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Memoirs of My Dead Life

by George Moore · English · Gutenberg #7789 · 557,356 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Memoirs of My Dead Life

Author: George Moore


        
Release date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7789]
                Most recently updated: April 12, 2014

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Cam Venezuela, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team










MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE

BY

GEORGE MOORE







CONTENTS


APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS

I. SPRING IN LONDON

II. FLOWERING NORMANDY

III. A WAITRESS

IV. THE END OF MARIE PELLEGRIN

V. LA BUTTE

VI. SPENT LOVES

VII. NINON'S TABLE D'HÔTE

VIII. THE LOVERS OF ORELAY

IX. IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS

X. A REMEMBRANCE

XI. BRING IN THE LAMP

XII. SUNDAY EVENING IN LONDON

XIII. RESURGAM




APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS

[_The_ APOLOGIA _which follows needs, perhaps, a word of
explanation, not to clear up Mr. Moore's text--that is as delightful,
as irrelevantly definite, as paradoxically clear as anything this
present wearer of the Ermine of English Literature has ever
written--but to explain why it was written and why it is published.
When the present publisher, who is hereinafter, in the words of
Schopenhauer, "flattened against the wall of the Wisdom of the East,"
first read and signified his pride in being able to publish these
"Memoirs," the passages now consigned to "the late Lord ----'s
library" were not in the manuscript. On the arrival of the final copy
they were discovered, and thereby hangs an amusing tale, consisting of
a series of letters which, in so far as they were written with a
certain caustic, humorous Irish pen, have taken their high place among
the "Curiosities of Literature." The upshot of the matter was that the
publisher, entangled in the "weeds" brought over by his_ Mayflower
_ancestors, found himself as against the author in the position of
Mr. Coote as against Shakespeare; that is, the matter was so
beautifully written that he had not the heart to decline it, and yet
in parts so--what shall we say?--so full of the "Wisdom of the East"
that he did not dare to publish it in the West. Whereupon he adopted
the policy of Mr. Henry Clay, which is, no doubt, always a mistake.
And the author, bearing in mind the make-up of that race of Man called
publishers, gave way on condition that this _APOLOGIA_ should
appear without change. Here it is, without so much as the alteration
of an Ibsen comma, and if the _Mayflower_ "weeds" mere instrumental
in calling it forth, then it is, after all, well that they grew_.--THE
PUBLISHER.]

Last month the post brought me two interesting letters, and the reader
will understand how interesting they were to me when I tell him that
one was from Mr. Sears, of the firm of Appleton, who not knowing me
personally had written to Messrs. Heinemann to tell them that the firm
he represented could not publish the "Memoirs" unless two stories were
omitted; "The Lovers of Orelay," and "In the Luxembourg Gardens,"--Messrs.
Heinemann had forwarded the letter to me; my interest in the
other letter was less direct, but the reader will understand that it was
not less interesting when I tell that it came from the secretary of a
certain charitable institution who had been reading the book in question,
and now wrote to consult me on many points of life and conduct. He had
been compelled to do so, for the reading of the "Memoirs" had disturbed
his mind. The reader will agree with me that disturbed is probably the
right word to use. To say that the book had undermined his convictions
or altered his outlook on life would be an exaggeration. "Outlook on life"
and "standard of conduct" are phrases from his own vocabulary, and they
depict him.

"Your outlook on life is so different from mine that I can hardly
imagine you being built of the same stuff as myself. Yet I venture to
put my difficulty before you. It is, of course, no question of mental
grasp or capacity or artistic endowment. I am, so far as these are
concerned, merely the man in the street, the averagely endowed and the
ordinarily educated. I call myself a Puritan and a Christian. I run
continually against walls of convention, of morals, of taste, which
may be all wrong, but which I should feel it wrong to climb over. You
range over fields where my make-up forbids me to wander.

"Such frankness as yours is repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak
of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but
interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last
analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call
illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I _do_ want to
know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do
you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned,
explained by the fact that Doris, by her mind and body, helped you to
cultivate your artistic sense? Was Goethe right in looking upon all
women merely as subjects for experiment, as a means of training his
aesthetic sensibilities? Does it not justify the seduction of any girl
by any man? And does not that take us straight back to the dissolution
of Society? The degradation of woman (and of man) seems to be
inextricably involved. Can you regard imperturbedly a thought of your
own sister or wife passing through Doris' Orelay experience?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The address of the charitable institution and his name are printed on
the notepaper, and I experience an odd feeling of surprise whenever
this printed matter catches my eye, or when I think of it; not so much
a sense of surprise as a sense of incongruity, and while trying to
think how I might fling myself into some mental attitude which he
would understand I could not help feeling that we were very far apart,
nearly as far apart as the bird in the air and the fish in the sea.
"And he seems to feel toward me as I feel toward him, for does he not
say in his letter that it is difficult for him to imagine me built of
the same stuff as himself?" On looking into his letter again I
imagined my correspondent as a young man in doubt as to which road he
shall take, the free road of his instincts up the mountainside with
nothing but the sky line in front of him or the puddled track along
which the shepherd drives the meek sheep; and I went to my writing
table asking myself if my correspondent's spiritual welfare was my
real object, for I might be writing to him in order to exercise myself
in a private debate before committing the article to paper, or if I
was writing for his views to make use of them. One asks oneself these
questions but receives no answer. He would supply me with a point of
view opposed to my own, this would be an advantage; so feeling rather
like a spy within the enemy's lines on the eve of the battle I began
my letter. "My Dear Sir: Let me assure you that we are 'built of the
same stuff.' Were it not so you would have put my book aside. I even
suspect we are of the same kin; were it otherwise you would not have
written to me and put your difficulties so plainly before me." Laying
the pen aside I meditated quite a long while if I should tell him that
I imagined him as a young man standing at the branching of the roads,
deciding eventually that it would not be wise for me to let him see
that reading between the lines I had guessed his difficulty to be a
personal one. "We must proceed cautiously," I said, "there may be a
woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and
the interest that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial.
Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching
of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his
attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted as a truth,
that there is one immutable standard of conduct for all men and all
women." But the difficulty of writing a sufficient letter on a subject
so large and so intricate puzzled me and I sat smiling, for an odd
thought had dropped suddenly into my mind. My correspondent was a
Bible reader, no doubt, and it would be amusing to refer him to the
chapter in Genesis where God is angry with our first parents because
they had eaten of the tree of good and evil. "This passage" I said to
myself, "has never been properly understood. Why was God angry? For no
other reason except that they had set up a moral standard and could be
happy no longer, even in Paradise. According to this chapter the moral
standard is the origin of all our woe. God himself summoned our first
parents before him, and in what plight did they appear? We know how
ridiculous the diminutive fig leaf makes a statue seem in our museums;
think of the poor man and woman attired in fig leaves just plucked
from the trees! I experienced a thrill of satisfaction that I should
have been the first to understand a text that men have been studying
for thousands of years, turning each word over and over, worrying over
it, all in vain, yet through no fault of the scribe who certainly
underlined his intention. Could he have done it better than by
exhibiting our first parents covering themselves with fig leaves, and
telling how after getting a severe talking to from the Almighty they
escaped from Paradise pursued by an angel? The story can have no other
meaning, and that I am the first to expound it is due to no
superiority of intelligence, but because my mind is free. But I must
not appear to my correspondent as an exegetist. Turning to his letter
again I read:

"I am sorely puzzled. Is your life all of a piece? Are your 'Memoirs'
a pose? I can't think the latter, for you seem sincere and frank to
the verge of brutality (or over). But what is your standard of
conduct? Is there a right and a wrong? Is everything open to any man?
Can you refer me now to any other book of yours in which you view life
steadily and view it whole from our standpoint? Forgive my intrusion.
You see I don't set myself as a judge, but you sweep away apparently
all my standards. And you take your reader so quietly and closely into
your confidence that you tempt a response. I see your many admirable
points, but your center of living is not mine, and I do want to know
as a matter of enormous human interest what your subsumptions are. I
cannot analyze or express myself with literary point as you do, but
you may see what I aim at. It is a bigger question to me than the
value or force of your book. It goes right to the core of the big
things, and I approach you as one man of limited outlook to another of
wider range."

The reader will not suspect me of vanity for indulging in these
quotations; he will see readily that my desire is to let the young man
paint his own portrait, and I hope he will catch glimpses as I seem to
do of an earnest spirit, a sort of protestant Father Gogarty,
hesitating on the brink of his lake. "There is a lake in every man's
heart"--but I must not quote my own writings. If I misinterpret him
... the reader will be able to judge, having the letter before him.
But if my view of him is right, my task is a more subtle one than
merely to point out that he will seek in vain for a moral standard
whether he seeks it in the book of Nature or in the book of God. I
should not move him by pointing out that in the Old Testament we are
told an eye for an eye is our due, and in the New the rede is to turn
the left cheek after receiving a blow on the right. Nor would he be
moved by referring him to the history of mankind, to the Boer War, for
instance, or the massacres which occur daily in Russia; everybody
knows more or less the history of mankind, and to know it at all is to
know that every virtue has at some time or other been a vice. But man
cannot live by negation alone, and to persuade my correspondent over
to our side it might be well to tell him that if there be no moral
standard he will nevertheless find a moral idea if he looks for it in
Nature. I reflected how I would tell him that he must not be
disappointed because the idea changes and adapts itself to
circumstance, and sometimes leaves us for long intervals; if he would
make progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only
becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what
is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more
wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved.
Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great
metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage
"Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration,
the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the
moral law." The only fault I find with this passage is that I read the
word "law" where I expected to read the word "idea," for the word
"law" seems to imply a Standard, and Kant knew there is none. Is the
fault with the translator or with Kant, who did not pick his words
carefully? The metaphysician spent ten years thinking out the
"Critique of Pure Reason" and only six months writing it; no doubt his
text might be emendated with advantage. If there was a moral standard
the world within us would be as insignificant as the firmament was
when the earth was the center of the universe and all the stars were
little candles and Jehovah sat above them, a God who changed his mind
and repented, a whimsical, fanciful God who ordered the waters to rise
so that his creatures might be overwhelmed in the flood, all except
one family (I need not repeat here the story of Noah's Ark and the
doctrine of the Atonement) if there was one fixed standard of right
and wrong, applicable to everybody, black, white, yellow, and red men
alike, an eternal standard that circumstance could not change. Those
who believe in spite of every proof to the contrary that there is a
moral standard cannot appreciate the beautiful analogy which Kant
drew, the moral idea within the heart and the night with its heaven of
stars above us. "It is strange," I reflected, "how men can go on
worrying themselves about Rome and Canterbury four hundred years after
the discovery that the earth moved, and involuntarily a comparison
rose up in my mind of a squabble between two departments in an office
after the firm has gone bankrupt.... But how to get all these vagrant
thoughts into a sheet of paper? St. Paul himself could not proselytize
within such limitations, and apparently what I wrote was not
sufficient to lead my correspondent out of the narrow lanes of
conventions and prejudices into the open field of inquiry. Turning to
his letter, I read it again, misjudging him, perhaps ... but the
reader shall form his own estimate.

"I honestly felt and feel a big difficulty in reading and thinking
over your 'Memoirs' for you are a propagandist whether you recognize
that as a conscious mission or not. There is in your book a
challenging standard of life which will not wave placidly by the side
of the standard which is generally looked up to as his regimental
colors by the average man. One must go down. And it was because I felt
the necessity of choosing that I wrote to you.

"'Memoirs' is clearly to me a sincere book. You have built your life
on the lines there indicated. And there is a charm not merely in that
sincerity but in the freedom of the life so built. I could not, for
instance, follow my thoughts as you do. I do not call myself a coward
for these limitations. I believe it to be a bit of my build; you say
that limitation has no other sanction than convention--race
inheritance, at least so I gather. Moral is derived from mos. Be it
so. Does not that then fortify the common conviction that the moral is
the best? Men have been hunting the best all their history long by a
process of trial and error. Surely the build of things condemns the
murderer, the liar, the sensualist, and the coward! and how do you
come by 'natural goodness' if your moral is merely your customary? No,
with all respect for your immense ability and your cultured outlook, I
do not recognize the lawless variability of the right and the wrong
standard which you posit. How get you your evidence? From human
actions? But it is the most familiar of facts that men do things they
feel to be wrong. I have known a thief who stole every time in pangs
of conscience; not merely in the fear of detection. There is a higher
and a lower in morals, but the lower is recognized as a lower, and
does not appeal to a surface reading of the code of an aboriginal in
discussing morals. That, I think is only fair. Your artistic sense is
finely developed, but it is none the less firmly based, although there
are Victorian back parlors and paper roses.

"You see you are a preacher, not merely an artist. Every glimpse of
the beautiful urges the beholder to imitation and _vice versa_.
And that is why your 'Memoirs' are not merely 'an exhibition' of the
immoral; they are 'an incitement' to the immoral. Don't you think so?
And thinking so would you not honestly admit, that society (in the
wide sense, of course--civilization) would relapse, go down,
deliquesce, if all of us were George Moores as depicted in your book?"

His letter dropped from my hand, and I sat muttering, "How
superficially men think!" How little they trouble themselves to
discover the truth! While declaring that truth is all important, they
accept any prejudice and convention they happen to meet, fastening on
to it like barnacles. How disappointing is that passage about the
murderer, the sensualist, the liar, and the coward; but of what use
would it be to remind my correspondent of Judith who went into the
tent of Holofernes to lie with him, and after the love feast drove a
nail into the forehead of the sleeping man. She is in Scripture held
up to our admiration as a heroine, the saviour of our nation.
Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath, yet who regards Charlotte
Corday as anything else but a heroine? In Russia men know that the
fugitives lie hidden in the cave, yet they tell the Cossack soldiers
they have taken the path across the hill--would my correspondent
reprove them and call them liars? I am afraid he has a lot of leeway
to make up, and it is beyond my power to help him.

Picking up his letter I glanced through it for some mention of "Esther
Waters," for in answer to the question if I could recommend him to any
book of mine in which I viewed life--I cannot bring myself to
transcribe that tag from Matthew Arnold--I referred him to "Esther
Waters," saying that a critic had spoken of it as a beautiful
amplification of the beatitudes. Of the book he makes no mention in
his letter, but he writes: "There is a challenging standard of life in
your book which will not wave placidly by the side of the standard
which is generally looked up to as his regimental colors by the
average man." The idea besets him, and he refers to it again in the
last paragraph; he says: "You see, you are a preacher, not merely an
artist." And very likely he is right; there is a messianic aspect in
my writings, and I fell to thinking over "Esther Waters"; and reading
between the lines for the first time, I understood that it was that
desire to standardize morality that had caused the poor girl to be
treated so shamefully. Once Catholicism took upon itself to torture
and then to burn all those it could lay hands upon who refused to
believe with its doctrines, and now in the twentieth century
Protestantism persecutes those who act or think in opposition to its
moralities. Even the saintly Mrs. Barfield did not dare to keep
Esther; but if she sent her servant away, she spoke kindly, giving her
enough money to see her through her trouble; there are good people
among Christians. The usual Christian attitude would be to tell Esther
that she must go into a reformatory after the birth of her child, for
the idea of punishment is never long out of the Christian's thoughts.
It is not necessary to recapitulate here how Esther, escaping from the
network of snares spread for her destruction, takes refuge in a
workhouse, and lives there till her child is reared; how she works
fifteen hours a day in a lodging house, sleeping in corners of
garrets, living upon insufficient food; or how, after years of
struggle, she meets William, now separated from his wife, and consents
to live with him that her child may have a father. For this second
"transgression," so said a clergyman in a review of the book, Esther
could not be regarded as a moral woman. His moral sense, dwarfed by
doctrine, did not enable him to see that the whole evil came out of
standard morality and the whole good out of the instinct incarnate in
her; and he must have read the book without perceiving its theme, the
revelation in the life of an outcast servant girl of the instinct on
which the whole world rests.

Not until writing these lines did I ever think of "Esther Waters" as a
book of doctrine; but it is one, I see that now, and that there is a
messianic aspect in my writings. My correspondent did well to point
that out, and no blame attaches to him because he seems to fail to see
that I may be an admirable moralist while depreciating Christian
morality and advocating a return to Nature's. He belonged to the
traditions yesterday, today he is among those who are seekers, and
to-morrow I doubt not he will be among those prone to think that
perhaps Christianity is, after all, retrograde. His lips will curl
contemptuously to-morrow when he hears the cruelty of the circus
denounced by men who would, if they were allowed, relight the bon
fires of the Inquisition; ... he is a Protestant, I had forgotten.
Gladiators have begun to appear to us less cruel than monks, and
everybody who can think has begun to think that some return to pagan
morality is desirable. That is so; awaking out of the great slumber of
Christianity, we are all asking if the qualities which once we deemed
our exclusive possession have not been discovered among pagans--pride,
courage, and heroism. Our contention has become that no superiority is
claimed in any respect but one; it appears that it must be admitted
that Christians are more chaste than pagans, at all events that
chastity flourishes among Christian communities as it has never
flourished among pagan. The Christian's boast is that all sexual
indulgence outside of the marriage bed is looked upon as sinful, and
he would seem to think that if he proclaims this opinion loudly, its
proclamation makes amends for many transgressions of the ethical law.
All he understands is the law; nothing of the subtler idea that the
ethical impulse is always invading the ethical law finds a way into
his mind. Women are hurried from Regent Street to Vine Street, and his
conscience is soothed by these raids; the owners of the houses in
which these women live are fined, and he congratulates himself that
vice is not licensed in England, that, in fact, its existence is
unrecognized. Prostitution thrives, nevertheless; but numbers do not
discourage the moralist, and when he reads in the newspapers of
degraded females, "unfortunates," he breathes a sigh; and if these
reports contain descriptions of miserable circumstance and human
grief, he mutters "how very sad!"

But the assurance that the women are wretched and despised soothes his
conscience, and he remembers if he has not been able to abolish
prostitution, he has at all events divested it of all "glamour." It
would appear that practical morality consists in making the meeting of
men and women as casual as that of animals. "But what do you wish--you
would not have vice respected, would you?" "What you call vice was
once respected and honored, and the world was as beautiful then as
now, and as noble men lived in it. In many ways the world was more
moral than when your ideas began to prevail." He asks me to explain,
and I tell him that with the degradation of the courtesan the moral
standard has fallen, for as we degrade her we disgrace the act of
love. We have come to speak of it as part of our lower nature,
permissible, it is true, if certain conditions are complied with, but
always looked upon askance; and continuing the same strain of
argument, I tell him that the act of love was once deemed a sacred
rite, and that I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and
exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused
men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels
instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he
asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too
old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions;
"a meager mind," I mutter to myself, "one incapable of the effort
necessary to understand me if I were to tell him, for instance, that
the desire of beauty is in itself a morality." It was, perhaps, the
only morality the Greeks knew, and upon the memory of Greece we have
been living ever since. In becoming _hetairae_, Aspasia, Lais,
Phryne, and Sappho became the distributors of that desire of beauty
necessary in a state which had already begun to dream the temples of
Minerva and Zeus.

