an unwise
method of publication, but it is to be feared that when entire it will
never equal the _Innocente_ or the _Trionfo_. Indeed when severed from
the theme of sensual psychology D'Annunzio loses in strength and in
colour; he becomes desultory, almost indifferent; and wanders through
his own garden of romance with little interest in it, much as in this
latest story his own Oddo and Antonello stray through the ruins of
Linturno and drift through the water-lilies of the lonely stream.
But this story, defective though it be, has a great charm for those
conversant with certain phases of Italian life. I have known just such a
grand old palace in the solitude of a deserted country, just such young
daughters growing up in stately poverty and perpetual joylessness; just
such paternal obsession in clinging to ruined thrones and perished
faiths; just such an interminable sequence of colourless, uninterested,
imprisoned days where the life is the life of the Lady of Shalott, and
no eyes are lifted to see that the almond-trees are in flower.
Every page of this short book, which Frederic Leighton would have
delighted to illustrate, is impressed with Italian verity of a kind
which few foreigners have ever occasion to verify. The vast stone stairs
of the approach, the huge dim archways, the great fountains where the
stone Tritons spout and the ghosts rise with the spray in the moonlight
of midnight, the dry fish-ponds full of odorous plants self sown, the
neglected, wild, beautiful, fragrant gardens, the immense halls and
chambers frescoed, water-gilt, marble-encrusted; the silent corridors,
the ceilings lofty as the cupolas of cathedrals, the fading tapestries,
the soft grey dust, the abandonment, the poverty, the stateliness, the
infinite pathos and charm of this splendour, 'which dies so slowly
because born of true art and of what was once an heroic nobility.' All
these are portrayed with perfect fidelity in this strange and too slight
story of the three daughters of the fallen House of Montega, and no less
true to the facts of Italian life is the destiny which weighs upon them,
the insanity which dwells amongst them in the person of their mother,
whom we see living before us as she passes, carried in her perfumed and
painted sedan chair, with her strange fixed regard, her tiara of ebon
hair, her pallid face, her jewelled hands. Madness is a frequent malady
in Italy, and few noble families are without some insane member. The
afflicted person is usually kept in his or her apartments in the palace,
or in one of the villas of the family, and is courteously inquired for
by all visitors as Claudio in this story asks after the health of Donna
Aldoina. Italians are usually kind to their insane relatives and not at
all ashamed of them, but _il pazzo_ or _la pazza_ lends a weird
fantastic gloom to the ancient and stately houses which saw their birth,
and shelter their infirmity, and will hold their coffins in their
crypts.
Possibly there seems more to me in this story than there actually is,
because I know so well the tenor of the life therein depicted; and the
absence of all objective interest, of all care for nature and for art,
of all perception of the consolations to be found in both, which render
that life so much more barren than it need be.
D'Annunzio has typified such barrenness of thought, such narrowness of
horizon, in the family which dwells in the grand old villa of Tregento,
and many a time he must, no doubt, with his own mind filled by classic
memories, and knowledge of the arts, and touched to impassioned
appreciation of all natural beauty, have suffered acutely from the
apathy, ignorance, and unconscious self-absorption of such a domestic
atmosphere. He has no doubt constantly been met with the incapacity to
understand, the wonder of ignorance, the blank dulness of unopened
minds, such as he suggests in the following passage:--
'We were near Rebursa. The rocky chain, with its sharp and
broken peaks turned to the right following the winding Saurgo,
rising tier on tier towards the massive summit of Mount Caran.
On the left of the road, the soil was smooth and undulating
like the large dunes of a seashore, becoming further off a
succession of hills, tawny and humped like camels of the
desert.
'"Look, look!" I cried, seeing another silver cloud of blossom.
"Can you not see it, Antonello?"
'He did not look at the almond trees with my eyes; he looked,
but with a faint smile, wondering probably at the childlike joy
awakened in me at the sight of the first flowers. Yet, what
fairer spectacle could this rude and stony country offer to us?
'"If my sisters only were here!" cried Oddo, to whom my
pleasure communicated itself. "Oh, if they were here!"
'His voice was full of regret.
'"They need to be brought where flowers bloom," said Antonello,
softly.
'"Look, look!" I cried again, giving myself up to my delight
with fuller ease, now that I saw some reflection of it at least
awakened in these poor shut souls. "I am glad these flowers are
mine, Oddo."
'"My sisters must come to them," sighed Antonello, like one who
speaks in a dream of sleep.
'It seemed as if his feverish eyes refreshed themselves with
that vision of things so pure....
'They both looked at me, somewhat confused, faintly smiling, as
if they had been brought unexpectedly before some extraordinary
sight which stupefied them, yet filled them with delicious
sensations. They had shown me their malady, had revealed to me
their suffering, had spoken to me of that melancholy prison
whence they had come and whither they would return; and I, on
the common highway open to all, had invited them to recognise
and celebrate the spring--the spring which they had both
forgotten, which they seemed to see now for the first time
after many years, which they gazed at with a mingling of fear
and joy as at a miracle.'
Is not this delicate in expression as the sprays of the almond blossoms
themselves?
An Italian scholar, in writing to me to-day, does indeed say with
considerable accuracy that the affectation in the style of D'Annunzio
takes from it its freedom and sincerity, that when he is writing of
almond boughs and nightingales he does not give us the impression that
these things are dear to him, but rather that he is endeavouring to say
the most beautiful things he can think of about them. 'His style,' says
my Italian correspondent, 'is the one occupation of his life, the one
absorbing interest of his work; he cares but little for nature or for
human nature, except as these are strings to his lyre.' This is in a
great measure a correct, if a too severe, censure. There is in him
nothing of that genuine emotion which wells up in the heart of Pierre
Loti as he writes; D'Annunzio is always outside that which he describes;
there is in him much of the virtuoso; he reminds me of a friend of mine,
a London celebrity, who once invited a party of artists to see a fine
work of art in his London house. When the curtain was drawn aside, the
work of art was found to be a young nude woman, of singularly beautiful
proportions, extended on a rug of black bear-skins to set off the ambers
and ivories and blue-vein traceries of her skin. D'Annunzio stretches
his subject thus bare before him in a well-adjusted light, and calls the
world to see: for the subject he has no compassion. This _preciosita_
(Anglice, affectation) is still more apparent in his prefaces than in
his works which they precede. These prefaces are long, elaborate, ornate
disquisitions, with much of the euphuism of pedantic scholarship; and
when in the preface to the _Trionfo_ the author claims that this
licentious romance is intended to hasten and welcome the coming of the
Uebermensch, it is impossible not to smile at such a pretension, and, as
even De Voguee admits, at this point we are driven to sigh for the return
of the _mandolinata_. He confirms the justice of a charge of
_preciosita_ himself in his introduction to _Il Piacere_, in which he
speaks of 'the long and grave fatigue, the disgust which follows the
painful and capricious artifices of style.' This is not the language of
a true artist, for in the beauties and intricacies of style which should
all have one aim--simplicity--the writer who is a true artist finds the
same intimate satisfaction as the musician, the painter, the sculptor,
each finds in the pursuit of his art. In style is the _sfogo_ of the
writer's procreative passion. It should bring with it neither fatigue
nor disgust, but the serene joys of a satisfied desire.
However, apart from this fault of _preciosita_ which De Voguee does not
appear to have perceived, but which seems to many Italians
incontestable, the style of D'Annunzio is very fine; finest of all when
it is spent on the portraiture of natural scenes, and of characters
unhampered by conventionality. Read this brief episode of the simplest
kind; how alive with actuality it is! It is taken from the earlier part
of the residence of Aurispa and Ippolita at the Hermitage.
'Hearing a rattle of plates, he asked, "Are you hungry?" And
the question suggested by the little homely sound, put eagerly,
with childlike insistence, made Ippolita smile.
'"Yes, a little," she answered, smiling; and both of them
looked at the table ready spread under the oak tree. In a few
minutes more their dinner was ready.
'"You must be content with what there is," said Giorgio. "It is
very humble fare."
'"Oh, I should be satisfied with herbs."
'And with a gay air she drew near the table, examined curiously
the tablecloth, the silver, the glass, the plates, finding
everything charming, delighted like a child with the blue
flowers which ornamented the fine white pottery.
'"Everything delights me here!"
'She bent over the big, round loaf, which was still warm under
its golden and crisp crust.
'"Ah! what a good smell it has!" And, as if impelled by her
childlike joy in the fresh bread, she broke off a piece of its
crust.
'"What good bread!"
'Her strong, white teeth shone as they bit and closed, and all
the movements of her curving lip expressed the pleasure which
she felt; and from her whole person there seemed to emanate a
rare, fresh grace, which attracted and amazed her lover with a
new and unexpected charm.
'"Oh, how good! Taste, how good it is!"'
What can be more graphic, more simple, more radiant, than this picture
painted in words so few?
Take this landscape, so true to the scenery of the Veneto:--
'It was afternoon. He explored the winding paths which went,
now up, now down, leading towards the point of the Penna, on
the seashore. He looked before him and around him with
curiosity, but, perhaps, with some forced attention, as if he
wished to understand obscure meanings hidden in these simple
scenes, to wrest from them some unseizable secret. Rising in
the heart of these hills of the coast the water of a brook,
directed by a homely aqueduct made of hollowed trees, crossed
the low-lying land between the two slopes. Other little
rivulets were caught and guided by concave tiles to water the
tilled earth grown with rich vegetation, and above these
streams, ever bright and rippling, there leaned some beautiful
purple flowers;[2] all these humble things seemed to him
pregnant with profound life. All the merry waters ran down
along the incline towards the pebbly beach, and passed under a
little bridge. In the shadow of its arch some women were
washing linen, and their gestures were mirrored in the stream.
On the shingle other linen was already outspread, whitening in
the sun. Along the path a man walked with bare feet, carrying
his shoes swinging in his hand. Two children, laden with linen,
ran along laughing and playing. An old woman hung up on a line
a blue mattress.
'On the edge of the path there were little white shells, out of
them frail tentacles trembled and stretched to the light. From
a rock above hung twisted dead roots like entwined snakes.
Farther on there was a large peasant's house, bearing on the
summit of its roof a floral ornament in clay. An outside
staircase led up to a covered terrace. Two women sat spinning
at the head of the stair, and the flax shone in the sun like
gold. You could hear the wheels turn. By a window sat another,
weaving; you could see her rhythmical gestures in moving the
shuttle. In the courtyard a huge grey ox was lying down; he
shook his ears and moved his tail faintly but incessantly in
war against the flies. The cocks and hens cackled and crowed
around him. Farther on still another little river crossed the
road; it laughed aloud, crisp, mirthful, vivid, limpid.
'Near another farmhouse a thick bay hedge shut in an orchard.
The straight, shining stems rose immovable, crowned with their
glistening foliage. One of the bay trees was enveloped in the
embrace of a clematis, which lovingly conquered the martial bay
with her blossoms of snow, the veil of her nuptial freshness.
Underneath, the earth was dewy and fragrant. In an angle a
black cross leaned over the hedge, the silence had the resigned
sadness of a graveyard. At the end of a line there arose a
flight of steps, half in shade, half in sunshine; they led to a
door standing half open, protected by two branches of olive
hung from its rustic architrave. On the lowest step sat an old
man asleep, his head uncovered, his chin on his breast, his
hands on his knees; the light touched his aged brow. From the
half-open door there came, to soothe his senile sleep, the
cadence of a rocking cradle, the rise and fall of a murmured
lullaby.'
[Footnote 2: Campanulas, spotted orchis, or foxglove, I suppose. It it
characteristic of him that he sighs for an 'unseizable secret,' and does
not take the trouble to learn the names of the flowers he sees.]
What can be more true or more beautiful than this? Mark the contrast of
the old man sleeping on the stone steps, with the young mother, unseen
within, singing _sotto voce_ her cradle song. In totally different style
and tone take these few lines on Orvieto:--
'A rock of tufa hanging above a melancholy valley; a city so
silent that it seems empty: the windows are closed, in the grey
lanes grass grows; a capuchin crosses a square; a bishop
descends from a closed carriage before the gate of a hospital;
a tower rises in a white and rainy sky; a clock strikes the
hour slowly; all at once at the end of the street a miracle in
stone--the Cathedral.'
Is not the city of Luca Signorelli set before you with those few lines?
There is here something far beyond dexterity or ingenuity of style;
there is the poet's, the painter's, power to embrace a world at a
glance, and with a touch set before duller eyes that world in all its
varieties and suggestions, all its past and its present, all its secrets
of the grave and of the future.
Take again this very different picture:--
'He found the gorse.
'On a tableland the thickly-growing gorse had flowered so
densely as to spread a vast golden mantle over all the soil.
Five maidens were gathering the flowers and filling with them
skips and baskets, singing as they worked. They sang a song of
thirds and fives in perfect harmony. When one of them reached a
special phrase she lifted her whole bust out of the yellow maze
of blossom that the notes might go forth from her throat with
fuller liberty, and held it long sustained in air, looking her
companions in the eyes whilst they applauded with their hands
of flowers.
'When they saw the stranger they stopped and bent again over
the gorse. Stifled saucy laughter rippled under the yellow sea.
Giorgio asked,--
'"Which of you is Favetta?"
'A girl, brown as an olive, raised her head in reply, amazed,
almost terrified: "It is I, sir."
'"Are you not the finest singer of San Vito?"
'"No, sir. That is not true."
'"It is true. It is true!" cried her companions.
'"Sir! make her sing."
'"No, sir, it is not true. I cannot sing."
'She hid herself, laughing, her face all aflame; she twisted
her apron whilst the others teased her. She was of short
stature but well-formed; her bosom was high and large, swollen
with songs. She had curly hair, dark eyebrows, aquiline
profile; something in her carriage wild and free. After the
first resistance she yielded.
'The others, taking her by the arms, held her in their circle.
They were up to their waists in the flowering gorse, whilst
round them the bees were humming.
'Favetta began unsteadily, but with each note her voice grew
firmer. It was limpid, liquid, crystal, clear as a water
spring. She sang a couplet and the others sang in chorus a
ritornello. They prolonged the harmonies, putting their mouths
close to form one single vocal flute; the song rose and fell in
the light air with the slow regularity of a litany.
'Favetta sang:--
'"All the springs are dry,
O poor love of mine!
He dies of thirst.
Where is the water thou broughtest me?
We have brought thee an earthen jar,
But round it is a chain of gold!"
'The others sang:--
'"Long live Love!"
'It was the salutation of May to Passion, pouring from young
breasts, which perchance as yet knew not its sweetness and
perchance never would know its sorrow.'
Or take the following passage which is as essentially true in its
accurate observation as it is beautiful in its expression. Tullio Hermil
and Giuliana are listening at Villa Lilla to the first songster of that
spring.
'The nightingale sang. At first it was like a burst of
melodious glee; a jet of easy trills which fell through the air
like pearls falling on the glass of a harmonium. Then came a
pause. A shake arose, agile, marvellously prolonged, like a
proof of strength, in an impulse of insolence, a challenge to
some unknown rivals.
'A second pause. A phrase of three notes with a tone of
interrogation passed on a chain of light variations repeating
the interrogative phrase five or six times, modulated softly
like a slender reed flute on which is played a pastoral. A
third pause: the song becomes elegiac, turns to a minor key,
tender as a sigh; it is almost a groan; it expresses all the
grief of the lonely lover, a heartrending desire; a vain hope;
it flings out a last appeal, improvised, acute as a scream of
anguish: then it ceases. A longer pause, more ominous. Then one
hears a new accent which scarcely seems to come from the same
throat so humble is it, so timid, so slight; it resembles the
twitter of scarce-fledged birds, the chirrup of sparrows; then,
with a miraculous volubility, this noisy note changes into a
breathless song, more and more rapid in its trills, vibrating
in sustained shakes, turning in daring flights of sound,
leaping, growing, bounding, attaining the highest heights of
the soprano. The songster is drunk with his own song. With
pause so brief that one note scarce ceases ere another succeeds
it, he spends his delirium in ever-varied melody, impassioned
and sweet, subdued and ear-piercing, light and grave, now
interrupted by broken sighs, by lament and supplication, now by
impetuous lyrical improvisation and supreme appeal. It seems
that even the gardens are listening, that the sky stoops over
the old tree from whose summit this poet, invisible to mortal
eyes, pours out such floods of eloquence. The flowers breathe
deeply and silently. A yellow glow lingers in the west. This
last lingering glance of the dying day is sad. But a single
star has risen, alone and tremulous like a drop of luminous
dew.'
