Ivory Apes and Peacocks Part 12

What I mean is this: Maupa.s.sant's temperament was utterly different from Flaubert's. They were both prosecuted for certain things they wrote, Guy for a poem in 1880, at Estampes; there had been a detraque nervous system in both cases. Yet, similar in ideals and physical peculiarities as were these two men, there was a profound psychical gulf between their temperaments. Flaubert was a great genius, a path breaker, a philosophic poet, and the author of La Tentation de St.

Antoine, the nearest approach that France can show to a prose epic, and a book of beauty and originality. Maupa.s.sant was a great talent, and a growing one when disease cut him down. He imitated the externals of Flaubert, his irony, his vivid power of picture-making; even his pessimism he developed--though that was personal, as we shall soon see. And yet his work is utterly unlike Flaubert, probably unlike what Flaubert had hoped for--the old man died in 1881 and therefore did not live to enjoy Maupa.s.sant in full bloom. If it did not sound quite heretical I should be tempted to a.s.sert that the writer Maupa.s.sant most patterned after, was Prosper Merimee, an artist detested by Flaubert because of his hard style. It is this precise style that Maupa.s.sant exhibits but coupled with a clarity, an ease, and a grace that Merimee could not boast. Of Flaubert's harmonious and imaginatively coloured manner, Maupa.s.sant shows no trace in his six novels and his two hundred and odd tales.

Maupa.s.sant was not altogether faithful to Flaubert's injunctions regarding the publication of his early attempts. He made many secret flights under different pen-names, though Boule de Suif was the first prose signed by him. It appeared in Les Soirees de Medan, and its originality quite outshone the more solid qualities of Zola's L'Attaque au Moulin, and a realistic tale of Huysmans's, Sac au dos.

It was this knapsack of story, nevertheless, that opened the eyes of both Zola and Goncourt to the genuine realism of Huysmans as opposed to the more human but also more sentimental surface realism of Maupa.s.sant. Huysmans proved himself devoid of the story-telling gift, of dramatic power; yet he has, if compared to Maupa.s.sant, without an iota of doubt, the more vivid vision of the two; "the intensest vision of the modern world," says Havelock Ellis. Pictorial, not imaginative vision, be it understood. In his mystic latter-day rhapsodies it is the realist who sees, the realist who makes those poignant, image-breeding phrases. Take up Maupa.s.sant and in his best tales and novels, such as La Maison Tellier, Boule de Suif, Une Vie, Fort Comme la Mort, to mention a few, you will be surprised at the fluidity, the artful devices to elude the harshness of reality, the pessimistic poetry that suffuses his pages after reading Huysmans's immitigable exposition of the ugly and his unflinching att.i.tude before the unpleasant. And Huysmans's point of departure is seldom from an idea; facts furnish him with an adequate spring-board. Maupa.s.sant is more lyric in tone and texture. Edmond de Goncourt, jealous of the success of the newcomer, wrote in his diary that Maupa.s.sant was an admirable conteur, but a great writer, never. Zola admitted to a few intimates that Guy was not the realist that Huysmans was. All of which is interesting, but proves nothing except that Maupa.s.sant wrote a marvellous collection of short stories, real, hyphenated short-stories, as Mr. Brander Matthews makes the delicate distinction, while Huysmans did not.

Edouard Maynial's La Vie et l'Oeuvre de Guy de Maupa.s.sant is the most recent of the biographical studies devoted to our subject, though Baron Albert Lumbroso, who escapes by a single letter from being confounded with the theory-ridden Turin psychiatrist, has given us, with the approval of Guy's mother, the definitive study of Maupa.s.sant's malady and death. It is frequently quoted by Maynial; there is a careful study of it which appeared in _Mercure de France_, June, 1905, by Louis Thomas. And there is that charming volume, Amitie amoureuse, in which Guy is said to figure as the Philippe, by Henri Amic and Madame Lecomte du Nouy. Here we get another Maupa.s.sant, not the taureau triste of Taine, but a delightful, sweet-tempered, unselfish, and altogether lovable fellow. What was the cause of his downfall? Dissipation? Mental overwork--which is the same thing?