The words of Blake come into my mind, "the daring of the lion or the
submission of the ox." With these words I should have headed my letter
to the secretary of the charitable institution, and I should have told
him that many books which he would regard as licentious are looked
upon by me as sacred. "Mademoiselle de Maupin," "the golden book of
spirit and sense," Swinburne has called it, I have always looked upon
as a sacred book from the very beginning of my life. It cleansed me of
the belief that man has a lower nature, and I learned from it that the
spirit and the flesh are equal, "that earth is as beautiful as heaven,
and that perfection of form is virtue." "Mademoiselle de Maupin" was a
great purifying influence, a lustral water dashed by a sacred hand,
and the words are forever ringing in my ear, "by exaltation of the
spirit and the flesh thou shalt live." This book would be regarded by
my correspondent as he regards my "Memoirs," and its publication has
been interdicted in England. How could it be permitted to circulate in
a country in which the kingdom of heaven is (in theory) regarded as
more important than the kingdom of earth? A few pages back the idea
came up under my pen that the aim of practical morality was to render
illicit love as unattractive as possible, and I suppose, though he has
never thought the matter out, the Christian moralist would regard
Gautier as the most pernicious of writers, for his theme is always
praise of the visible world, of all that we can touch and see; and in
this book art and sex are not estranged. I have often wondered if the
estrangement of the twain so noticeable in English literature is not
the origin of this strange belief that bodily love is part of our
lower nature. Our appreciation of the mauve flush dying in the west
has been indefinitely heightened by descriptions seen in pictures and
read in poems, and I cannot but think that if the lover's exaltation
before the curve of his mistress's breast had not been forbidden, the
ugly thought that the lover's ardor is inferior to the poet's would
never have obtained credence. There is but one energy, and the vital
fluid, whether expended in love or in a poem, is the same. The poet
and the lover are creators, they participate and carry on the great
work begun billions of years ago when the great Breath breathing out
of chaos summoned the stars into being. But why do I address myself
like this to the average moralist? How little will he understand me!
In the Orelay adventure which horrified him there was an appreciation
of beauty which he has, I am afraid, rendered himself incapable of.
Myself and Doris were spiritual gainers by the Orelay adventure,
Doris's rendering of "The Moonlight Sonata," till she went to Orelay,
was merely brilliant and effective; and have not all the critics in
England agreed that the story in which I relate her contains some of
the best pages of prose I have written? But why talk of myself when
there is Wagner's experience to speak about? Did he not write to
Madame Wasendonck, "I owe you Tristan for all eternity"? She has not
left any written record of her debt to Wagner, perhaps because she
could not find words to give the reader any idea how great it was.

Histories of human civilization there are in abundance, but I do not
know of any history of the human intelligence. But when this comes to
be written--if it ever should come to be written--the writer will
hesitate, at least I can imagine him hesitating, how much of the
genius of artists he would be justified in tracing back to sexual
impulses. Goethe, as my correspondent informs me, looked upon love of
woman as a means of increasing his aesthetic sensibilities, and my
correspondent seems to think that he did them wrong thereby, whereas I
think he honored them exceedingly. Balzac held the contrary belief, so
Gautier tells us, maintaining that great spiritual elation could be
gained by restraint, and when inquiry was made into his precise
beliefs on this point he confessed that he could not allow an author
more than half an hour once a year with his beloved; he placed no
restriction, however, on correspondence, "for that helped to form a
style." When Gautier mentioned the names of certain great men whose
lives offered a striking refutation of this theory, Balzac answered
they would have written better if they had lived chastely. Gautier
seems to have left the question there, and so will we, remarking only
that Balzac was prone to formulating laws out of his single
experience. I remember having written, or having heard somebody say,
"in other writers we discover this or that thing, but everything
exists in Balzac." And in his conversation with Gautier we do not find
him praising chastity as a virtue, but extolling the results that may
be gotten from chastity as a Yogi might. It is said that English
missionaries in India sometimes drive out in their pony chaises to
visit a holy man who has left his womenfolk, plentiful food, and a
luxurious dwelling for a cave in some lonely ravine. The pony chaise
only takes the parson to the mouth of the ravine, and leaving his wife
and children in charge of his servant, the parson ascends the rocky
way on foot, meeting, perchance, a fat peasant priest from Maynooth
bent on the same mission as himself--the conversion of the Yogi. It is
amusing for a moment to imagine these two Western barbarians sitting
with the emaciated saint on the ledge in front of the cave. Thinking
to win his sympathy, they tell him that on one point they are all
agreed. The Brahman's eyes would dilate; how can this thing be? his
eyes would seem to ask, and it is easy to imagine how contemptuously
he would raise his eyes when he gathered gradually from their
discourse that his visitors believed that chastity was incumbent upon
all men. "But all men are not the same," he would answer, if he
answered his visitors; "I dwell in solitude and in silence, and am
chaste, and live upon the rice that the pious leave on the rocks for
me, but I do not regard chastity and abstinence as possessed of any
inherent merits; as virtues, they are but a means to an end. How would
you impose chastity upon all men, since every man brings a different
idea into the world with him? There are men who would die if forced to
live chaste lives, and there are men who would choose death rather
than live unchaste, and many a woman if she were forced to live with
one husband would make him very unhappy, whereas if she lived with two
men she would make them both supremely happy. But the news has reached
me even here that in the West you seek a moral standard, and this
quest always fills me with wonder. There are priests among you, I can
see that, and soldiers, and fishermen, and artists and princes and
folk who labor in the fields--now do you expect all these men, living
in different conditions of life, to live under the same rule? I am
afraid that the East and the West will never understand each other.
The sun is setting, my time for speech is over," and the wise man,
rising from the stone on which he has been sitting, enters into the
cave, leaving the priest and the parson to descend the rocks together
in the twilight, their differences hushed for the moment, to break
forth again the next day.

Schopenhauer has a fine phrase, one that has haunted my mind these
many years, that the follies of the West flatten against the sublime
wisdom of the East like bullets fired against a cliff.

How can it be otherwise? For when we were naked savages the Brahmans
were learned philosophers, and had seen as far into every mystery as
mortal eyes will ever see. We have progressed a little lately; our
universities, it is true, are a few hundred years old, but in
comparison with the East we are still savages; our culture is but
rudimentary, and my correspondent's letter is proof of it. It is
characteristic of the ideas that still flourish on the banks of the
Thames, ideas that have changed only a little since the
_Mayflower_ sailed. It would have been better if Columbus had
delayed his discovery for, let us say, a thousand years. I am afraid
the _Mayflower_ carried over a great many intellectual weeds
which have caught root and flourished exceedingly in your
States--Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. A letter arrived
from Washington some two or three months ago. The writer was a lady
who used to write to me on all subjects under the sun; about fifteen
years ago we had ceased to write to each other, so she began her
letter, not unnaturally, by speaking of the surprise she guessed her
handwriting would cause me. She had broken the long silence, for she
had been reading "The Lake," and had been much interested in the book.
It would have been impolite to write to me without alluding to the
aesthetic pleasure the book had given her, but her interest was mainly
a religious one. About five years ago she had become a Roman Catholic,
she was writing a book on the subject of her conversion, and would
like to find out from me why I had made Father Gogarty's conversion
turn upon his love of woman, "for it seems to me clear, unless I have
misunderstood your book, that you intended to represent Gogarty as an
intellectual man." It is difficult to trace one's motives back, but I
remember the irritation her letter caused me, and how I felt it would
not be dignified for me to explain; my book was there for her to
interpret or misinterpret, as she pleased; added to which her
"conversion" to Rome was an annoying piece of news. Fifteen years ago
she was an intelligent woman and a beautiful woman, if photographs do
not lie, and it was disagreeable for me to think of her going on her
knees in a confessional, receiving the sacraments, wearing scapulars,
trying to persuade herself that she believed in the Pope's
indulgences. She must now be middle-aged, but the decay of physical
beauty is not so sad a spectacle as the mind's declension. "She began
to think," I said, "of another world only when she found herself
unable to enjoy this one any longer; weariness of this world produces
what the theologians call 'faith.' How often have we heard the phrase
'You will believe when you are dying'? She would have had," I said,
"Father Gogarty leave his church for doctrinal rather than natural
reasons, believing scrolls to be more intellectual than the instincts;
Father Gogarty poring over some early edition of the Scriptures in his
little house on the hilltop, reading by the light of the lamp at
midnight and deciding that he would go out of his parish because,
according to recent exegesis, a certain verset in the Gospel had been
added three hundred years after the death of Christ." I fell to
thinking how dry, common, and uninteresting the tale would be had it
been written on these doctrinal lines. Carlyle said that Cardinal
Newman had the brain of a half-grown rabbit, and he was right; Newman
never got further than a scroll, and man must think with his body, as
well as with his brain. To think well the whole man must think, and it
seems to me that Father Gogarty thought in this complete way. Rose
Leicester revealed to him the enchantment and the grace of life, and
his quest became life. Had it been Hose Leicester herself the story
would have merely been a sensual incident. The instinct to go rose up
within him, he could not tell how or whence it came, and he went as
the bird goes, finding his way toward a country where he had never
been, led as the bird is led by some nostalgic instinct. And I do not
doubt that he found life, whether in the form of political or literary
ambition or in some other woman who would remind him of the woman he
had lost; perhaps he found it in all these things, perhaps in none.
Told as I told it the story seems to me a true and human one, and one
that might easily occur in these modern days; much more easily than
the story my correspondent would have had me write. The story of a
priest abandoning his parish for theological reasons is not an
improbable one, but I think such a story would be more typical of the
sixteenth century, when men were more interested in the authenticity
of the Biblical texts than they are in the twentieth. The Bible has
been sifted again and again; its history is known, every word has been
weighed, and it is difficult to imagine the most scrupulous exegetist
throwing a search light into any unexplored corner. Even Catholic
scholarship, if Loisy can be regarded as a Catholic, has abandoned the
theory that the gospels were written by the Apostles. The earliest,
that of Mark, was written sixty years after the death of Christ, and
it is the only one for which any scholar claims the faintest
historical value. With this knowledge of history in our possession
belief has become in modern times merely a matter of temperament,
entirely dissociated from the intellect. Some painter once said that
Nature put him out. The theologian can say the same about the
intellect--it puts him out. Out of a great deal of temperament and a
minimum of intellect he gets a precipitate, if I may be permitted to
drop into the parlance of the chemist, for dregs would be an impolite
word to use, and the precipitate always delights in the fetich. There
will always be men and women, the cleric has discovered, who will
barter their souls for the sake of rosaries and scapulars and the
Pope's indulgences. The two great enemies of religion, as the clerics
know well, are the desire to live and the desire to know. We find this
in Genesis: God: i. e., the clerics, was angry because his creatures
ate of these different fruits. God's comprehension of the danger of
the tree of life is not wonderful, but his foreseeing of the danger of
the tree of knowledge was extraordinary foreseeing, for very little of
the fruit of this tree had been eaten at the time the text was
written. All through the Middle Ages the clerics strove to keep men
from it with tortures and burnings at the stake, and they were so
anxiously striving for success in protecting their flocks from this
tree that they allowed the sheep to wander, the rams to follow the
ewes, and to gambol as they pleased. But the efforts of the clerics
were vain. There were rams who renounced the ewes, and the succulent
herbage that grows about the tree of life, for the sake of the fruit
of the tree of knowledge; all the fences that the clerics had erected
were broken down one by one; and during the nineteenth century a great
feast was held under the tree. But after every feast there are always
ailing stomachs; these denouncing the feast go about in great
depression of spirit, surfeited feasters, saying the branches of the
tree have been plucked bare; others complain they have eaten bitter
fruit. This is the moment for the prowling cleric. Hell is remote, it
has been going down in the world for some time, and biology, if no
conclusions be drawn, serves the clerical purpose almost as well. "The
origins of existence are humble enough, my son, but think of the
glorious heritage," and the faint-hearted sheep is folded again....
The tree of life is more abundant; whenever a fruit is plucked another
instantly takes its place, and all the efforts of the clerics are now
directed to keep their flocks from this tree. "Back to the tree of
knowledge!" they cry. "Hu! Hu! Hu! Both trees," they mutter among
themselves, "are accursed, but this one, from which sweet fruit may
always be plucked, is the worser." And they collect together in groups
to pass censure on their predecessors. "My predecessors were
infallible fools," cries the Pope, "to have permitted praise of this
fatal tree, wasting their energies on such men as Bruno, who said the
earth was round, and Galileo, whom they forced to say he was mistaken
when he said the earth moves. A pretty set of difficulties they have
involved us in with their accursed astronomy. Boccaccio and the
Troubadours should have been burned instead, and if this had been done
all the abominable modern literature which would persuade the faithful
that this world is not all sackcloth and ashes would never have been
written. Away with him who says that the earth is as beautiful as
heaven," and Gautier's phrase, _"Moi, je trouve la terre aussi belle
que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la
vertu,"_ has become the heresy more intolerable than any other to
the modern cleric, and to me and to all the ardent and intellectual
spirits of my generation a complete and perfect expression of
doctrine. To some it will always seem absurd to look to Gautier rather
than to a Bedouin for light. Nature produces certain attitudes of
mind, and among these is an attitude which regards archbishops as more
serious than pretty women. These will never be among my disciples. So
leaving them in full possession of the sacraments, I pass on.

My generation was in sympathy with "Mademoiselle de Maupin" and it did
more than to reveal and clarify the ideas we were seeking. It would be
vain for me, as for any other man, to attempt to follow the course of
an idea and to try to determine its action upon life. Perhaps the part
of the book which interested us the least was that very part which
would be read aloud in court if a prosecution were attempted: I am
alluding to the scene when Mademoiselle de Maupin comes into Albert's
room. This scene was, however, inevitable, and could not be omitted,
for does it not contain that vision of beauty which Albert had been
seeking and which was vouchsafed to him for a little while? Never did
he see Mademoiselle de Maupin afterwards, she was but a phantom of his
own imagination made visible by some prodigy to him. For a still
briefer space Rosette shared Albert's dream, and man and wife remained
faithful to each other. It is easy to imagine the vileness which a
prosecuting counsel could extract from these beautiful pages made
entirely of vision and ecstasy. How false and shameful is the whole
business. We are allowed to state that we prefer pagan morality to
Christian, but are interdicted from illustrating our beliefs by
incident. So long as we confine ourselves to theory we are unmolested.
But these are subtleties which do not trouble the minds of the members
of vigilance associations, the men and women who gather together in
back parlors with lead pencils to mark out passages which they
consider "un-Kur-istean" (a good strong accent on the second
syllable). Their thoughts pursue beaten tracks. Books like
"Mademoiselle de Maupin" they hold would act directly on the
temperament, and we know that they do not do this, we know that the
things of the intellect belong to the intellect and the things of the
flesh to the flesh. Were it otherwise Rose Leicester, the pretty
school mistress, might have been left out of my story entitled "The
Lake," and her place taken by a book. My lady correspondent, it will
be remembered, was in favor of some doctrinal difficulty. My second
correspondent, the secretary of the charitable institution, would have
chosen as the cause of Father Oliver's flight a sensual book. His
choice might have been Burton's "Arabian Nights"; better still
Casanova's "Memoirs," for this is a book written almost entirely with
the senses; the intellect hardly ever intrudes itself; and instead of
an emaciated priest poring over a dusty folio we should have had an
inflamed young man curled up in an armchair reading eagerly, walking
up and down the room from time to time, unable to contain himself, and
eventually throwing the book aside, he would find his way down to the
lake.

These two versions of "The Lake," as it might have been written by my
correspondents, will convince, I think, almost anyone, even them, that
the desire of life which set Father Gogarty free could have been
inspired only by a woman's personality. It was not necessary that he
should go after the woman herself--but that point has already been
explained. What concerns us now to understand is how the strange idea
could have come into men's minds that literature is a more potent
influence than life itself. The solving of this problem has beguiled
many an hour, but the solution seems as far away as ever, and I have
never got nearer than the supposition that perhaps this fear of
literature is a survival of the very legitimate fear that prevailed in
the Middle Ages against writing. In my childhood I remember hearing an
old woman say that writing was an invention of the devil, and what an
old woman believed forty years ago in outlying districts was almost
the universal opinion of the Middle Ages. Denunciations and burnings
of books were frequent, and ideas die slowly, finding a slow
extinction many generations after the reason for their existence has
ceased. In the famous trial of Gille de Rais we have it on record that
the Breton baron was asked by his ecclesiastical judges if pagan
literature had inspired the strange crimes of which he was accused, if
he had read of them in--I have forgotten the names of the Latin
authors mentioned, but I remember Gille de Rais' quite simple answer
that his own heart had inspired the crimes. Whereupon the judges not
unnaturally were shocked, for the conclusion was forced upon them that
if Gille's confession were true they were not trying a man who had
been perverted by outward influence but one who had been born
perverted. Who then was responsible for his crimes? Lunacy sometimes
in these modern days serves as a scapegoat, but the knowledge of
lunacy in the fifteenth century was not so complete as it is now and
the judges preferred to believe that Gille was lying. And about ten
years ago London found itself in the same moral quandary. Three or
four little boys were discovered to have planned the murder of one of
their comrades--sixpence, I think, was the object of the murder; not
one was over eight, yet they planned the crime skillfully and very
nearly succeeded in avoiding detection. To credit these little boys
with instinctive crime was intolerable, and just as in the Middle Ages
a scapegoat had to be found. Apuleius and his Ass were out of the
question, but the little boys admitted having read penny dreadfuls;
London breathed again, the way now was clear, these newspapers must be
prosecuted, and this recrudescence of wickedness in the heart of a
little boy would never be heard of again. A little later or maybe it
was a little earlier, I relate these things in the order in which they
come into my mind, the London Vigilance Association instituted a
prosecution against Mr. Henry Vizetelly, a man of letters and the
publisher of Zola's novels. With the exception of Mr. Robert Buchanan
and myself not a single man of letters could be found to speak in Mr.
Vizetelly's defense. Everybody urged some excuse, his wife was ill,
his children were at the seaside and he had to go down to see them, or
that he had never cared much about naturalistic literature; whereas,
if the prosecution had been directed against something romantic,
etc.--Stranger still is the fact that it was almost impossible to find
a counsel willing to defend Mr. Vizetelly. One man threw up the case,
giving as his reason that he would have to read the books, another
said that it would be impossible to adequately defend Mr. Vizetelly's
case because no one could say what one had a right to put into a book.
This remark seemed to me at the time contemptible, but there was more
in it than I thought, for will it be believed that when the case came
into court the judge ruled that the fact that standard writers had
availed themselves of a great deal of license could not be taken as a
proof that such license was permissible? Two wrongs do not make a
right he said. In these circumstances perhaps counsel was wise to tell
Mr. Vizetelly to plead guilty to having published an indecent libel;
but the advice seemed so cruel that, justly or unjustly, I suspect the
lawyer of a wish to escape the odium that would have attached to him
if he had defended a book accused of immorality. The old man was
heavily fined. On going out of court he set to work to have the books
revised, spending hundreds of pounds having the plates altered, but
the Vigilance Association attacked him again, and this time they
succeeded in killing him. Mr. Vizetelly was over seventy years of age
when he went to prison, and the shame, anxiety, and three months of
prison life killed him. Five years afterwards the Authors' Society,
who would not say a word in his favor, voted a great banquet for Zola
when he came to London. Zola received every homage that could be paid
to a man of letters. The Vigilance Association raised no protest, and
I do not blame them. None would have been heard. But while the
banquets were held and the speeches were published in the newspapers
some of the members of the Association must have meditated sadly on
the futility of their efforts and the death of Mr. Vizetelly. It
requires a heavy blow of a very heavy mallet to get anything into some
people's heads, and nothing short of the reception that was given to
Zola could have affected the minds of the Vigilance Association. The
significance of the judge's words that the fact that classical writers
had availed themselves of a certain license could not be taken as
proof that such license was permissible escaped them altogether, for
some time afterwards the question of immorality in literature arose
again--I have forgotten the circumstances of this case--but I remember
that Mr. Coote, the secretary of the Association, was asked if
Shakespeare had not written many very reprehensible passages. Mr.
Coote was obliged to admit that he had, and when asked why the
Association he represented did mot proceed against Shakespeare he
answered because Shakespeare wrote beautifully. A strangely immoral
doctrine, for if the license of expression that Shakespeare availed
himself of be harmful, Shakespeare should be prosecuted; that he wrote
beautifully is no defense whatever. Life comes before literature, and
the Vigilance Association lays itself open to a charge of neglect of
duty by not proceeding at once against Shakespeare and against all
those who have indulged in the same license of expression. The members
and their secretary have indeed set themselves a stiff job, but they
must not shrink from it if they would avoid shocking other people's
moral sense by exhibiting themselves in the light of mere busybodies
with a taste for what boys and old men speak of as "spicy bits."
Proceedings will have to be taken against all the literature that Mr.
Coote believes to be harmful (I accept him as the representative of
the ideas of his Association), and the plea must not be raised again
that because a reprehensible passage is well written it should be
acquitted. We must consider the question impartially. It is true that
a magistrate may be found presiding at Bow Street who will refuse to
issue a warrant against the publishers, let us say of Byron, Sterne,
the Restoration, and the Elizabethan dramatists. The Association will
have to risk the refusal; but I would not discourage the Association
from the adventure. It must not abandon the tope of finding a
magistrate who, anxious to prove himself no moral laggard, will do all
that is asked of him. A very pretty selection of "spicy bits" can be
picked from "Don Juan," and toward this compilation every member, male
and female, might contribute. The reading of these selections in Bow
Street in a crowded court would prove quite a literary entertainment,
and if the magistrate refused to issue a warrant he could only do so
on the pretext that the book had been published a long while, a
pretext which can hardly be held to be more valid than the pretext put
forward by Mr. Coote for not prosecuting Shakespeare. Of one thing
only would I warn the Society which I seem to be taking under my wing,
and that is, even if it should succeed in interdicting two-thirds of
English literature its task will still be only half accomplished. The
newspaper question will still have to be faced. Books are relatively
expensive, but the newspaper can be bought for a halfpenny, and it
will be admitted that no author is as indecent as the common reporter.
The reader thinks that I am going to draw his attention to some
celebrated divorce case, an account of which was reported in full in
the columns of some daily paper under a large heading "Painful
Details," the details being the account the chambermaid gave the
outraged husband of--I will spare my reader.