He who can write thus is a great writer; and the charm of this passage
is not alone its poetry but its exact truth. The song of the nightingale
varies much in accord with age, with species (for there are two species,
Luscinia Philomela, and Luscinia Major), with climate, with the sense of
security, and the want of security, but the song of a nightingale in its
maturity, who is unalarmed and feels at home in the gardens of his
choice, is precisely such a song as is described in this passage, and is
more completely echoed in it than in the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven.
This sympathy with the melody of birds is the more singular in
D'Annunzio, because Italians are almost invariably indifferent to such
melody, and snare the divine songster in the net, or shoot him whilst he
shouts his nuptial _Io Triumphe!_ with the most stolid indifference. And
it may, perhaps, be that D'Annunzio does not care for the bird himself
more than the rest of his countrymen, but only cares for his own
eloquence concerning it. It may be said, without risk of injustice to
him, that great tenderness is at no moment found in him. He has not 'the
pathetic fallacy'; but he approaches it very nearly at times. When women
shall have lost for him some of the intensity of their physical charm,
nature in her wider and more profound meanings will, perhaps, become
more visible and more dear to him. Perhaps, however, it will not, for
the Italian is rarely impersonal.
Something of the affectation to which the delicate taste of my Italian
correspondent justly objects must be admitted to mar, by its
artificiality, the many magnificent pages dedicated by him to the sea.
Magnificent they are, true also, entirely true; but some mannerism there
is in them, some over-intricate embroidery of phrase. The sea he knows
best, and remembers always, is the Adriatic, of which the extreme beauty
of the colour, like the leaves of the silverweed, as wind and sun pass
over the meadows, has always before him been too little noted except, I
may venture to say, by myself.
'O, fair, clear seas of September!' he cries in the _Piacere_.
'The water is calm and innocent as a sleeping child, and lies
outstretched under a pearl-like sky. Sometimes it is all green
of the brilliant and intense green of malachite, and on it the
small rosy sails seem like wandering fires. Sometimes it is all
azure, of an intense blue, like the ultramarine which heralds
use for blazonries, veined with gold like lapis-lazuli, and on
it the painted sails seem like a procession of standards, of
banners, of spears borne on a Catholic holy day. And yet again
at other moments it takes on a metallic gleam, a silvery
paleness, the hues of a ripening lemon, something indefinable
and strange, and on this mystical surface the boats then glide
and fade, and are seen no more as the illumined wings of
cherubim sink into the faint fundamental hues of an old
Giottesque fresco.
'The sea was not alone for him a delight for the eyes, but it
was a perennial wave in which he steeped his thirsting
thoughts; a magical fountain of youth in which his body
recovered health and his mind nobility. The sea had for him the
mysterious attraction of a native country, and he abandoned
himself to it with filial confidence, as a weak child in the
arms of an omnipotent father; and he derived consolation from
it, for no one had ever confided his sorrows, his desires, or
his dreams to the ear of the sea in vain.'
So, we are told by D'Annunzio, thinks Andrea Sperelli, and so thought
also Giorgio Aurispa. But the sea has no permanent power on the soul of
either; the one returns from his contemplations of it to his life of
voluptuous pleasure, and the other drowns both himself and the woman,
whom he has adored to frenzy, in its waves, whilst the dog mourns
'forsaken beneath the olive trees, and the waters murmur softly, rocking
as in a cradle the reflections of the stars.'
Only once in D'Annunzio's work does genuine and yearning regret, of
which it is impossible to doubt the spontaneity and sincerity, thrill
through him, and move him to intense emotion and unstudied eloquence. It
is when, in the person of Claudio Cantelmo, he speaks in furious
invective of the modern desecration of Rome; in these passages he is
strong without effort, eloquent without study, and veracious alike in
sorrow and in scorn. His invective is poured from his heart's depths,
and thrills with the force of the Latin orators of the ruined Forum.
'I have lived several years in Rome; in that third Rome which
should have represented "Love reigning by Latin blood on Latin
soil," and have seen radiant on its heights the wondrous lights
of a new Ideal. I have been witness to its most ignominious
evolutions, to the most obscene unions that have ever
desecrated a sacred place. And I have understood the symbolism
hidden in that act of an Asiatic conqueror, who cast myriads of
human heads in the fountains of Samarcand, when he desired to
create a capital. The wise and cruel tyrant meant to signify
the necessity of merciless destruction in the creation of a new
order of things.
* * * * *
'The ship which bore the Thousand of Marsala only set sail that
the art of exchange and barter should be protected and covered
by the State!
* * * * *
'It was the epoch of the most frenzied fury of the destroyers
and contractors on the site of Rome. With the storms of dust
there were propagated a sort of lunacy of gain, a malignant
delirium, seizing not only on the tradesman and money-lenders,
and the workers in brick and mortar, but also on the elect
heirs of the papal _majorat_, who primarily had looked with
scorn and disgust on the newcomers from the windows of their
palaces of travertine, indestructible under the encrustations
of ages.
'The magnificent patrician races founded there, renewed and
strengthened by nepotism, and the strife of opposing houses,
descended and abased themselves one by one, slid down into the
new mud, sank, and vanished. The illustrious riches, amassed
through centuries of gorgeous pillage and Maecenic luxury, were
thrown into the whirlpool of the speculations of the Bourse.
'And around them, on these patrician lawns, where, only the
previous spring, the violets had blossomed more numberless than
the blades of grass, there were now mounds of lime, heaps of
bricks, the wheels of stone-laden carts creaked on the turf, on
the air were the oaths of the drivers, the shouts of the
overseers, while every hour hastened on the brutal work which
was to efface and occupy the sacred soil once dedicated to
Beauty and to Dreams. There passed over Rome a blighting
blizzard of barbarism, menacing all that greatness and
loveliness which were without equals in the memory of the
world. Even the laurels and the rose trees of the Villa
Schiarra, for so many nights of so many summers hymned by their
nightingales, fell destroyed, or remained in their desecration
behind the gates of little gardens parcelled out to the little
cockney boxes of tradesmen. The gigantic Ludovisian cypresses,
those of the Aurora, those which spread the clouds of their
solemn and mystic antiquity above the Olympian brows of Goethe,
were now laid prone in line one after another, with all their
dishonoured roots stretching towards the pallid sky, the black
dishonoured roots which still seemed to hold in their immense
network the web of a life greater than our own.
'Even over the box alleys of the Villa Albani, which had seemed
as immortal as their Caryatides and their Hermes, there hung
that shadow of a vandal's ruin. The contagion of destruction
spread everywhere. In the ceaseless combat of gain, in the
savage fury of avaricious greed and passions, in the disordered
haste of commercial activity, every sense of common decency was
forgotten, all respect for the past was trampled under foot.
The struggle for gain was carried on with blind fury, with
neither check nor curb. The pickaxe, the shovel, and the
cunning of fraud were the weapons employed. And week after
week, with incredible velocity, there arose on the violated
earth the huge foolish cages of brick and mortar, pierced with
square holes, surmounted with sham cornices, encrusted with
shameful stucco ornaments. A kind of immense white tumour rose
and spread on the wounded and bleeding side of the great Urbs
and drained away its life.
'And then, day after day, at sunset, along the princely avenues
of the Borghese Park, we could see in gorgeous brand-new
equipages the new elect of Fortune, from whom not barber, nor
tailor, nor boot-maker, had power to take away the ignoble
stamp. We could see them pass and repass with the sonorous trot
of their shining bay and brown horses; they were recognisable
at a glance by the insolence of their pose and the awkward
carriage of their rapacious and vulgar hands; and they seemed
to cry aloud,--
'"We are the new rulers of Rome. Bow down to us!"
'In truth such are its rulers; such the present masters of that
Rome which prophets and poets once likened to the bow of
Ulysses.'
Often have I myself written similar things, but in me they have been
considered exaggerations. They cannot be so considered in Gabriele
D'Annunzio of Francavilla.
All who love Rome and loathe her modern violation must thank him from
their hearts for such passages, and must mourn with him that we cannot
drive out the spoilers from our desecrated temples.
This is, indeed, his greatest strength, that, whilst still a young man,
he yet has the courage to resist the intellectual tendencies of his
contemporaries, to refuse to worship their gods, to see and despise the
falseness of those scientific pretensions which enslave the multitude in
modern life. His intellect, richly stored by learning, is, in a large
measure, free of prejudice. This is a great and rare distinction in a
generation which more completely than any which has preceded it, is the
timid slave of formula and the credulous servant of professional
bigotry.
He has kept a complete mental liberty; free from the superstitions of
religion, which, in this day, it is easy to be; but also free from the
superstitions of science, which is far harder, and incurs far greater
obloquy and opposition.
In his study on Giorgione, he says what it needs much courage to say in
these days:--
'The scientific spirit has invaded the generation of the second
half of our century. Struck by the surprising results of
physics and calculation, men were inclined to believe for a
time, that by the aid of the one or the other, they would be
able to penetrate into all mysteries and solve all problems.
But to this proud exaltation has now succeeded a discouragement
mingled with suspicion. They say to themselves, and not without
reason: "Where is this certainty that science promised us?" If
ever certainty were incomplete, deprived of solid criterion, it
is that offered by natural science. As for the sciences called
exact, some, like geometry, repose on a tottering base of
arbitrary affirmations; others, like algebra, on mere methods
of reasoning, and contain as much or as little certainty as the
formula of a syllogism.'
This is emphatically true; but it is a fact which is by no means
recognised by all, and which is still violently denied by those fanatics
whose form of bigotry is either experimental or exact science.
The mind of D'Annunzio refuses all bondage. It is a law to itself, as
the mind of the great writer should be. I imagine that the opinion of
him held by others, is to him of the most absolute unimportance. His
teaching is always to preserve the independence of the Ego, to live
without attention to formula or usage, to be, both materially and
spiritually, that which we were created to be by nature.
His morality is of the most primitive kind; or rather, he has none
whatever, no more than has a South-Sea islander lying in the sun under a
cocoa-nut tree whilst the surf bathes his naked limbs. It would be
absurd to accuse him of immorality because the indulgence of the senses
is as natural and as legitimate in his estimation, as Favetta's song
amongst the golden furze, or the reapers' welcome of the purple wine.
Yet by a not rare anomaly, this demand for perfect freedom of the
passions is accompanied by a tendency to desire tyranny in political
matters. He is disposed to deify force. In one or two expressions there
is an echo of Carlyle which sounds oddly and jarringly amongst the
amorous liberties and artistic debaucheries of the rest; and is not
worthy of a writer who has so much courage in opposing scientific
pharisaism and the thraldom of the schools. He is disposed to admire
what is strong simply because it is strong, forgetful that such strength
is sustained and nourished by the suffering of the weak. It is true that
he has lived in an atmosphere in which the verities embodied in the
aspirations, abortive but always noble, of the higher efforts of
revolution have been received with fear and misunderstanding. The
tendencies and training of the _Codini_ are visible through the
eloquence of the poet and the conclusions of the philosopher. The entire
lack in him of all altruism comes from this. Mazzini must be as
unintelligible to him as Tolstoi. The mass of humanity is always to him
the filthy, surging, bestial multitudes of the crowd at Casalbordino.
But even this absence of benevolence is better than the pitiful
sycophancy of writers who are as fulsome in their flattery to Demos as
to kings; is manlier than the nauseating self-worship of a Humanity at
once its own pimp and pander, its own adorer and assassin.
In his scorn of the human flocks of sheep, he forgets, I admit, too
entirely the justice to which the humblest unit amongst these flocks has
right, but that scorn, even when misdirected, is fresh and bracing as
the dash of his own Adriatic waves, when the east wind drives them
hurrying on to the shingle beach. He has no fear; and he never stoops to
that base flattery of his own species which is the most nauseous feature
of modern politics and of modern science.
'This alone is your office,' he cries to his contemporaries, if
they would resist the debasing influences of their time,
'defend the dream which is in you. Since in this day mortals no
longer bring tribute of love and honour to the choristers of
the Muses, defend yourselves, O poets, with all your weapons,
steep the point of your rapiers in the most biting poisons. Let
your satires bear such corrosive acid in them that they shall
pierce to the very pith of the spine and destroy it. Brand to
the very bone the stupid forehead of those fools who would mark
every soul with the same label, and make every brain like
another, as the heads of nails are beaten into a common
likeness by the blows of the nailmaker. Let your mordant
laughter reach to heaven when you hear the stablemen of the
Great Beast shouting in the parliaments of the earth.... Defend
the thought which they menace, defend the beauty which they
outrage, defend the antique freedom of your masters and the
future freedom of your disciples, against the insane assaults
of drunken slaves. Despair not, though you be few in number.
You have the supreme force of the world: the written word.'
The written word is indeed in his hand a scourge, a sword, a sheaf of
arrows from the quiver of the divine Python Slayer.
And in no country more than in the Italy of his generation is such a
scourge, such a sword, such flame-tipped arrows, needed to slay the
courtiers, the usurers, the sycophants, the knaves, the brutes, the
sellers of justice who fasten like leeches on her body.
This son of Italy is a great writer; a great poet. Read his works in the
original text all ye who can, men and women for whom life has no secrets
and truth has no terror.
He is young; the time will come, as it comes to all, when the joys of
the senses will fade for him as the roses of the summer are scattered by
autumn winds.
Let us hope that there will be later a second period of his creative
art, in which there will be developed an original genius free of exotic
influences, and untrammelled by the search for idioms and pruriencies.
Genius, like the river at its source, takes the colour of the earth it
springs from. It is only when it has reached its full volume, its
deepest currents, that it becomes clear and reflects the sky alone.
Let us hope that such a future awaits him, and that more and more fully
will he realise what he has already said in noble words:--
'Art! Here is the one faithful passion ever youthful, nay,
immortal; here is the fountain of pure joy unknown to the
multitude; here is the divine food which makes men like to
gods. How could he have stooped to drink at other cups when he
had once tasted of this?[3] How could he have bent to taste of
other joys, once having known this ecstasy? How could his
senses have let themselves be weakened and debased to lowest
lusts when they had once been stirred to that highest
sensibility which beholds the invisible, which touches the
impalpable, which divines the most hidden secrets in the heart
of nature?'
[Footnote 3: He is writing of Andrea Sperelli in _Il Piacere_.]
With these words, which are the greatest in meaning that he has hitherto
written, I will, for the present moment, take my leave of him.
II
GEORGES DARIEN
Of all countries, France remains the land in which it is possible to
tell the most truth. The nation of Montaigne and Moliere is always the
first to recognise and award the title of talent to lay bare the
shoulders of her community and use the scourge upon them. If at its
first appearance the strange and terrible revelations contained in the
work entitled _Biribi_ were met by official obstruction and attempted
suppression, the book has conquered them, and has been allowed to carry
the light of its torches into the dark places of military administration
and oppression. In Italy, as in Germany and Austria, it would have been
stopped by fine, exile, and seizure. In Russia it could never have been
issued at all. In England it would have been as costly to the author as
were his issues of Zola to the unhappy and martyrised Vizetelly. In
France alone its pictures of the most terrible facts pass unarrested, by
right of that literary liberty which the _esprit gaulois_ has always
awarded, however much government and law may have been alarmed.
