Appreciations, with an Essay on Style Part 11

"My child," he said to her one day, taking the hand which she abandoned to him, "I have just been scolding old Victoire. She is losing her head. In spite of the repeated a.s.surances of the doctors, she is alarmed at seeing you a little worse than usual to-day, and has had the Cure sent for. Do you wish to see him?"

"Pray let me see him!"

[234] She sighed heavily, and fixed upon her husband her large blue eyes, full of anguish--an anguish so sharp and so singular that he felt frozen to the marrow.

He could not help saying with deep emotion, "Do you love me no longer, Aliette?"

"For ever!" murmured the poor child.

He leaned over her with a long kiss upon the forehead. She saw tears stealing from the eyes of her husband, and seemed as if surprised.

Soon afterwards Aliette is dead, to the profound sorrow of Bernard.

Less than two years later he has become the husband of Mademoiselle Tallevaut. It was about two years after his marriage with Sabine that Bernard resumed the journal with which we began. In the pages which he now adds he seems at first unchanged. How then as to that story of M.

de Rance, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head of his dead mistress; an incident which the reader of La Morte will surely have taken as a "presentiment"? Aliette had so taken it. "A head so charming as yours," Bernard had a.s.sured her tenderly, "does not need to be dead that it may work miracles!"--How, in the few pages that remain, will M. Feuillet justify that, and certain other delicate touches of presentiment, and at the same time justify the t.i.tle of his book?

The journal is recommenced in February. On the twentieth of April Bernard writes, at Valmoutiers:

Under pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come to pa.s.s a week at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air. By my orders they have kept Aliette's room under lock and key since [235] the day when she left it in her coffin. To-day I re-entered it for the first time.

There was a vague odour of her favourite perfumes. My poor Aliette!

why was I unable, as you so ardently desired, to share your gentle creed, and a.s.sociate myself to the life of your dreams, the life of honesty and peace? Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems to me like paradise. What a terrible scene it was, here in this room!

What a memory! I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a look almost of terror! and how quickly she died! I have taken the room for my own. But I shall not remain here long. I intend to go for a few days to Varaville. I want to see my little girl: her dear angel's face.

VALMOUTIERS, April 22.--What a change there has been in the world since my childhood: since my youth even! what a surprising change in so short a period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing! Then we were, as it were, impregnated with the thought of G.o.d--a just G.o.d, but benevolent and fatherlike. We really lived under His eyes, as under the eyes of a parent, with respect and fear, but with confidence. We felt sustained by His invisible but undoubted presence. We spoke to Him, and it seemed that He answered. And now we feel ourselves alone--as it were abandoned in the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard, savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle for existence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements, let loose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, with no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above us, in place of the good G.o.d of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse than nothing--a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares nothing at all about us.

The aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter, is lately dead. Bernard proposes to take the child away with him to Paris. The child's old nurse objects. On April the twenty-seventh, Bernard writes:

For a moment--for a few moments--in that room where I have been shutting myself up with the shadow of my poor [236] dead one, a horrible thought had come to me. I had driven it away as an insane fancy. But now, yes! it is becoming a reality. Shall I write this?

Yes! I will write it. It is my duty to do so; for from this moment the journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart, is but my last will and testament. If I should disappear from the world, the secret must not die with me. It must be bequeathed to the natural protectors of my child. Her interests, if not her life, are concerned therein.

Here, then, is what pa.s.sed: I had not arrived in time to render my last duty to Madame de Courteheuse. The family was already dispersed. I found here only Aliette's brother. To him I communicated my plan concerning the child, and he could but approve. My intention was to bring away with Jeanne her nurse Victoire, who had brought her up, as she brought up her mother. But she is old, and in feeble health, and I feared some difficulties on her part; the more as her att.i.tude towards myself since the death of my first wife has been marked by an ill grace approaching to hostility. I took her aside while Jeanne was playing in the garden.

"My good Victoire," I said, "while Madame de Courteheuse was living, I considered it a duty to leave her granddaughter in her keeping.

Besides, no one was better fitted to watch over her education. At present my duty is to watch over it myself. I propose therefore to take Jeanne with me to Paris; and I hope that you may be willing to accompany her, and remain in her service." When she understood my intention, the old woman, in whose hands I had noticed a faint trembling, became suddenly very pale. She fixed her firm, grey eyes upon me: "Monsieur le Comte will not do that!"