About fifteen years ago I was asked if I would care to go over to ----
College to see the sports. We walked across the downs, and while
watching the racing I was accosted by the head master, who asked me if
I would like to see the college. The sports were more interesting than
refectories and dormitories, but it seemed a little churlish to refuse
and we went together. No doubt we visited the kitchens and the chapel,
but what I remember was a long hall wainscoted with oak and furnished
with oak tables and chairs and benches, In this hall there were some
thirty or forty boys, of ages varying from twelve to eighteen, reading
the newspapers, reading the reports of the Oscar Wilde trial; each
daily paper contained three or four columns of it. I asked the head
master if it were right to allow the boys to read such reports and he
answered that lately the newspapers contained a great deal of
objectionable matter, "But how am I to keep the daily papers out of
the college?" Now I am not easily scandalized, but I could not help
feeling that a grave scandal was being committed in allowing these
boys to read the newspapers during the week of that trial. But if you
admit the newspapers one day how can you forbid them on another
occasion? And while appreciating the head master's difficulty I walked
out into the open air unable to take any further interest in the
sports. Nor has time obliterated anything of the shame I felt that
day. I don't want to make a fuss, I don't want to pose as a moralist,
but I cannot help thinking that while newspapers continue to be
published, the Vigilance Society need not trouble lest certain books
should fall into the hands of young people. My correspondent forgot
that thousands of newspapers are published to-day when he wrote to me
saying that my book roused sensuality. I am afraid I omitted the
passage in which these words occur, fearing to burden my article with
quotation. Here it is:

"The perusal of the episodes (Doris' Orelay experiences) does
certainly not ennoble me, it rouses sensuality, it lowers woman from a
friend and helpmeet into a convenience and a minister to pleasure. I
am less able and less willing to think 'high' after your book; poetry
is distasteful, art is narrowed, I look out for the licentious, the
suggestive, the low, and the mean; and don't you? You seem in passage
after passage to be world-weary in a sense that no sane man ought to
be, sated, disgusted, tired of life--is it not so? You see I speak
from what I am sure you will regard as a narrow platform, my ideals
are certainly not yours but I am simply and frankly curious as to the
ultimates in your book and in yourself."

Let us suppose now that the Vigilance Association after a sharp
crusade has succeeded in redeeming our literature from all
reprehensible matter, and flushed with success has attacked the
newspapers and obtained an interdiction against the publication of all
reports of sexual crimes and misdemeanors. And having extended our
imagination so far we may presume as the sequence a world of such
highly developed moral susceptibilities that Miss Austen's novels are
beginning to cause uneasiness. Miss Austen's novels are still
permitted, but in current literature nothing is said that would lead
the reader to suppose that men and women are not of the same sex. But
men and women still continue to meet and hold conversation. Only some
advanced members of the Association are in favor of that complete
separation of the sexes which obtains in Ireland in the rural
districts. In the imaginary time of which I am writing the Association
has only obtained complete control over literature. The theaters are
either closed or given over to the representation of plays on
religious subjects; but private life has not been invaded by the
Puritan missionary, and waltz tunes are still heard and figures seen
whirling past lighted windows in Grosvenor Square and Fifth Avenue.
Mr. Coote has at this time become a moderate, he is no longer among
the progressives, and is in danger of losing his post, so I have no
difficulty in imagining what he would do in such a dilemma. He would
disguise himself as a waiter and at the next meeting of the Society
tell how he had until now showed some reluctance to--the sentence
would be a difficult one to finish, perhaps Mr. Coote would break off
and say--reluctance to put restraint on the action of men and women as
long as they kept within their own doors, but after what he has seen,
he finds himself obliged to pass from the moderates to the
progressives. What has Mr. Coote seen. How would he tell his tale?

He would tell of the length and the breadth of the ball room, of the
parquet floor usually covered with an aubusson carpet but the carpet
had been lifted and the gilded furniture taken away; the windows and
the recesses had been filled with flowers, and to keep these fresh,
great blocks of ice had been placed in the niches. He would tell of
the lighting arrangements, for are not flowers and lights incentives
to immorality? But his descriptions of the roses and the lilies would
only lead up to his descriptions of the shameless animality that came
up the staircase between twelve and one. A half-naked lady, the
hostess, stood at the head of the stairs receiving her guests with
smiles and words of welcome. The dresses the women wore resembled the
dress worn by the hostess; young and old alike went about their
pleasure with necks and bosoms and arms uncovered, and he saw these
undressed creatures slip into the arms of men who whirled them round
and round; it was but a whirling of silk ankles and a shuffling of
glazed shoes; and every now and then the men and women looked into
each other's eyes, and the whole scene was reflected shamelessly in
tall mirrors. Notwithstanding the fact that most of Mr. Coote's time
was spent behind the buffet serving out ices, he nevertheless
contrived to find a spare moment for investigation. On the pretext of
seeking a lady who had dropped a handkerchief he had crossed the ball
room and was therefore in a position to give an accurate account of
the waltzes he had heard, dulcet, undulating, capricious measures, far
more provocative than Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" which Tolstoy has
denounced. The lady that Mr. Coote sought was not in the ball room,
and so he had an opportunity of investigating all the retiring rooms,
and I need not describe the pensive and shocked faces that listened to
his descriptions of the shady nooks. Sometimes it was a screen,
sometimes it was a palm that was employed to hide the couple from
observation. Mr. Coote at last discovered the owner of the
handkerchief in one of those shady nooks, she was there with a
gentleman.... Mr. Coote, of course, would refuse to relate what he
saw, he would hesitate, but the members of his Association would
insist upon knowing everything, and he would at last confess: "Well,
the gentleman had kissed the lady on the point of her shoulder." From
this scandalous incident he would pass to tell all that he remembered
of the conversation he had heard at the table round which he had
worked till nearly four o'clock in the morning handing cutlets,
chicken patties, and other delicacies, the names of which he was not
acquainted with.

Mr. Coote's description of what he saw may be ingenuous, but is his
description untrue? And when Mr. Coote finished up his speech as I
imagine him finishing it, by stating that the dancing, the music, the
dresses, the wines, and the meats were arranged and learnedly chosen
for one purpose and one only, the stimulation of sexual passion, I
cannot imagine anyone accusing him of having spoken an untruth. Mr.
Coote added that no one went to the ball for the pleasure of the
conversation--he was convinced that old and young derived their
pleasure, consciously or unconsciously, from sex.

We will imagine the members of Mr. Coote's Society being greatly moved
by his description, and the sudden determination of everybody that
dancing must be stopped. Had not Byron declared the waltz to be "half
a whore"? Tolstoy has gone one better and asked people to say if a
woman can remain chaste if a low dress is permitted and Beethoven's
"Kreutzer Sonata" is played. Forgetful, of course, that they have
prosecuted "Don Juan," the Society accepts Byron's dictum as their war
cry, and henceforth the business of Mr. Coote is to inquire into what
is immoral in dress, in music, in wine, and in food. After a long
consultation with experts and expensive law proceedings the Vigilance
Association has (in our imagination) succeeded in reforming society as
completely as it succeeded in reforming literature; and the months go
by, October, November, December, January, February, March ... but one
night the wind changes, and coming out of our houses in the morning we
are taken with a sense of delight, a soft south wind is blowing and
the lilacs are coming into bloom. My correspondent says that my book
rouses sensuality. Perhaps it does, but not nearly so much as a spring
day, and no one has yet thought of suppressing or curtailing spring
days. Yet how infinitely more pernicious is their influence than any
book! What thoughts they put into the hearts of lads and lasses! and
perforce even the moralist has to accept the irrepressible feeling of
union and growth, the loosening of the earth about the hyacinth shoots
and the birds going about their amorous business, and the white clouds
floating up gladly through the blue air. Why, then, should he look
askance at my book, which is no more than memories of my spring days?
If the thing itself cannot be suppressed, why is it worth while to
interfere with the recollection? What strange twist in his mind leads
him to decry in art what he accepts in nature? A strange twist indeed,
one which may be described as a sort of inverted sexuality, finding
its pleasure not in the spring day, but in odd corners of ancient
literature read only for the sake of passages which he declares to be
disgusting, and in spying on modern literature, seeking out passages
and expressions which might be denounced in the newspapers or
proceeded against in the police court. The psychology of one of these
purity mongers is more interesting to the alienist than to a man of
letters. Let us take a typical case, that of the late Lord ----. Forty
or fifty years ago he was one of the most strenuous advocates of
purity in literature, and more shops were raided at his instigation
than at any other; yet when he died his library was found to contain
the finest collection of impure literature in Europe, and his
executors were left wondering whether the prosecutions were prompted
by a desire to increase the value of his collection by the destruction
of rare books, copies of which were in his possession, or whether he
had been moved by conscientious scruples; a man might bamboozle
himself in this way: "I am a man of letters and possess these books
because they are rare, a curious corner of literature, but it would be
highly inexpedient for others to possess them." His conscience might
take a still more curious turn, leading to a dizzier height: "I am a
sinner; that, alas! is so; but I can prevent others from sinning
likewise." No doubt the greater part of the literature which the noble
lord collected with so much industry was of that frankly indecent kind
which is debarred from every library, Continental as well as English
and American. There is a literature which does not come within the
scope of the present inquiry, and there is what may perhaps be called
a border literature, books which are found in public libraries in the
German, the French, and the Italian texts. It seems pertinent to ask
why a little knowledge of French and German and Italian should procure
the right to read Brantôme's "Femmes Gallantes." It would be difficult
for anybody to say that this book is not frankly obscene, and yet in
the French text I suppose every library contains it. Casanova's
"Memoirs" is another book of the same kind; I am not aware of any
complete translation of Boccaccio's tales, but every library possesses
an edition in the original Italian. The only reason that can be put
forward for the suppression of a book is that it is harmful, and if
Brantôme, Casanova, and Boccaccio are harmful in English, they do harm
to those who can read them in the original texts. But perhaps I have
pointed out enough inconsistencies, and the reader, growing weary, may
say: "Are you so young, then, that you don't know that the world is a
mass of contradictions? that life is no more than a tale told by an
idiot full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing?" Shakespeare did
no more than to put into eloquent language every man's belief, that we
are all mad on one subject or another. If this be so, every race is
mad on some point, for have we not often heard that what is true of
the individual is true of the race? Anglo-Saxon madness is book
morality. Madness has been defined as a lack of consequence in ideas,
and can anything be less consequent than--we need look no further back
than Ibsen? The great genius who died in May last was decried by the
English people as one of the most immoral of writers; for twenty years
at least this opinion obtained in the press, and even among men of
letters; suddenly the opinion disappeared, it went out like the flame
of a candle; the text is the same, not a comma has been changed, yet
now everybody reads it differently. But I must not allow myself to be
drawn into speaking of the moral crusades directed against other
writers; the task is tempting, and I hope it will be undertaken one of
these days. Here, at all events, my concern is with my own writings,
as indicated by the title of the article, and it is doubtful if
reference to any book would make my point clearer than the tale of
what happened in America to my own book, "Esther Waters." The proof
sheets were sent in turn to three leading firms, Scribner, Harper, and
Appleton, and all three refused the book on the ground that, while
recognizing, etc., they did not think it was exactly the kind of book,
etc. Even experts make mistakes; this is not denied; what makes my
story so remarkable is that all three firms offered to publish an
authorized edition of the book as soon as news of its success in
England had been cabled to New York. Mr. Appleton, whom I met in
Paris, expressed his regret that expert opinion regarding this book
had been at fault. "The book," he said, "was quite a proper book to
publish, a most admirable book, which would do honor to any firm." I
answered: "Very likely all you say, Mr. Appleton, is true, but three
weeks ago the experts thought differently. How is it that an immoral
book can become moral in three weeks?" My next book, "Evelyn Innes,"
disturbed the house of Appleton as much as "Esther Waters," and a
gentleman of leisure connected with the firm was deputed to mark out
not the passages to which he himself took exception, but to which,
being an expert, he felt sure that others would take exception. The
gentleman was kind enough to insist on submitting his marked copy to
me, and my wonderment increased as I turned over the pages, and it
reached a climax when I happened upon the following passage, which had
been marked to be omitted by the American printer. The passage was:
"... in her stage life Evelyn was an agent of the sensual passion, not
only with her voice, but in her arms, her neck, and hair, and in every
expression of her face; and it was the craving music that had thrown
her into Ulick's arms. If it had subjugated her how much more would it
subjugate and hold within its persuasion the listener--the listener,
who perceived in the music nothing but its sensuality?" "But for what
reason," I asked the expert, "do you suggest the elimination of this
passage? This is the Puritan point of view. I thought that your
proposal was to draw my attention to the passages to which you thought
the Puritan would object." "Ah," he said, "that is how I began, but as
I got on with the work I thought it better to mark every passage that
might give offense." "And to whom would this passage give offense?" I
said. "Certainly not to any religious body?" "No," he answered, "not
to any religious body, but it would give offense to the subscribers to
the New Opera House. If parents read that the music of 'Tristan' threw
Evelyn Innes into the arms of Ulick Dean, they would not care to bring
their daughters to hear the opera, and might possibly discontinue
their subscriptions." Everybody will agree that "expert opinion" can
hardly go further, yet the folly which this "expert" was betrayed into
did not arise from any congenital stupidity; it is the mistake that
you and I, every one of us, would make when we seek the truth in our
casual experience instead of in our hearts.

One would have thought that my pointing out the absurdity of this
expurgation of "Evelyn Innes" to the house of Appleton would have
saved it ever afterwards from similar folly, and forgetful that
experience is, as Coleridge describes it, only a lamp in a vessel's
stern which throws a light on the waters we have passed through, none
on those which lie before us, the publication of "The Lake" was issued
by Messrs. Appleton with my consent. The book, as the American public
already know, is free from all matter to which the most severe
moralist could take exception, yet the American edition did not
conform entirely with the English; a dedication written in French was
omitted, for what reason I do not know, but it was omitted. The matter
may seem a small one, and it may seem invidious to allude to it at
all, but on an occasion like the present nothing must be passed over.
The English proofs of the "Memoirs" were read, and the book was
accepted, but when it was set up in America it did not seem quite so
moral in the American type as it did in the English and difficulties
arose; these have been alluded to in the first paragraph of this
article, and perhaps wrongly I agreed that the two stories, "The
Lovers of Orelay" and "In the Luxembourg Gardens," should be left out.
On September 28th I wrote, suggesting that "In the Luxembourg Gardens"
might be retained, that it was only necessary to drop out a few
sentences to make it, as the expert would say, "acceptable to the
American public," but it never occurred to me that "The Lovers of
Orelay" could be published in any form except the form in which I
wrote it. This morning I received a letter from Mr. Sears.

October 8, 1906. DEAR MR. MOORE:

Your letter of September 28th has just arrived this morning. I hope
that by the time you receive this I shall have the open letter which
we are to print in "Memoirs of My Dead Life." The book is all ready,
waiting for it. As a matter of fact, we have not cut out either "In
the Luxembourg Gardens" or "The Lovers of Orelay." We simply have
taken out parts of each. Very truly yours, J. H. SEARS.

"Simply have taken out parts of each!" My book, then, is a sort of
unfortunate animal, whose destiny was to be thrown on the American
vivisecting table and pieces taken out of it. Well, I raise no
objection. The promise that this preface will be published without
alteration soothes me (it is the anaesthetic), and after all, is it
not an honor to be Bowdlerized? Only the best are deemed dangerous....
I am not aware that anybody ever took liberties with Miss Braddon's
texts. And the day of the Bowdlerizer is a brief one! Sooner or later
the original text is published. This is the rule, and I am confident I
shall not prove an exception to the rule.

GEORGE MOORE.




MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE




CHAPTER I

SPRING IN LONDON


As I sit at my window on Sunday morning, lazily watching the
sparrows--restless black dots that haunt the old tree at the corner of
King's Bench Walk--I begin to distinguish a faint green haze in the
branches of the old lime. Yes, there it is green in the branches; and
I'm moved by an impulse--the impulse of Spring is in my feet;
india-rubber seems to have come into the soles of my feet, and I would
see London. It is delightful to walk across Temple Gardens, to
stop--pigeons are sweeping down from the roofs--to call a hansom, and
to notice, as one passes, the sapling behind St. Clement's Danes. The
quality of the green is exquisite on the smoke-black wall. London can
be seen better on Sundays than on week-days; lying back in a hansom,
one is alone with London. London is beautiful in that narrow street,
celebrated for licentious literature. The blue and white sky shows
above a seventeenth-century gable, and a few moments after we are in
Drury Lane. The fine weather has enticed the population out of grim
courts and alleys; skipping-ropes are whirling everywhere. The
children hardly escape being run over. Coster girls sit wrapped in
shawls, contentedly, like rabbits at the edge of a burrow; the men
smoke their pipes in sullen groups, their eyes on the closed doors of
the public house. At the corner of the great theatre a vendor of cheap
ices is rapidly absorbing the few spare pennies of the neighbourhood.
The hansom turns out of the lane into the great thoroughfare, a bright
glow like the sunset fills the roadway, and upon it a triangular block
of masonry and St. Giles's church rise, the spire aloft in the faint
blue and delicate air. Spires are so beautiful that we would fain
believe that they will outlast creeds; religion or no religion we must
have spires, and in town and country--spires showing between trees and
rising out of the city purlieus.

The spring tide is rising; the almond trees are in bloom, that one
growing in an area spreads its Japanese decoration fan-like upon the
wall. The hedges in the time-worn streets of Fitzroy Square light
up--how the green runs along? The spring is more winsome here than in
the country. One must be in London to see the spring. One can see the
spring from afar dancing in St. John's wood, haze and sun playing
together like a lad and a lass. The sweet air, how tempting! How
exciting! It melts on the lips in fond kisses, instilling a delicate
gluttony of life. It would be pleasant in these gardens walking
through shadowy alleys, lit here and there by a ray, to see girls
walking hand in hand, catching at branches, as girls do when dreaming
of lovers. But alas! the gardens are empty; only some daffodils! But
how beautiful is the curve of the flower when seen in profile, and
still more beautiful is the starry yellow when the flower is seen full
face. That antique flower carries my mind back--not to Greek times,
for the daffodil has lost something of its ancient loveliness; it is
more reminiscent of a Wedgwood than of a Greek vase. My nonsense
thoughts amuse me; I follow my thoughts as a child follows
butterflies; and all this ecstasy in and about me, is the joy of
health--my health and the health of the world. This April day has set
brain and blood on fire. Now it would be well to ponder by this old
canal! It looks as if it had fallen into disuse, and that is charming;
an abandoned canal is a perfect symbol of--well, I do not know of
what. A river flows or rushes, even an artificial lake harbours
waterfowl, children sail their boats upon it; but a canal does
nothing.

Here comes a boat! The canal has not been abandoned. Ah! that boat has
interrupted my dreams, and I feel quite wretched. I had hoped that the
last had passed twenty years ago. Here it comes with its lean horse,
the rope tightening and stretching, a great black mass with ripples at
the prow and a figure bearing against the rudder. A canal reminds me
of my childhood; every child likes a canal. A canal recalls the first
wonder. We all remember the wonder with which we watched the first
barge, the wonder which the smoke coming out of the funnel excited.
When my father asked me why I'd like to go to Dublin better by canal
than by railroad, I couldn't tell him. Nor could I tell any one to-day
why I love a canal. One never loses one's fondness for canals. The
boats glide like the days, and the toiling horse is a symbol! how he
strains, sticking his toes into the path!