It has been said that the accusations contained in the works of Georges
Darien are a _Retrissure a la France_, and as such should never have
been made public by a patriotic writer and a ci-devant soldier. But here
we merely meet again the hackneyed question whether the writer of talent
is bound by patriotism or any other scruple to withhold truth, or
whether he is not rather bound to disclose the truth as he believes it
to be at all costs, whether to himself or to others. It is not necessary
for me to say with which of these opinions I agree. The little which has
been done towards any true progress of the human mind has been done by
the expression of free thought, and by its fearless exposure of evils
protected by the crystallisation of time, usage, and prejudice. Over the
modern world which chatters of liberty, but does not anywhere possess
it, or even know actually what it means, there hang, in heavy and icy
weight, two ever-increasing despotisms: the scientific and the military.
Of the former it is not necessary to treat in these pages; of the latter
the yearly increase throughout Europe, ever since the war of 1870-71,
must alarm every unbiassed thinker, bringing with it, as it does, the
impoverishment of the people, the curse of youth and manhood, the
endless strain of a fiscal burden, so enormous that every class groans
under it, and the perpetual and diseased anxiety in which every nation
lives, suspecting its neighbours, and turn by turn affronting them
insolently and cringing to them obsequiously, according as it is made to
feel the power of its own strength or the weakness of its own
inferiority. Every syllable printed which tends to show the reality of
military tyranny at this moment is valuable, and should be welcomed,
however odious it may be to military authority and government; and
especially valuable when it comes from one who has passed through the
scenes which he depicts, and draws, not from imagination, but from
memory.
Georges Darien has been the man whom he describes; treated as the worst
of criminals, though wholly guiltless of breaking any criminal law.
Georges Darien in using the first person, both in _Biribi_ and in _Bas
les Coeurs_, is but writing portions of his own autobiography; he was
a boy of ten, like his young hero in the latter book, and a volunteer
like the gunner of the second class in the 41st battery of artillery in
the former work, and to this fact there are owing that directness,
simplicity, and virility which are the distinguishing characteristics of
both these volumes. They are alive with life. The reader may resent
them, detest them, dread them and their revelations; but he must be
impressed by them; he must receive from their perusal that thrill which
can only come from reality. They are saturated with the tears of blood
of a strong man who feels his own impotency to rouse his generation and
to change humanity; who knows that his voice is the voice of the prophet
crying in the wilderness, and echoing over a desert of dead bones and
drifting sand. There are few greater pangs than to see the truth and
know it, and feel that the salvation of others lies in it, and to tell
it in vain to deaf ears, and offer its water of life to lips closed by
pride and cruelty and folly.
The name _Biribi_ sounds too light for such a subject; it sounds like a
joke; but the joke is grim indeed, grim as the dance of skeletons round
a gallows-tree. In actual fact _Biribi_ is the nickname given by French
and native soldiers in Algeria to the punishment-battalions of the
Franco-African army; a slangy _petit nom_ given in jest to one of the
most awful hells that earth holds. The tortures which are suffered in
every army, in the best army, and in the time of greatest peace, can
scarcely ever be over-rated; and they are not the less, but the more
terrible, because almost always endured in silence and ignored by
authority. Now and then a voice is raised from the ranks, occasionally,
very rarely, some punishment, or injustice, more brutal than usual,
comes to light, and rouses public indignation. _Biribi_ is one of those
rare utterances rising from the sealed pits, in which uncared-for and
unpitied lives are beaten into senseless pulp of bruised and bleeding
flesh.
There is great originality in the literary talent of Georges Darien. His
style is all his own. His manner of relation resembles no other. He has
nothing of the modern school, except its hopelessness; he is strong,
intense, virile, rough; he seeks no ornament, he strives for no effect;
he writes as he feels, boldly, passionately, with that eloquence which
is the offspring of simplicity and of veracity, and that potency which
comes from wide knowledge of literatures and of mankind. Belonging by
birth to the _bourgeoisie_, son of a Catholic father and a Calvinist
mother, his early years were embittered by religious strife. He has
later on travelled much; he has known the lowest classes and the hardest
ways of life; he is still young in years, but old in the most varied
experiences; and he has, certainly, uncommon powers, which have as yet
not been duly recognised, for he offends the prejudices and vested
interests of his generation, and even in France prejudice and vested
interests are strong and close many channels.
He disdains, moreover, to appeal to that large class of readers who
require a book, cast in the form of a story, to possess a story. Like
the famous knife-grinder he has none to tell, if by story we understand,
as most people do, a love-tale in some one of its forms. _Biribi_ is the
stern and terrible narrative of the career of an _insoumis_; _Bas les
Coeurs_ is the simple, domestic record of a boy's recollections of the
_Annee Terrible_. In neither is there any hint or fragment of romance.
This fact at once limits his public to the restricted number who
appreciate the skill which can afford to dispense with the elements of
romance, and to rely solely on its own power of description and analysis
of character. In this respect for literary excellence and harmonious
treatment I should place _Bas les Coeurs_ before _Biribi_. The
relation of events at Versailles, before and after the Prussian
occupation, as seen from the point of view of a family of the town, is
told with such perfect naturalness that the reader follows it with the
deepest interest, and remains fascinated by the admirable manner in
which the most tragic and momentous events of history are reflected in
the mind of a boy of ten years old.
The tranquillity and precision of his use of the etching-needle, with
which he describes the daily life and street scenes in Versailles,
contrasts curiously with the hot colour and broad charcoal marks with
which he portrays the tortures of the punishment-battalions in Africa.
This testifies to the flexibility of Darien's talent, since nothing can
be more different to the impetuous and turgid violence of _Biribi_ than
the restrained and delicate irony of _Bas les Coeurs_: the one is a
battle-piece of Vereschagin, crowded with begrimed and panting figures,
in which the dumb canvas seems to shriek with war and smoke with blood;
the other is a cabinet picture of Meissonier's, finished, polished,
small in measurement, illimitable in suggestion, fine as the point of a
needle, cruel as the fork of a snake's tongue. For, undoubtedly, Darien
is cruel; but he is cruel from the impotent rage which is in him, the
powerless sorrow and scorn which his country, his generation, his fellow
mortals, his vision of things as they are, awaken in his memory and in
his desires.
The apathy and sheepishness of the general multitude fill him with
wrath; he longs to pull down on the world its temple, like Samson,
regardless of the fall of the column and the roof on himself. No one who
loves received doctrines, crystallised commonplaces, undisputed formulae,
should open these books. Such persons will only see in them blasphemies
against their honoured gods; for this author is not suited to the smug
self-complacency of Philistinism, 'sanding its sugar and praising its
Lord.'
To represent war as it is done in the terrible pages of _La Debacle_, or
in the heartrending sketch of the _Attaque du Moulin_, is not difficult
to the novelist who has power and knowledge. To represent the effects of
war on entirely uninteresting and commonplace persons, and yet keep the
attention of the reader riveted to what is passing in one ordinary
household during a frightful national calamity, is a far more difficult
feat; especially when all the sympathies of the reader which would be
easily roused by noble sentiments in the sufferers are voluntarily
alienated, and the only motives and feelings depicted are sordid,
egotistic, and miserable, except in the young narrator, whose childish
intelligence is so slowly awakened to the baseness of those around him,
but whose naturally honest and patriotic little soul burns and thrills
with shame when once it becomes conscious of the meanness and cowardice
of his family and of his neighbours. The highest literary faculty seems
to me to show itself in the completeness with which the childlikeness of
the young observer is retained, the vague apprehension, the slowly
awakening comprehension, the gradually dawning horror with which the
events around him impress themselves on a mind remaining instinctively
loyal and just in the midst of corrupt and unworthy examples.
Take this as an example of its style:--
'Shouts are heard afar off in the woods.
'"Ah, my poor child!" says my aunt, weeping, "what a hideous
thing is war!"
'She looks very feeble, very worn, my poor great-aunt Moreau.
The sight of her thin face, her skeleton-like hands, moves me
painfully. She sees this.
'"At my age," she murmurs, "these events, my dear, are hard to
bear."
'However, she assures me the Germans are not very cruel. The
Captain in command of those billeted on her, despite his rude
exterior, is not uncivil.
'At that moment, indeed, this officer returns with his men; his
heels ring on the bricks of the ante-chamber. He opens the door
of the little room where we are sitting.
'"Do not be disturbed, Madame," he says, addressing my aunt,
"on account of the firing you may have heard. There is nothing
of any consequence. A wood-cutter, in whose hut we found arms,
and whom we have shot: nothing more."
'He salutes and retires. My aunt shudders. She turns white, her
eyes close, her head falls back against the chair. She is
faint. I call her maid, who runs to my summons, with the cook
and the servant just come to fetch me. The three women try and
revive her. She remains so weak when again conscious, that they
carry her to her chamber. She is grieved to have fainted.
'"When my dear little Jean came to see me," she murmurs! "It
was the thought of that poor wood-cutter--"
'She trembles like a leaf as I leave her.
'Germaine, who has come from my grandfather's to fetch me, asks
me to wait a moment; she has a message for the Prussian Captain
from my grandfather. The officer is walking up and down,
smoking, under the lime-trees. I hear his guttural voice as he
answers, "Tell your master that I shall expect him here." What
can this mean? When I reach my grandfather's house I rush to
the dining-room to question the old man, but Germaine catches
hold of my arm.
'"You must not disturb Monsieur. He is engaged with someone."
'Through the door, which I hold half-opened, I have seen that
someone. He is a person dressed like a peasant, who looks not
like a peasant, nevertheless. His large hat is worn too
gracefully; his ragged blue blouse is too old to accord with
his proud and delicate features. Is he an officer of
franc-tireurs? A French spy, perhaps? Is my grandfather giving
or receiving information? Is he not, as I hope, planning to
surprise the Prussians? I question Germaine. She is astonished
at my anxiety.
'"That man? He wanted to see the Mayor, and as the Germans have
put the Mayor in prison, he was brought here. Do not trouble
yourself about him, Monsieur Jean."
'I hear a sound of closing doors. It is, of course, the
stranger going away.
'My grandfather joins me.
'"Well, how is your aunt?"
'I tell him what happened, the story of the wood-cutter and its
effect upon her.
'"Ah! what a pity!--humph, humph!--I will go and see her.
Germaine, my cloak."
'"Shall I come with you, grandpapa?"
'"No, no; not worth while. I shall be back in half an hour."
'In twenty minutes' time he returns.
'"You see I am as good as my word. I made haste, eh?"
'"Is my aunt better?"
'"Your aunt? Yes--no--that is, yes, much better."
'"Jean," he says to me after dinner, "you were to go back the
day after to-morrow, but as I must go on business to Versailles
in the morning early, I will take you with me. Does it
disappoint you, eh?"
'"A little, yes."
'"Bah! you shall make up for it another time. You shall come
again soon for several days, and send your lessons to the
deuce."
'I laugh. I think I must have been mistaken. The man whom I saw
must have been really a peasant. My grandsire could not be so
gay if there were to be fighting at Maussy this evening.
However, before going to bed I look out over the country, and
when I lie down I strain my ear to catch a sound. All night
long I cannot sleep; I can only listen. All at once a hand
touches my elbow. I start up, screaming. Germaine laughs.
'"What is the matter, Monsieur Jean? Were you dreaming?"
'I stare round me in amaze. It is broad day.
'"Make haste and get up; the chocolate is ready; master is
waiting."
'Half an hour later we leave the house. We are at the end of
the street which opens on to the Versailles road, when a
platoon of Prussian soldiers, with bayonets fixed, appears upon
that road. My grandfather seizes me brutally and throws me down
under a fence behind a hedge. I look through the branches. The
Prussians pass at quick march. Amidst them marches a man, with
his hands tied behind his back. I see a broad-leafed hat, a
pale proud face, an old blue blouse. It is the man of
yesterday. I know him at a glance.
'"Grandfather, who is that?"
'"Eh! Who? who? Some vagabond a Prussian patrol has picked up
out of some ditch. The Prussians are very severe for--for--for
wayfarers. It is better not to be seen in these affairs--it is
better not to be mixed up--I mean--"
'My grandfather is lying, I am certain; I feel it. Why should
he lie? Where are they taking this fettered man? Why force me
to lie hidden under a hedge? From behind the village a loud
volley thunders through the air.
'"Grandpapa, grandpapa, did you hear that?"
'The old man is livid.
'"It is the Prussians who practise--who practise at firing--in
the morning. It is their custom--their custom--every morning--"
'His teeth chatter.'
Or see this description of the troops leaving for the frontier:--
'To-day the last regiment quartered here goes to the front; it
is a regiment of the line.
'Leon and I wait in the market-place to go with the soldiers to
the railway station.
'It is an epic, this departure of the troops. I have never felt
what I feel now. There is a sense and scent of battle in the
air; the midsummer sun shining on the musket-barrels and
sparkling on the accoutrements sets fire to one's brain. The
earth trembles under the passage of artillery which is about to
vomit death; and one's heart dances in one's breast whilst the
ponderous caissons, with their iron-circled wheels, shake the
stones, and the mouths of the bronze guns display their yawning
jaws. Bands play warlike tunes, men chant the _Marseillaise_,
the gold of epaulets and the lace on uniforms glow in the
light; the flags flap against the flagstaffs, on whose summits
eagles spread their wings; the shoes of the chargers glitter
like silver crescents; and one feels some mighty spirit of war
soar above these hearts of flesh and of iron who are about to
face the shock of battle. The blood steams in one's veins; the
fever of the hour devours one; and one shouts louder and
louder, faster and faster, not to become mad.
'It is market-day. The square is filled by country people who
have brought in their vegetables and fruits for sale. Their
stalls are under all the trees, and, here and there, take up
the pavement. We are standing between a woman selling salads
and an old man who has onions, and is on all fours beside his
skips, because every moment or so an onion slides off the heap
and rolls towards the gutter, unless he stops it. What a funny
old fellow he is to take so much trouble for an onion! Ah!
there goes another one! The old man hurries to catch it, but an
officer, booted and spurred, steps on it; slips, slides,
tumbles down. The onion-seller takes off his cap: "Oh, sir! a
thousand pardons!"
'The officer gets up, takes his riding-whip by the whip-end,
and brings it with all his force on the uncovered head of the
old man, who falls backward on his skull. Blood bespatters his
skips of onions.
'"Here comes the regiment!" screams Leon.
'The band sounds at the end of the street. We run towards it.
'"Did you see the poor old man?" I ask.
'"Yes. He deserved what he got. Only think! The officer might
have broken his legs, eh?"
'I do not answer. I am absorbed in watching the soldiers whom
we escort, walking on the pavement, keeping step with them.
'The soldiers do not all keep step with one another; emotion,
enthusiasm, the delights of going to thrash the Prussians, the
natural sorrow at leaving those they love--a thousand different
feelings. There is an old soldier, a decorated soldier next to
me, who is very unsteady on his legs. A young officer, very
young, almost beardless, puts his musket straight on the old
fellow's shoulder every second. It is admirable to see the
harmony which reigns between privates and officers. The
Colonel, a grey-beard, salutes with his sword when the people
cheer him; and a trumpeter in the front rank has stuck a great
bouquet of roses to the banner of his instrument, and carries
it as a priest carries the host. Other nosegays are thrust into
the barrels of muskets. Bottles of wine show their corks from
under the piles of knapsacks, and two or three dogs are
stretched out on the haver-sacks in the baggage-waggons. The
crowd cheers the dogs.
'All the peasants throng to see, shouting their applause to
the regiment. Before the chemist's shop at the corner, a knot
of young men wave their caps in the air; the chemist waves his
white handkerchief; behind him I see the blue blouse of the old
onion-seller, who lies unnoticed on the ground.