Disease? Maynial, Lumbroso, and Thomas offer us such a variety of doc.u.ments that there can be no doubt as to the determining element.

From 1880 to his death in 1893 Guy de Maupa.s.sant was "a candidate for general paralysis." These are the words of his doctor, later approved by Doctor Blanche, to whose sanitarium in Paris he was taken, January 7, 1893.

The father of Guy was Gustave de Maupa.s.sant, of an ancient Lorraine family. This family was n.o.ble. His mother was of Norman extraction, Laure de Poittevin, the sister of Alfred de Poittevin, Flaubert's dearest friend, a poet who died young. There is no truth in the gossip that Guy was the son of Flaubert. Flaubert loved both the Poittevins; hence his lively interest in Guy. There was a younger brother, Herve de Maupa.s.sant, who died of a mental disorder. His daughter, Simone, is the legatee of her uncle. The marriage of the elder Maupa.s.sants proved a failure. They are both dead now, and the subject may be discussed to the point of admitting that the father was not a domestic man; Guy inherited his taste for Bohemian life, and Madame Laure de Maupa.s.sant, after separating from her husband, was subject to nervous crises in which she attempted her life by swallowing laudanum and by strangling herself with her own hair. She was rescued both times, but she was an invalid to the last. A loving mother, she overlooked the education of Guy, and let it be said that no happier child ever lived. His early days were pa.s.sed at Etretat, at the Villa Verguies, and generally in the open air.

The future writer adored the sea; he has written many tales of the water, of yachts and river sports. He went to the seminary at Yvetot and the lyceum of Rouen, but his education was desultory, his reading princ.i.p.ally of his own selection--like most men of individual character. He was a farceur, fond of mystifications, of rough practical jokes, of horseplay. His physique was more Flemish than French--a deep chest, broad shoulders, heavy muscular arms and legs, a small head, a bull-neck. He looked like the mate of a deep-sea ship rather than a literary man. Add to this a craze for rowing, canoeing, swimming, boxing, fencing, and running. An all-round athlete, as the phrase goes, Guy, it is related, once paid a hulking chap to let himself be kicked. So hard was Guy's kick, done in an experimental humour, that the victim became enraged and knocked the kicker off his pins. Flaubert, the apostle of the immobile, objected. Too many flirtations, too much exercise! he admonishingly cried. A writer must cultivate repose.

In sooth Maupa.s.sant went a terrific pace. He abused his const.i.tution from the beginning, seemingly tormented by seven restless devils. He spent five hours a day at his office in the Ministry, in the afternoon he rowed on the Seine, in the evening he wrote. After he had resigned as a bureaucrat he worked from seven until twelve every morning, no matter the excesses of the previous night; the afternoon he spent on the river, retiring very late. "Toujours les femmes, pet.i.t cochon,"

wrote Flaubert in 1876, "il faut travailler." But it was precisely work that helped to kill the man. Those six pages a day, while they seldom showed erasures, were carefully written, and not until after much thought. Guy was the type of the apparently spontaneous writers.

His ma.n.u.scripts are free from the interlineations of Flaubert. He wrote at one jet; but there was elaborate mental preparation. Toward the last began the ether inhalations, the chloroform, hasheesh, the absinthe, cocaine, and the "odour symphonies"--Huysmans's des Esseintes, and his symphonic perfume sprays were not altogether the result of invention. On his yacht _Bel Ami_ Guy never ceased his daily travail. It was Taine who called him un taureau triste. Paul Bourget relates that when he told Maupa.s.sant of this epigram, he calmly replied: "Better a bull than an ox."