There are visits to pay. Three hours pass--of course women, always
women. But at six I am free, and I resume my meditations in declining
light as the cab rolls through the old brick streets that crowd round
Golden Square; streets whose names you meet in old novels; streets
full of studios where Hayden, Fuseli, and others of the rank
historical tribe talked art with a big A, drank their despair away,
and died wondering why the world did not recognise their genius.
Children are scrambling round a neglected archway, striving to reach
to a lantern of old time. The smell of these dry faded streets is
peculiar to London; there is something of the odour of the original
marsh in the smell of these streets; it rises through the pavement and
mingles with the smoke. Fancy follows fancy, image succeeds image;
till all is but a seeming, and mystery envelops everything. That white
Arch seems to speak to me out of the twilight. I would fain believe it
has its secret to reveal. London wraps herself in mists; blue scarfs
are falling--trailing. London has a secret! Let me peer into her
veiled face and read. I have only to fix my thoughts to
decipher--what? I know not. Something ... perhaps. But I cannot
control my thoughts. I am absorbed in turn by the beauty of the Marble
Arch and the perspective of the Bayswater Road, fading like an
apparition amid the romance of great trees.

As I turn away, for the wind thrills and obliges me to walk rapidly, I
think how fortunate I am to experience these emotions in Hyde Park,
whereas my fellows have to go to Switzerland and to climb up Mont
Blanc, to feel half what I am feeling now, as I stand looking across
the level park watching the sunset, a dusky one. The last red bar of
light fades, and nothing remains but the grey park with the blue of
the suburb behind it, flowing away full of mist and people, dim and
mournful to the pallid lights of Kensington; and its crowds are like
strips of black tape scattered here and there. By the railings the
tape has been wound into a black ball, and, no doubt, the peg on which
it is wound is some preacher promising human nature deliverance from
evil if it will forego the spring time. But the spring time continues,
despite the preacher, over yonder, under branches swelling with leaf
and noisy with sparrows; the spring is there amid the boys and girls,
boys dressed in ill-fitting suits of broadcloth, daffodils in their
buttonholes; girls hardly less coarse, creatures made for work,
escaped for a while from the thraldom of the kitchen, now doing the
business of the world better than the preacher; poor servants of
sacred Spring. A woman in a close-fitting green cloth dress passes me
to meet a young man; a rich fur hangs from her shoulders; and they go
towards Park Lane, towards the wilful little houses with low balconies
and pendent flower-baskets swinging in the areas. Circumspect little
gardens! There is one, Greek as an eighteenth-century engraving, and
the woman in the close-fitting green cloth dress, rich fur hanging
from her shoulders, almost hiding the pleasant waist, enters one of
these. She is Park Lane. Park Lane supper parties and divorce are
written in her eyes and manner. The old beau, walking swiftly lest he
should catch cold, his moustache clearly dyed, his waist certainly
pinched by a belt, he, too, is Park Lane. And those two young men,
talking joyously--admirable specimens of Anglo-Saxons, slender feet,
varnished boots, health and abundant youth--they, too, are
characteristic of Park Lane.

Park Lane dips in a narrow and old-fashioned way as it enters
Piccadilly. Piccadilly has not yet grown vulgar, only a little modern,
a little out of keeping with the beauty of the Green Park, of that
beautiful dell, about whose mounds I should like to see a comedy of
the Restoration acted.

I used to stand here, at this very spot, twenty years ago, to watch
the moonlight between the trees, and the shadows of the trees floating
over that beautiful dell; I used to think of Wycherly's comedy, "Love
in St. James's Park," and I think of it still. In those days the
Argyle Rooms, Kate Hamilton's in Panton Street, and the Café de la
Régence were the fashion. But Paris drew me from these, towards other
pleasures, towards the Nouvelle Athènes and the Elysée Montmartre; and
when I returned to London after an absence of ten years I found a new
London, a less English London. Paris draws me still, and I shall be
there in three weeks, when the chestnuts are in bloom.




CHAPTER II

FLOWERING NORMANDY


On my arrival in Paris, though the hour was that stupid hour of seven
in the morning, while I walked up the grey platform, my head was
filled with memories of the sea, for all the way across it had seemed
like a beautiful blue plain without beginning or end, a plain on which
the ship threw a little circle of light, moving always like life
itself, with darkness before and after. I remembered how we steamed
into the long winding harbour in the dusk, half an hour before we were
due--at daybreak. Against the green sky, along the cliff's edge, a
line of broken paling zigzagged; one star shone in the dawning sky,
one reflection wavered in the tranquil harbour. There was no sound
except the splashing of paddle-wheels, and not wind enough to take the
fishing boats out to sea; the boats rolled in the tide, their sails
only half-filled. From the deck of the steamer we watched the strange
crews, wild-looking men and boys, leaning over the bulwarks; and I
remembered how I had sought for the town amid the shadow, but nowhere
could I discover trace of it; yet I knew it was there, smothered in
the dusk, under the green sky, its streets leading to the cathedral,
the end of every one crossed by flying buttresses, and the round roof
disappearing amid the chimney-stacks. A curious, pathetic town, full
of nuns and pigeons and old gables and strange dormer windows, and
courtyards where French nobles once assembled--fish will be sold there
in a few hours. Once I spent a summer in Dieppe. And during the hour
we had to wait for the train, during the hour that we watched the
green sky widening between masses of shrouding cloud, I thought of ten
years ago. The town emerged very slowly, and only a few roofs were
visible when the fisher girl clanked down the quays with a clumsy
movement of the hips, and we were called upon to take our seats in the
train. We moved along the quays, into the suburbs, and then into a
quiet garden country of little fields and brooks and hillsides
breaking into cliffs. The fields and the hills were still shadowless
and grey, and even the orchards in bloom seemed sad. But what shall I
say of their beauty when the first faint lights appeared, when the
first rose clouds appeared above the hills? Orchard succeeded orchard,
and the farmhouses were all asleep. There is no such journey in the
world as the journey from Dieppe to Paris on a fine May morning. Never
shall I forget the first glimpse of Rouen Cathedral in the diamond
air, the branching river, and the tall ships anchored in the deep
current. I was dreaming of the cathedral when we had left Rouen far
behind us, and when I awoke from my dream we were in the midst of a
flat green country, the river winding about islands and through fields
in which stood solitary poplar-trees, formerly haunts of Corot and
Daubigny. I could see the spots where they had set their easels--that
slight rise with the solitary poplar for Corot, that rich river bank
and shady backwater for Daubigny. Soon after I saw the first weir, and
then the first hay-boat; and at every moment the river grew more
serene, more gracious, it passed its arms about a flat, green-wooded
island, on which there was a rookery; and sometimes we saw it ahead of
us, looping up the verdant landscape as if it were a gown, running
through it like a white silk ribbon, and over there the green gown
disappearing in fine muslin vapours, drawn about the low horizon.

I did not weary of this landscape, and was sorry when the first villa
appeared. Another and then another showed between the chestnut-trees
in bloom; and there were often blue vases on the steps and sometimes
lanterns in metalwork hung from wooden balconies. The shutters were
not yet open, those heavy French shutters that we all know so well,
and that give the French houses such a look of comfort, of ease, of
long tradition. Suddenly the aspect of a street struck me as a place I
had known, and I said, "Is it possible that we are passing through
Asnières?" The name flitted past, and I was glad I had recognised
Asnières, for at the end of that very long road is the restaurant
where we used to dine, and between it and the bridge is the _bal_
where we used to dance. It was there I saw the beautiful Blanche
D'Antigny surrounded by her admirers. It was there she used to sit by
the side of the composer of the musical follies which she sang--in
those days I thought she sang enchantingly. Those were the days of
L'Oeil, Crevé, and Chilpéric. She once passed under the chestnut-trees
of that dusty little _bal de banlieue_ with me by her side, proud
of being with her. She has gone and Julia Baron has gone; Hortense has
outlived them all. She must be very old, eighty-five at least. It
would be wonderful to hear her sing "Mon cher amant, je te jure" in
the quavering voice of eighty-five; it would be wonderful to hear her
sing it because she doesn't know how wonderful she is; the old light
of love requires an interpreter, and she has had many; many great
poets have voiced her woe and decadence.

Not five minutes from that _bal_ was the little house in which
Hervé lived, and to which he used to invite us to supper; and where,
after supper, he used to play to us the last music he had composed. We
listened, but the public would listen to it no longer. Sedan had taken
all the tinkle out of it, and the poor _compositeur toqué_ never
caught the public ear again. We listened to his chirpy scores,
believing that they would revive that old nervous fever which was the
Empire when Hortense used to dance, when Hortense took the Empire for
a spring-board, when Paris cried out, "Cascade ma fille, Hortense,
cascade." The great Hortense Schneider, the great goddess of folly,
used to come down there to sing the songs which were intended to
revive her triumphs. She was growing old then, her days were over, and
Hervé's day was over. Vainly did he pile parody upon parody; vainly
did he seize the conductor's _bâton_; the days of their glory had
gone. Now Asnières itself is forgotten; the modern youth has chosen
another suburb to disport himself in; the ballroom has been pulled
down, and never again will an orchestra play a note of these poor
scores; even their names are unknown. A few bars of a chorus of pages
came back to me, remembered only by me, all are gone, like Hortense
and Blanche and Julia.

But after all I am in Paris. Almost the same Paris; almost the same
George Moore, my senses awake as before to all enjoyment, my soul as
enwrapped as ever in the divine sensation of life. Once my youth moved
through thy whiteness, O City, and its dreams lay down to dreams in
the freedom of thy fields! Years come and years go, but every year I
see city and plain in the happy exaltation of Spring, and departing
before the cuckoo, while the blossom is still bright on the bough, it
has come to me to think that Paris and May are one.




CHAPTER III

A WAITRESS


Feeling that he would never see Scotland again, Stevenson wrote in a
preface to "Catriona":--"I see like a vision the youth of my father,
and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there
far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out
in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I
admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny." Does not this
sentence read as if it were written in stress of some effusive febrile
emotion, as if he wrote while still pursuing his idea? And so it
reminds us of a moth fluttering after a light. But however
vacillating, the sentence contains some pretty clauses, and it will be
remembered though not perhaps in its original form. We shall forget
the "laughter and the tears" and the "sudden freshet," and a simpler
phrase will form itself in our memories. The emotion that Stevenson
had to express transpires only in the words, "romance of destiny,
ultimate islands." Who does not feel his destiny to be a romance, and
who does not admire the ultimate island whither his destiny will cast
him? Giacomo Cenci, whom the Pope ordered to be flayed alive, no doubt
admired the romance of destiny that laid him on his ultimate island, a
raised plank, so that the executioner might conveniently roll up the
skin of his belly like an apron. And a hare that I once saw beating a
tambourine in Regent Street looked at me so wistfully that I am sure
it admired in some remote way the romance of destiny that had taken it
from the woodland and cast it upon its ultimate island--in this case a
barrow. But neither of these strange examples of the romance of
destiny seems to me more wonderful than the destiny of a wistful Irish
girl whom I saw serving drinks to students in a certain ultimate café
in the Latin Quarter; she, too, no doubt, admired the destiny which
had cast her out, ordaining that she should die amid tobacco smoke,
serving drinks to students, entertaining them with whatever
conversation they desired.

Gervex, Mademoiselle D'Avary, and I had gone to this café after the
theatre for half an hour's distraction; I had thought that the place
seemed too rough for Mademoiselle D'Avary, but Gervex had said that we
should find a quiet corner, and we had happened to choose one in
charge of a thin, delicate girl, a girl touched with languor,
weakness, and a grace which interested and moved me; her cheeks were
thin, and the deep grey eyes were wistful as a drawing of Rossetti;
her waving brown hair fell over the temples, and was looped up low
over the neck after the Rossetti fashion. I had noticed how the two
women looked at each other, one woman healthful and rich, the other
poor and ailing; I had guessed the thought that passed across their
minds. Each had doubtless asked and wondered why life had come to them
so differently. But first I must tell who was Mademoiselle D'Avary,
and how I came to know her. I had gone to Tortoni, a once-celebrated
cafe at the corner of the Rue Taitbout, the dining place of Rossini.
When Rossini had earned an income of two thousand pounds a year it is
recorded that he said: "Now I've done with music, it has served its
turn, and I'm going to dine every day at Tortoni's." Even in my time
Tortoni was the rendezvous of the world of art and letters; every one
was there at five o'clock, and to Tortoni I went the day I arrived in
Paris. To be seen there would make known the fact that I was in Paris.
Tortoni was a sort of publication. At Tortoni I had discovered a young
man, one of my oldest friends, a painter of talent--he had a picture
in the Luxembourg--and a man who was beloved by women. Gervex, for it
was he, had seized me by the hand, and with voluble eagerness had told
me that I was the person he was seeking: he had heard of my coming and
had sought me in every cafe from the Madeleine to Tortoni. He had been
seeking me because he wished to ask me to dinner to meet Mademoiselle
D'Avary; we were to fetch her in the Rue des Capucines. I write the
name of the street, not because it matters to my little story in what
street she lived, but because the name is an evocation. Those who like
Paris like to hear the names of the streets, and the long staircase
turning closely up the painted walls, the brown painted doors on the
landings, and the bell rope, are evocative of Parisian life; and
Mademoiselle D'Avary is herself an evocation, for she was an actress
of the Palais Royal. My friend, too, is an evocation, he was one of
those whose pride is not to spend money upon women, whose theory of
life is that "If she likes to come round to the studio when one's work
is done, _nous pouvons faire la fête ensemble_." But however
defensible this view of life may be, and there is much to be said for
it, I had thought that he might have refrained from saying when I
looked round the drawing-room admiring it--a drawing-room furnished
with sixteenth-century bronzes, Dresden figures, _étagères_
covered with silver ornaments, three drawings by Boucher--Boucher in
three periods, a French Boucher, a Flemish Boucher, and an Italian
Boucher--that I must not think that any of these things were presents
from him, and from saying when she came into the room that the
bracelet on her arm was not from him. It had seemed to me in slightly
bad taste that he should remind her that he made no presents, for his
remark had clouded her joyousness; I could see that she was not so
happy at the thought of going out to dine with him as she had been.

It was _chez Foyoz_ that we dined, an old-fashioned restaurant
still free from the new taste that likes walls painted white and gold,
electric lamps and fiddlers. After dinner we had gone to see a play
next door at the Odéon, a play in which shepherds spoke to each other
about singing brooks, and stabbed each other for false women, a play
diversified with vintages, processions, wains, and songs. Nevertheless
it had not interested us. And during the _entr'actes_ Gervex had
paid visits in various parts of the house, leaving Mademoiselle
D'Avary to make herself agreeable to me. I dearly love to walk by the
perambulator in which Love is wheeling a pair of lovers. After the
play he had said, "Allons boire un bock," and we had turned into a
students' café, a café furnished with tapestries and oak tables, and
old-time jugs and Medicis gowns, a café in which a student
occasionally caught up a tall bock in his teeth, emptied it at a gulp,
and after turning head over heels, walked out without having smiled.
Mademoiselle D'Avary's beauty and fashion had drawn the wild eyes of
all the students gathered there. She wore a flower-enwoven dress, and
from under the large hat her hair showed dark as night; and her
southern skin filled with rich tints, yellow and dark green where the
hair grew scanty on the neck; the shoulders drooped into opulent
suggestion in the lace bodice. And it was interesting to compare her
ripe beauty with the pale deciduous beauty of the waitress.
Mademoiselle D'Avary sat, her fan wide-spread across her bosom, her
lips parted, the small teeth showing between the red lips. The
waitress sat, her thin arms leaning on the table, joining very
prettily in the conversation, betraying only in one glance that she
knew that she was only a failure and Mademoiselle D'Avary a success.
It was some time before the ear caught the slight accent; an accent
that was difficult to trace to any country. Once I heard a southern
intonation, and then a northern; finally I heard an unmistakable
English intonation, and said:

"But you're English."

"I'm Irish. I'm from Dublin."

And thinking of a girl reared in its Dublin conventions, but whom the
romance of destiny had cast upon this ultimate café, I asked her how
she had found her way here; and she told me she had left Dublin when
she was sixteen; she had come to Paris six years ago to take a
situation as nursery governess. She used to go with the children into
the Luxembourg Gardens and talk to them in English. One day a student
had sat on the bench beside her. The rest of the story is easily
guessed. But he had no money to keep her, and she had to come to this
café to earn her living.

"It doesn't suit me, but what am I to do? One must live, and the
tobacco smoke makes me cough." I sat looking at her, and she must have
guessed what was passing in my mind, for she told me that one lung was
gone; and we spoke of health, of the South, and she said that the
doctor had advised her to go away south.

Seeing that Gervex and Mademoiselle D'Avary were engaged in
conversation, I leaned forward and devoted all my attention to this
wistful Irish girl, so interesting in her phthisis, in her red Medicis
gown, her thin arms showing in the long rucked sleeves. I had to offer
her drink; to do so was the custom of the place. She said that drink
harmed her, but she would get into trouble if she refused drink;
perhaps I would not mind paying for a piece of beef-steak instead. She
had been ordered raw steak! I have only to close my eyes to see her
going over to the corner of the cafe and cutting a piece and putting
it away. She said she would eat it before going to bed, and that would
be two hours hence, about three. While talking to her I thought of a
cottage in the South amid olive and orange trees, an open window full
of fragrant air, and this girl sitting by it.

"I should like to take you south and attend upon you."

"I'm afraid you would grow weary of nursing me. And I should be able
to give you very little in return for your care. The doctor says I'm
not to love any one."

We must have talked for some time, for it was like waking out of a
dream when Gervex and Mademoiselle D'Avary got up to go, and, seeing
how interested I was, he laughed, saying to Mademoiselle D'Avary that
it would be kind to leave me with my new friend. His pleasantry
jarred, and though I should like to have remained, I followed them
into the street, where the moon was shining over the Luxembourg
Gardens. And as I have said before, I dearly love to walk by a
perambulator in which Love is wheeling a pair of lovers: but it is sad
to find oneself alone on the pavement at midnight. Instead of going
back to the café I wandered on, thinking of the girl I had seen, and
of her certain death, for she could not live many months in that café.
We all want to think at midnight, under the moon, when the city looks
like a black Italian engraving, and poems come to us as we watch a
swirling river. Not only the idea of a poem came to me that night, but
on the Pont Neuf the words began to sing together, and I jotted down
the first lines before going to bed. Next morning I continued my poem,
and all day was passed in this little composition.

  We are alone! Listen, a little while,
  And hear the reason why your weary smile
  And lute-toned speaking are so very sweet,
  And how my love of you is more complete
  Than any love of any lover. They
  Have only been attracted by the grey
  Delicious softness of your eyes, your slim
  And delicate form, or some such other whim,
  The simple pretexts of all lovers;--I
  For other reason. Listen whilst I try
  To say. I joy to see the sunset slope
  Beyond the weak hours' hopeless horoscope,
  Leaving the heavens a melancholy calm
  Of quiet colour chaunted like a psalm,
  In mildly modulated phrases; thus
  Your life shall fade like a voluptuous
  Vision beyond the sight, and you shall die
  Like some soft evening's sad serenity....
  I would possess your dying hours; indeed
  My love is worthy of the gift, I plead
  For them. Although I never loved as yet,
  Methinks that I might love you; I would get
  From out the knowledge that the time was brief,
  That tenderness, whose pity grows to grief,
  And grief that sanctifies, a joy, a charm
  Beyond all other loves, for now the arm
  Of Death is stretched to you-ward, and he claims
  You as his bride. Maybe my soul misnames
  Its passion; love perhaps it is not, yet
  To see you fading like a violet,
  Or some sweet thought, would be a very strange
  And costly pleasure, far beyond the range
  Of formal man's emotion. Listen, I
  Will chose a country spot where fields of rye
  And wheat extend in rustling yellow plains,
  Broken with wooded hills and leafy lanes,
  To pass our honeymoon; a cottage where
  The porch and windows are festooned with fair
  Green leaves of eglantine, and look upon
  A shady garden where we'll walk alone
  In the autumn summer evenings; each will see
  Our walks grow shorter, till to the orange tree,
  The garden's length, is far, and you will rest
  From time to time, leaning upon my breast
  Your languid lily face, then later still
  Unto the sofa by the window-sill
  Your wasted body I shall carry, so
  That you may drink the last left lingering glow
  Of evening, when the air is filled with scent
  Of blossoms; and my spirits shall be rent
  The while with many griefs. Like some blue day
  That grows more lovely as it fades away,
  Gaining that calm serenity and height
  Of colour wanted, as the solemn night
  Steals forward you will sweetly fall asleep
  For ever and for ever; I shall weep
  A day and night large tears upon your face,
  Laying you then beneath a rose-red place
  Where I may muse and dedicate and dream
  Volumes of poesy of you; and deem
  It happiness to know that you are far
  From any base desires as that fair star
  Set in the evening magnitude of heaven.
  Death takes but little, yea, your death has given
  Me that deep peace and immaculate possession
  Which man may never find in earthly passion.