"Pardon me, my good Victoire, that I shall do. I appreciate your good qualities of fidelity and devotion. I shall be very grateful if you will continue to take care of my daughter, as you have done so excellently. But for the rest, I intend to be the only master in my own house, and the only master of my child." She laid a hand upon my arm: "I implore you, Monsieur, don't do this!" Her fixed look did not leave my face, and seemed to be questioning me to the very bottom of my soul. "I have never believed it," she murmured, "No! I [237] never could believe it. But if you take the child away I shall."

"Believe what, wretched woman? believe what?"

Her voice sank lower still. "Believe that you knew how her mother came by her death; and that you mean the daughter to die as she did."

"Die as her mother did?"

"Yes! by the same hand!"

The sweat came on my forehead. I felt as it were a breathing of death upon me. But still I thrust away from me that terrible light on things.

"Victoire!" I said, "take care! You are no fool: you are something worse. Your hatred of the woman who has taken the place of my first wife--your blind hatred--has suggested to you odious, nay! criminal words."

"Ah! Ah! Monsieur", she cried with wild energy. "After what I have just told you, take your daughter to live with that woman if you dare."

I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses. Then, returning to the old woman, "Yet how can I believe you?" I asked. "If you had had the shadow of a proof of what you give me to understand, how could you have kept silence so long? How could you have allowed me to contract that hateful marriage?"

She seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler. "Monsieur, it is because Madame, before she went to G.o.d, made me take oath on the crucifix to keep that secret for ever."

"Yet not with me, in fact,--not with me!" And I, in turn, questioned her; my eyes upon hers. She hesitated: then stammered out, "True! not with you! because she believed, poor little soul! that..."

"What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice? Tell me!" Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. "Is it possible, my G.o.d, is it possible? But come, sit by me here, and tell me all you know, all you saw. At what time was it you noticed anything--the precise moment?" For in truth she had been suffering for a long time past.

Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's [238] crime--we must pardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary world M. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of fully knowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised her in the very act, and did not credit her explanation. "When I surprised her,"

she goes on:

"It may already have been too late--be sure it was not the first time she had been guilty--my first thought was to give you information. But I had not the courage. Then I told Madame. I thought I saw plainly that I had nothing to tell she was not already aware of. Nevertheless she chided me almost harshly. 'You know very well,' she said, 'that my husband is always there when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. So that he too would be guilty. Rather than believe that, I would accept death at his hands a hundred times over!' And I remember, Monsieur, how at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from the little boudoir, and brought her a gla.s.s of valerian. She cast on me a terrible look and drank. A few minutes afterwards she was so ill that she thought the end was come. She begged me to give her her crucifix, and made me swear never to utter a word concerning our suspicions. It was then I sent for the priest. I have told you, Monsieur, what I know; what I have seen with my own eyes. I swear that I have said nothing but what is absolutely true." She paused. I could not answer her. I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them to my forehead, and wept like a child.

May 10.--She died believing me guilty! The thought is terrible to me.

I know not what to do. A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet.

"Yes!" she said to herself, "my husband is a murderer; what he is giving me is poison, and he knows it." She died with that thought in her mind--her last thought. And she will never, never know that it was not so; that I am innocent; that the thought is torment to me: that I am the most unhappy of men. Ah! G.o.d, all-powerful! if you indeed exist, you see what I suffer. Have pity on me!

Ah! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between [239] her and me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew the truth. But I find it impossible! impossible!

June.--That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she will never be undeceived.

All seems so completely ended when one dies. All returns to its first elements. How credit that miracle of a personal resurrection? and yet in truth all is mystery,--miracle, around us, about us, within ourselves. The entire universe is but a continuous miracle. Man's new birth from the womb of death--is it a mystery less comprehensible than his birth from the womb of his mother?

Those lines are the last written by Bernard de Vaudricourt. His health, for some time past disturbed by grief, was powerless against the emotions of the last terrible trial imposed on him. A malady, the exact nature of which was not determined, in a few days a.s.sumed a mortal character. Perceiving that his end was come, he caused Monseigneur de Courteheuse to be summoned--he desired to die in the religion of Aliette. Living, the poor child had been defeated: she prevailed in her death.

Two distinguished souls! deux etres d'elite--M. Feuillet thinks--whose fine qualities properly brought them together. When Mademoiselle de Courteheuse said of the heroes of her favourite age, that their pa.s.sions, their errors, did but pa.s.s over a ground of what was solid and serious, and which always discovered itself afresh, she was unconsciously describing Bernard. Singular young brother of Monsieur de Camors--after all, certainly, more fortunate than he--he belongs to the age, which, if it had great faults, had also great repentances. In appearance, frivolous; with all the light charm of the world, yet with that impressibility to great things, according to the law which makes the best of M. Feuillet's [240] characters so interesting; above all, with that capacity for pity which almost everything around him tended to suppress; in real life, if he exists there, and certainly in M.