His output--as they say in publishing circles--was breath-catching. It is whispered that he worked all the better after a "hard night." Now there can be but one end to such an expenditure of nervous energy, and that end came, not suddenly, but with the treacherous, creeping approach of paralysis. "Literary" criticism of the Nordau type is usually a foolish thing; yet in Maupa.s.sant's case one does not need to be a skilled psychiatrist to follow and note the gradual palsy of the writer's higher centres. Such stories as Qui Sait? Lui, Le Horla--a terrifying conception that beats Poe on his own chosen field--Fou, Un Fou, and several others show the nature of his malady. Guy de Maupa.s.sant came fairly by his cracked nervous const.i.tution, and instead of dissipation, mental and physical, being the determining causes of his shattered health, they were really the outcome of an inherited predisposition to all that is self-destructive. The French alienists called it une heredite chargee. (No doubt the dread Spirochaeta pallida.)

He never relaxed his diligence, even writing criticism. He saluted the literary debuts of Paul Hervieu and Edouard Rod in an article which appeared in _Gil Blas_. At the time of his death he was contemplating an extensive study of Turgenieff. Edmond de Goncourt did not like him, suspecting him of irreverence because of some words Guy had written in the preface to Pierre et Jean about complicated exotic vocabularies; meaning the Goncourts, of course. It is to be believed that Flaubert also had some quiet fun with the brothers and with Zola regarding their mania for note taking; read Bouvard et Pecuchet for confirmation of this idea of mine.

Maupa.s.sant was paid one franc a line for his novels in the periodicals, and 500 francs for the newspaper rights of publication only; good prices twenty-five years ago in Paris.

His annual income was about 28,000 to 35,000 francs, and it kept up for at least ten years. A table shows us that to December, 1891, the sale of his books was as follows: short stories, 169,000; novels, 180,000; travel, 24,000; in all 373,000 volumes. Maupa.s.sant was even for these days of swollen figures a big "seller." His mother had an income of 5,000 francs, but she far excelled the amount in her living expenses. Guy was an admirable son--tender, thoughtful, and generous.

He made her an allowance, and at his death left her in comfort, if not actually wealthy. She died at Nice, December 8, 1904, his father surviving him until 1899.

And that death was achieved by the most hideous route--insanity.

Restless, travelling incessantly, fearful of darkness, of his own shadow, he was like an Oriental magician who had summoned malignant spirits from outer s.p.a.ce only to be destroyed by them. Not in Corsica or Sicily, in Africa nor the south of France, did Guy fight off his rapidly growing disease. He worked hard, he drank hard, but to no avail; the blackness of his brain increased. Melancholia and irritability supervened; he spelled words wrong, he quarrelled with his friends, he inst.i.tuted a lawsuit against a New York newspaper, _The Star_; then the persecution craze, folie des grandeurs, frenzy.

The case was "cla.s.sic" from the beginning, even to the dilated pupils of his eyes, as far back as 1880. The 1st of January, 1892, he had promised to spend with his mother at Villa de Ravenelles, at Nice. But he went, instead, against his mother's wishes, to Ste.-Marguerite in company with two sisters, society women, one of them said to have been the heroine of Notre Coeur.

The next day he arrived, his features discomposed, and in a state of great mental excitement. He was tearful and soon left for Cannes with his valet, Francois. What pa.s.sed during the night was never exactly known, except that Guy attempted suicide by shooting, and with a paper-knife. The knife inflicted a slight wound; the pistol contained blank cartridges--Francois had suspected his master's mood, and told the world later of it in his simple loving memoirs--and his forehead was slightly burned. Some months previous he had told Doctor Fremy that between madness and death he would not hesitate; a lucid moment had shown him his fate, and he sought death. After a week, during which two stout sailors of his yacht, _Bel Ami_, guarded him, as he sadly walked on the beach regarding with tear-stained cheeks his favourite boat, he was taken to Pa.s.sy, to Doctor Blanche's inst.i.tution. One of his examining physicians there was Doctor Franklin Grout, who later married Flaubert's niece, Caroline Commanville.