Good poetry of course not, but good verse, well turned every line
except the penultimate. The elision is not a happy one, and the mere
suppression of the "and" does not produce a satisfying line.

  Death takes but little, Death I thank for giving
  Me a remembrance, and a pure possession
  Of unrequited love.

And mumbling the last lines of the poem, I hastened to the café near
the Luxembourg Gardens, wondering if I should find courage to ask the
girl to come away to the South and live, fearing that I should not,
fearing it was the idea rather than the deed that tempted me; for the
soul of a poet is not the soul of Florence Nightingale. I was sorry
for this wistful Irish girl, and was hastening to her, I knew not why;
not to show her the poem--the very thought was intolerable. Often did
I stop on the way to ask myself why I was going, and on what errand.
Without discovering an answer in my heart I hastened on, feeling, I
suppose, in some blind way that my quest was in my own heart. I would
know if it were capable of making a sacrifice; and sitting down at one
of her tables I waited, but she did not come, and I asked the student
by me if he knew the girl generally in charge of these tables. He said
he did, and told me about her case. There was no hope for her; only a
transfusion of blood could save her; she was almost bloodless. He
described how blood could be taken from the arm of a healthy man and
passed into the veins of the almost bloodless. But as he spoke things
began to get dim and his voice to grow faint; I heard some one saying,
"You're very pale," and he ordered some brandy for me. The South could
not save her; practically nothing could; and I returned home thinking
of her.

Twenty years have passed, and I am thinking of her again. Poor little
Irish girl! Cast out in the end by a sudden freshet on an ultimate
café. Poor little heap of bones! And I bow my head and admire the
romance of destiny which ordained that I, who only saw her once,
should be the last to remember her. Perhaps I should have forgotten
her had it not been that I wrote a poem, a poem which I now inscribe
and dedicate to her nameless memory.




CHAPTER IV

THE END OF MARIE PELLEGRIN


Octave Barrès liked his friends to come to his studio, and a few of us
who believed in his talent used to drop in during the afternoon, and
little by little I got to know every picture, every sketch; but one
never knows everything that a painter has done, and one day, coming
into the studio, I caught sight of a full-length portrait I had never
seen before on the easel.

"It was in the back room turned to the wall," he said. "I took it out,
thinking that the Russian prince who ordered the Pegasus decoration
might buy it," and he turned away, not liking to hear my praise of it;
for it neither pleases a painter to hear his early works praised nor
abused. "I painted it before I knew how to paint," and standing before
me, his palette in his hand, he expounded his new aestheticism: that
up to the beginning of the nineteenth century all painting had been
done first in monochrome and then glazed, and what we know as solid
painting had been invented by Greuze. One day in the Louvre he had
perceived something in Delacroix, something not wholly satisfactory;
this something had set him thinking. It was Rubens, however, who had
revealed the secret! It was Rubens who had taught him how to paint! He
admitted that there was danger in retracing one's steps, in beginning
one's education over again; but what help was there for it, since
painting was not taught in the schools.

I had heard all he had to say before, and could not change my belief
that every man must live in the ideas of his time, be they good or
bad. It is easy to say that we must only adopt Rubens's method and
jealously guard against any infringement on our personality; but in
art our personality is determined by the methods we employ, and
Octave's portrait interested me more than the Pegasus decoration, or
the three pink Venuses holding a basket of flowers above their heads.
The portrait was crude and violent, but so was the man that had
painted it; he had painted it when he was a disciple of Manet's, and
the methods of Manet were in agreement with my friend's temperament.
We are all impressionists to-day; we are eager to note down what we
feel and see; and the carefully prepared rhetorical manner of Rubens
was as incompatible with Octave's temperament as the manner of John
Milton is with mine. There was a thought of Goya in the background, in
the contrast between the grey and the black, and there was something
of Manet's simplifications in the face, but these echoes were faint,
nor did they matter, for they were of our time. In looking at his
model he had seen and felt something; he had noted this harshly,
crudely, but he noted it; and to do this, is after all the main thing.
His sitter had inspired him. The word "inspired" offended him; I
withdrew it; I said that he had been fortunate in his model, and he
admitted that: to see that thin, olive-complexioned girl with fine
delicate features and blue-black hair lying close about her head like
feathers--she wore her hair as a blackbird wears his wing--compelled
one to paint; and after admiring the face I admired the black silk
dress he had painted her in, a black silk dress covered with black
lace. She wore grey pearls in her ears, and pearls upon her neck.

I was interested in the quality of the painting, so different from
Octave's present painting, but I was more interested in the woman
herself. The picture revealed to me something in human nature that I
had never seen before, something that I had never thought of. The soul
in this picture was so intense that I forgot the painting, and began
to think of her. She was unlike any one I had ever met in Octave
Barrès's studio; a studio beloved of women; the women one met there
seemed to be of all sorts, but in truth they were all of a sort. They
began to arrive about four o'clock in the afternoon, and they stayed
on until they were sent away. He allowed them to play the piano and
sing to him; he allowed them, as he would phrase it, to
_grouiller_ about the place, and they talked of the painters they
had sat to, of their gowns, and they showed us their shoes and their
garters. He heeded them hardly at all, walking to and fro thinking of
his painting, of his archaic painting. I often wondered if his
appearance counted for anything in his renunciation of modern methods,
and certainly his appearance was a link of association; he did not
look like a modern man, but like a sixteenth-century baron; his beard
and his broken nose and his hierarchial air contributed to the
resemblance; the jersey he wore reminded one of a cuirass, a coat of
mail. Even in his choice of a dwelling-place he seemed instinctively
to avoid the modern; he had found a studio in the street, the name of
which no one had ever heard before; it was found with difficulty; and
the studio, too, it was hidden behind great crumbling walls, in the
middle of a plot of ground in which some one was growing cabbages.
Octave was always, as he would phrase it, _dans une dèche
épouvantable_, but he managed to keep a thoroughbred horse in the
stable at the end of the garden, and this horse was ordered as soon as
the light failed. He would say, "Mes amis et mes amies, je regrette,
mais mon cheval m'attend." And the women liked to see him mount, and
many thought, I am sure, that he looked like a Centaur as he rode
away.

But who was this refined girl? this--a painting tells things that
cannot be translated into words--this olive-skinned girl who might
have sat to Raphael for a Virgin, so different from Octave's usual
women? They were of the Montmartre kin; but this woman might be a
Spanish princess. And remembering that Octave had said he had taken
out the portrait hoping that the Russian who had ordered the Pegasus
might buy it, the thought struck me that she might be the prince's
mistress. His mistress! Oh, what fabulous fortune! What might her
history be? I burned to hear it, and wearied of Octave's seemingly
endless chatter about his method of painting; I had heard all he was
saying many times before, but I listened to it all again, and to
propitiate him I regretted that the picture was not painted in his
present manner, "for there are good things in the picture," I said,
"and the model--you seem to have been lucky with your model."

"Yes, she was nice to paint from, but it was difficult to get her to
sit. A _concierge's_ daughter--you wouldn't think it, would you?"
My astonishment amused him, and he began to laugh. "You don't know
her?" he said. "That is Marie Pellegrin," and when I asked him where
he had met her he told me, at Alphonsine's; but I did not know where
Alphonsine's was.

"I'm going to dine there to-night. I'm going to meet her; she's going
back to Russia with the prince; she has been staying in the Quartier
Bréda on her holiday. _Sacré nom!_ Half-past five, and I haven't
washed my brushes yet!"

In answer to my question, what he meant by going to the Quartier Bréda
for a holiday, he said:

"I'll tell you all about that in the carriage."

But no sooner had we got into the carriage than he remembered that he
must leave word for a woman who had promised to sit to him, and
swearing that a message would not delay us for more than a few minutes
he directed the coachman. We were shown into a drawing-room, and the
lady ran out of her bedroom, wrapping herself as she ran in a
_peignoir_, and the sitting was discussed in the middle of a
polished _parquet_ floor. We at last returned to the carriage,
but we were hardly seated when he remembered another appointment. He
scribbled notes in the lodges of the _concierges_, and between
whiles told me all he knew of the story of Marie Pellegrin. This
delicate woman that I had felt could not be of the Montmartre kin was
the daughter of a _concierge_ on the Boulevard Extérieur. She had
run away from home at fifteen, had danced at the Elysée Montmartre.

  Sa jupe avait des trous,
  Elle aimait des voyous,
  Ils ont des yeux si doux.

But one day a Russian prince had caught sight of her, and had built
her a palace in the Champs Elysées; but the Russian prince and his
palace bored her.

The stopping of the carriage interrupted Octave's narrative. "Here we
are," he said, seizing a bell hanging on a jangling wire, and the
green door in the crumbling wall opened, and I saw an undersized
woman--I saw Alphonsine! And her portrait, a life-sized caricature
drawn by Octave, faced me from the white-washed wall of the hen-coop.
He had drawn her two cats purring about her legs, and had written
under it, "Ils viennent après le mou." Her garden was a gravelled
space; I think there was one tree in it. A tent had been stretched
from wall to wall; and a seedy-looking waiter laid the tables (there
were two), placing bottles of wine in front of each knife and fork,
and bread in long sticks at regular intervals. He was constantly
disturbed by the ringing of the bell, and had to run to the door to
admit the company. Here and there I recognised faces that I had
already seen in the studio; Clementine, who last year was studying the
part of Elsa and this year was singing, "La femme de feu, la cui, la
cui, la cuisinière," in a _café chantant_; and Margaret Byron,
who had just retreated from Russia--a disastrous campaign hers was
said to have been. The greater number were _hors concours_, for
Alphonsine's was to the aged courtesan what Chelsea Hospital is to the
aged soldier. It was a sort of human garden full of the sound and
colour of October.

I scrutinised the crowd. How could any one of these women interest the
woman whose portrait I had seen in Barrès's studio? That one, for
instance, whom I saw every morning in the Rue des Martyres, in a
greasy _peignoir_, going marketing, a basket on her arm. Search
as I would I could not find a friend for Marie among the women nor a
lover among the men--neither of those two stout middle-aged men with
large whiskers, who had probably once been stockbrokers, nor the
withered journalist whom I heard speaking to Octave about a duel he
had fought recently; nor the little sandy Scotchman whose French was
not understood by the women and whose English was nearly
unintelligible to me; nor the man who looked like a
head-waiter--Alphonsine's lover; he had been a waiter, and he told
you with the air of Napoleon describing Waterloo that he had "created"
a certain fashionable café on the Boulevard. I could not attribute
any one of these men to Marie; and Octave spoke of her with
indifference; she had interested him to paint, and now he hoped she
would get the Russian to buy her picture.

"But she's not here," I said.

"She'll be here presently," Octave answered, and he went on talking to
Clementine, a fair pretty woman whom one saw every night at the _Rat
Mort_. It was when the soup-plates were being taken away that I saw
a young woman dressed in black coming across the garden.

It was she, Marie Pellegrin.

She wore a dress similar to the one she wore in her portrait, a black
silk covered with lace, and her black hair was swathed about her
shapely little head. She was her portrait and something more. Her
smile was her own, a sad little smile that seemed to come out of a
depth of her being, and her voice was a little musical voice,
irresponsible as a bird's, and during dinner I noticed how she broke
into speech abruptly as a bird breaks into song, and she stopped as
abruptly. I never saw a woman so like herself, and sometimes her
beauty brought a little mist into my eyes, and I lost sight of her or
very nearly, and I went on eating mechanically. Dinner seemed to end
suddenly, and before I knew that it was over we were getting up from
table.

As we went towards the house where coffee was being served, Marie
asked me if I played cards, but I excused myself, saying that I would
prefer to sit and look at her; and just then a thin woman with red
hair, who had arrived at the same time as Marie and who had sat next
her at dinner, was introduced to me, and I was told that she was
Marie's intimate friend, and that the two lived together whenever
Marie returned to Montmartre. She was known as _La Glue_, her
real name was Victorine, she had sat for Manet's picture of Olympe,
but that was years ago. The face was thinner, but I recognised the red
hair and the brown eyes, small eyes set closely, reminding one of
_des petits verres de cognac_. Her sketch-book was being passed
round, and as it came into my hands I noticed that she did not wear
stays and was dressed in old grey woollen. She lit cigarette after
cigarette, and leaned over Marie with her arm about her shoulder,
advising her what cards to play. The game was baccarat, and in a
little while I saw that Marie was losing a great deal of money, and a
little later I saw _La Glue_ trying to persuade her away from the
card-table.

"One more deal." That deal lost her the last louis she had placed on
the table. "Some one will have to pay my cab," she said.

We were going to the Elysée Montmartre, and Alphonsine lent her a
couple of louis, _pour passer sa soirée_, and we all went away in
carriages, the little horses straining up the steep streets; the
plumes of the women's hats floating over the carriage hoods. Marie was
in one of the front carriages, and was waiting for us on the high
steps leading from the street to the _bal_.

"It's my last night," she said, "the last night I shall see the Elysée
for many a month."

"You'll soon be back again?"

"You see, I have been offered five hundred thousand francs to go to
Russia for three years. Fancy three years without seeing the Elysée,"
and she looked round as an angel might look upon Paradise out of which
she is about to be driven. "The trees are beautiful," she said,
"they're like a fairy tale," and that is exactly what they were like,
rising into the summer darkness, unnaturally green above the electric
lights. In the middle of a circle of white globes the orchestra played
upon an _estrade_, and everyone whirled his partner as if she
were a top. "I always sit over there under the trees in the angle,"
she said; and she was about to invite me to come and sit with her when
her attention was distracted from me; for the people had drawn
together into groups, and I heard everybody whispering: "That's Marie
Pellegrin." Seeing her coming, her waiter with much ostentation began
to draw aside tables and chairs, and in a few minutes she was sitting
under her tree, she and _La Glue_ together, their friends about
them, Marie distributing absinthe, brandy, and cigarettes. A little
procession suddenly formed under the trees and came towards her, and
Marie was presented with a great basket of flowers, and all her
company with bouquets; and a little cheer went up from different parts
of the _bal_, "Vive Marie Pellegrin, la reine de l'Elysée."

The music began again, the people rushed to see a quadrille where two
women, with ease, were kicking off men's hats; and while watching them
I heard that a special display of fireworks had been arranged in
Marie's honour, the news having got about that this was her last night
at the Elysée. A swishing sound was heard; the rocket rose to its
height high up in the thick sky. Then it dipped over, the star fell a
little way and burst: it melted into turquoise blue, and changed to
ruby red, beautiful as the colour of flowers, roses or tulips. The
falling fire changed again and again. And Marie stood on a chair and
watched till the last sparks vanished.

"Doesn't she look like my picture now?" said Octave.

"You seemed to have divined her soul."

He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. "I'm not a psychologist; I
am a painter. But I must get a word with her," and with a carelessness
that was almost insolence, he pushed his way into the crowd and called
her, saying he wanted to speak to her; and they walked round the
_bal_ together. I could not understand his indifference to her
charm, and asked myself if he had always been so indifferent. In a
little while they returned.

"I'll do my best," I heard her say; and she ran back to join her
companions.

"I suppose you've seen enough of the Elysée?"

"Ah! qu'elle est jolie ce soir; et elle ferait joliment marcher le
Russe."

We walked on in silence. Octave did not notice that he had said
anything to jar my feelings; he was thinking of his portrait, and
presently he said that he was sorry she was going to Russia.

"I should like to begin another portrait, now that I have learned to
paint."

"Do you think she'll go to Russia?"

"Yes, she'll go there; but she'll come back one of these days, and
I'll get her to sit again. It is extraordinary how little is known of
the art of painting; the art is forgotten. The old masters did
perfectly in two days what we spend weeks fumbling at. In two days
Rubens finished his _grisaille_, and the glazing was done with
certainty, with skill, with ease in half an hour! He could get more
depth of colour with a glaze than any one can to-day, however much
paint is put on the canvas. The old masters had method; now there's
none. One brush as well as another, rub the paint up or down, it
doesn't matter so long as the canvas is covered. Manet began it, and
Cézanne has--well, filed the petition: painting is bankrupt."

I listened to him a little wearily, for I had heard all he was saying
many times before; but Octave always talked as he wanted to talk, and
this evening he wanted to talk of painting, not of Marie, and I was
glad when we came to the spot where our ways parted.

"You know that the Russian is coming to the studio to-morrow; I hope
he'll buy the portrait."

"I hope he will," I said. "I'd buy it myself if I could afford it."

"I'd prefer you to have something I have done since, unless it be the
woman you're after ... but one minute. You're coming to sit to me the
day after to-morrow?"

"Yes," I said, "I'll come."

"And then I'll be able to tell you if he has bought the picture."

Three days afterwards I asked Octave on the threshold if the Russian
had bought the portrait, and he told me nothing had been definitely
settled yet.

Marie had gone to St. Petersburg with the prince, and this was the
last news I had of her for many months. But a week rarely passed
without something happening to remind me of her. One day a books of
travels in Siberia opened at a passage telling how a boy belonging to
a tribe of Asiatic savages had been taken from his deserts, where he
had been found deserted and dying, and brought to Moscow. The
gentleman who had found him adopted and educated him, and the
reclaimed savage became in time a fashionable young man about town,
betraying no trace of his origin until one day he happened to meet one
of his tribe. The man had come to Moscow to sell skins; and the smell
of the skins awoke a longing for the desert. The reclaimed savage grew
melancholy; his adopted father tried in vain to overcome the original
instinct; presents of money did not soothe his homesickness. He
disappeared, and was not heard of for years until one day a caravan
came back with the news of a man among the savages who had betrayed
himself by speaking French. On being questioned, he denied any
knowledge of French; he said he had never been to St. Petersburg, nor
did he wish to go there. And what was this story but the story of
Marie Pellegrin, who, when weary of Russian princes and palaces,
returned for her holiday to the Quartier Bréda?

A few days afterwards I heard in Barrès's studio that she had escaped
from Russia; and that evening I went to Alphonsine's to dinner, hoping
to see her there. But she was not there. There was no one there except
Clementine and the two stockbrokers; and I waited eagerly for news of
her. I did not like to mention her name, and the dreary dinner was
nearly over before her name was mentioned. I heard that she was ill;
no, not dying, but very ill. Alphonsine gave me her address; a little
higher up on the same side as the Cirque Fernando, nearly facing the
Elysée Montmartre. The number I could inquire out, she said, and I
went away in a cab up the steep and stony Rue des Martyres, noticing
the café and then the _brasserie_ and a little higher up the
fruit-seller and the photographer. When the mind is at stress one
notices the casual, and mine was at stress, and too agitated to think.
The first house we stopped at happened to be the right one, and the
_concierge_ said, "The fourth floor." As I went upstairs I
thought of _La Glue_, of her untidy dress and her red hair, and
it was she who answered the bell and asked me into an unfurnished
drawing-room, and we stood by the chimneypiece.

"She's talking of going to the Elysée to-night. Won't you come in?
She'd like to see you. There are three or four of us here. You know
them. Clementine, Margaret Byron?" And she mentioned some other names
that I did not remember, and opening a door she cried: "Marie, here's
a visitor for you, a gentleman from Alphonsine's. You know, dear, the
Englishman, Octave Barrès's friend."

She gave me her hand, and I held it a long while.