'All at once the music breaks out into the _Marseillaise_.
'"Allons, enfans de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive!"
'Oh, how beautiful it all is! The soldiers fall into line. The
populace, shouting and cheering, accompanies them to the
station. Through the bars of the station-gates a private passes
me his drinking-cup, and asks me to get it filled at the
wine-shop in front of the gates.
'"Wait; here is the money."
'But I do not wish for the brave fellow's money, I have a franc
in my pocket. I will pay for his pint. In a moment I run back
again.
'"Thanks, young sir," says the soldier. "It is perhaps the last
drop I shall ever drink."
'"The last!" cries Leon, red as a turkey-cock; so proud is he
to be able to rouse the spirit of a warrior. "The last? Ah! we
shall give you floods of wine when you come back from victory."
'The townspeople, who are crowding round us, cheer. The soldier
shakes his head dubiously.
'"Thanks all the same," he says sadly.
'He does not seem very confident of success.
'"Doubt that we shall be victorious?" says Leon in disgust as
we go homeward. "Leave the town for the frontier with so
little confidence! I would give--oh, what wouldn't I give?--to
be old enough to go and beat the Prussians. My dear Jean, that
soldier has no soul!"
'I am not sure. The soldier perhaps does not look on the
campaign as a picnic. Perhaps he sees more clearly than we do?
Perhaps? A great many things I had never thought of before
crowd into my brain.'
A few days later, after Sedan, Jean sees the Germans enter Versailles.
'"Here they are!"
'It is the octroi-guards who cry out this as they come flying
from the gates across the town. They brush me roughly as they
pass, and their abject terror gains on me.
'I follow them. But as I run I see on the other side of the
boulevard five or six inquisitive persons, who have stopped in
their walk, and hide themselves behind the trees. If they stay
to see, why may not I? I, too, get behind the stem of a tree,
and I watch with staring eyes to see what will happen. On the
road, fifty yards from the gates, a dozen horsemen are coming
onward at a walk. They stop a moment before the
octroi-officers; then they come on into the town in two lines,
almost touching the pavement.
'"The Uhlans!" says someone behind me. Ah, I think with a
thrill, these are the Uhlans!
'They draw near us; their pistols are cocked. They pass me
close, and I feel that I shall fall from fright; my nails
clutch the bark of the tree which screens me. These riders are
covered with blood. There is blood on the pennons of their
lances, on the hocks of their horses, on the rents in their
torn uniforms, and one of the foremost has a white linen band
stained with red on his forehead. Ah! it is hideous! I want to
run away--I want to run away; it is impossible. Before me there
are these Germans, riding slowly, searching with piercing
glances the streets which open out to the left and to the
right. Behind them comes on a dense dark mass. One can hear the
tramp of feet. One can distinguish the spikes of helmets, the
barrels of muskets, the little drums no bigger than
tambourines, and the fifes which are playing a march. These
drummers and pipers are followed by linesmen in dark blue, shod
with boots drawn up above their trousers, the musket held
straight on the shoulder, the cloak rolled.
'And these men, grey with dust and mud, black with powder, with
their coats in rags--these men, who fought no doubt this
morning, and who have just made a forced march--preserve the
most marvellous exactitude, the most perfect regularity in the
dressing of their ranks, and the rhythm of their steps keeps
measure from the first line to the last of the whole column.
'They pass--they pass--they will never end. I have almost
forgotten my fear. I am partly in front of my sheltering tree.
The drums and the fifes cease to sound, and music replaces it
from a band marching in front of a group of staff-officers.
They play a warlike march, a battle-hymn, and all down the line
of troops, from the foremost company which has reached the
Chateau of Versailles, to the last which is leaving the
Chesnay, shouts of triumph arise and drown the brazen voice of
the cymbals. The victorious chant thunders down the wind. It is
the _Marseillaise_--the _Marseillaise_ which our own troops
played as they left for the frontier, the hymn which was to
render every French soldier invincible, which I had sung myself
when we had been so sure of supremacy, and when I had planted
my little tricolour flags on the map, all along the route from
Paris to Berlin in a Via Triumphalis!
'Now the artillery comes on; its black cannon on their blue
gun-carriages, with their attendants on foot and in saddle,
wearing helmets surmounted with brass balls. There are flowers
in the mouths of the cannon, and they are garlanded with ivy
and green boughs. The cavalry follow on the artillery;
dragoons, cuirassiers, hussars with white facings and a
death's-head on their shakoes. Then come the carriages, the
waggons, the vehicles with ladders, the baggage-carts.... All
at once my heart sickens and stands still. Behind the wheels of
the last waggons I seem to see some red cloth. Yes, it is our
red cloth--our soldiers. Between two rows of Prussians, who
have their bayonets fixed, our prisoners march without arms,
dirty, ragged, miserable, and ashamed. There are at least two
hundred of them, and I strain my eyes after these, my
countrymen, who are destined to rot in German fortresses.'
It seems to me that in no contemporary fiction do we possess studies of
spectacles, of sentiments, of street-life in a momentous hour, more
accurate, more vivid, more simple in diction, more touching in
suggestion, than in the above passages.
The sustained and withering irony and censure in this sketch, which yet
never goes out of the selected orbit of a boy's observation and
experiences, seem to me to be perfect in their kind. The incompleteness
of the child's understanding gives only a keener incisiveness to the
satire embodied in his narrative. The general reader will never forgive
such portraits as that of the elder Barbier, who, after shouting,
'Sursum Corda! Prenons serment de defendre le sol sacre de la Patrie!'
accepts the large Prussian orders, sets his steam-saws going in his
timber yard, and furnishes the wood for the besiegers of Paris; or of
that of the tobacconist Legros, who, after crying, 'Un soldat qui renie
son drapeau? Qu'il creve comme un chien!' stands bareheaded with bent
spine to sell cigars to Bavarian officers. This is human nature: human
nature as commerce and modern teaching and the cheap Press have made it;
but Barbier and Legros will never pardon the limner who thus portrays
them. To the reproach that such portraits are nearly always those which
he selects, Darien would, no doubt, reply that it is not his fault if
they are what have been in his path to the exclusion of finer and nobler
figures. He is a realist in the full sense of that often-abused word,
and he has the courage to represent the realities which he finds.
The _Annee Terrible_ casts its black shadows over the childhood of this
writer, and as long as his life shall last the gloom it has left will
stay with him. If France herself should ever forget, which Heaven
forbid, he will not do so. His soul has been dipped in the Styx.
What will, no doubt, alienate from him a large number of readers will be
his almost absolute want of human sympathy, or, at least, of expressions
of such sympathy. It is exceedingly rare with him to give way to any
sign of any emotion of pity. He sees human nature, in all its phases,
with little compassion for it. He sees (and this is, too often, either
through weakness or through policy, ignored by writers and thinkers)
that the great majority of men are neither the martyrs nor the heroes,
neither the victims nor the tyrants of their time, but a mass
considerable alone by its numbers, inconsiderable by any mental or moral
worth, and chiefly absorbed in different forms of selfishness and the
desire of gain. It is probably an error, though one consecrated by usage
and talent, to represent the generality of human beings as worthy
subjects either of blessing or of curse. But the author who says so will
never be forgiven by that mass of mediocrity which forms nine-tenths of
the population of the world. Darien says it, and shows it, and it is
this which will always make his works appear dreary and depressing to
the general reader, who cannot accept and pardon this manner of looking
at life for the sake of its veracity and courage.
Of course, also, in the Press generally, the accusation of exaggeration
is always brought against exposures and delineations which are unwelcome
and embarrassing. But the writer's word may certainly be taken for it
that nothing in his descriptions is exaggerated or invented, and many
recent inquiries into the causes of deaths in the ranks, and of
executions after summary, and almost secret, court-martial in Algeria,
have confirmed the veracity of the statements made in _Biribi_. The
French Government, indeed, was, as I have said, so apprehensive of the
effect of these on the public mind that, although it did not suppress
the book, it forbade large coloured cartoons of the events described in
it to be posted up on the boulevards. In all nations the public is
treated like a child by authority; and as a child who will only walk
straight and submissively if its eyes be bandaged and its feet hobbled.
But in these pages we are not so much concerned with the political and
military side of these works as with their literary qualities; and these
are considerable and of a strong and rare originality of style. _Il vous
empoigne_, and it is impossible to read either of his two works without
recognising their courage and ability, if we feel pained by their
withering scorn and rugged wrath. They are at times hard as the stones
over which the sick and swooning soldier is dragged, tied to the tail of
a mule. They are at times ferocious as the licensed torturer with the
three stripes on the sleeve, who throws his helpless prisoner, gagged
and bound, on the burning sands. Terrible they always are, with all the
terror of truths which have been lived through by the person who
chronicles them. It is not any betrayal of confidence to say that the
author of _Biribi_ has experienced in his own person the tortures of
which the dread record is made under this little playful-sounding word.
After such scenes as are herein described, and such sufferings as these,
the blood in a man's veins cannot be rose-water. 'La haine c'est comme
les balles; en la machant on s'empoisonne.' And it is impossible that
the military system can beget any other than hatred, violent,
unforgiving, imperishable, in the victims of that system.
'A young soldier, a conscript, a chasseur a cheval, has lost
two cartridges as the battalion is about to leave for Tunis.
'The Corporal informs the Captain in command, who turns and
looks in silence. The boy Loupat gazes at him with the eyes of
an animal watching the descent of the club which is about to
brain it, and from which it knows not how to escape.
'In passing through Tunis the Corporal says to him, "We shall
leave you here. That will teach you to sell your cartridges."
'The boy understands. The council of war, the sentence as a
thief, the indelible shame stamped on the brow of a youth
because he has lost two of the cartridges of the State! The
following morning the bugle sounds the _reveil_ at four
o'clock. It is still dark. At twenty minutes to five the
company, with knapsacks on their backs, is drawn up in line on
the road which runs through the camp. The trumpets sound the
roll-call, and all down the line each man answers "Present" as
his name is spoken.
'"No one is missing?"
'"Yes, Loupat, my Captain."
'"Loupat is absent?"
'"Yes, my Captain."
'"The scoundrel! He has slunk off in the night to escape
court-martial, but we will find him. Go on. No one else
missing?"
'"Look there!" A soldier points to the gymnasium. All the men
look where he points. Under the portico, on the great
architrave on the left, a body is swinging, black, at the end
of a cord.
'A lieutenant runs to the place, climbs to the body takes hold
of it, lets it go, returns.
'"Dead?" says the officer in command. "Is it Loupat?"
'"He is already cold."
'"The scoundrel!" says the Captain again. "Well! he has done
justice on himself. Right flank, march!"
'We are crowded pell-mell into the railway waggons which are
bound for Tunis. I look through the opening in the door and see
far away below me--already far away--a small dark shape which
swings in the wind as on a gibbet, and which is lighted solely
by the first rays of the rising sun.
* * * * *
'Another soldier, Barnaux, has had some liqueurs given him by a
comrade; Barnaux is drinking with the men of his _marabout_,
when a sergeant enters, espies the irregularity, takes the
offender before the officer in command.
'Barnaux refuses to say who the giver of the liqueur was. The
Captain orders him to be put in irons. They have put him _a la
crapaudine_, that is, with his arms bound behind him and
chained to his ankles. He is cast down thus on the sand of the
camp. Because he moans with pain they gag him with a dirty rag,
they tie his chin to his head with a cord. He remains all the
night thus, tied up into a shapeless packet. In the morning
when they change sentinels they perceive that he is dead. The
gag has stifled him.
* * * * *
'Then the horror of the hospital; those hells which these men
so dread that they will tear the bandages off their wounds, or
cut their veins with a bit of broken glass, rather than live to
enter them.
'The muleteers set us down at a great tent which serves as an
infirmary; within there are planks on trestles and large pails
filled with reddened water.
'"You see that," says Palot, who has divined with the instinct
of the dying the destination of those sinister planks. "Well,
that will be my last bed."
'An assistant, a filthy apron round his body, signs to us to
enter.
'The great tent is an unutterably miserable place; it has been
battered about by wind and weather; the currents of air blow
unchecked through it, and clouds of dust arise from the ground.
Some twenty iron beds are there, not more; and beyond those a
pile of mattresses, on which men are lying, rolled up in rough
counterpanes. There are not sheets enough for all. They make a
sick man rise and give up his place to Palot, whose pulse the
surgeon feels.
'"Done for," says the doctor, between his teeth, without
heeding whether Palot hears him or not.
'To the rest of us they assign the mattresses lying on the
earth; these are full of vermin; they throw on us some
covering, stained with the vomit of our predecessors.
'How wretched it is, this hospital! How weary are the days
passed, with no other companions than the dying, whose
characters are poisoned by suffering and whose cries of horror
and anguish ring in one's ears! When, moved by the disgust and
despair which comes over you in this foetid hole filled with
filth and misery, you drag yourself out on your trembling limbs
into the sun, you feel so feeble, so exhausted, so helpless,
you cannot walk a step. You sit down in the torrid heat; you
are chilly, despite the high temperature; your teeth chatter,
your body is drenched with sweat. And at evening you are
obliged to return to the tent, where you pass such hideous
nights, troubled by such frightful nightmares, by such vague
sudden shapeless terrors, which seem to seize you by the throat
and freeze the blood in your veins. Oh! those horrible nights
when you see the dying shake off their covering with shrunken
fingers and try to raise their haggard faces, lighted by the
yellow-green rays of a lanthorn!
'These nights in which the living, who so soon will be the
dead, clutch at the rags which cover them, and shriek with rage
and fear as though they saw an enemy descend on them! These
nights in which one hears the childlike sobs of young Palot,
who is delirious, and who in his long agony calls on his
mother, "Mamma! Mamma!"
'They will ring for ever in my ears those two piteous words
which through three whole nights fill that wretched place with
their unpitied lament. A lament, low and tender at first,
broken with choking tears, ending in screams which make one's
hair stand up on one's skull with horror. The desperate screams
of a perishing life which has lost all sense and measure of
things or of time, of one who knows only that he will die, and
in one supreme appeal protests against his severance from those
he loves.'
* * * * *
And the youth Palot dies in that appeal, and they dig a hole in the red
clay under a low wall beside a Barbary fig-tree.
'Ah! poor little soldier, who breathe your last, calling on
your mother; you who, with your glazing eyes, saw the vision of
your home; you who are laid there, at twenty-three years of
age, to be devoured by the worms of that foreign soil on which
you have suffered so much, and where you have met your death
alone, forsaken, without a friend to soothe your last struggle,
without a hand to close your eyelids, except the brutal hand of
the hospital servant, which shut on your mouth like a muzzle
when your desperate cries disturbed his sleep. Ah, I know why
your sickness was mortal; I know it much better than the
surgeon whose steel dissected your emaciated body; and I pity
you, poor victim of the State, with all my heart and soul as I
pity your mother who waits for you, counting the days of your
absence, and who will only receive in her solitude the dry
official notice of your death!
* * * * *
'Ah, no! I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your
mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are
killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they
send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of
childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the
Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves
let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that
there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne
away from them? Do you not understand that it would be better
to tear your new-born creatures limb from limb than to bring
them up for one-and-twenty years, only to throw them into the
hands of those who want their flesh to feed the cannon?... And
you would ask our pity when, in some dark hour, the end comes,
and the bones of your children are gnawed by hyaenas and
whitened by the sun in some forgotten corner of the earth?'