July 6, 1893, Maupa.s.sant died, as a lamp is extinguished for lack of oil. But the year he spent at the asylum was wretched; he became a mere machine, and perhaps the only pleasure he experienced was the hallucination of bands of black b.u.t.terflies that seemed to sweep across his room. Monsieur Maynial does not tell of the black b.u.t.terflies, the truth of which I can vouch for, as I heard the story from La.s.salle, the French barytone, a friend of Maupa.s.sant's.

It may be interesting to the curious to learn that the good-hearted, brave heroine of Boule de Suif was a certain Adrienne Legay of Rouen, and that she heartily reprobated the writer for giving her story to the world. She even went so far as to say that Guy did it in a spirit of revenge. Madame Laure de Maupa.s.sant made inquiries about the patriotic little sinner so as to help her. It was too late. She had died in extreme poverty. The heroine of Mademoiselle Fifi was a brunette, Rachel by name; the hero was a young German officer, Baron William d'Eyrick.

Would Maupa.s.sant have reached the sunlit heights, as Tolstoy believed?

Who may say? Truth lies not at the bottom of a well, but in suffering; suffering alone reveals the truth of himself, of his soul to man, and Guy had suffered as few; he had pa.s.sed into the Inferno that later Nietzsche entered, pa.s.sed into though not through it. Turgenieff, for whom Guy entertained a profound regard, had influenced him more than he, with his doglike fidelity for Flaubert, would have cared to acknowledge. Paul Bourget gives us chapter and verse for this statement; furthermore, the same authority, has described--in his Etudes et Portraits--the enormous travail of Maupa.s.sant in pursuit of style--he, seemingly, the most spontaneous writer of his generation.

His books offend, delight, startle, and edify thousands of readers.

That they have done absolute harm we are not prepared to say; book wickedness is, after all, an academic, not a vital question. If all the wicked books that have seen the light of publication had wrought the evil predicted of them the earth would be an abomination. In reality, we discuss with varying shades of enthusiasm or detestation such frank literature--naturally when it is literature--and after the hullabaloo of the moral bell-boys has ceased, the book is quietly forgotten on its shelf. Flaubert once wrote of the vast fund of indifference possessed by society. Dramas, books, pictures, statues have never ruined our overmoral world. The day for such things--if there ever was such a day--has pa.s.sed. Besides, among the people of most nations, the hatred of art and literature is pushed to the point of lecturing boastfully about that same hatred.

XVII

PUVIS DE CHAVANNES

Although he has been dead since October 24, 1898, critical battles are still fought over the artistic merits of Puvis de Chavannes. Whether you agree with Huysmans and call this mural painter a pasticheur of the Italian Primitives, or else the greatest artist in decoration since Paolo Veronese, depends much on your critical temperament. There are many to whom Henri Martin's gorgeous colour--really the methods of Monet applied to vast s.p.a.ces--or the blazing originality of Albert Besnard make more intimate appeal than the pallid poetry, solemn rhythms, and faded moonlit tonal gamut of Puvis. Because the names of Gustave Moreau and Puvis were often a.s.sociated, Huysmans, ab irato, cries against the "obsequious heresy" of the conjunction, forgetting that the two men were friends. Marius Vauchon, despite his excessive admiration for Puvis has rendered a service to his memory in his study, because he has shown us the real, not the legendary man. With Vauchon, we are far from Huysmans, and his succinct, but disagreeable, epigram: C'est un vieux rigaudon qui s'essaie dans le requiem. The truth is, that some idealists were disappointed to find Puvis to be a sane, healthy, solidly built man, a bon vivant in the best sense of the phrase, without a suggestion of the morbid, vapouring pontiff or haughty Olympian. Personally he was not in the least like his art, a crime that sentimental persons seldom forgive. A Burgundian--born at Lyons, December 14, 1824--he possessed all the characteristics of his race. Asceticism was the last quality to seek in him. A good dinner with old vintage, plenty of comrades, above all the society of his beloved Princess Cantacuzene, whose love of her husband was the one romance in his career; these, and twelve hours' toil a day in his atelier made up the long life of this distinguished painter. He lived for a half-century between his two ateliers, on the Place Pigalle, and at Neuilly. Notwithstanding his arduous combat with the Inst.i.tute and public indifference, his cannot be called an unhappy existence. He had his art, in the practice of which he was a veritable fanatic; he was rich through inheritance, and he was happy in his love; affluence, art, love, a triad to attain, for which most men yearn, came to Puvis.