"Comme les Anglais sont gentils. Dès qu'on est malade--"

I don't think Marie finished the sentence, if she did I did not hear
her; but I remember quite well that she spoke of my distaste for
cards.

"You didn't play that night at Alphonsine's when I lost all my money.
You preferred to look at Victorine's drawings. She has done some
better ones. Go and look at them, and let's finish our game. Then I'll
talk to you. So you heard about me at Alphonsine's? They say I'm very
ill, don't they? But now that I've come back I'll soon get well. I'm
always well at Montmartre, amn't I, Victorine?" "Nous ne sommes pas
installés encore," Marie said, referring to the scarcity of furniture,
and to the clock and candelabra which stood on the floor. But if there
were too few chairs, there was a good deal of money and jewellery
among the bed-clothes; and Marie toyed with this jewellery during the
games. She wore large lace sleeves, and the thin arms showed delicate
and slight when she raised them to change her ear-rings. Her small
beauty, fashioned like an ivory, contrasted with the coarse features
about her, and the little nose with beautifully shaped nostrils, above
all the mouth fading at the ends into faint indecisions. Every now and
then a tenderness came over her face; Octave had seen the essential in
her, whatever he might say; he had painted herself--her soul; and
Marie's soul rose up like a water-flower in her eyes, and then the
soul sank out of sight, and I saw another Marie, _une grue_,
playing cards with five others from Alphonsine's, losing her money and
her health. A bottle of absinthe stood on a beautiful Empire table
that her prince had given her, and Bijou, Clementine's little dog,
slept on an embroidered cushion. Bijou was one of those dear little
Japanese or Chinese spaniels, those dogs that are like the King
Charles. She was going to have puppies, and I was stroking her silky
coat thinking of her coming trouble, when I suddenly heard
Clementine's voice raised above the others, and looking up I saw a
great animation in her face; I heard that the cards had not been
fairly dealt, and then the women threw their cards aside, and _La
Glue_ told Clementine that she was not wanted, that _elle ferait
bien de débarrasser les planches_, that was the expression she
used. I heard further accusations, and among them the plaintive voice
of Marie begging of me not to believe what they said. The women caught
each other by the hair, and tore at each other's faces, and Marie
raised herself up in bed and implored them to cease; and then she fell
back crying. For a moment it seemed as if they were going to sit down
to cards again, but suddenly everybody snatched her own money and then
everybody snatched at the money within her reach; and, calling each
other thieves, they struggled through the door, and I heard them
quarrelling all the way down the staircase. Bijou jumped from her
chair and followed her mistress.

"Help me to look," Marie said; and looking I saw her faint hands
seeking through the bed-clothes. Some jewellery was missing, a
bracelet and some pearls, as well as all her money. Marie fell back
among the pillows unable to speak, and every moment I dreaded a flow
of blood. She began to cry, and the little lace handkerchief was soon
soaking. I had to find her another. The money that had been taken had
been paid her by a _fournisseur_ in the _Quartier_, who had
given her two thousand francs for her _garniture de cheminée_. A
few francs were found among the bed-clothes, and these few francs, she
said, were sufficient _pour passer sa soirée_, and she begged me
to go the dressmaker to inquire for the gown that had been promised
for ten o'clock.

"I shall be at the Elysée by eleven. _Au revoir, au revoir!_ Let
me rest a little now. I shall see you to-night. You know where I
always sit, in the left-hand corner; they always keep those seats for
me."

Her eyes closed, I could see that she was already asleep, and her calm
and reasonable sleep reminded me of her agitated and unreasonable
life; and I stood looking at her, at this poor butterfly who was lying
here all alone, robbed by her friends and associates. But she slept
contentedly, having found a few francs that they had overlooked amid
the bedclothes, enough to enable her to pass her evening at the
Elysée! The prince might be written to; but he, no doubt, was weary of
her inability to lead a respectable life, and knew, no doubt, that if
he were to send her money, it would go as his last gift had gone. If
she lived, Marie would one day be selling fried potatoes on the
streets. And this decadence--was it her fault? Octave would say:
"Qu'est ce que cela peut nous faire, une fille plus ou moins fichue
... si je pouvais réussir un peu dans ce sacré métier!" This was how
he talked, but he thought more profoundly in his painting; his picture
of her was something more than mere sarcasm.

She was going to the Elysée to-night. It was just six o'clock, so she
wanted her dress by ten. I must hasten away to the dressmaker at once;
it might be wiser not--she lay in bed peaceful and beautiful; at the
Elysée she would be drinking absinthe and smoking cigarettes until
three in the morning. But I had promised: she wouldn't forgive me if I
didn't, and I went.

The dressmaker said that Madame Pellegrin would have her dress by
nine, and at half-past ten I was at the Elysée waiting for her.

How many times did I walk round the gravel path, wearying of the
unnatural green of the chestnut leaves and of the high kicking in the
quadrilles? Now and then there would be a rush of people, and then the
human tide would disperse again under the trees among the zinc chairs
and tables, for the enjoyment of bocks and cigars. I noticed that
Marie's friends spent their evening in the left-hand corner; but they
did not call me to drink with them, knowing well that I knew the money
they were spending was stolen money.

I left the place discontented and weary, glad in a way that Marie had
not come. No doubt the dressmaker had disappointed her, or maybe she
had felt too ill. There was no time to go to inquire in the morning,
for I was breakfasting with Octave, and in the afternoon sitting to
him.

We were in the middle of the sitting, he had just sketched in my head,
when we heard footsteps on the stairs.

"Only some women," he said; "I've a mind not to open the door."

"But do," I said, feeling sure the women were Marie's friends bringing
news of her. And it was so. She had been found dead on her balcony
dressed in the gown that had just come home from the dressmaker.

I hoped that Octave would not try to pass the matter off with some
ribald jest, and I was surprised at his gravity. "Even Octave," I
said, "refrains, _on ne blague pas la mort_."

"But what was she doing on the balcony?" he asked. "What I don't
understand is the balcony."

We all stood looking at her picture, trying to read the face.

"I suppose she went out to look at the fireworks; they begin about
eleven."

It was one of the women who had spoken, and her remark seemed to
explain the picture.




CHAPTER V

LA BUTTE


To-morrow I shall drive to breakfast, seeing Paris continuously
unfolding, prospect after prospect, green swards, white buildings,
villas engarlanded; to-day I drive to breakfast through the white
torridities of Rue Blanche. The back of the coachman grows drowsier,
and would have rounded off into sleep long ago had it not been for the
great paving stones that swing the vehicle from side to side, and we
have to climb the Rue Lepic, and the poor little fainting animal will
never be able to draw me to the Butte. So I dismiss my carriage, half
out of pity, half out of a wish to study the Rue Lepic, so typical is
it of the upper lower classes. In the Rue Blanche there are
_portes-cochères_, but in Rue Lepic there are narrow doors,
partially grated, open on narrow passages at the end of which,
squeezed between the wall and the stairs, are small rooms where
_concierges_ sit, eternally _en camisole_, amid vegetables
and sewing. The wooden blinds are flung back on the faded yellow
walls, revealing a portion of white bed-curtain and a heavy
middle-aged woman, _en camisole_, passing between the cooking
stove, in which a rabbit in a tin pail lies steeping, and the men
sitting at their trades in the windows. The smell of leather follows
me for several steps; a few doors farther a girl sits trimming a
bonnet, her mother beside her. The girl looks up, pale with the
exhausting heat. At the corner of the next street there is the
_marchand de vins_, and opposite the dirty little _charbonnier_,
and standing about a little hole which he calls his _boutique_
a group of women in discoloured _peignoirs_ and heavy carpet
slippers. They have baskets on their arms. Everywhere traces of
meagre and humble life, but nowhere do I see the demented wretch
common in our London streets--the man with bare feet, the furtive
and frightened creature, gnawing a crust and drawing a black,
tattered shirt about his consumptive chest.

The asphalt is melting, the reverberation of the stones intolerable,
my feet ache and burn. At the top of the street I enter a still poorer
neighbourhood, a still steeper street, but so narrow that the shadow
has already begun to draw out on the pavements. At the top of the
street is a stairway, and above the stairway a grassy knoll, and above
the knoll a windmill lifts its black and motionless arms. For the mill
is now a mute ornament, a sign for the _Bal du Moulin de la
Galette_.

As I ascend the street grows whiter, and at the Butte it is empty of
everything except the white rays of noon. There are some dusty
streets, and silhouetting against the dim sky a dilapidated façade of
some broken pillars. Some stand in the midst of ruined gardens,
circled by high walls crumbling and white, and looking through a
broken gateway I see a fountain splashing, but nowhere the inhabitants
that correspond to these houses--only a workwoman, a grisette, a child
crying in the dust. The Butte Montmartre is full of suggestion; grand
folk must at some time have lived there. Could it be that this place
was once country? To-day it is full of romantic idleness and
abandonment.

On my left an iron gateway, swinging on rusty hinges, leads on to a
large terrace, at the end of which is a row of houses. It is in one of
these houses that my friend lives, and as I pull the bell I think that
the pleasure of seeing him is worth the ascent, and my thoughts float
back over the long time I have known Paul. We have known each other
always, since we began to write. But Paul is not at home. The servant
comes to the door with a baby in her arms, another baby! and tells me
that Monsieur et Madame are gone out for the day. No breakfast, no
smoke, no talk about literature, only a long walk back--cabs are not
found at these heights--a long walk back through the roasting sun. And
it is no consolation to be told that I should have written and warned
them I was coming.

But I must rest, and ask leave to do so, and the servant brings me in
some claret and a siphon. The study is better to sit in than the front
room, for in the front room, although the shutters are closed, the
white rays pierce through the chinks, and lie like sword-blades along
the floor. The study is pleasant and the wine refreshing. The house
seems built on the sheer hillside. Fifty feet--more than that--a
hundred feet under me there are gardens, gardens caught somehow in the
hollow of the hill, and planted with trees, tall trees, for swings
hang out of them, otherwise I should not know they were tall. From
this window they look like shrubs, and beyond the houses that surround
these gardens Paris spreads out over the plain, an endless tide of
bricks and stone, splashed with white when the sun shines on some
railway station or great boulevard: a dim reddish mass, like a
gigantic brickfield, and far away a line of hills, and above the plain
a sky as pale and faint as the blue ash of a cigarette.

I can never look upon this city without strong emotion; it has been
all my life to me. I came here in my youth, I relinquished myself to
Paris, never extending once my adventure beyond Bas Meudon, Ville
d'Avray, Fontainebleau--and Paris has made me. How much of my mind do
I owe to Paris? And by thus acquiring a fatherland more ideal than the
one birth had arrogantly imposed, because deliberately chosen, I have
doubled my span of life. Do I not exist in two countries? Have I not
furnished myself with two sets of thoughts and sensations? Ah! the
delicate delight of owning _un pays ami_--a country where you may
go when you are weary to madness of the routine of life, sure of
finding there all the sensations of home, plus those of irresponsible
caprice. The pleasure of a literature that is yours without being
wholly your own, a literature that is like an exquisite mistress, in
whom you find consolation for all the commonplaces of life! The
comparison is perfect, for although I know these French folk better
than all else in the world, they must ever remain my pleasure, and not
my work in life. It is strange that this should be so, for in truth I
know them strangely well. I can see them living their lives from hour
to hour; I know what they would say on any given occasion.

There is Paul. I understand nothing more completely than that man's
mind. I know its habitual colour and every varying shade, and yet I
may not make him the hero of a novel when I lay the scene in
Montmartre, though I know it so well. I know when he dresses, how long
he takes to dress, and what he wears. I know the breakfast he eats,
and the streets down which he passes--their shape, their colour, their
smell. I know exactly how life has come to him, how it has affected
him. The day I met him in London! Paul in London! He was there to meet
_une petite fermière_ with whom he had become infatuated when he
went to Normandy to finish his novel. Paul is _foncièrement bon; he
married her_, and this is their abode. There is the _salle-à-manger_,
furnished with a nice sideboard in oak, and six chairs to match; on the
left is their bedroom, and there is the baby's cot, a present from
_le grand, le cher et illustre maître_.

Paul and Mrs. Paul get up at twelve, and they loiter over breakfast;
some friends come in and they loiter over les _petits verres_.
About four Paul begins to write his article, which he finishes or
nearly finishes before dinner. They loiter over dinner until it is
time for Paul to take his article to the newspaper. He loiters in the
printing office or the cafe until his proof is ready, and when that is
corrected he loiters in the many cafés of the Faubourg Montmartre,
smoking interminable cigars, finding his way back to the Butte between
three and four in the morning. Paul is fat and of an equable
temperament. He believes in naturalism all the day, particularly after
a breakfast over _les petits verres_. He never said an unkind
word to any one, and I am sure never thought one. He used to be fond
of grisettes, but since he married he has thought of no one but his
wife. _Il écrit des choses raides_, but no woman ever had a
better husband. And now you know him as well as I do. Here are his own
books, "The End of Lucie Pellegrin," the story that I have just
finished writing: I think I must explain how it was that I have come
to rewrite one of Paul's stories, the best he ever wrote. I remember
asking him why he called her Lucie, and he was surprised to hear her
name was Marie; he never knew her, he had never been to Alphonsine's,
and he had told the story as he had picked it up from the women who
turned into the Rat Mort at midnight for a _soupe à l'oignon_. He
said it was a pity he did not know me when he was writing it, for I
could have told him her story more sympathetically than the women in
the Rat Mort, supplying him with many pretty details that they had
never noticed or had forgotten. It would have been easy for me to have
done this, for Marie Pellegrin is enshrined in my memory like a
miniature in a case. I press a spring, and I see the beautifully
shaped little head, the pale olive face, the dark eyes, and the
blue-black hair. Marie Pellegrin is really part of my own story, so
why should I have any scruple about telling it? Merely because my
friend had written it from hearsay? Whereas I knew her; I saw her on
her death-bed. Chance made me her natural historian. Now I think that
every one will accept my excuses, and will acquit me of plagiarism.

I see the Rougon-Macquart series, each volume presented to him by the
author, Goncourt, Huysmans, Duranty, Céard, Maupassant, Hennique,
etc.; in a word, the works of those with whom I grew up, those who
tied my first literary pinafore round my neck. But here are "Les
Moralités Legendaires" by Jules Laforgue, and "Les Illuminations" by
Rambaud. Paul has not read these books; they were sent to him, I
suppose, for review, and put away on the bookcase, all uncut; their
authors do not visit here.

And this sets me thinking that one knows very little of any generation
except one's own. True that I know a little more of the symbolists
than Paul. I am the youngest of the naturalists, the eldest of the
symbolists. The naturalists affected the art of painting, the
symbolists the art of music; and since the symbolists there has been
no artistic manifestation--the game is played out. When Huysmans and
Paul and myself are dead, it will be as impossible to write a
naturalistic novel as to revive the megatherium. Where is Hennique?
When Monet is dead it will be as impossible to paint an
impressionistic picture as to revive the ichthyosaurus. A little world
of ideas goes by every five-and-twenty years, and the next that
emerges will be incomprehensible to me, as incomprehensible as Monet
was to Corot.... Was the young generation knocking at the door of the
Opéra Comique last night? If the music was the young generation, I am
sorry for it. It was the second time I had gone. I had been to hear
the music, and I left exasperated after the third act. A friend was
with me and he left, but for different reasons; he suffered in his
ears; it was my intelligence that suffered. Why did the flute play the
chromatic scale when the boy said, "Il faut que cela soit un grand
navire," and why were all the cellos in motion when the girl answered,
"Cela ou bien tout autre chose?" I suffered because of the divorce of
the orchestra and singers, uniting perhaps at the end of the scene. It
was speaking through music, no more, monotonous as the Sahara, league
after league, and I lost amid sands. A chord is heard in "Lohengrin"
to sustain Elsa's voice, and it performs its purpose; a motive is
heard to attract attention to a certain part of the story, and it
fills its purpose, when Ortrud shrieks out the motive of the secret,
and in its simplest form, at the church door, the method may be
criticised as crude, but the crudest melodrama is better than this
desert wandering. While I ponder on the music of the younger
generation, remembering the perplexity it had caused me, I hear a
vagrant singing on the other side of the terrace:

[Illustration]

  Moi, je m'en fous, Je reste dans mon trou

and I say: "I hear the truth in the mouth of the vagrant minstrel, one
who possibly has no _trou_ wherein to lay his head." _Et moi
aussi, je reste dans mon trou, et mon trou est assez beau pour que j'y
reste, car mon trou est_--Richard Wagner. My _trou_ is the
Ring--the Sacrosanct Ring. Again I fall to musing. The intention of
Liszt and Wagner and Strauss was to write music. However long Wotan
might ponder on Mother Earth the moment comes when the violins begin
to sing; ah! how the spring uncloses in the orchestra, and the lovers
fly to the woods!...

The vagrant continued his wail, and forgetful of Paul, forgetful of
all things but the philosophy of the minstrel of the Butte, I picked
my way down the tortuous streets repeating:

[Illustration]

Moi, je m'en fous, Je reste dans mon trou




CHAPTER VI

SPENT LOVES


I am going to see dear and affectionate friends. The train would take
me to them, that droll little _chemin de fer de ceinture_, and it
seems a pity to miss the Gare St. Lazare, its Sunday morning tumult of
Parisians starting with their mistresses and their wives for a
favourite suburb. I never run up these wide stairways leading to the
great wide galleries full of bookstalls (charming yellow notes), and
pierced with little _guichets_ painted round with blue, without
experiencing a sensation of happy lightness--a light-headedness that I
associate with the month of May in Paris. But the tramway that passes
through the Place de la Concorde goes as far as Passy, and though I
love the droll little _chemin de fer de ceinture_ I love this
tramway better. It speeds along the quays between the Seine and the
garden of the Champs Elysées, through miles of chestnut bloom, the
roadway chequered with shadows of chestnut leaves; the branches meet
overhead, and in a faint delirium of the senses I catch at a bloom,
cherish it for a moment, and cast it away. The plucky little
steamboats are making for the landing-places, stemming the current. I
love this sprightly little river better than the melancholy Thames,
along whose banks saturnine immoralities flourish like bulrushes!
Behold the white architecture, the pillars, the balustraded steps, the
domes in the blue air, the monumented swards! Paris, like all pagan
cities, is full of statues. A little later we roll past gardens,
gaiety is in the air.... And then the streets of Passy begin to
appear, mean streets, like London streets. I like them not; but the
railway station is compensation; the little railway station like a
house of cards under toy trees, and the train steaming out into the
fanciful country. The bright wood along which it speeds is like the
season's millinery.

It is pleasant to notice everything in Paris, the flymen asleep on
their box-seats, the little horses dozing beneath the chestnut trees,
the bloused workmen leaning over a green-painted table in an arbour,
drinking wine at sixteen sous the litre, the villas of Auteuil, rich
woodwork, rich iron railings, and the summer hush about villas
engarlanded. Auteuil is so French, its symbolism enchants me. Auteuil
is like a flower, its petals opening out to the kiss of the air, its
roots feeling for way among the rich earth. Ah, the land of France,
its vineyards and orchards, its earthly life! Thoughts come unbidden,
my thoughts sing together, and I hardly knowing what they are singing.
My thoughts are singing like the sun; do not ask me their meaning;
they mean as much and as little as the sun that I am part of--the
sun of France that I shall enjoy for thirty days. May takes me to dear
and affectionate friends who await me at Auteuil, and June takes me
away from them. There is the villa! And there amid the engarlanding
trees my friend, dressed in pale yellow, sits in front of his easel.
How the sunlight plays through the foliage, leaping through the rich,
long grass; and amid the rhododendrons in bloom sits a little girl of
four, his model, her frock and cap impossibly white under the great,
gaudy greenery.