There are many such passages in _Biribi_, burning with truth and with
pain; and it would be well if they could be stamped into the mind and
the memory of the peoples of this epoch, who go meekly and stupidly as
sheep to the slaughter, under the pressure of their sovereigns and
statesmen. Of course, such a teaching as this carries with it its own
condemnation by what is called authority, and by all those classes of
which I have spoken, to whom war is a necessity and a standing army is
the ark of the Government. But it would be well if the populace of every
country could read, learn, and digest it, and realise its truth and its
justification. As I have said, I place _Bas les Coeurs_ higher, in a
purely literary sense, than _Biribi_, in the sense of construction and
of concentration. For _Biribi_ is abrupt, at times confused; is rather a
series of terrible records and tragical incidents than a consecutive and
harmonious narrative, although it relates the career of the same
soldier from the time when he enters the ranks, to the last day
in which he flings from him for ever the grey coat and _kepi_ of the
punishment-battalion. In that punishment-battalion he has been placed,
let the reader remember, for no especial crime against law or decency,
but for those offences against the military code (the unwritten code)
which make the offender more guilty in the eyes of a court-martial than
any actually criminal accusation: to have lost a regimental article, to
have forgotten to salute a superior, to have stopped to drink at a brook
on a march, to have omitted to put the regulation number on a clothes
brush or a pewter platter, to have been out without leave, to have lost
cartridges or buttons--any one of those innumerable and incessantly
recurring actions or omissions which make a soldier an _insoumis_ to his
military superior, whether sergeant or general, corporal or colonel,
which to the military mind constitute crimes too heinous to be named,
offences which fill a punishment-book with accusations of acts in which
only the semi-insanity of perverted authority could see any provocation.
Read only of the punishment of the _tombeau_ for simple sins of
negligence or thoughtless mirth. The _tombeau_ is a canvas cover,
stretched on stakes, making a cage a metre long by sixty centimetres
wide, into which the soldier condemned to this torment is obliged to
creep on his stomach as best he can. In this cage he spends days,
weeks, months, at the caprice of his tyrants, with a litre of water as
his only drink, and nothing but the canvas between him and scorching
heat or icy rain, or blinding desert dust. On hot days the water in his
little can evaporates rapidly; and at the will of the corporals in
charge of him he may be kept thirty-six hours without other drink and
without food at all. Remember, as you read these lines, that the
_tombeau_ has been the home for months of the man who describes it; a
home on the scorching Algerian sand in the parching African weather; a
home in which he envied the jackal its lair and the vulture its wings; a
home in which his flesh rotted and his manhood swooned.
It is, perhaps, the finest compliment one can pay to an author to be so
much impressed by his theme that one almost forgets to speak of his
purely intellectual qualities. It is difficult to treat of either of
these works in a coldly critical spirit. For they are written with tears
of blood--such tears as are wrung from the heart's depths of all those
by whom France is beloved.
For if militarism be her only armour, her only resource against her
foes, then must we tremble for her indeed; and tremble no less for the
whole of Europe, of which all the male youth is bruised and crushed
under militarism as in a mortar. The charge of want of patriotism has
been brought against Georges Darien for both these volumes. But it is
the flaw in human nature, not in French nature only, which he exposes;
the cynicism, the selfishness, the cowardice, the meanness, which are
so conspicuous in all modern society, in all nations and in all grades.
Were there a German invasion of Italy or of England next year, there
would probably be as many Italians or English ready to succumb to, to
cringe before, and to profit by, the conquerors as there are Versaillais
ready to do so in the volume called _Bas les Coeurs_. There is a moral
motor ataxy in the spinal marrow of modern nationalities; the love of
money, the fear of poverty, and the continual concentration of the mind
on personal interests taught by modern education and by modern commerce
make up a large percentage of human beings, who are mere time-servers,
always ready to hold the stirrup-leather of the strongest. It is not
alone the French bourgeois of 1870 who is satirised in these pictures of
Versailles under German domination; it is the whole modernity of the
last quarter of the nineteenth century under the teaching of modern
science, modern trade, and modern morality. All humanity has been
inoculated with the serum of concentrated cowardice and egotism; some
are robust enough to resist the contagion, but the majority absorb it
and develop the disease. That which Darien calls not cowardice, but
fear, is enormously developed by modern influences, and will probably
continue to increase in the coming century. He asks himself and his
reader of what elements is it composed that discipline, that blind
obedience, which is enforced in military life (and which is already
demanded in civil life by the scientific and medical tyrannies). He
replies, and it is a subtle distinction which will escape the
comprehension of many, that the soldier who thus cringes to base orders
is not a coward but a craven (_pas un lache; un peureux_).
'This craven would throw himself into fire or flood to-day to
save a comrade's life; but he would blow his comrade's brains
out to-morrow at the word of command of a non-commissioned
officer. He is not base: he is frightened. His courage
disappears before a watch-word: his boldness shrinks and
vanishes under a regimental order. What cows him is the
apprehension of punishment, the fear of the men set above him.
Fear is the keystone of the ark of the temple of Janus. The
army is a laundry where they throw the consciences of men into
a tub of soap-suds, and where the characters of men are wrung
and twisted like wet linen, and are placed, shapeless, under
the wooden beater of a brutalising discipline. It is only by
means of fear that the military system has been able to
establish itself. It is only by such fear that it maintains its
position. It is obliged to affect the imagination by terror, as
it must extinguish the soul and sense of nations to prevent
each from seeing farther than the stupid limit of a frontier.
It is obliged to surround itself with a mysterious ceremony,
with a religious pomp in which horror is united to
magnificence; in which the trumpet-blast joins in the
death-shrieks; in which one can see confused together the
blood-stained robe of glory, the plume of generals, the
handcuffs of gendarmes, the marshal's baton, and the dozen
balls of the execution-volley, the golden palms of triumph and
the shattered bones of the dead. It must present this
spectacle to the crowds which stare and tremble before it as
they stand open-mouthed before a charlatan quack doctor at a
fair, whose tinsel and feathers attract them, but from whom
they shrink alarmed as soon as they see a forceps or a lancet
glitter ominously in his hand. It must do this in order that
the people, always in ecstasy before the marvellous, which it
does not attempt to analyse, shall be seized before it with awe
and admiration: even as a savage who prostrates himself in
terror and respect before the shooting-iron which he does not
understand, but which he knows possesses the power to strike
him to the earth.'
Many will protest against this figure as an insult to the general
public, but like many other insults which carry an intolerable sting in
them, it may claim that it is merited, and does not overpass the truth.
Darien writes with that force which can, indeed, only come from the
intimate persuasion that what it tells mankind is true, and should be
told.
'"It is commonly said," he continues, "that the army incarnates
the nation. History puts this into our heads by means of all
her subtlest lies. Ten martial anecdotes sum up a century; a
boast describes a reign. History preaches hatred of the people,
respect for the pillager, the sanctification of carnage, the
glorification of slaughter. The weak, the sensitive, the timid
succumb beneath it, and are buried in the red clay or left on
the sand for the vultures and jackal. The strong (sometimes,
not always) lives to have his whole future poisoned by these
memories, his whole temperament warped and embittered; or he
forces his tormentors to shoot him by some unpardonable breach
of discipline; some blow to a superior, or some intentionally
insolent reply; death is the continually recurring sentence in
the military code; if the man does not bend he must be broken:
broken in two with a volley which smashes his spine. The
punishment-battalions, the workshops of the Travaux Forces, are
the immediate consequences of the standing armies. Society, to
protect its interests, makes of a young citizen a soldier, and
of the soldier a galley slave at the first effort in him to
shake off the yoke of that discipline which degrades and
brutalises him, requiring like all tyrants and usurpers to
support its rule by terror, to make itself dreaded that its
prestige may dazzle and its tottering throne be secured. What
society requires is an obedience passive and blind, a total
imbecility, a humiliation which has no limit or hesitation; the
response of the machine to the mechanic, of the dancing dog to
the stick of his teacher. Take your man, make him surrender all
free will, power of choice, liberty, and conscience, and you
create and possess a soldier. To-day, at the end of the
nineteenth century, there is as much difference between the two
words, soldier and citizen, as there was in the time of Caesar
between two similar words--Milites and Quirites. The standing
army is the corner-stone of the actual social structure; it is
a force which sanctions and secures the conquests of force; it
is a barrier raised much less to combat foreign invasion than
to resist and paralyse the just claims of nations. Soldiers,
those sons of the people armed against their fathers, are
nothing more or less than gendarmes in disguise."'
This is surely absolute truth--that truth which is of all others most
feared by those in authority; those who, whether as sovereigns,
ministers, financiers, professional men, or tradesmen, live on and by
the servility and gullibility of the nations.
'What is discipline except fear? The soldier is reared to dread
what is behind him more than what he is forced to face; he must
be more afraid of the fellow-trooper who will be told off to
shoot him in the back, than of the adversary whom he is ordered
to attack. The army is the incarnation of fear. The soldier
must dread his commanders as a burnt child dreads the fire. He
must never laugh at their absurdities, nor raise a voice
against their injustice or their tyrannies. He must never
speak. He must not even think. His superiors do both for him.
If he laugh, or resent, or speak, or think, if he be neither a
coward nor a dolt, he is a mutineer: he must be tamed, beaten,
broken _a Biribi_.'
And when the dreamer, Queslier, says that it will not be long before the
people will become awake to this abuse of them, and will see that the
military caste is established on prejudices and interests hostile to
them, and will arise and destroy it, Darien replies, with equal
truth:--
'There will flow much water under all the bridges of the world
before the people will have ceased to adore their vain idols
bathed in blood and tears.'
Vain idols, indeed! For thousands of years the Juggernaut of military
despotism has rolled over the living pavement of the prostrate
multitudes, and there is no sign as yet that those multitudes will arise
and shiver the blood-stained car to atoms. Darien has but little hope in
the resistance of the people. He fears that the majority of them will
always continue to be daunted, dazzled, made dumb and helpless by the
powers which ruin and slay them. William of Germany makes his insolent
and inhuman declaration that the soldier must slaughter his own
progenitors if his 'war-lord' bid him do so; and yet William of Germany
is allowed to continue his reign.
What are we to look for from nations which lie down to be stamped on
thus? which lick the spurred boots of those who outrage them?
_Biribi_, and what _Biribi_ represents, has its prototype in every
country of Europe; and wherever Europe introduces her 'civilisation'
there she introduces also her quick-firing cannon, her numbered
battalions of slaves, her organised butchery, her pulverisation of
virility and of volition, her destruction of initiative and of liberty.
England considers that such arguments as those contained in this book do
not concern her because she has no conscription. But how long will she
be able, or be allowed, to be free from enforced service? The present
field-marshal, commanding-in-chief, Lord Wolesley, desires
conscription. It may well be that events, in the not far distant future,
may strengthen his hands and enable him to enforce it.[4]
[Footnote 4: This was written by me in 1897; England has not waited long
to confirm the truth of it.]
'Ah, Mascarille! who wished to put history into madrigals!'
cries Darien. 'History has given us Chauvinism (Jingoism), that
epidemic which makes a nation run headlong like the Gadarene
swine, to fall into the pit of absolutism! The army incarnates
the nation, you say? No. It diminishes it. It incarnates
nothing but force, brutal and blind, which lies at the service
of whoever most pleases it; or--sad to say--whoever pays it
highest. The army is the social cancer; is the octopus of which
the tentacles drain the blood of the nations; the hundred arms
and feelers which the people should sever with blows of their
hatchets if they desire themselves to live.'
Such language is very strong, and will rouse strong opposition in those
who have long been cradled in conventional opinions, and believe that
the established order of society, now existing, is admirable, and
intangible, because it has had the force and the cunning to so establish
itself. It is language which may, of course, be challenged by adverse
argument, which may at anyrate be met by counter-statements deserving to
be weighed against it; but it is language which is more needed than any
other in the present state of Europe, with every nation armed to the
teeth and every country an arsenal.
III
THE ITALIAN NOVELS OF MARION CRAWFORD
I believe that the novels of Mr Crawford of which the scene and the
characters are Italian are not among those of his works which are the
most generally popular. This fact, if it be a fact, must be due to the
general inability of his English and American public to appreciate their
accuracy of observation and lineation. Nearly all of them have qualities
which cannot be gauged by those to whom the nationality of his
personages in these works is unknown. In my own works, of which the
scene is in Italy, I have dealt almost exclusively with the Italian
peasantry. Mr Crawford has devoted his attention to the middle and the
higher classes. I do not think his portraiture of the Italian
aristocracy always redolent of the soil, but that of the lower and
middle classes is faithful to a wonderful degree. That side of Italian
life which is given in _Marzio's Crucifix_, for instance, is drawn with
an accuracy not to be surpassed. The whole of this story indeed is
admirable in its construction and execution. There is not a page one
would wish cancelled, and nothing could be added which would increase
its excellence. It is to my taste the _capo d'opera_ of all which he has
hitherto done.
I think in his studies of the Italian aristocracy he has given them less
charm and more backbone than they possess. He has drawn their passions
more visible and furious than they are, and their wills less mutable and
less feeble than they are in general. He seems to have mistaken their
obstinacy for strength, while, if he have perceived it, he has not
rendered that captivating courtesy and graceful animation which are so
lovable in them, and which render so many of their men and women so
irresistibly seductive. According to him they are a savage set of
_berserkers_, always cutting each other's throats, and he does not in
any way render that extreme politeness which so effectually conceals the
real thoughts of the Italian gentleman, and which never deserts him
except in rare moments of irresistible fury. No one remembers so
constantly as the Italian of all classes that language is given us to
conceal our thoughts, and no one lives so completely as the Italian does
from the cradle to the grave in strict concealment of his thoughts even
from his nearest and his dearest.
But in his Italian _genre_ pictures, and in portraiture of the people
whom we meet every day in society, Mr Crawford has a delightful pencil;
little side studies also of more humble persons, which many writers
would neglect, are charming in his treatment; take, for instance, the
old priest of Aquila in _Saracinesca_; with how few touches he is made
to live for us. We only see him once, but he will always remain in our
memory; in his whitewashed room with its sweet smell from the pot of
pinks, and his touching regret that he has never seen Rome, and at his
age cannot hope to do so.
His priests, by the way, are always excellently drawn, from the humble
village vicar to the learned and imposing cardinal. He has penetrated
alike their interiors and their characters with that skill which is only
born of sympathy, and it is therefore perhaps only natural that he has
not the faintest conception of the motives and views of the socialist
and republican whom he dreads and hates.
All these charming little details, like the pot of pinks, can only be
thoroughly appreciated by those who know intimately Italian character
and habits; but they abound, and show so much of fine observation and
delicate discernment in the author that one cannot forgive him for ever
beating the big drum of florid sensation.
Let me not be understood to mean that crime, or the impulse of crime, is
not a perfectly legitimate subject for the novelist; both can be made
so, but they are only so when treated as Mr Crawford himself treats them
in _Marzio's Crucifix_. When treated as he treats them in _To Leeward_
and _Greifenstein_ and _Casa Braccio_ they are merely coarse and
inartistic. He has a leaning towards melodrama which is chiefly to be
regretted because it mars and strains the style most natural to him, and
does not accord with his way of looking at life, which is not either
poetic or passionate, but slightly sad, and slightly humorous, modern
and instinctively superficial, superficial in that sense in which
modern society itself is so.
In _Marzio's Crucifix_ he is perfectly natural, and one cannot but wish
that he had never left that manner of treatment. Every motive therein is
natural, every character consistent with itself. This naturalness in his
characters is Mr Crawford's greatest attraction, and when he departs
from it, as he does in such detestable melodramas as the _Witch of
Prague_ and _Greifenstein_, he is no longer himself. It is hard to
understand that the same author can create the most delicate of
aquarelles and the most glaring of posters, or why one who can draw so
well and finely in silver-point can descend to daub with brooms in such
gross distemper. If this be the price of versatility, it were best not
to be versatile. But it is not versatility, because true versatility
consists in possessing a many-sided power which flashes like a jewel of
which all the facets are equally well cut. True versatility, moreover,
does not consist in the mere change of subject, but in the change of
style, of treatment of thought, in fact, the mutation of the entire mind
of an author, such as brings it into entire harmony with its fresh field
and its new atmosphere. There is no such change in these novels. Mr
Crawford is Mr Crawford always. As he never loses himself in his
creations, so he is always present in them to the reader; and his style
never varies, whether he treats of horrible psychological mysteries in
Prague or of pleasant carnival seasons in Rome.
