Confessions of a Young Man Part 6

Whistler, of all artists, is the least impressionist; the idea people have of his being an impressionist only proves once again the absolute inability of the public to understand the merits or the demerits of artistic work. Whistler's art is cla.s.sical; he thinks of nature, but he does not see nature; he is guided by his mind, and not by his eyes; and the best of it is he says so. He knows it well enough! Any one who knows him must have heard him say, "Painting is absolutely scientific; it is an exact science." And his work is in accord with his theory; he risks nothing, all is brought down, arranged, balanced, and made one; his pictures are thought out beforehand, they are mental conceptions. I admire his work; I am showing how he is misunderstood, even by those who think they understand. Does he ever seek a pose that is characteristic of the model, a pose that the model repeats oftener than any other?--Never. He advances the foot, puts the hand on the hip, etc., with a view to rendering his _idea_. Take his portrait of Duret. Did he ever see Duret in dress clothes? Probably not. Did he ever see Duret with a lady's opera cloak?--I am sure he never did. Is Duret in the habit of going to the theatre with ladies? No, he is a _litterateur_ who is always in men's society, rarely in ladies'. But these facts mattered nothing to Whistler as they matter to Degas, or to Manet. Whistler took Duret out of his environment, dressed him up, thought out a scheme--in a word, painted his idea without concerning himself in the least with the model. Mark you, I deny that I am urging any fault or flaw; I am merely contending that Whistler's art is not modern art, but cla.s.sic art--yes, and severely cla.s.sical, far more cla.s.sical than t.i.tian's or Velasquez;--from an opposite pole as cla.s.sical as Ingres. No Greek dramatist ever sought the synthesis of things more uncompromisingly than Whistler. And he is right. Art is not nature. Art is nature digested.

Zola and Goncourt cannot, or will not understand that the artistic stomach must be allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion. If a man is really an artist he will remember what is necessary, forget what is useless; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the elegant rhythm of the synthesis.

I am sick of synthetical art; we want observation direct and unreasoned.

What I reproach Millet with is that it is always the same thing, the same peasant, the same _sabot_, the same sentiment. You must admit that it is somewhat stereotyped.

What does that matter; what is more stereotyped than j.a.panese art? But that does not prevent it from being always beautiful.

People talk of Manet's originality; that is just what I can't see. What he has got, and what you can't take away from him, is a magnificent execution. A piece of still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in the world; vividness of colour, breadth, simplicity, and directness of touch--marvellous!

French translation is the only translation; in England you still continue to translate poetry into poetry, instead of into prose. We used to do the same, but we have long ago renounced such follies. Either of two things--if the translator is a good poet, he subst.i.tutes his verse for that of the original;--I don't want his verse, I want the original;--if he is a bad poet; he gives us bad verse, which is intolerable. Where the original poet put an effect of caesura, the translator puts an effect of rhyme; where the original poet puts an effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of caesura. Take Longfellow's "Dante." Does it give as good an idea of the original as our prose translation? Is it as interesting reading? Take Bayard Taylor's translation of "Goethe." Is it readable? Not to any one with an ear for verse. Will any one say that Taylor's would be read if the original did not exist? The fragment translated by Sh.e.l.ley is beautiful, but then it is Sh.e.l.ley. Look at Swinburne's translations of Villon. They are beautiful poems by Swinburne, that is all; he makes Villon speak of a "splendid kissing mouth." Villon could not have done this unless he had read Swinburne. "Heine," translated by James Thomson, is not different from Thomson's original poems; "Heine," translated by Sir Theodore Martin, is doggerel.

But in English blank verse you can translate quite as literally as you could into prose?

I doubt it, but even so, the rhythm of the blank line would carry your mind away from that of the original.

But if you don't know the original? The rhythm of the original can be suggested in prose judiciously used; even if it isn't, your mind is at least free, whereas the English rhythm must destroy the sensation of something foreign. There is no translation except a word-for-word translation. Baudelaire's translation of Poe, and Hugo's translation of Shakespeare, are marvellous in this respect; a pun or joke that is untranslatable is explained in a note.

But that is the way young ladies translate--word for word!

No; 'tis just what they don't do; they think they are translating word for word, but they aren't. All the proper names, no matter how unp.r.o.nounceable, must be rigidly adhered to; you must never transpose versts into kilometres, or roubles into francs;--I don't know what a verst is or what a rouble is, but when I see the words I am in Russia.