Year after year the same affectionate welcome, the same spontaneous
welcome in this garden of rhododendrons and chestnut bloom. I would
linger in the garden, but I may not, for breakfast is ready _et il
ne faut pas faire manquer la messe à Madame. La messe_! How gentle
the word is, much gentler than our word, mass, and it shocks us hardly
at all to see an old lady going away in her carriage _pour entendre
la messe_. Religion purged of faith is a pleasant, almost a pretty
thing. Some fruits are better dried than fresh; religion is such a
one, and religion, when nothing is left of it but the pleasant,
familiar habit, may be defended, for were it not for our habits life
would be unrecorded, it would be all on the flat, as we would say if
we were talking about a picture without perspective. Our habits are
our stories, and tell whence we have come and how we came to be what
we are. This is quite a pretty reflection, but there is no time to
think the matter out--here is the doctor! He lifts his skull-cap, and
how beautiful is the gesture; his dignity is the dignity that only
goodness gives; and his goodness is a pure gift, existing independent
of formula, a thing in itself, like Manet's painting. It was Degas who
said, "A man whose profile no one ever saw," and the aphorism reminds
us of the beautiful goodness that floats over his face, a light from
Paradise. But why from Paradise? Paradise is an ugly ecclesiastical
invention, and angels are an ugly Hebrew invention. It is unpardonable
to think of angels in Auteuil; an angel is a prig compared to the dear
doctor, and an angel has wings. Well, so had this admirable chicken, a
bird that was grown for the use of the table, produced like a
vegetable. A dear bird that was never allowed to run about and weary
itself as our helpless English chicken is; it lived to get fat without
acquiring any useless knowledge or desire of life; it became a capon
in tender years, and then a pipe was introduced into its mouth and it
was fed by machinery until it could hardly walk, until it could only
stagger to its bed, and there it lay in happy digestion until the hour
came for it to be crammed again. So did it grow up without knowledge
or sensation or feeling of life, moving gradually, peacefully towards
its predestined end--a delicious repast! What better end, what greater
glory than to be a fat chicken? The carcasses of sheep that hang in
butchers' shops are beginning to horrify the conscience of Europe. To
cut a sheep's throat is an offensive act, but to clip out a bird's
tongue with a long pair of scissors made for the purpose is genteel.
It is true that it beats its wings for a few moments, but we must not
allow ourselves to be disturbed by a mere flutter of feathers. Man is
merciful, and saved it from life. It grew like an asparagus! And
talking of asparagus, here are some from Argenteuil thick as umbrellas
and so succulent! A word about the wine. French red wines in England
always seem to taste like ink, but in France they taste of the sun.
Melons are better in June--that one comes, no doubt, from Algeria. It
is, however, the kind I like best, the rich, red melon that one eats
only in France; a thing of the moment, unrememberable; but the chicken
will never be forgotten; twenty years hence I shall be talking of a
chicken, that in becoming a fat chicken acquired twenty years of
immortality--which of us will acquire as many?

As we rise from table the doctor calls me into his studio: for he
would give me an excellent cigar before he bids me good-bye, and
having lighted it I follow my friend to the studio at the end of the
garden, to that airy drawing-room which he has furnished in pale
yellow and dark blue. On the walls are examples of the great modern
masters--Manet and Monet. That view of a plain by Monet--is it not
facile? It flows like a Japanese water-colour: the low horizon
evaporating in the low light, the spire of the town visible in the
haze. And look at the celebrated "Leçon de Danse" by Degas--that
dancer descending the spiral staircase, only her legs are visible, the
staircase cutting the picture in twain. On the right is the dancing
class and the dancing master; something has gone wrong, and he holds
out his hands in entreaty; a group of dancers are seated on chairs in
the foreground, and their mothers are covering their shoulders with
shawls--good mothers anxious for their daughters' welfare, for their
advancement in life.

This picture betrays a mind curious, inquisitive and mordant; and that
plaid shawl is as unexpected as an adjective of Flaubert's. A portrait
by Manet hangs close by, large, permanent and mysterious as nature.
Degas is more intellectual, but how little is intellect compared with
a gift like Manet's! Yesterday I was in the Louvre, and when wearied
with examination and debate--I had gone there on a special errand--I
turned into the Salle Carrée for relaxation, and there wandered about,
waiting to be attracted. Long ago the Mona Liza was my adventure, and
I remember how Titian's "Entombment" enchanted me; another year I
delighted in the smooth impartiality of a Terbourg interior; but this
year Rembrandt's portrait of his wife held me at gaze. The face tells
of her woman's life, her woman's weakness, and she seems conscious of
the burden of her sex, and of the burden of her own special lot--she
is Rembrandt's wife, a servant, a satellite, a watcher. The emotion
that this picture awakens is an almost physical emotion. It gets at
you like music, like a sudden breath of perfume. When I approach, her
eyes fade into brown shadow, but when I withdraw they begin telling
her story. The mouth is no more than a little shadow, but what wistful
tenderness there is in it! and the colour of the face is white,
faintly tinted with bitumen, and in the cheeks some rose madder comes
through the yellow. She wears a fur jacket, but the fur was no trouble
to Rembrandt; he did not strive for realism. It is fur, that is
sufficient. Grey pearls hang in her ears, there is a brooch upon her
breast, and a hand at the bottom of the picture passing out of the
frame, and that hand reminds one, as the chin does, of the old story
that God took a little clay and made man out of it. That chin and that
hand and arm are moulded without display of knowledge, as Nature
moulds. The picture seems as if it had been breathed upon the canvas.
Did not a great poet once say that God breathed into Adam? and here it
is even so.

The other pictures seem dry, insignificant; the Mona Liza, celebrated
in literature, hanging a few feet away, seems factitious when compared
with this portrait; I have heard that tedious smile excused on the
ground that she is smiling at the nonsense she hears talked about her;
that hesitating smile which held my youth in tether has come to seem
but a grimace; and the pale mountains no more mysterious than a globe
or map seen from a little distance. The Mona Liza is a sort of riddle,
an acrostic, a poetical decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle
or ballade with double burden, a sestina, that is what it is like, a
sestina or chant royal. The Mona Liza, being literature in intention
rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets. We must forgive
her many mediocre verses for the sake of one incomparable prose
passage. She has passed out of that mysterious misuse of oil paint,
that arid glazing of _terre verte_, and has come into her
possession of eternal life, into the immortality of Pater's prose.
Degas is wilting already; year after year he will wither, until one
day some great prose writer will arise and transfer his spirit into
its proper medium--literature. The Mona Liza and the "Leçon de Danse"
are intellectual pictures; they were painted with the brains rather
than with the temperaments; and what is any intellect compared with a
gift like Manet's! Leonardo made roads; Degas makes witticisms.
Yesterday I heard one that delighted me far more than any road would,
for I have given up bicycling. Somebody was saying he did not like
Daumier, and Degas preserved silence for a long while. "If you were to
show Raphael," he said at last, "a Daumier, he would admire it, he
would take off his hat; but if you were to show him a Cabanel he would
say with a sigh 'That is my fault!'"

My reverie is broken by the piano; my friend is playing, and it is
pleasant to listen to music in this airy studio. But there are women I
must see, women whom I see every time I go to Paris, and too much time
has been spent in the studio--I must go.

But where shall I go? My thoughts strike through the little streets of
Passy, measuring the distance between Passy and the Arc de Triomphe.
For a moment I think that I might sit under the trees and watch the
people returning from the races. Were she not dead I might stop at her
little house in the fortifications among the lilac trees. There is her
portrait by Manet on the wall, the very toque she used to wear. How
wonderful the touch is; the beads--how well they are rendered! And
while thinking of the extraordinary handicraft I remember his studio,
and the tall fair woman like a tea-rose coming into it: Mary Laurant!
The daughter of a peasant, and the mistress of all the great
men--perhaps I should have said of all the distinguished men. I used
to call her _toute la lyre_.

The last time I saw her we talked about Manet. She said that every
year she took the first lilac to lay upon his grave. Is there one of
her many lovers who brings flowers to her grave? What was so
rememberable about her was her pleasure in life, and her desire to get
all the pleasure, and her consciousness of her desire to enjoy every
moment of her life. Evans, the great dentist, settled two thousand a
year upon her, and how angry he was one night on meeting Manet on the
staircase! In order to rid herself of her lover she invited him to
dinner, intending to plead a sick headache after dinner.... She must
go and lie down. But as soon as her guest was gone she took off the
_peignoir_ which hid her ball dress and signed to Manet, who was
waiting at the street corner, with her handkerchief. But as they went
downstairs together whom should they meet but the dentist _qui a
oublié ses carnets_. And he was so disappointed at meeting his
beautiful but deceitful mistress that he didn't visit her again for
three or four days. His anger mattered very little to Mary. Someone
else settled two thousand a year more upon her; and having four
thousand a year or thereabouts, she dedicated herself to the love and
conversation of those who wrote books and music and painted pictures.

We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the
imagination, at least the imagination stimulates the senses, acting as
a sort of adjuvant. The barmaid falls in love with No. 1 because he
wipes a glass better than No. 2, and Mary fell in love with Coppée on
account of his sonnet "Le Lys," and she grew indifferent when he wrote
poems like "La Nourrice" or "Le petit épicier de Montrouge qui cassait
le sucre avec mélancolie." And it was at this time when their love
story was at wane that I became a competitor. But one day Madame
Albazi came to Manet's studio, a splendid creature in a carriage drawn
by Russian horses from the Steppes, so she said; but who can tell
whether a horse comes from the Steppes or from the horse-dealers? Nor
does it matter when the lady is extraordinarily attractive, when she
inspires the thought--a mistress for Attila! That is not exactly how
Manet saw her: but she looks like that in his pastel. In it she holds
a tortoiseshell fan widespread across her bosom, and it was on one of
the sticks of the fan that he signed his name. A great painter always
knows where to sign his pictures, and he never signs twice in the same
place. The merit of these Russians is that they never leave one in
doubt. She could not sit that day, she was going to the Bois, and
asked me and a young man who happened to be in Manet's studio at the
time to go there with her, and we went there drawn by the Russian
horses, the young man and I wondering all the while which was going to
be the countess's lover; we played hard for her; but that day I was
wiser than he; I let him talk and recite poetry and jingle out all the
aphorisms that he had been collecting for years, feeling his
witticisms were in vain, for she was dark as a raven and I was as gold
as a sunflower. It was at the corner of the Rue Pontière that we got
rid of him. Some days afterwards she sat to Manet. The pastel now
hangs in the room of a friend of mine; I bought it for him.

The picture of a woman one knows is never so agreeable a companion as
the picture of a woman one has never seen. One's memory and the
painter's vision are in conflict, and I like to think better of the
long delicate nose, and the sparkling eyes, and a mouth like red
fruit. The pastel once belonged to me; it used to hang in my rooms;
for with that grace of mind which never left him, Manet said one day,
"I always promised you a picture," and searching among the pastels
that lined the wall he turned to me saying, "Now I think that this
comes to you by right." When I left Paris hurriedly, and left my
things to be sold, the countess came to the sale and bought her
picture, and then she sold it years afterwards to a picture-dealer,
tempted by the price that Manet's pictures were fetching. Hearing that
it was for sale, I bought it, as I have said, for a friend. And now I
have told the whole story, forgetting nothing except that it was years
afterwards, when I had written "Les Confessions d'un jeune Anglais" in
the _Revue Indépendante_, that Mary Laurant asked me--oh! she was
very enterprising; she sent the editor of the _Revue_ to me; an
appointment was made. She was wonderful in the garden. She said the
moment I arrived, "Now, my dear ----, you must go," and we walked
about, I listening to her aphorisms. Mary was beautiful, but she liked
one to love her for her wit, to admire her wit; and when I asked her
why she did not leave Evans, the great dentist, she said, "That would
be a base thing to do. I content myself by deceiving him," and
then--this confidence seemed to have a particular significance--"I am
not a woman," she said, "that is made love to in a garden." Her garden
was a nook at the fortifications, hidden among lilac bushes. She
wished to show me her house, and we talked for a long time in her
boudoir. But I knew she was Mallarmé's mistress at the time, so
nothing came of this _caprice littéraire_.

My thoughts run upon women, and why not? On what would you have them
run? on copper mines? Woman is the legitimate subject of all men's
thoughts. We pretend to be interested in other things. In the
smoking-rooms I have listened to men talking about hunting, and I have
said to myself, "Your interest is a pretence: of what woman are you
thinking?" We forget women for a little while when we are thinking
about art, but only for a while. The legitimate occupation of man's
mind is woman; and listening to my friend who is playing music--music
I do not care to hear, Brahms--I fall to thinking which of the women I
have known in years past would interest me most to visit.

In the spring weather the walk from Passy to the Champs Elysées would
be pleasant and not too far; I like to see the swards and the poplars
and the villas, the tall iron railings, and the flower vases hidden in
bouquets of trees. These things are Paris; the mind of the country,
that mind which comes out of a long past, and which may be defined as
a sort of ancestral beauty and energy is manifested everywhere in
Paris; and a more beautiful day for seeing the tall, white houses and
the villas and the trees and the swards can hardly be imagined. I
should be interested in all these things, but my real interest would
be in one little hillside, a line of houses, eight or nine, close by
the Arc de Triomphe, the most ordinary in the avenue. She liked the
ordinary, and I have often wondered what was the link of association?
Was it no more than her blonde hair drawn up from the neck, her
fragrant skin, or her perverse subtle senses? It was something more,
but you must not ask me to explain further. I like to remember the
rustle of a flowered dress she wore as she moved, drifting like a
perfume, passing from her frivolous bedroom into the drawing-room. A
room without taste, stiff and middle-class, notwithstanding the crowns
placed over the tall portraits. I see a picture of two children; but
she is the fairer, and in her pale eyes and thinly-curved lips there
is a mixture of yearning and restlessness. As the child was, so is the
woman, and Georgette has lived to paper one entire wall of her bedroom
with trophies won in the battlefields of ardently danced cotillons.
The other child is of a stricter nature, and even in the picture her
slightly darkened ringlets are less wanton than her sister's. Her eyes
are more pensive, and any one could have predicted children for one
and cotillon favours for the other.

We often sat on her bedroom balcony reading, talking, or watching the
sky growing pale beyond Mount Valerian, the shadow drifting and
defining and shaping the hill. In hours like the present, dreaming in
a studio, we remember those who deceived us, those who made us suffer,
and in these hours faces, fragments of faces, rise out of a past, the
line of a bent neck, the whiteness of a hand, and the eyes. I remember
her eyes; one day in an orchard, in the lush and luxuriance of June,
her husband was walking in front with a friend, and I was pleading.
"Well," she said, raising her eyes, "you can kiss me now." But her
husband was in front, and he was a thick-set man, and there was a
stream, and I foresaw a struggle--and an unpleasant one: confess and
be done with it!--I didn't dare to kiss her, and I don't think she
ever forgave me that lack of courage. All this is twenty years ago,
and is it not silly to spend the afternoon thinking of such rubbish?
But it is of such rubbish that our lives are made. Shall I go to her
now and see her in her decadence? Grey hair has not begun to appear
yet in the blonde, it will never turn grey, but she was shrivelling a
little the last time I saw her. And next year she will be older. At
her age a year counts for double. Others are more worthy of a visit.
If I do not go to her this year, shall I go next?

In imagination I go past her house, thinking of a man she used to talk
about, "the man she left her 'ome for"; that is how the London street
girl would word it. He had been the centre of a disgraceful scandal in
his old age, a sordid but characteristic end for the Don Juan of the
nineteenth century. Perhaps she loved the big, bearded man whose
photograph she had once shown me. He killed himself for not having
enough money to live as he wished to live. That was her explanation. I
think there was some blackmail; she had to pay some money to the dead
man's relations for letters. These sensual American women are like
orchids, and who would hesitate between an orchid and a rose? It was
twenty years ago since she turned round on me in the gloom of her
brougham unexpectedly, and it was as if some sensual spirit had come
out of a world of perfume and lace.

       *       *       *       *       *

In imagination I have descended the Champs Elysées, and have crossed
the Place de la Concorde, and the Seine is flowing past just as it
flowed when the workmen were building Notre Dame, just as it will flow
a thousand years hence. A thousand years hence men will stand watching
its current, thinking of little blonde women, and the shudder they can
send through the flesh; they can, but not twenty years afterwards. The
Reverend Donne has it that certain ghosts do not raise the hair but
the flesh; mine do no more than to set me thinking that rivers were
not created to bear ships to the sea, but to set our memories flowing.
Full many a time have I crossed the Pont Neuf on my way to see another
woman--an American! The time comes when desire wilts and dies, but the
sexual interest never dies, and we take pleasure in thinking in middle
life of those we enjoyed in youth. She, of whom I am thinking, lives
far away in the Latin Quarter, in an ill-paven street. How it used to
throw my carriage from side to side! I have been there so often that I
know all the shops, and where the shops end, and there is a
whitewashed wall opposite her house; the street bends there. The
_concierge_ is the same, a little thicker, a little heavier; she
always used to have a baby in her arms, now there are no more babies;
her children, I suppose, have grown up and have gone away. There used
to be a darkness at the foot of the stairs, and I used to slip on
those stairs, so great was my haste; the very tinkle of the bell I
remember, and the trepidation with which I waited.

Her rooms looked as if they had never been sat in; even the studio was
formal, and the richly-bound volumes on the tables looked as if they
had never been opened. She only kept one servant, a little, redheaded
girl, and seeing this girl back again after an absence of many years,
I spoke to Lizzie of the old days. Lizzie told me her servant's story.
She had gone away to be married, and after ten years of misfortune she
had returned to her old mistress, this demure, discreet and sly New
Englander, who concealed a fierce sensuality under a homely
appearance. Lizzie must have had many lovers, but I knew nothing of
her except her sensuality, for she had to let me into that secret.

She was a religious woman, a devout Protestant, and thinking of her my
thoughts are carried across the sea, and I am in the National Gallery
looking at Van Eyke's picture, studying the grave sensuality of the
man's face--he speaks with uplifted hand like one in a pulpit, and the
gesture and expression tell us as plainly as if we heard him that he
is admonishing his wife (he is given to admonition), informing her
that her condition--her new pregnancy--is an act of the Divine Will.
She listens, but how curiously! with a sort of partial comprehension
afloat upon her face, more of the guinea-pig than of the rabbit type.
The twain are sharply differentiated, and one of the objects of the
painter seems to have been to show us how far one human being may be
removed from another. The husband is painfully clear to himself, the
wife is happily unconscious of herself. Now everything in the picture
suggests order; the man's face tells a mind the same from day to day,
from year to year, the same passions, the same prayers; his apparel,
the wide-brimmed hat, the cloak falling in long straight folds, the
peaked shoon, are an habitual part of him. We see little of the room,
but every one remembers the chandelier hanging from the ceiling
reflected in the mirror opposite. These reflections have lasted for
three hundred years; they are the same to-day as the day they were
painted, and so is the man; he lives again, he is a type that Nature
never wearies of reproducing, for I suppose he is essential to life.
This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost
as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill,
a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood
waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its
appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the
tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung
about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage
there were oak chests, and you can imagine, reader, this woman waiting
for me by an oak table, a little ashamed of her thoughts, but unable
to overcome them. Once I heard her playing the piano, and it struck me
as an affectation. As I let my thoughts run back things forgotten
emerge; here comes one of her gowns! a dark-green gown, the very same
olive green as the man's cloak. She wore her hair short like a boy's,
and though it ran all over her head in little curls, it did not
detract at all from the New England type, the woman in whose speech
Biblical phraseology still lingers. Lizzie was a miraculous survival
of the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic in the _Mayflower_ and
settled in New England. Paris had not changed her. She was _le grave
Puritan du tableau_. The reader will notice that I write _le
grave Puritan_, for of his submissive, childlike wife there was
nothing in Lizzie except her sex. As her instinct was in conflict with
her ideals, her manner was studied, and she affected a certain
cheerfulness which she dared not allow to subside. She never
relinquished her soul, never fell into confidence, so in a sense we
always remained strangers, for it is when lovers tell their illusions
and lonelinesses that they know each other, the fiercest spasm tells
us little, and it is forgotten, whereas the moment when a woman sighs
and breaks into a simple confidence is remembered years afterwards,
and brings her before us though she be underground or a thousand miles
away. These intimacies she had not, but there was something true and
real in her, something which I cannot find words to express to-day;
she was a clever woman, that was it, and that is why I pay her the
homage of an annual visit. These courteous visits began twenty years
ago; they are not always pleasant, yet I endure them. Our conversation
is often laboured, there are awkward and painful pauses, and during
these pauses we sit looking at each other, thinking no doubt of the
changes that time has wrought. One of her chief charms was her
figure--one of the prettiest I have ever seen--and she still retains a
good deal of its grace. But she shows her age in her hands; they have
thickened at the joints, and they were such beautiful hands. Last year
she spoke of herself as an old woman, and the remark seemed to me
disgraceful and useless, for no man cares to hear a woman whom he has
loved call herself old; why call attention to one's age, especially
when one does not look it? and last year she looked astonishingly
young for fifty-five; that was her age, she said. She asked me my age;
the question was unpleasant, and before I was aware of it I had told
her a lie, and I hate those who force me to tell lies. The interview
grew painful, and to bring it to a close she asked me if I would care
to see her husband.