He is not strong or forcible in tragedy. When it is incidental in his
stories like the murder of Montevarchi, or the attempted assassination
of Ser Tommaso, it is admirably sketched in; but when it forms the
structure and essence of a romance he fails entirely to give it
sublimity; it becomes in his hands a mere scarecrow, which makes us only
smile as its wooden hands beat the empty air. One feels that it is not
his natural element, that he does not like it or feel at home in it, and
has merely lent himself to it from some wrong impression that the public
requires it; due, perhaps, to the suggestion of some unwise publisher or
friend. The coarse melodrama with which some of his novels ends is not
in unison with the characters or the scope of his work. It is quite true
that, as murder is, in some circumstances, justified in actual life, so
in some circumstances it may be used as a _denouement_ in fiction with
perfect accuracy; yet it is always a violent ending which fully accords
with romance of wild life or peasant life, but always jars, unless
introduced with the most perfect skill, in stories of men and women of
the world; because the evil passions of this latter class of persons are
of a different quality, and find different modes of relief, from the
primitive and barbarous satisfaction of killing enemies or rivals. All
the influences and habits of society make it almost impossible for men
and women of society to become assassins.
Now Mr Crawford can draw men and women of the world so well that it is a
pity he so often goes out of his way to spoil his portraits of them with
the bowl and dagger taken from a different phase of life from that in
which they move.
He is always a gentleman, and he is at his best when writing of
gentlemen in the society which he knows so well. Duels are quite
natural in good society everywhere, except in England, and no one since
Charles Lever ever described them so well as Mr Crawford; but murders
are not general in the world of well-bred people, indeed are not very
often heard of out of the lowest strata of plebeian life.
In _Casa Braccio_ a fine motive, that of the peasant of Subiaco's
long-cherished vengeance, with its final satisfaction, both based on a
mistake, is wasted, because no one can care in the least for the man who
is slain, and the original sin committed by this victim (marriage with a
nun), although it seems so great to Mr Crawford, appears to us no sin at
all; so that his tragic end neither moves us nor satisfies in us any
sense of justice. What are admirably rendered and true to life in _Casa
Braccio_ are not Griggs and Gloria, or Angus Dalrymple and Maria
Addorata, but the peasants of Subiaco, Stefanone, with his
long-cherished vendetta, and his wife, Sora Nanna, who wears her lost
daughter's shoes because it would have been a sin to waste them. One
regrets that two persons so perfectly natural and well drawn should be
set on a pyre of flaring melodrama which obscures their portraits in its
smoke and flame. Why could he not give us a story of Subiaco, passionate
but natural, in which the action would have passed entirely in that
interesting and little-known part of the Sabine mountains?
When I use the term melodrama, I mean by it that which mimics the
tragic, but falls short of it; the tragic, imitated but so environed,
that it loses dignity and has something of the inflated and grotesque.
The melodrama in _Pietro Ghisleri_, in _Taquisara_, and in _The
Children of the King_ is this kind of melodrama; it does not move us for
a moment; we are, on the contrary, impatient of it in a modern period
and history, with neither of which it has any harmony. In the latter
story the conception of Rughero, though by no means new, is fine; but
the frame in which this mariner is set lacks all fitness for such a
figure; and the man whom he murders is not sinner enough, nor serious
enough in his actions, for the reader to be moved to pardon the act as
the author himself pardons it. If violent delights have violent endings,
violent endings need strong provocation and clear explanation; they
should appear to the reader to be inevitable, the offspring of an
unavoidable result. To the reader such a crime as this should appear to
be the inexorable justice of an inevitable retribution. But in the
violent _denouement_ of _The Children of the King_ the cause is trivial,
the act under the circumstances improbable, and the rude shock of it is
not in accordance with any of the other characters and with the light,
careless modernity of the setting of this story.
This defect of consistency, which is grave in literature, would be
ruinous on the stage where action is so much quicker, and where the
idiosyncrasies of each personage are so visible to the audience; and
such a fault is the more vexatious because it shows that the author was
never really absorbed in his own creations, was never so possessed with
them that they dominated him and made him do what they chose, as Bulwer
Lytton has said that the characters of every true novelist must do,
because a character once conceived is like a child, being once begotten,
it becomes what it must, we cannot control the subsequent shape it
takes.
Another defect of Mr Crawford's works is usually that their interest
flags towards the close, that this close is too abrupt, and that it
gives the reader the impression of the narrative being brought to an
untimely end because the writer no longer cared about narrating it. This
defect may be noticed in nearly all his stories, beginning with _Mr
Isaacs_, in which it is conspicuous; and is startlingly and irritatingly
visible in one of his latest, _Adam Johnstone's Son_; indeed, in the
last-named story the conclusion is obviously totally different from what
it was intended to be in the opening chapters. Now, a well-constructed
novel may please you or not, may be attractive or offensive, but it will
always be accurately conceived and harmoniously balanced; and nothing
animate or intimate will be introduced into it which has not some
bearing direct or indirect upon the plot. Nothing can be more incorrect
than to excite the expectations of the reader by indications which
result in nothing, sign-posts on a road which do but lead to a blank
wall.
A grave violation of this rule is frequently to be found in the Crawford
stories, no worse one than that in this story of Adam Johnstone's son,
where a long chapter is occupied by an incident with a brutal Neapolitan
carter on the Sorrento road. The man is knocked down by the hero, and
endeavours in return to stab him; carabineers arrive and arrest the
carter and not the Englishman (as in real life they unquestionably would
have done). The whole incident, related with much spirit, is obviously
only in its place, only pardonable as an episode, if the carter be
destined to appear again and sate his thirst for vengeance on the hero.
But he disappears from the scene for ever as the carabineers handcuff
him. We neither see nor hear any more of him, nor does the Englishman
hear any more of the matter, which in actual life certainly would have
caused him much annoyance at the local tribunal. The appetite of the
reader should not be tempted by dishes, which become a mere Barmecide's
feast, in this manner. Some intention must have been in the author's
mind when he created this scene. Why did he not carry out his intention?
In this manner many combinations and situations of the most interesting
and uncommon kind are deliberately thrown away unused. He frequently
introduces personages about whom he excites our liveliest interest, and
whom he then forsakes or dismisses with an indifference which the reader
does not share. It is as though a painter painted into his canvas
numerous figures which he has never finished, though he sends out his
picture as a finished work. The only novels of his which are entirely
free from this defect are the _Cigarette Maker_, the _Three Fates_, and
_Marzio's Crucifix_, and here I cannot resist (though it is not within
the scope of this article, since its venue is America) pointing out how
delicate, subtle, and clever is that story entitled the _Three Fates_.
There is little movement in it, no incident of any note, its interest
lies entirely in the development of character and in the evolution of
feeling, but these are so treated that they suffice to hold the reader's
charmed attention, and the study of the man whose hesitations and
tergiversations make the subject of it is one which may be caviare to
the general, but which may be read again and again with sympathy and
curiosity by those who can appreciate psychological problems. The
persons in it are such as we may have known to-day or may know
to-morrow; and the working of their minds and inclinations is traced
with a masterly skill, and is as correct as a physiologist's diagram of
the nervous system.
What to me is especially attractive in Mr Crawford's novels is the
atmosphere of good breeding which one breathes in them. One feels in the
company of a well-bred man. Their philosophy, their experiences, their
views, are all those of a man of the world; and there is in them a
tolerance and a total absence of prejudice (except in religious and
political matters) which are refreshing, and which are a fair approach
to, if not an actual attainment of, unbiassed liberality. There is in
them no enthusiasm for anything, no altruism, no deep emotion. They are
unfortunately entirely lacking in any perception of those myriads of
other lives not human, but as sentient as the human, such as vibrates in
every line of Pierre Loti's works. We have never in his novels any
profound tenderness like that with which the Freres Rosny speak of the
semi-humanity of inanimate things, or show us the dog gambolling on the
wayside turf in all the simple joy of its youth and its pleasure in
existence. To Mr Crawford as to Peter Bell, a primrose by the river's
side is a primrose, and it is nothing more, and the thrush or the linnet
which sings in the hawthorn above the primrose roots for him has no
existence. He has the American's indifference to all created things
which are not human. There are no animals in his books except two poor
terriers (who have their necks broken by the odious lover in _To
Leeward_), and the unhappy cat, introduced only to be poisoned in
_Taquisara_. There is nothing which indicates that he cares for nature
in any of its phases, and he calls the cicala a locust.
In Italy he lives only for the people around him as he would live in
Pall Mall, or Broadway, or the Champs Elysees. That passion with which
Italy has inspired Shelley, Byron, George Sand, De Musset, Owen
Meredith, even the calm analytic mind of Taine, has never touched him.
He has never felt the ecstasy which is embodied in that single phrase of
Taine's, 'On nage dans la lumiere.' One would say that the moonlight
shining on the waters of Tiber, under the bridge of St Angelo, is no
more to him than a flash-light illumining a grain-elevator on the
Hudson. All which is still Italy, of colour, of perfume, of light, of
legend, of rapture, of emotion, has wholly escaped him; he has never
felt its _hysterica passio_; he has never known its eternal youth, he
has never seen its lost gods rise and walk through its blossoming grass
as the star rays shine in the white cups of the narcissus of its fields.
But of the people who pass him in the Corso and on the Chiaja, who shake
hands with him at Montecitorio and on the Lung' Arno, who lounge and
talk with him at the cafes, and the legations, and the public gardens,
he is an admirable student, and an admirable photographer.
One of the most admirable of his portraits is that of the young Don
Orsino, the hero of the novel of that name. Sant' Ilario, like his
gallant old father, might be a North German, a Hungarian, or a Scottish
noble, his temperament is, indeed, much more northern than southern; but
Don Orsino,[5] his son, is exactly that which he is represented to be, a
youthful Italian of high rank, who has been educated at an English
public school, and has all the vanity, and egotism, and _secheresse de
coeur_ of modern youth in him. The type of the modern youngster of
rank was never so well drawn as in this story of his _debut_ in
speculation and his failure in it. His character is one very difficult
to draw, that coldness, that self-reliance, that self-sufficiency, which
are something at once harder and less contemptible than conceit, the
qualities which will make him successful later on but will never make
him lovable or tender; the instincts of race which hold him back from
meanness but are not strong enough to raise him to nobility, attenuated
as they have been by modern education, all these are rendered with the
utmost skill till the boy, in his sterile and self-satisfied modernity,
lives before us, and vain and selfish though he be, we are loth to part
from him, and curious to know what his future will become. In his
history that one supreme charm of Mr Crawford's, of which I have
previously spoken, his naturalness, is conspicuous; nothing can be more
natural than the relations of Don Orsino with his mother and father and
those who surround him, and the crafty _affaristi_ who get him into
their meshes of speculation.
[Footnote 5: A novel called _Corleone_ reproduces Don Orsino, but was
published after these pages had been printed. It has been very popular,
but in it, unfortunately, Don Orsino is given away deplorably, and
turned into a mere romantic lover, which in real life he never would
have become.]
What is not natural in this story is the character of Madame d'Aranjuez.
She comes before us instinct with all which goes to make up an
unscrupulous adventuress. She is that, or she is nothing. She does her
uttermost to fascinate and capture the son of Saracinesca. She succeeds;
and lo! with one of those _volte-faces_ which are so frequent and so
irritating in Mr Crawford's works, she gives up the game when she has
won it, does nothing that we expect her to do, and marries the
speculator who has beggared Don Orsino on condition that this gentleman
shall restore to Don Orsino all he has lost. Nothing more improbable or
inconsistent, given the character of the woman, could possibly be
conceived; nor is it more probable that the haughty and irascible young
man would endure to be served by her mediation, however it might be
veiled. Everything surrounding this lady promises us passion, intrigue,
perhaps tragedy, certainly peril, but we are balked of them all. The
mysteries concerning her turn out to be very tame ones indeed, she
appears a wholly innocent and harmless person, and even a very large
paper-knife shaped like a dagger, which we are told always lies beside
her and which has no _raison d'etre_, unless it is to be ultimately used
in killing or defending somebody, does nothing whatever and disappears
from the story, leaving us in tantalising ignorance of why we were ever
introduced to it.
Now no French writer of any degree would have created that remarkable
paper-knife, and kept it lying beside the heroine, and laid stress on
its unusual size and splendour, unless he intended to turn it to
account as a _deus ex machina_. To draw the reader's attention to a
conspicuous object, and then to cheat the expectations raised concerning
it, is a great fault in art; but it is one of which English and American
writers are continually guilty. It is true we are told casually, towards
the end, that her husband had hit her with this paper-knife, and that
for this blow the famous fencer Spicca had killed him; but this is
mentioned incidentally, and does not sufficiently account for the
interest we have been excited to take in this weapon. Spicca is, on the
contrary, admirably drawn, and the regard we feel for the merciless old
duellist is roused in us with true art. We have that sense of Spicca
having really lived, and really been that which he is described, which
can only be aroused in a reader by life-like accurate and sympathetic
portraiture.
There are many pathetic touches in this portrait of Spicca, and little
incidents entirely true to the life of an Italian gentleman of
aristocratic race and straitened means, as when in his distress of mind
his servant persuades him to eat 'a little mixed fry' with a fresh
salad, 'the salad is very good to-day'; and Spicca, touched and
refreshed, examines his meagre purse and takes out a ten-franc note
which he gives to the man, remarking that it will buy him a pair of
boots, and this ten-franc note is, when his purse lies on the table at
night, slipped back into it by the servant, who knows that his master
'never counts.'
I think the most exquisitely drawn of all Mr Crawford's many characters
is this Count Spicca; because the character of a noted duellist who
invariably kills, and kills how and in what way he chooses, with
profound indifference and unerring accuracy, is one very hard to make
sympathetic to the general reader, and especially to the English reader,
by whom duelling is abhorred. But Spicca is so perfect a gentleman, so
sad and simple and calm, so natural and unassuming despite his deadly
power, that no one can regard him without interest and even affection,
and see him without sorrow ill-treated by a woman so extremely
unpleasant as Consuelo Aranjuez, for whom he has done and suffered so
much.
The fencing of Mr Crawford is always very accurate, and we hold our
breath when Leone Saracinesca acts as his son's second. All this is
quite true to life in Italy, where duels with the sabre or rapier are
still of daily occurrence, and are resorted to after any insult, and
after a mere difference of opinion or trivial impoliteness.
It is wonderful that these stories have not been appropriated for the
stage by those unscrupulous thieves the London dramatists, for they are
full of dramatic situations and of duologues in which the give and take
is brilliant. Some have indeed the dramatic effect of inconsistency of
which I have spoken, but all are full of fine suggestions for the
theatre. _Saracinesca_, or _Sant' Ilario_, for instance, would be
transferable to the stage with scarcely any alteration. It is full of
incidents which would be most effective on the stage; and the strong
emotions and sensational scenes which it offers would most certainly
thrill and charm an audience.
One wonders also that their author himself does not write for the
stage, for his command of incident and of intricacies of circumstance
would raise him high above many playwrights of the London theatre. There
are scenes in nearly all his works which might be put upon the boards
with scarcely any alteration, such as the duel between Don Giovanni and
Del Ferice in _Saracinesca_, and the death scene of the librarian
Meschini in _Sant' Ilario_, while the whole story of _The Children of
the King_ would furnish matter for a romantic drama were the causes for
the crime in it made more credible.