Every proverb must be rendered literally, even if it doesn't make very good sense: if it doesn't make sense at all, it must be explained in a note. For example, there is a proverb in German: "_Quand le cheval est selle il faut le monter_;" in French there is a proverb: "_Quand le vin est tire il faut le boire_." Well, a translator who would translate _quand le cheval_, etc., by _quand le vin_, etc., is an a.s.s, and does not know his business. In translation only a strictly cla.s.sical language should be used; no word of slang, or even word of modern origin should be employed; the translator's aim should be never to dissipate the illusion of an exotic. If I were translating the "a.s.sommoir" into English, I should strive after a strong, flexible, but colourless language, something--what shall I say?--the style of a modern Addison.

What, don't you know the story about Mendes?--when _Chose_ wanted to marry his sister? _Chose's_ mother, it appears, went to live with a priest. The poor fellow was dreadfully cut up; he was broken-hearted; and he went to Mendes, his heart swollen with grief, determined to make a clean breast of it, let the worst come to the worst. After a great deal of beating about the bush, and apologising, he got it out. You know Mendes, you can see him smiling a little; and looking at _Chose_ with that white cameo face of his he said,

"_Avec quel meillur homme voulez-vous que votre mere se mit? vous n'avez donc, jeune homme, aucun sentiment religieux._"

Victor Hugo, he is a painter on porcelain; his verse is mere decoration, long tendrils and flowers; and the same thing over and over again.

How to be happy!--not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the _Nouvelle Athenes_, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the _bourgeois_ over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense consciousness of life,--to live in a sleepy country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy;--and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw these people out of the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them pa.s.sions! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times.

X

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER

"Why did you not send a letter? We have all been writing to you for the last six months, but no answer--none. Had you written one word I would have saved all. The poor _concierge_ was in despair; she said the _proprietaire_ would wait if you had only said when you were coming back, or if you only had let us know what you wished to be done. Three quarters rent was due, and no news could be obtained of you, so an auction had to be called. It nearly broke my heart to see those horrid men tramping over the delicate carpets, their coa.r.s.e faces set against the sweet colour of that beautiful English cretonne.... And all the while the pastel by Manet, the great hat set like an aureole about the face--'the eyes deep set in crimson shadow,' 'the fan widespread across the bosom' (you see I am quoting your own words), looking down, the mistress of that little paradise of tapestry. She seemed to resent the intrusion. I looked once or twice half expecting those eyes 'deep set in crimson shadow' to fill with tears. But nothing altered her great dignity; she seemed to see all, but as a Buddha she remained impenetrable....

"I was there the night before the sale. I looked through the books, taking notes of those I intended to buy--those which we used to read together when the snow lay high about the legs of the poor faun in _terre cuite_, that laughed amid the frosty _boulingrins_. I found a large packet of letters which I instantly destroyed. You should not be so careless; I wonder how it is that men are always careless about their letters.

"The sale was announced for one o'clock. I wore a thick veil, for I did not wish to be recognised; the _concierge_ of course knew me, but she can be depended upon. The poor old woman was in tears, so sorry was she to see all your pretty things sold up. You left owing her a hundred francs, but I have paid her; and talking of you we waited till the auctioneer arrived. Everything had been pulled down; the tapestry from the walls, the picture, the two vases I gave you were on the table waiting the stroke of the hammer. And then the men, all the _marchands de meubles_ in the _quartier_, came upstairs, spitting and talking coa.r.s.ely--their foul voices went through me. They stamped, spat, pulled the things about, nothing escaped them. One of them held up the j.a.panese dressing-gown and made some horrible jokes; and the auctioneer, who was a humorist, answered, 'If there are any ladies' men present, we shall have some spirited bidding.' The pastel I bought, and I shall keep it and try to find some excuse to satisfy my husband, but I send you the miniature, and I hope you will not let it be sold again. There were many other things I should have liked to buy, but I did not dare--the organ that you used to play hymns on and I waltzes on, the Turkish lamp which we could never agree about...but when I saw the satin shoes which I gave you to carry the night of that adorable ball, and which you would not give back, but nailed up on the wall on either side of your bed and put matches in, I was seized with an almost invincible desire to steal them.