Feuillet's pages, it is a refreshment to meet him.

1886.

POSTSCRIPT

ainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnon neoteron+

[241] THE words, cla.s.sical and romantic, although, like many other critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood them too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in the history of art and literature. Used in an exaggerated sense, to express a greater opposition between those tendencies than really exists, they have at times tended to divide people of taste into opposite camps. But in that House Beautiful, which the creative minds of all generations--the artists and those who have treated life in the spirit of art--are always building together, for the refreshment of the human spirit, these oppositions cease; and the Interpreter of the House Beautiful, the true aesthetic critic, uses these divisions, only so far as they enable him to enter into the peculiarities of the objects with which he has to do. The term cla.s.sical, fixed, as it is, to a well-defined literature, and a well-defined group in art, is clear, indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard, and merely scholastic [242] sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about it--people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and tame.

And as the term, cla.s.sical, has been used in a too absolute, and therefore in a misleading sense, so the term, romantic, has been used much too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The sense in which Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this; that, in opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange adventure, and sought it in the Middle Age. Much later, in a Yorkshire village, the spirit of romanticism bore a more really characteristic fruit in the work of a young girl, Emily Bronte, the romance of Wuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of Catherine Linton, and of Heathcliffe--tearing open Catherine's grave, removing one side of her coffin, that he may really lie beside her in death--figures so pa.s.sionate, yet woven on a background of delicately beautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit. In Germany, again, [243] that spirit is shown less in Tieck, its professional representative, than in Meinhold, the author of Sidonia the Sorceress and the Amber-Witch. In Germany and France, within the last hundred years, the term has been used to describe a particular school of writers; and, consequently, when Heine criticises the Romantic School in Germany--that movement which culminated in Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen; or when Theophile Gautier criticises the romantic movement in France, where, indeed, it bore its most characteristic fruits, and its play is hardly yet over where, by a certain audacity, or bizarrerie of motive, united with faultless literary execution, it still shows itself in imaginative literature, they use the word, with an exact sense of special artistic qualities, indeed; but use it, nevertheless, with a limited application to the manifestation of those qualities at a particular period. But the romantic spirit is, in reality, an ever-present, an enduring principle, in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought and style which that, and other similar uses of the word romantic really indicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widely working influence.

Though the words cla.s.sical and romantic, then, have acquired an almost technical meaning, in application to certain developments of German and French taste, yet this is but one variation of an old opposition, which may be traced from the [244] very beginning of the formation of European art and literature. From the first formation of anything like a standard of taste in these things, the restless curiosity of their more eager lovers necessarily made itself felt, in the craving for new motives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of style. Hence, the opposition between the cla.s.sicists and the romanticists--between the adherents, in the culture of beauty, of the principles of liberty, and authority, respectively--of strength, and order or what the Greeks called kosmiotes.+

Sainte-Beuve, in the third volume of the Causeries du Lundi, has discussed the question, What is meant by a cla.s.sic? It was a question he was well fitted to answer, having himself lived through many phases of taste, and having been in earlier life an enthusiastic member of the romantic school: he was also a great master of that sort of "philosophy of literature," which delights in tracing traditions in it, and the way in which various phases of thought and sentiment maintain themselves, through successive modifications, from epoch to epoch. His aim, then, is to give the word cla.s.sic a wider and, as he says, a more generous sense than it commonly bears, to make it expressly grandiose et flottant; and, in doing this, he develops, in a masterly manner, those qualities of measure, purity, temperance, of which it is the especial function of cla.s.sical art [245] and literature, whatever meaning, narrower or wider, we attach to the term, to take care.

The charm, therefore, of what is cla.s.sical, in art or literature, is that of the well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil, charm of familiarity. There are times, indeed, at which these charms fail to work on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us.

"Romanticism," says Stendhal, "is the art of presenting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; cla.s.sicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers." But then, beneath all changes of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere abstract proportion--of music--which what is cla.s.sical in literature possesses, still maintains itself in the best of us, and what pleased our grandparents may at least tranquillise us. The "cla.s.sic" comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times; as the measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never displease us. And in the cla.s.sical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the cla.s.sics of the last century, the essentially cla.s.sical element is that quality of order in beauty, which they possess, indeed, [246] in a pre-eminent degree, and which impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else in them.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that const.i.tutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organisation, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty, that const.i.tutes the romantic temper.