Here let me note a small but irritating fault in these works, _i.e._,
the childish habit (common to writers of the last century) of naming
characters after their calling, or after some moral characteristic.
Meschini is the plural of the Italian adjective mean, cowardly, or
contemptible, and is given to a man with these defects; while a very
interesting person, a French artist famous in portraiture, is
unfortunately burdened with the ridiculous and impossible name of
Gouache. Mr Crawford is indeed frequently infelicitous in names. In
_Casa Braccio_, the American lover of Gloria, a stagey sort of person,
but one whom we are invited to regard with admiration and sympathy, is
weighted with the shocking name of Griggs. Mr Crawford does not see that
were Othello or Hamlet called Griggs, either would try to move the souls
of men in vain. If a name does not matter to a rose, it does matter
immensely to a character in a book; and there are so many euphonious
names in use in the world that it is wholly unpardonable to select a
ludicrous or ugly one. The poor little natural child of Gloria in this
same novel is also burdened at its birth by the name of Walter Crowdie,
which, for a baby, has such a comical effect that the very pathetic
position of this poor infant is rendered ridiculous by it. It is perhaps
under the idea of being realistic that these droll names are selected to
jar on tragic circumstances, but then Mr Crawford's stories are not
realistic, and cannot be made so by this one expedient.
He has also another fault which is visible in nearly all his works, and
is a grave one. He forgets at times the attributes which he has given to
his chief characters. Thus Giovanni Saracinesca is described as a man of
strong, noble, and reticent nature, and of intellect so superior that
his wife tells him he will be very great some day; and he resembles,
indeed, precisely, one of those men who become great leaders of other
men. But in the sequel (where he is called Sant' Ilario) all this
changes, and he behaves like an idiot, and of his great qualities we
hear no more and certainly see nothing. And where we still farther
follow his fortunes in the subsequent sequel of _Don Orsino_, he has
sunk into complete self-effacement, so complete that he allows his son
to be the associate and the debtor of that very Del Ferice whose utter
baseness and vileness he knows so well, and who tried in the famous duel
to murder him by foul play. Sequels are always ill-advised trials of the
author's consistency and the reader's memory, and it would have been
unquestionably better to have made Don Orsino stand alone in his history
and not figure as the son of Giovanni Saracinesca and of Corona
d'Astrardente. When a reader has followed with interest and sympathy the
fortune of an impassioned lover it is trying to see him standing in St
Peter's 'a middle-aged man,' talking to a son taller than himself. Great
art is required to make a character 'grow' quite consistently. The
continuation of histories, thus, greatly pleased Anthony Trollope and
Thackeray, but I cannot consider it a desirable thing in fiction.
Mr Crawford misses many opportunities of developing the capacity for
analysis and deduction which he undoubtedly possesses. He is very
observant but he is content to note a fact, he does not trouble himself
to seek its origin or the influences which have made it the fact it is.
When the two young people who wish to marry in _Marzio's Crucifix_
discuss what their house shall be like, and what colour the walls and
furniture, their biographer adds, 'Italians have lost all sense of
colour.' This is true, but it is one of the most amazing, grievous, and
extraordinary truths that exist; it is one for which I search in vain
and in perplexity for an explanation. But Mr Crawford does not seek for
any explanation. He states the fact and passes to another subject.
Again, in this sentence he begins well: 'It is of no use to deny the
enormous influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the
present day. Something might be gained indeed if we could trace the
causes which have made gambling especially the vice of our generation.
But I do not believe this is possible.' That is to say, he does not care
to be at the trouble of such an investigation, even though he adds the
acute sentence that most of the men and women of the world of pleasure
in our times exhibit 'the peculiar and unmistakable signs of physical
exhaustion, chief of which is cerebral anaemia. They are overtrained and
overworked, in the language of training they are "stale."'
He says in another place, 'Italians have no imagination.' This is but
partially true; I am not sure that it is true at all. Their modern
poetry is beautiful, more beautiful than that of any other nation. Their
popular songs are poetic and impassioned as those of no other nation
are, and one may hear among their peasantry expressions of singular
beauty of sentiment and phrase. A woman of middle age, a contadina, said
to me once, 'So long as one's mother lives, one's youth is never quite
gone, for there is always somebody for whom one is young.' A rough, rude
man, a day labourer, who knew not a letter, and spent all his life bent
over his spade or plough, said to me once, one lovely night in spring,
as he looked up at the full moon, 'How beautiful she is! But she has no
heart. She sees us toiling and groaning and suffering down here, and she
is always fair and calm, and never weeps!' Another said once, when a
tree was hard to fell, 'He is sorry to come away, it has been his field
so long.' And when a flock of solan geese flew over our lands, going
from the Marches to the mountains on their homeward way, and descended
to rest, the peasants did not touch them: 'They are tired, poor souls,'
said one of the women; 'one must not grudge them the soil for their
lodging.' Surely such ideas as these in people wholly uneducated
indicate imagination in the speakers?
And what can he possibly mean by no poets, which he says in another
place? Has he never read a line of Carducci? Much as we may mourn and
resent Carducci's turncoat and reactionary politics, no one can deny
that he is a poet of the purest kind. Has he never heard the ringing
stanzas of Cavallotti which sound like a clarion through the land? Has
he never studied the exquisite if too erotic odes of D'Annunzio, or the
touching verse of Stecchetti? There are others besides these who are
true and fine poets also; and even in the ordinary verses written for
newspapers (which in other countries are so poor and tawdry) there is
frequently in Italy a true and delicate feeling and an adorable lyrical
harmony which make one mourn to see things so fair wasted on so
ephemeral a life.
It is through their imagination still more than by their vanity that
Italians are led by unscrupulous political flattery and cajoled into
disastrous political enterprises. They will believe anything if it be
sufficiently captivating to their self-admiration and their fancy, and
will dance blindfold on the brink of a bottomless pit. It is only an
imaginative people who love so wildly, and kill themselves so madly for
affection's sake, as the Italian people do. The other day, because a
young soldier was sent to Africa, his brother killed himself in despair,
and the father of the two youths then killed himself also. It is an
inflammable imagination which makes the nation so easily led away by the
promises and the phantasmagoria of glory with which unscrupulous
statesmen have enticed it to the brink of ruin. It was its imagination
which made it so credulous that when told by its victors that the
disgraceful surrender of Makale was a victory, it believed and rejoiced,
illuminated and hung out flags, and never saw what a dupe it was being
made until cruelly awakened from its delusions by the _deroute_ of Abbu
Carima.
Mr Crawford has lived chiefly in cities, and in the cities, even in
Rome, the Italian is much debased by contact with foreigners; the
influence of foreigners on Italians is excessively bad, especially
American and English influence; and in the cities also the preponderance
of Jews is great. Innumerable persons who call themselves by Italian
names and speak of Italy as their country are Jews and nothing else. A
Finnish Jew known to me buys an Italian estate, and with the estate a
title, which, by the payment of a large sum to a complaisant Government,
he is allowed to adopt; he is decorated by the king for his munificent
'charities' in the land of his adoption; he marries an English woman,
and their children masquerade as Italian nobility with not a single drop
of Italian blood in their veins. Such 'Italian nobles' are numerous,
unhappily, in modern Italy, and do immeasurable discredit to the
nationality which they assume. In a generation or two their origin will
be forgotten, and they will be taken by society in general to be what
they pretend to be. Thus, unhappily, are great nations caricatured, old
titles prostituted, and Italy accredited with sons not her own, with
pretended offspring who are not even her bastards; persons who
impudently affect her name and boast of her blood, when not one single
hair of their head or fibre of their flesh has any affiliation to her.
What stifles Italian imagination, and kills the Italian soul, is the
passion for money; pure acquisitiveness or avarice, for the desire is to
get, little or no pleasure is taken in spending. It is often alleged
that this passion is due to their poverty; but poverty is not
necessarily accompanied by avarice; the Irish people are very poor, but
they are extremely generous; the Spanish people are so also. A comical
instance of this stinginess occurred the other day at Milan: a rich
tradesman had built himself a fine set of new premises, and opened his
new establishment with much feasting; he sent fifteen francs to the
municipality to be divided among the poor, and everyone applauded his
liberality! This love of money, acquisitiveness, niggardliness, or
whatever we call it, is too general not to be injurious to the Italian
character; and it enters into all daily life and personal acts, and is
frequently the chief motor power of marriage, of career, of education.
And then added to this injurious power there is another which is more
deleterious still, which weakens, debases, and falsifies the character
from infancy: it is the direful influence of the Church. But to treat of
this matter would occupy too much space, and would lead too far away
from the stories of Mr Crawford, in which there is an unfortunate
tendency towards approval of what he calls hierarchical government,
although a tendency not strongly enough insisted on by him for it to
demand minute examination. The powers of Mr Crawford, however, are
limited by the narrowness of what is called religion, and the inability
to see the higher side of these subversive opinions which he dreads, and
which he has done his best to turn into ridicule by putting them into
the mouth of the half-mad artist Marzio.
Indeed, his bigotry on religious subjects is very droll to see in these
days; and he speaks of 'unbelievers' in a tone worthy of Puritans in the
days of the _Mayflower_ pilgrims. It does not agree with the tone of his
books, which is invariably the tone of a man of the world; as such he
should possess that liberality of thought which is the chief, perhaps
the only, virtue of his generation; and if he had possessed it he would
undoubtedly have reached a much higher level, a much finer ideal, than
he has actually done. It would seem as if he distrusted and checked the
larger intelligence in him, as an over-cautious rider distrusts and
checks a horse which only asks to be given a free rein to go at speed
over a wide pasture; it would seem as if some extraneous 'influence'
were always at his elbow to keep his reason cribbed, cabined and
confined.
His religious prejudices have contributed to arrest his intellectual
development, for they are puritanical and antiquated in a singular and
lamentable degree. He speaks of _liberi pensatori_ as the Church elders
of Maine or Massachusetts might have done in the days of witch-torturing
and atheist-burning. He thinks that the future great war will be between
what he calls believers and unbelievers; and he looks forward with joy
to the coming conflict when men shall again fly at each other's throat
for the glory of God. This kind of mental cecity has its inevitable
results: it makes him step lamely where he would otherwise walk with
manly alacrity, and it makes him afraid to face the light of facts which
his truer instincts tell him are existing and incontrovertible. Is this
the result of early education, of hereditary inclinations, of female or
ecclesiastical influence? I do not know; but come whence it may, this
taint of bigotry obscures his intelligence and stops his progress, and
is matter of profound regret to those who see what he would have been
without it.
Many passages in his works show that he has perceived and grasped the
universal dominance of that corruption which so fatally exists in all
Italian life, and one could wish that he would make a more complete
exposure of it. Take this account of how the banker, Del Ferice,
obtained the decoration for a syndic who was one of his political
supporters:--
'Del Ferice, left to himself, returned to the question of the
mayor's decoration. If he failed to get the man what he wanted,
the fellow would doubtless apply to someone of the opposite
party, would receive the coveted honour, and would take the
whole voting population with him at the next general election,
to the total discomfiture of Del Ferice.
It was necessary to find some valid reason for proposing him
for the distinction. He could not decide what to do just then,
but he ultimately hit upon a successful plan. He advised his
correspondent to write a pamphlet upon the rapid improvement of
agricultural interests in his district under the existing
Ministry, and he even went so far as to compose and send some
notes on the subject. These notes proved to be so voluminous
and complete, that when the mayor had copied them he could not
find a pretext for adding a single word or correction. They
were printed upon excellent paper with ornamental margins under
the title of _Onward, Parthenope!_ The mayor got his decoration
and Del Ferice was re-elected, but no one has ever inquired
into the truth of the statements contained in the pamphlet.'
These passages and others similar give one the conviction that Mr
Crawford, if he had 'let himself go,' might have been a satirist of no
slight force. He has preferred to write charming stories, ingenious in
construction, but slight in development, to amuse his generation; yet
there is, I think, abundant evidence that he might have done stronger
things, perhaps may do them still. He has preferred to lead a seagull's
life, skimming the surface of the deep and shunning its storms. But he
might have led the petrel's. Probably all the influences of an agreeable
social existence have tended to make him indolent and unwilling to raise
tempests in it. Few resist the pressure of a social atmosphere. His book
called _With the Immortals_, marred as it is by the incongruity and
impossibility of its setting, shows that he can reflect if he likes, and
can express his reflections. If this work had been cast in such a form
as Mr Mallock's _New Republic_, or Sir Arthur Helps' _Friends in
Council_, or Christopher North's _Noctes Ambrosianae_ it would have been
remarkable for the arguments and dialogues contained in it. But the
ghost-element, the supernatural scenic effects, kill its excellence. Dr
Johnson, Heine, Pascal, Bayard, Francois de Valois and Caesar are too
ill-assorted for us to accept them in each other's company, and the
idea of these dead men being all able to converse in English, and all
doomed to wear through ages the clothes they wore in life, is so comical
that it destroys all interest and illusion which their conversation
otherwise might excite. There is a regrettable inability in Mr Crawford
to perceive the ridiculous. He lacks humour, and the perception of the
incongruous is not alive in him; nor is there either any poetic feeling
in his way of regarding life. He is essentially a citizen of the world
as the world exists in this last quarter of the fast-fading century, and
the Sirens sing not for him, though he dwells upon their shores.
Let him, therefore, appreciate more thoroughly his own very admirable
powers, and confine himself to painting the men and women of his time
and class, with all that cosmopolitan knowledge of them which he
possesses. I should like to see from him an Italian novel of modern
political life. He has, I make no doubt, had ample opportunities of
studying its machinery and its intrigues. He can dissect with so much
subtlety and correctness the brain and the temper of such a man as Del
Ferice, that there can be no doubt a political novel from him, placed in
Rome, would have alike accuracy and interest and irony. But he must
clear his mind of some of its cobwebs, and he must realise that the
'unbelievers' and revolutionists, who at present horrify him, constitute
the keenest intellectual element in Italy, indeed, the only healthy one,
and contain the only hope there is, if this be but a feeble one, of any
attainment by the nation in the future to any true liberty and
cleanliness in political aims.
I cannot conclude these few remarks upon his Italian stories without a
word of thanks to him for the pleasant hours he has often given me, and
the gallery of interesting portraits with which he has enriched the
memory of all those who read his novels.
IV
LE SECRET DU PRECEPTEUR
At the opening ceremony of a new free library at Lambeth in London, not
many weeks ago, Sir John Lubbock is reported to have made the following
remarks regarding fiction:--
'Sir J. Lubbock, in moving a vote of thanks to the Prince of
Wales and the Princess Louise, remarked that the free libraries
of London now contained more than 250,000 books, whilst last
year over 100,000 people borrowed volumes, and on more than
2,500,000 occasions books were used in the libraries
themselves. It was a fallacy to suppose that public libraries
were only used by novel readers. The proportion of works of
fiction used in the Camberwell libraries was only 65 per cent.,
and, of course, in this percentage were included nearly all the
books used by children. It must also be borne in mind that it
took a great deal longer to read a history or a work of science
than it did to run through a story. Under these circumstances
he thought it might fairly be said that the people of London
exercised a very good choice in the books they read. He himself
should be very sorry to undervalue novels. Even nonsense was
extremely refreshing, and he thought the English people had
learnt more of their history from novels and from Shakespeare's
plays than from books of history.'
In these few sentences there are embraced the views entertained in
general by the English nation with regard to the art of fiction. By the
English nation it is, and probably always will be, regarded as on a par
with chromo-lithography, the use of the kodak, and tight-rope dancing.
'Even nonsense is refreshing,' says this kind defender of romance. He
might have added that this depends very much on the character of the
nonsense; there is dull nonsense, strained nonsense, self-conscious
nonsense, vulgar nonsense, which is duller than a dull sermon and
heavier than heavy bread; the nonsense which dilates and delights the
heart of the coarse and common fool, is as a stagnant and stinking pond
to the cultured mind; and true nonsense, _i.e._, _jeux d'esprit_,
caricatures, parodies, 'exquisite fooling,' does not come under the head
of novels at all.