I don't know why, _un caprice de femme_. No one but you would have ever thought of converting satin shoes into match boxes. I wore them at that delicious ball; we danced all night together, and you had an explanation with my husband (I was a little afraid for a moment, but it came out all right), and we went and sat on the balcony in the soft warm moonlight; we watched the glitter of epaulets and gas, the satin of the bodices, the whiteness of pa.s.sing shoulders: we dreamed the ma.s.sy darknesses of the park, the fairy light along the lawny s.p.a.ces, the heavy perfume of the flowers, the pink of the camellias; and you quoted something: '_les camelias du balcon ressemblent a des desirs mourants_.'

It was horrid of you: but you always had a knack of rubbing one up the wrong way. Then do you not remember how we danced in one room, while the servants set the other out with little tables? That supper was fascinating! I suppose it was these pleasant remembrances which made me wish for the shoes, but I could not summon up courage enough to buy them, and the horrid people were comparing me with the pastel; I suppose I did look a little mysterious with a double veil bound across my face.

The shoes went with a lot of other things--and oh, to whom?

"So now that pretty little retreat in the _Rue de la Tour des Dames_ is ended for ever for you and me. We shall not see the faun in _terre cuite_ again; I was thinking of going to see him the other day, but the street is so steep; my coachman advised me to spare the horse's hind legs. I believe it is the steepest street in Paris. And your luncheon parties, how I did enjoy them, and how Fay did enjoy them too; and what I risked, short-sighted as I am, picking my way from the tramcar down to that out-of-the-way little street! Men never appreciate the risks women run for them. But to leave my letters lying about--I cannot forgive that. When I told Fay she said, 'What can you expect? I warned you against flirting with boys.' I never did before--never.

"Paris is now just as it was when you used to sit on the balcony and I read you Browning. You never liked his poetry, and I cannot understand why. I have found a new poem which I am sure would convert you; you should be here. There are lilacs in the room and the _Mont Valerien_ is beautiful upon a great lemon sky, and the long avenue is merging into violet vapour.

"We have already begun to think of where we shall go to this year. Last year we went to P----, an enchanting place, quite rustic, but within easy distance of a casino. I had vowed not to dance, for I had been out every night during the season, but the temptation proved irresistible, and I gave way. There were two young men here, one the Count of B----, the other the Marquis of G----, one of the best families in France, a distant cousin of my husband. He has written a book which every one says is one of the most amusing things that has appeared for years, _c'est surtout tres Parisien_. He paid me great attentions, and made my husband wildly jealous. I used to go out and sit with him amid the rocks, and it was perhaps very lucky for me that he went away. We may return there this year; if so, I wish you would come and spend a month; there is an excellent hotel where you would be very comfortable. We have decided nothing as yet. The d.u.c.h.esse de ---- is giving a costume ball; they say it is going to be a most wonderful affair. I don't know what money is not going to be spent upon the cotillion. I have just got home a fascinating toilette. I am going as a _Pierette_; you know, a short skirt and a little cap. The Marquise gave a ball some few days ago. I danced the cotillion with L----, who, as you know, dances divinely; _il m'a fait la cour_, but it is of course no use, you know that.

"The other night we went to see the _Maitre-de-Forges_, a fascinating play, and I am reading the book; I don't know which I like the best. I think the play, but the book is very good too. Now that is what I call a novel; and I am a judge, for I have read all novels. But I must not talk literature, or you will say something stupid. I wish you would not make foolish remarks about men that _tout-Paris_ considers the cleverest. It does not matter so much with me, I know you, but then people laugh at you behind your back, and that is not nice for me. The _marquise_ was here the other day, and she said she almost wished you would not come on her 'days,' so extraordinary were the remarks you made. And by the way, the _marquise_ has written a book. I have not seen it, but I hear that it is really too _decollete_. She is _une femme d'esprit_, but the way she affiche's herself is too much for any one. She never goes anywhere now without _le pet.i.t_ D----. It is a great pity.