We found the old man alone in his studio, looking at an engraving
under the light of the lamp, much more like a picture than any of his
paintings. She asked him if he remembered me, and he got up muttering
something, and to help him I mentioned that I had been one of his
pupils. The dear old man said of course he remembered, and that he
would like to show me his pictures, but Lizzie said--I suppose it was
nervousness that made her say it, but it was a strangely tactless
remark--"I don't think, dear, that Mr. ---- cares for your pictures."
However celebrated one may be, it is always mortifying to hear that
some one, however humble the person may be, does not care for one's
art. But I saved the situation, and I think my remarks were judicious
and witty. It is not always that one thinks of the right words at the
right moment, but it would be hard to improve on the admonition that
she did me a wrong, that, like every one who liked art, I had changed
my opinion many times, but after many wanderings had come back to the
truth, and in order to deceive the old man I spoke of Ingres. I had
never failed in that love, and how could I love Ingres without loving
him? The contrary was the truth, but the old man's answer was very
sweet. Forgetful of his own high position, he answered, "We may both
like Ingres, but it is not probable that we like the same Ingres." I
said I did not know any Ingres I did not admire, and asked him which
he admired, and we had a pleasant conversation about the Apotheosis of
Homer, and the pictures in the Musée de Montauban. Then the old man
said, "I must show Mr. ---- my pictures." No doubt he had been
thinking of them all through the conversation about the Musée de
Montauban. "I must show you my Virgin," and he explained that the face
of the Infant Jesus was not yet finished.

It was wonderful to see this old man, who must have been nearly
eighty, taking the same interest in his pictures as he took fifty
years ago. Some stupid reader will think, perchance, that it mattered
that I had once loved his wife. But how could such a thing matter?
Think for a moment, dear reader, for all readers are dear, even the
stupidest, and you will see that you are still entangled in
conventions and prejudices. Perhaps, dear reader, you think she and I
should have dropped on our knees and confessed. Had we done so, he
would have thought us two rude people, and nothing more.

What will happen to her when he dies? Will she return to Boston? Shall
I ever see her again? Last year I vowed that I would not, and I think
it would please her as well if I stayed away.... And she is right, for
so long as I am not by her she is with me. But in the same room, amid
the familiar furniture, we are divided by the insuperable past, and to
retain her I must send her away. The idea is an amusing one; I think I
have read it somewhere, it seems to me like something I have read. Did
I ever read of a man who sent his mistress away so that his possession
might be more complete? Whether I did or didn't matters little, the
idea is true to me to-day--in order to possess her I must never see
her again. A pretty adventure it would be, nevertheless, to spend a
week paying visits to those whom I loved about that time; and I can
imagine a sort of Beau Brummel of the emotions going every year to
Paris to spend a day with each of his mistresses.

There were others about that time. There was Madame ----. The name is
in itself beautiful, characteristically French, and it takes me back
to the middle centuries, to the middle of France. I always imagined
that tall woman, who thought so quickly and spoke so sincerely,
dealing out her soul rapidly, as one might cards, must have been born
near Tours. She was so French that she must have come from the very
heart of France; she was French as the wine of France; as Balzac, who
also came from Tours; and her voice, and her thoughts, and her words
transported one; by her side one was really in France; and, as her
lover, one lived through every circumstance of a French love story.
She lived in what is called in Paris an hotel; it had its own
_concierge_, and it was nice to hear the man say, "Oui, monsieur,
Madame la Marquise est chez elle," to walk across a courtyard and wait
in a boudoir stretched with blue silk, to sit under a Louis XVI. rock
crystal chandelier. She said one day, "I'm afraid you're thinking of
me a great deal," and she leaned her hands on the back of the chair,
making it easy for me to take them. She said her hands had not done
any kitchen work for five hundred years, and at the time that seemed a
very witty thing to say. The drawing-room opened onto a conservatory
twenty feet high; it nearly filled the garden, and the marquise used
to receive her visitors there. I do not remember who was the
marquise's lover when the last fête was given, nor what play was
acted; only that the ordinary guests lingered over their light
refreshments, scenting the supper, and that to get rid of them we had
to bid the marquise ostentatiously goodnight. Creeping round by the
back of the house, we gained the bedrooms by the servants' staircase,
and hid there until the ordinary guests in decency could delay no
longer. As soon as the last one was gone the stage was removed, and
the supper tables were laid out. Shall I ever forget the moment when
the glass roof of the conservatory began to turn blue, and the
shrilling of awakening sparrows! How haggard we all were, but we
remained till eight in the morning. That fête was paid for with the
last remnant of the poor marquise's fortune. Afterwards she was very
poor, and Suzanne, her daughter, went on the stage and discovered a
certain talent for acting which has been her fortune to this day. I
will go to the Vaudeville to-night to see her; we might arrange to go
together to see her mother's grave. To visit the grave, and to strew
azaleas upon it, would be a pretty piece of sentimental mockery. But
for my adventure there should be seven visits; Madame ---- would make
a fourth; I hear that she is losing her sight, and lives in a chateau
about fifty miles from Paris, a chateau built in the time of Louis
XIII., with high-pitched roofs and many shutters, and formal gardens
with balustrades and fish-ponds, yes _et des charmilles--charmilles_--what
is that in English?--avenues of clipped limes. To walk in an avenue
of clipped limes with a woman who is nearly blind, and talk to her of the
past, would be indeed an adventure far "beyond the range of formal man's
emotion."

Madame ---- interrupted our love story. She would be another--that
would be five--and I shall think of two more during dinner. But now I
must be moving on; the day has ended; Paris is defining itself upon a
straw-coloured sky. I must go, the day is done; and hearing the last
notes trickle out--somebody has been playing the prelude to
"Tristan"--I say: "Another pretty day passed, a day of meditation on
art and women--and what else is there to meditate about? To-morrow
will happily be the same as to-day, and to-morrow I shall again
meditate on art and women, and the day after I shall be occupied with
what I once heard dear old M'Cormac, Bishop of Galway, describe in his
sermon as 'the degrading passion of "loave."'"




CHAPTER VII

NINON'S TABLE D'HÔTE


The day dies in sultry languor. A warm night breathes upon the town,
and in the exhaustion of light and hush of sound, life strikes sharply
on the ear and brain.

It was early in the evening when I returned home, and, sitting in the
window, I read till surprised by the dusk; and when my eyes could no
longer follow the printed page, holding the book between finger and
thumb, my face resting on the other hand, I looked out on the garden,
allowing my heart to fill with dreams. The book that had interested me
dealt with the complex technique of the art of the Low Countries--a
book written by a painter. It has awakened in me memories of all
kinds, heartrending struggles, youthful passion, bitter
disappointments; it has called into mind a multitude of thoughts and
things, and, wearied with admiring many pictures and arguing with
myself, I am now glad to exchange my book for the gentle
hallucinations of the twilight.

I see a line of leafage drawn across the Thames, but the line dips,
revealing a slip of grey water with no gleam upon it. Warehouses and a
factory chimney rise ghostly and grey, and so cold is that grey tint
that it might be obtained with black and white; hardly is the warmth
of umber needed. Behind the warehouses and the factory chimney the sky
is murky and motionless, but higher up it is creamy white, and there
is some cloud movement. Four lamps, two on either side of the factory
chimney, look across the river; one constantly goes out--always the
same lamp--and a moment after it springs into its place again. Across
my window a beautiful branch waves like a feather fan. It is the only
part of the picture worked out in detail. I watch its soft and almost
imperceptible swaying, and am tempted to count the leaves. Below it,
and a little beyond it, between it and the river, night gathers in the
gardens; and there, amid serious greens, passes the black stain of a
man's coat, and, in a line with the coat, in the beautifully swaying
branch, a belated sparrow is hopping from twig to twig, awakening his
mates in search for a satisfactory resting-place. In the sharp towers
of Temple Gardens the pigeons have gone to sleep. I can see the cots
under the conical caps of slate.

The gross, jaded, uncouth present has slipped from me as a garment
might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and
heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent
curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures
from the past come and go without an effort of will; many are habitual
memories, but the one before me rises for the first time--for fifteen
years it has lain submerged, and now like a water weed or flower it
rises--the Countess Ninon de Calvador's boudoir! Her boudoir or her
drawing-room, be that as it may, the room into which I was ushered
many years ago when I went to see her. I was then a young man, very
thin, with sloping shoulders, and that pale gold hair that Manet
used to like to paint. I had come with a great bouquet for Ninon,
for it was _son jour de fête_, and was surprised and somewhat
disappointed to meet a large brunette with many creases in her neck, a
loose and unstayed bosom; one could hardly imagine Ninon dressed
otherwise than in a _peignoir_--a blue _peignoir_ seemed inevitable.
She was sitting by a dark, broad-shouldered young man when I came
in; they were sitting close together; he rose out of a corner and
showed me an impressionistic picture of a railway station. He was
one of the many young men who at that time thought the substitution of
dots of pink and yellow for the grey and slate and square brushwork of
Bastien Lepage was the certain way to paint well. I learned
afterwards, during the course of the evening, that he was looked at
askance, for even in Montmartre it was regarded as a dishonour to
allow the lady with whom you lived to pay for your dinner. Villiers de
L'Isle Adam, who had once been Ninon's lover, answered the reproaches
levelled against him for having accepted too largely of her
hospitality with, "Que de bruit pour quelques côtelettes!" and his
transgressions were forgiven him for the sake of the _mot_ which
seemed to summarise the moral endeavour and difficulties of the entire
quarter. When Villiers was her lover Villiers was middle-aged, and
Ninon was a young woman; but when I knew her she was interested in the
young generation, yet she kept friends with all her old lovers, never
denying them her board. How funny was the impressionist's indignation
against Villiers! He charged him with having squandered a great part
of Ninon's fortune, but Villiers's answer to the young man was, "He
talks like the _concierge_ in my story of 'Les Demoiselles de
Bienfillatre.'"

Poor Villiers was not much to blame; it was part of Ninon's
temperament to waste her money, and the canvases round the room
testified that she spent a great deal on modern art. She certainly had
been a rich woman; rumour credited her with spending fifty thousand
francs a year, and in her case rumour said no more than the truth, for
it would require that at least to live as she lived, keeping open
house to all the literature, music, painting, and sculpture done in
Montmartre. At first sight her hospitality seems unreasonable, but
when one thinks one sees that it conforms to the rules of all
hospitality. There must be a principle of selection, and were the
_ratés_ she entertained less amusing than the people one meets in
Grosvenor Square or the Champs Elysées? Any friend could introduce
another, that is common practice, but at Ninon's there was a
restriction which I never met elsewhere--no friend could bring another
unless the newcomer was a _raté_--in other words, unless he had
written music or verse, or painted or carved, in a way that did not
appeal to the taste of the ordinary public; inability to reach the
taste of the general public was the criterion that obtained there.

The windows of Ninon's boudoir opened upon the garden, and on my
expressing surprise at its size and at the large trees that grew
there, she gave me permission to admire and investigate; and I walked
about the pond, interested in the numerous ducks, in the cats, in the
companies of macaws and cockatoos that climbed down from their perches
and strutted across the swards. I came upon a badger and her brood,
and at my approach they disappeared into an enormous excavation, and
behind the summer-house I happened upon a bear asleep and retreated
hurriedly. But on going towards the house I heard a well-known voice.
"That is Augusta Holmes singing her opera," I said; "she sings all the
different parts--soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass." At this time we
were all talking about her, and I stood by the window listening until
suddenly a well-known smell interrupted her. It was Ninon's cat that
had misconducted herself. A window was thrown open, but the
ventilation did not prove sufficient. Augusta and her admirers had to
leave the piano, and they came from the house glad to breathe the
evening air. How dear to me are flowered gowns and evening skies and
women with scarfs about their shoulders. Ah! what a beautiful evening
it was! And how well do I remember the poet comparing the darkening
sky to a blue veil with the moon like a gold beetle upon it. One of
the women had brought a guitar with her, and again Augusta's voice
streamed up through the stillness, till, compelled by the beauty of
the singing, we drew nearer; as the composer sang her songs attitudes
grew more abandoned, and hands fell pensively. Among the half-seen
faces I caught sight of a woman of exceeding fairness; her hair had
only a faint tinge of gold in it; and Ninon remembered that she was a
cousin of hers, one whom she had not seen for many years. How Clare
had discovered her in the Rue la Moine she could not tell. It was
whispered that she was the wife of a rich _commerçant_ at Tours.
This added to the mystery, and later in the evening the lady told me
she had never been in artistic society before, and begged me to point
out to her the celebrities present, and to tell her why they were
celebrated.

"Who is he--that one slouching towards the pond, that one wearing grey
trousers and a black jacket?--oh!"

My companion's exclamation was caused by a new sight of Verlaine; at
that moment he had lifted off his hat (the evening was still warm),
and the great bald skull, hanging like a cliff over the shaggy
eyebrows, shaggy as furze bushes, frightened her. The poet continued
his walk round the pond, and, turning suddenly towards us, he stopped
to speak to me. I was but a pretext; he clearly wished to speak to my
companion. But how strangely did he suit his conversation to her, yet
how characteristic of his genius were the words I heard as I turned
away, thinking to leave them together--"If I were in love with a young
girl or with a young man?" My companion ran forward quickly and seized
my arm. "You must not leave me with him," she said. On account of his
genius Verlaine was a little slow to see things outside of
himself--all that was within him was clear, all without him obscure;
so we had some difficulty in getting rid of him, and as soon as he was
out of hearing my companion inquired eagerly who he was, and I was
astonished at the perception she showed. "Is he a priest? I mean, was
he ever a priest?" "A sort of cross between a thieves' kitchen and a
presbytery. He is the poet Verlaine. The singer of the sweetest verses
in the French language--a sort of ambling song like a robin's. You
have heard the robin singing on a coral hedge in autumn-tide; the
robin confesses his little soul from the topmost twig; his song is but
a tracery of his soul, and so is Verlaine's. His gift is a vision of
his own soul, and he makes a tracery as you might of a drawing with a
lead pencil, never troubling himself to inquire if what he traces is
good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but
society's point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and
also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times,
at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that
Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of
Gilles de Rais,--there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist
painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on
his forehead--Huysmans somewhere in his description of the trial of
the fifteenth-century monster, the prototype, so it is said, of the
nursery tale of Blue Beard, speaks of the white soul of the Middle
Ages; he must have had Verlaine on his mind, for Verlaine has spoken
of himself as a mediaeval Catholic, that is to say a Catholic in whom
sinning and repentance alternates regularly as night and day. Verlaine
has not cut the throats of so many little boys as Gilles de Rais, but
Gilles de Rais always declared himself to be a good Catholic. Verlaine
abandons himself to the Church as a child to a fairy tale; he does
trouble to argue whether the Conception of the Virgin was Immaculate;
the mediaeval sculptors have represented her attired very prettily in
cloaks with long folds, they have put graceful crowns upon her head,
and Verlaine likes these things; they inspire him to write, he feels
that belief in the Church is part of himself, and his poetical genius
is to tell his own story; he is one of the great soul-tellers. From a
literary point of view there is a good deal to be said in favour of
faith when it is not joined with practice; acceptation of dogma
shields one from controversy; it allows Verlaine to concentrate
himself entirely upon things; it weans him away from ideas--the curse
of modern literature--and makes him a sort of divine vagrant living
his life in the tavern and in the hospital. It is only those who have
freed themselves from all prejudice that get close to life, who get
the real taste of life--the aroma as from a wine that has been many
years in bottle. And Verlaine is aware that this is so. Sometimes he
thinks he might have written a little more poetry, and he sighs, but
he quickly recovers. 'After all, I have written a good many volumes.'
'And what would art be without life, without love?' He has a verse on
that subject; I wish I could remember it for you. His verse is always
so winsome, so delicate, slender as the birch tree, elegiac like it; a
birch bending over a lake's edge reminds me of Verlaine. He is a lake
poet, but the lake is in a suburb not far from a casino. What makes me
speak about the lake is that for a long time I thought these verses,

  Ton âme est un lac d'amour
  Dont mes pensêes sont les cygnes.
  Vois comme ils font le tour....

were Verlaine's, but they are much less original; their beauty, for
they are beautiful, is conventional; numbers of poets might have
written them, whereas nobody but Verlaine could have written any of
his, really his own, poetry. His desires go sometimes as high as the
crucifix; very often they are in the gutter, hardly poetry at all,
having hardly any beauty except that of truth, and of course the
beauty of a versification that haunts in his ear, for he hears a song
in French verse that no French poet has ever heard before, and a song
so fluent, ranging from the ecstasy of the nightingale to the robin's
little homily.

  Oui, c'était par un soir joyeux de cabaret,
  Un de ces soirs plutôt trop chauds où l'on dirait
  Que le gaz du plafond conspire à notre perte
  Avec le vin du zinc, saveur naïve et verte.
  On s'amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et on
  Entendait des soupirs voisins d'accordéon
  Que ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence.
  Quand la porte s'ouvrit de la salle de danse
  Vomissant tout un flot dont toi, vers où j'étais,
  Et de ta voix fait que soudain je me tais,
  S'il te plaît de me donner un ordre péremptoire.
  Tu t'écrias 'Dieu, qu'il fait chaud! Patron, à boire!'

"She was from Picardy; and he tells of her horrible accent, and in
elegy number five he continues the confession, telling how his well
beloved used to get drunk.

 "Tu fis le saut de ... Seine et, depuis morte-vive,
  Tu gardes le vertige et le goût du néant."

"But how can a man confess such things?" my companion asked me, and we
stood looking at each other in the midst of the gardens until an ape,
cattling prettily, ran towards me and jumped into my arms, and looking
at the curious little wizened face, the long arms covered with hair, I
said:

"Verlaine has an extraordinary power of expression, and to be ashamed
of nothing; but to be ashamed is his genius, just as it was Manet's.
It is to his shamelessness that we owe his most beautiful poems, all
written in garrets, in taverns, in hospitals--yes, and in prison."

"In prison! But he didn't steal, did he?" and the _commerçant's_
wife looked at me with a frightened air, and I think her hand went
towards her pocket.

"No, no; a mere love story, a dispute with Rambaud in some haunt of
vice, a knife flashed, Rambaud was stabbed, and Verlaine spent three
years in prison. As for Rambaud, it was said that he repented and
renounced love, entered a monastery, and was digging the soil
somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea for the grace of God. But these
hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will
not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a
caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with
these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine
preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he
drags on, living in thieves' quarters, getting drunk, writing
beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and falling
in love with drabs."

  Dans ces femmes d'ailleurs je n'ai pas trouvé l'ange
  Qu'il eût fallu pour remplacer ce diable, toi!
  L'une, fille du Nord, native d'un Crotoy,
  Etait rousse, mal grasse et de prestance molle;
  Elle ne m'adressa guère qu'une parole
  Et c'était d'un petit cadeau qu'il s'agissait,
  En revanche, dans son accent d'ail et de poivre,
  Une troisième, recemment chanteuse au Havre,
  Affectait de dandinement des matelots
  Et m'... enguelait comme un gabier tancant les flots,
  Mais portrait beau vraiment, sacrédié, quel dommage
  La quatrième était sage comme une image,
  Châtain clair, peu de gorge et priait Dieu parfois:
  Le diantre soit de ses sacrés signes de croix!
  Les seize autres, autant du moins que ma mémoire
  Surnage en ce vortex, contaient toutes l'histoire
  Connue, un amant chic, puis des vieux, puis "l'îlot"
  Tantôt bien, tantôt moins, le clair café falot
  Les terasses l'été, l'hiver les brasseries
  Et par degrés l'humble trottoir en théories
  En attendant les bons messieurs compatissants
  Capabl

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