Someone had apparently been objecting to the creation of free libraries
on the score that they were chiefly used by readers of fiction, and in
support of such libraries Sir John Lubbock (not venturing to make so
heterodox an assertion as that the perusal of fiction _per se_ is
valuable and desirable) pleads that only sixty-five per cent. of the
books borrowed were novels, and refers to the rapidity with which a
novel can be 'run through,' as he phrases it, and proceeds, as an
excuse for the perusal of fiction, to state that the English public
chiefly derives its knowledge of history from novels and from
Shakespeare's plays. This declaration, which is enough to make Mr
Freeman turn in his grave, and Mr Froude writhe in his professorial
chair, is, I believe, based on an exact truth, but it never appears to
occur to the speaker that while the history to be learned from fiction
and the drama is not of the purest kind, the fine art of an admirable
book, as of an admirable play, contains many another lesson more
valuable than even those of correct history to the reader who is capable
of assimilating and appreciating it.
Sir John Lubbock kindly adds that he should be 'very sorry to undervalue
novels.' Sweet and gracious condescension! He would be sorry to
'undervalue' Boccaccio, Cervantes, Guerrazzi, Theophile Gautier,
Merimee, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, Walter Scott, Fielding, Octave
Feuillet, Georges Sand, and Bulwer Lytton! Admirable benevolence! A
treatise on the ways of ants or bees must, of course, rank as an
infinitely higher work than a mere study of the manners, characters, and
passions of mankind. To peruse the former work is education; to read the
latter work is recreation, not absolutely injurious, perhaps, but
scarcely beneficial. Sir John Lubbock on an ant-hill has the sublimity
of the scientist: Alphonse Daudet on human nature is a mere trumpery
trifler.
It does not appear even to occur to Sir John Lubbock that a fine novel
contains intellectual qualities of the highest kind, and combines in
itself the widest effects and the most delicate minutiae of creative
art. A fine novel should be no more 'run through' than the sculptures of
the Vatican or the pictures of the Uffizi should be run through in
ignorance and haste: common readers, like common tourists, may do so,
but to do so is as gross and unpardonable an insult to the book as it is
to the sculptures and the paintings.
Reflect but a moment upon all the divers and numerous qualities which
are of necessity existent in the creator of a fine novel before it can
be produced; not only imagination but wit, not only wit but scholarship,
not only scholarship but fancy, not only fancy but discrimination,
observation, knowledge of the passions, sympathy with the most opposite
temperaments, the power to call up character from the void, as the
sculptor creates figures from the clay, and, for amalgamating,
condensing, and vivifying all these talents, the mastery of an exquisite
subtlety, force, and eloquence in language. All these various gifts must
be united in one writer before a fine novel can be produced; and when it
is produced it requires (to be duly estimated) as cultured and as
respectful a study of it as an educated traveller would take to the
Vatican or to the Uffizi.
I have derived month by month, as it has appeared in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, the most delicate and acute pleasure from the perusal of _Le
Secret du Precepteur_, yet it is a pleasure which can only be obtained
from it by a serene, leisurely, artistic enjoyment of its exquisite
literary qualities. It is like a wine of which the bouquet can only be
appreciated by educated palates. There is but little movement in it;
the incident is slight, the situations derive their fascination for the
reader not from their violence or their singularity, but from their
perfect probability, and from their psychological interests; and the
whole tone of it is kept carefully throughout to the smooth bantering
semi-_gouailleur_ tone of the opening recital. Ah, that style!--clear as
water, delicate, full of grace, limpid, harmonious, exquisite! It has
all the polished charm of the man of the world, and all the eloquence
and brilliancy of the artist. I have heard a great ambassador in a
beautiful tapestried chamber play the music of Schumann and Chopin and
Bach with admirable and sympathetic _maestria_; the style of Cherbuliez
reminds me of that _diplomat-virtuose_. We hear incessantly of the
magical style of Paul Bourget; but beside the style of Cherbuliez that
of Bourget is strained, tortuous, affected, artificial. The supreme
excellence of that of Cherbuliez is its consummate ease, like the ease
of a perfect manner in society. To employ all the resources of such a
style is as great a delight to the master of it as the use of the rapier
to the master of fencing, as the handling of the plastic clay to the
sculptor. To relate a narrative in such a style is as warm and full a
pleasure to the possessor of it as it is to the painter to create a
winter's night or summer's day, youth or age, dawn or moonlight, a dance
of nymphs, or a frolic of fauns, out of a few ground earths, a little
oil, and a square of canvas. But to appreciate it the reader of it must
bring with him some qualities on his own behalf.
There are in it none of those Anglicisms so irritating in the works of
Bourget and others, such as Henry for Henri, Francis for Francois,
'window' for 'fenetre,' 'le cab stoppait' for 'le fiacre s'arretait,'
and so many similar disfigurements of the most polished and elegant
language of the world. The temptation to use a foreign language is great
when its expressions are such as no other language can equally well
render. But who can think that 'cab' is better than 'fiacre,' or
'window' than 'fenetre'? The French of Cherbuliez is the French of an
elegant writer, of a man of the world, and is, beside that of 'les
jeunes,' as a pure and limpid river beside a crooked and choked-up
stream. Without their professorial jargon of psychology or their
strained analysis, which so greatly fatigues the reader and resembles
nothing so much as the efforts of a cyclist to run smoothly on a stony
road, _Le Secret du Precepteur_ is full of delicate and interesting
studies of the human mind and character. Its especial triumph is to
excite and retain the interest of the reader in a character which in the
hands of most writers would have been either insignificant or absurd.
The teller of the story is the preceptor himself, who, unlovely in face
and form, filling a subordinate and somewhat absurd position, frankly
confessing his own follies and errors, is yet the most lovable and the
most dignified of men; the intellectual grace of the scholar and the
philosopher wholly atoning for and effacing the inferiority of place and
the deformity of features. He tells us of his own extreme ugliness, so
that we are not deluded into thinking it a _belle laideur_, but accept
it as what he calls it, an ugliness which, coupled with poverty, would
scare all women away from him all the years of his life; but, despite
of it, we feel the irresistible charm of his personality, we admire his
tact, we adore his unselfishness, we are as delighted by his
self-restraint as by his courage and his will, and we take leave of him
with the regret which we feel when we part for an indefinite period from
a companion of the finest culture and the warmest sympathies. We regret
also that, like most unselfish persons, he is forced to be content with
the crumbs of happiness instead of its bread. It is strictly true to
life that he should receive no more; it proves the author a true artist
that he has been able to resist the temptation of giving so attractive a
character a happy and unnatural fate, and we who know how the awards of
life are proportioned, know that it is entirely in keeping both with art
and truth that the _bon chien_ should receive no more than the good dog
usually gets in recompense for his fidelity. We know that it could not
be otherwise; yet we regret the necessity for leaving the good dog with
his dry broken crusts.
I regard the extreme interest and attachment with which this character
inspires us as one of the greatest triumphs of fiction, because its
attraction is stripped of all the adventitious aids to interest which
accompany beauty, rank, or position. We have a plain, poor man, in a
paltry and invidious situation, who conquers all which is against him as
a hero of romance, and arrives at the highest place in the reader's
esteem and affection by mere force of natural dignity, excellence of
heart, and the irresistible superiority of wit and intellect. He is
throughout all his actions, moreover, entirely natural. It is difficult,
in reading his account of them, to believe that he is a fictitious
character; all that he does and says is so real, so human. No one who
reads _Terre Promise_ or _Coeur de Femme_ is ever for an instant
tempted to think that the characters ever did live or ever could have
lived; they are _cartonnages_, lay figures, draped in clothes from the
costume maker's, and moving in obedience to the hand of their
manipulator. But as Maupassant's Pierre et Jean are living, as Loti's
Gaud and Fatougay live, as Rod's Michael Teissier lives, as the
delicious Yette lives, so, and with even more vitality than they, the
tutor Tristan lives in this admirable novel. And all the people around
him live in this country house near Epernay, which is the scene of
nearly all his joys and sufferings. We wish, indeed, that this scene
never changed; so well does its landscape accord with the narrative,
that one wishes the unities could have been preserved to the end. One
regrets the change of venue when the story is carried to Paris. It is
perhaps probable that the end is not what was originally intended by
Cherbuliez.
It is a story which it is very difficult to end artistically. In point
of fact it is not ended at all; it is only broken off at a certain
crisis, and leaves the reader in the persuasion that Monique will have
many adventures, and her 'bon chien' and her husband many anxieties. The
fault in it, if fault there is, seems to me to be that, if this crisis
had been contemplated from the beginning, the character of Louis
Moufrin, extremely natural as far as it goes, should have been rendered
a little more heroic, so that more interest would have attached to his
transformation under the stings of jealousy. If this were not done the
_coup de pistolet_ should have been given, not by him, but by the
preceptor; indeed, since Tristan tells us early in his story that he is
a very fine pistol-shot, we are always expecting him to prove his skill
on someone, and one could wish that he had exercised it as he desired to
do on the odious coxcomb, Trigueres. The impression is irresistibly made
on the reader's mind that this was the _denouement_ originally
contemplated by the author, and it would have been one stronger and more
satisfactory. But perhaps he renounced it from the feeling that tragedy
as a climax would have jarred on the harmony of a book which is
throughout kept to the good-humoured and jesting tone of cultured
society.
It would take many pages to do justice to the other persons of the
novel; all are admirably drawn; there is only some exaggeration in that
of Madame Moufrin, _mere_. But the cheery and generous merchant Brogues,
the high-bred, high-born _devote_ who is his wife, the charming priest
Verlet, the shy, silent, tender-hearted and timid Moufrin, the
inimitable portrait of the learned, excellent and insufferable Sidonie,
and lastly, the entirely uncommon conception of the captious and
provoking _petite Japonaise_, who rules her faithful two-legged dog with
a rod of iron; all these are admirably pourtrayed, even if they yield in
importance to the central figure of the preceptor himself. The finest
and most complicated study of them all is that of Madame Brogues, with
her piety, her sensuality, her instinctive patrician revolt against the
monotony of a bourgeois interior, her complex and scornful nature, her
mingled indifference and tenderness for her daughters, the union of
touching maternal sadness and devotion to the superior claims of
_chiffons_, which traits are so admirably depicted in her last meeting
with her younger daughter Monique.
Cherbuliez has, it is plain to see, been much struck with the large
place which _chiffons_ occupy in the lives of women of the world, and
with the power of consolation which the interests of the toilette
possess for them. The mother and daughter are both extremely touched by
their accidental meeting (the first since the elopement of the former
and the marriage of the latter); but this meeting takes place in the
Exhibition building in Paris, and their emotions do not prevent them
from studying, discussing, and purchasing beautiful fabrics. It is
exactly the union of conflicting feelings which is really to be observed
in life: the mingling of deep sentiment and sincere regret with
interests of a totally different kind which appear trivial but are
really absorbing distractions, perhaps frivolous, but entirely natural,
arising from those cares and pleasures of personal appearance which are
indestructible in the _elegante_ by anything short of death.
There is also another passage which equally illustrates the ability and
insight of the author in his perception and representation of that dual
motive, that twin yet conflicting sentiment, which so frequently moves
us and so especially characterises the modern mind, which is frequently
complex and artificial, trivial and analytic, and thereby incapable of a
single, or of a simple, emotion. Sidonie, a very proud, chaste, and
implacable maiden, is stung to the core by her discovery of her
mother's flight; the thought of what the neighbours and the servants
will think is torture to her, and a generous and genuine grief for the
blow to her father moves her to the first tears which she has ever shed.
But still the idea, the knowledge that since she means never to marry,
she is now and will be for ever supreme mistress of her father's house
is a source of irresistible pleasure and consolation, and as she goes
upstairs she cannot resist, even on this terrible night, exercising her
first despotic and unshared power. Her mother, who loved softness and
shadow, had always insisted on the electric lamp at the foot of the
staircase being shaded and softened by folds of rose-coloured stuff,
Sidonie had the rose-coloured stuff taken away, and even on this first
evening of her reign the undimmed and intense radiance of the unveiled
light proclaims the change of domestic government, and the absolute
authority of the new ruler. This is one of the many exquisite finenesses
of touch which reveal the delicacy of observation in the writer
throughout this novel, and can be only appreciated by a reader who
brings to it that attention and capacity which Sir John Lubbock and his
audience would think it only worth while to devote to a treatise on the
stalk-eyed crustacea or a monograph upon the household flea.
M. Jules Lemaitre, in his story of _Les Rois_, says with a sneer that
one of his personages was 'nee pour gouter Auber, Cabanel, et les romans
de la _Revue des Deux Mondes_.' Now in his own volume, entitled _Les
Rois_, published this season, and received with great curiosity in
Paris, M. Jules Lemaitre has merely mixed up the tragedy of Meyerling,
the mystery of Johann Orth, and recent well-known card and debt
scandals concerning living princes; and, having reproduced with these
the individuality of Louise Michel, the life of Kropotkine, and the
career of a well-known financier, he has introduced some essays on
social and political problems into his reproductions of these
personages, dated the whole 1900, and called it a novel. But it is not a
novel, for the imagination does not enter into it. It is a photograph,
or a travesty, whatever the reader may please to call it, of actual
recent modern events, thinly disguised, but unjustly exaggerated, and an
almost impudent imitation in many ways of Daudet's _Rois en Exil_. There
is some brilliant writing in it, and some fine thoughts and expressions,
which is, of course, always the case when the writer is so intelligent a
man as Lemaitre, but a novel it is not; it is a series of scenes, almost
all borrowed or imitated from well-known events; it is a patchwork with
little harmony in its arrangement, and it has the supreme fault of
introducing long descriptions of anterior events, and bringing in new
characters, at the close of the action. There is also one suggestion, if
not more, concerning a royal person, so horrible that it seems unfair
and even cruel to make it of one who cannot resent it or defend herself.
The date of the story may be called 1900, but the events on which it is
built have already been lived through by conspicuous characters.
It is not becoming, therefore, in so immature a story-teller as M.
Lemaitre proves himself to be, and one who is obliged to go for his
incidents to the scandals of courts, to sneer at the novels of the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, in which, to go no further back than last
year, such admirable works as _La Vie Privet de Michael Teissier_ and
_Le Secret du Precepteur_ have first seen the light. To be a critic of
it is much easier than to be a creator of fine fiction; to pull to
pieces requires lesser qualities than to construct.
In the past twenty months there have been some very fine novels in
French literature. _A l'Abime_, by Paul Vassili, is a masterpiece of
originality, and the character of the great egoist, who is its hero, is
matchless in its intuition, its philosophy, and its realism; it is a
narrative of intense interest without its having any other source for
its interest than that which lies in following the evolution of a type
wholly new in literature, and the crystallisation of a naturally
generous nature into a complete philosophic selfishness through
circumstances which lead to its moral isolation amidst the full success
of a triumphant career. _Amants_ and _La Force des Choses_, of Paul
Margueritte, are beautiful novels, remarkable for originality of
conception, correctness of observation, and the talent of interesting
the reader in perfectly natural events. The former in especial is full
of truth, poetic feeling, and novelty of situation and of character; it
is entirely a story of love, but it is love pourtrayed with equal
sympathy and comprehension, and embracing scenes entirely dramatic
whilst entirely natural. If Sir John Lubbock will read these three books
and end with _Le Secret du Precepteur_, he will, I think, feel bound to
admit that such works require for their due appreciation quite as much
attentive respect in their perusal, and quite as many intellectual and
perceptive qualities in their reader, as the analysis, however
interesting, of a wasp's social habits, and the diary, howe
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