"And now, my dear friend, write me a nice letter, and tell me when you are coming back to Paris. I am sure you cannot amuse yourself in that hateful London; the nicest thing about you was that you were really _tres Parisien_. Come back and take a nice apartment on the Champs Elysees. You might come back for the d.u.c.h.esse's ball. I will get an invitation for you, and will keep the cotillion for you. The idea of running away as you did, and never telling any one where you were going to. I always said you were a little cracked. And letting all your things be sold! If you had only told me! I should like so much to have had that Turkish lamp. Yours ----"

How like her that letter is,--egotistical, vain, foolish; no, not foolish--narrow, limited, but not foolish; worldly, oh, how worldly! and yet not repulsively so, for there always was in her a certain intensity of feeling that saved her from the commonplace, and gave her an inexpressible charm. Yes, she is a woman who can feel, and she has lived her life and felt it very acutely, very sincerely--sincerely?...like a moth caught in a gauze curtain! Well, would that preclude sincerity?

Sincerity seems to convey an idea of depth, and she was not very deep, that is quite certain. I never could understand her;--a little brain that span rapidly and hummed a pretty humming tune. But no, there was something more in her than that. She often said things that I thought clever, things that I did not forget, things that I should like to put into books. But it was not brain power; it was only intensity of feeling--nervous feeling. I don't know...perhaps.... She has lived her life...yes, within certain limits she has lived her life. None of us do more than that. True. I remember the first time I saw her. Sharp, little, and merry--a changeable little sprite. I thought she had ugly hands; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her hands before I had known her a month. It is now seven years ago. How time pa.s.ses! I was very young then. What battles we have had, what quarrels! Still we had good times together. She never lost sight of me, but no intrusion; far too clever for that. I never got the better of her but once...once I did, _enfin_! She soon made up for lost ground. I wonder what the charm was. I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever; that I know.... I never knew if she cared for me, never. There were moments when.... Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely subtle, subtle in everything, in her sensations subtle; I suppose that was her charm, subtleness. I never knew if she cared for me, I never knew if she hated her husband,--one never knew her,--I never knew how she would receive me. The last time I saw her...that stupid American would take her downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding behind one of the pillars in the Rue de Rivoli, my hand on the cab door.

However, she could not blame me that time--and all the stories she used to invent of my indiscretions; I believe she used to get them up for the sake of the excitement. She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got her into a certain line; that marriage, that t.i.tle, and she used to think of it night and day. I shall never forget when she went into mourning for the Count de Chambord. And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois they were! That salon; the flagrantly modern clock, bra.s.s work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard St Germain, the cabinets, bra.s.s work, the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of comfort; a little grotesque no doubt;--the mechanical admiration for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere; the _Figaro_, that is to say Albert Wolf, _l'homme le plus spirituel de Paris, c'est-a-dire, dans le monde_, the success of Georges Ohnet and the talent of Gustave Dore. But with all this vulgarity of taste certain appreciations, certain ebullitions of sentiment, within the radius of sentiment certain elevations and depravities,--depravities in the legitimate sense of the word, that is to say, a revolt against the commonplace....

Ha, ha, ha! how I have been dreaming! I wish I had not been awoke from my reverie, it was pleasant.

The letter just read indicates, if it does not clearly tell, the changes that have taken place in my life; and it is only necessary to say that one morning, a few months ago, when my servant brought me some summer honey and a gla.s.s of milk to my bedside, she handed me an unpleasant letter. My agent's handwriting, even when I knew the envelope contained a cheque, has never quite failed to produce a sensation of repugnance in me;--so hateful is any sort of account, that I avoid as much as possible even knowing how I stand at my banker's. Therefore the odour of honey and milk, so evocative of fresh flowers and fields, was spoilt that morning for me; and it was some time before I slipped on that beautiful j.a.panese dressing-gown, which I shall never see again, and read the odious epistle.

That some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to starve, that I may not be deprived of my _demi-ta.s.se_ at _Tortoni's_, that I may not be forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my cat and my python--monstrous.

And these wretched creatures will find moral support in England; they will find pity!

Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me.

The great pagan world I love knew it not. Now the world proposes to interrupt the terrible austere laws of nature which ordain that the weak shall be trampled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the strong shall be really strong,--that the strong shall be glorious, sublime. A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of right, cry the moderns.

Hither the world has been drifting since the coming of the pale socialist of Galilee; and this is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity.

His divinity is falling, it is evanescent in sight of the goal He dreamed; again He is denied by His disciples. Poor fallen G.o.d! I, who hold nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands and feet, Thy hanging body; Thou at least art picturesque, and in a way beautiful in the midst of the sombre mediocrity, towards which Thou has drifted for two thousand years, a flag; and in which Thou shalt find Thy doom as I mine, I, who will not adore Thee and cannot curse Thee now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been greater, stranger and more Divine than any man's has been. The chosen people, the garden, the betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful story, not of Mary, but of Magdalen. The G.o.d descending to the harlot! Even the great pagan world of marble and pomp and l.u.s.t and cruelty, that my soul goes out to and hails as the grandest, has not so sublime a contrast to show us as this.

Come to me, ye who are weak. The Word went forth, the terrible disastrous Word, and before it fell the ancient G.o.ds, and the vices that they represent, and which I revere, are outcast now in the world of men; the Word went forth, and the world interpreted the Word, blindly, ignorantly, savagely, for two thousand years, but nevertheless nearing every day the end--the end that Thou in Thy divine intelligence foresaw, that finds its voice to-day (enormous though the ant.i.thesis may be, I will say it) in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. What fate has been like Thine?

Betrayed by Judas in the garden, denied by Peter before the c.o.c.k crew, crucified between thieves, and mourned for by a harlot, and then sent bound and bare, nothing changed, nothing altered, in Thy ignominious plight, forthward in the world's van the glory and symbol of a man's new idea--Pity. Thy day is closing in, but the heavens are now wider aflame with Thy light than ever before--Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing on the last verge of the old world, declare to be darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the twentieth century. The bearers have relinquished Thy cross, they leave Thee in the hour of Thy universal triumph, Thy crown of thorns is falling, Thy face is buffeted with blows, and not even a reed is placed in Thy hand for sceptre; only I and mine are by Thee, we who shall perish with Thee, in the ruin Thou hast created.

Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice. Hail, therefore, to the thrice glorious virtue injustice!

What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh's lash or Egypt's sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment.

Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died? What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maiden was the price paid for Ingres' _La Source_? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital, is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have _La Source_, that exquisite dream of innocence, to think of till my soul is sick with delight of the painter's holy vision. Nay more, the knowledge that a wrong was done--that millions of Israelites died in torments, that a girl, or a thousand girls, died in the hospital for that one virginal thing, is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies; to see the great gladiators pa.s.s, to hear them cry the famous "Ave Caesar," to hold the thumb down, to see the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the agonies of poisoned slaves! Oh, for excess, for crime! I would give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire; for the hymn, "_A la tres-chere, a la tres-belle, qui remplit man cur de clarte"_ let the first-born in every house in Europe be slain; and in all sincerity I profess my readiness to decapitate all the j.a.panese in j.a.pan and elsewhere, to save from destruction one drawing by Hokusai. Again I say that all we deem sublime in the world's history are acts of injustice; and it is certain that if mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism. England was great and glorious, because England was unjust, and England's greatest son was the personification of injustice--Cromwell.

But the old world of heroes is over now. The skies above us are dark with sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are running with streaming canvas upon ruin; all ideals have gone; nothing remains to us for worship but the Ma.s.s, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Ma.s.s; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and rushes about us--we, the great ship that has floated up from the antique world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain pa.s.sion, its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plaintive blast, and the forest where the whiteness of the nymph was seen escaping! We are weary of pity, we are weary of being good; we are weary of tears and effusion, and our refuge--the British Museum--is the wide sea sh.o.r.e and the wind of the ocean. There, there is real joy in the flesh; our statues are naked, but we are ashamed, and our nakedness is indecency: a fair, frank soul is mirrored in those fauns and nymphs; and how strangely enigmatic is the soul of the antique world, the bare, barbarous soul of beauty and of might!

XI

But neither Apollo nor Buddha could help or save me. One in his exquisite balance of body, a skylark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing; the other sat in sombre contemplation, calm as a beautiful evening. I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the pastel--the beautiful pastel that seemed to fill with a real presence the rich autumnal leaves where the jays darted and screamed. The twisted columns of the bed rose, burdened with great weight of fringes and curtains, the python devoured a guinea-pig, the last I gave him; the great white cat came to me. I said all this must go, must henceforth be to me an abandoned dream, a something, not more real than a summer meditation. So be it, and, as was characteristic of me, I broke with Paris suddenly, without warning anyone. I knew in my heart of hearts that I should never return, but no word was spoken, and I continued a pleasant delusion with myself; I told my _concierge_ that I would return in a month, and I left all to be sold, brutally sold by auction, as the letter I read in the last chapter charmingly and touchingly describes.