Yet the gadfly of ambition was in his flesh. He was a visionary, even a recluse, like his friend Moreau, but a fighter for his ideas; and those ideas have shown not only French artists, but the entire world, the path back to true mural tradition. It is not an exaggeration to say that Puvis created modern decorative art.

His father was chief engineer of mines, a strong-willed, successful man. Like father, like son, was true in this case, though the young De Chavannes, after some opposition, elected painting as his profession.

He had fallen ill, and a trip to Italy was ordained. There he did not, as has been a.s.serted, linger over Pompeii, or in the Roman Catacombs, but saved his time and enthusiasm for the Quattrocentisti. He admired the old Umbrian and Tuscan masters, he was ravished by the basilica of St. Francis at a.s.sisi, and by Santa Maria Novella, Florence. t.i.tian, Tintoretto, finally Veronese, riveted his pa.s.sion for what has been falsely styled the "archaic." Returning to Paris he was conducted by his friend Beauderon to the studio of Delacroix, whom he adored. He remained just fifteen days, when the shop was closed. Delacroix, in a rage because of the lack of talent and funds among his pupils, sent them away. Puvis had been under the tuition of Henri, the brother of Ary Scheffer, and for years spoke with reverence of that serious but mediocre painter. He next sought the advice of Couture, and remained with him three months, not, however, quarrelling with the master, as did later another pupil, Edouard Manet. Puvis was tractable enough; he had one failing--not always a sign of either talent or the reverse--he refused to see or paint as he was told by his teachers, or, indeed, like other pupils. Because of this stubbornness, his enemies, among whom ranked the most powerful critics of Paris, declared that he had never been grounded in the elements of his art, that he could not draw or design, that his colour-sense only proved colour-blindness. To be sure, he does not boast a fulgurant brush, and his line is often stiff and awkward; but he had the fundamentals of decorative art well in hand.

After his death thousands of sketches, designs, pencilled memoranda, and cartoons were found, and then there was whistled another tune. His draughtsmanship is that of a decorative artist, as the Rodin drawings are those of a sculptor, not of a painter. Considering the rigid standard by which the work of Puvis was judged, criticism was not altogether wrong, as was claimed when the wave of reaction set in. His easel pictures are not ingratiating. He does not show well in a gallery. He needs huge s.p.a.ces in which to swim about; there he makes the compositions of other men seem pigmy. [It is the case of Wagner repeated, though there is little likeness between the ideas of the Frenchman and the German, except an epical bigness. Judged by the cla.s.sical concert-room formulas, Wagner must not be compared with the miniaturist Mendelssohn. His form is the form of the music-drama, not the symphonic form.] Puvis adhered to one principle: A wall is a wall, and not an easel picture; it is flat, and that flatness must be emphasised, not disguised; decoration is the desideratum. He contrived a schematic painting that would harmonise with the flatness, with the texture and the architectural surroundings, and, as George Moore has happily said: "No other painter ever kept this end so strictly before his eyes. For this end Chavannes reduced his palette almost to a monochrome, for this end he models in two flat tints, for this end he draws in huge undisciplined ma.s.ses.... Mural decoration, if it form part of the wall, should be a variant of the stonework." One might take exception to the word "undisciplined"--Puvis was one of the most calculating painters that ever used a brush, and one of the most cerebral. His favourite aphorism was: "Beauty is character." His figures have been called immobile, his palette impoverished; the unfair s.e.x abused his lean, lanky female creatures, and finally he was named a painter for Lent--for fast-days. Even the hieratic figures of Moreau were p.r.o.nounced opulent in comparison with the pale moonlighted spectres of the Puvis landscapes. Courbet, in Paris, was known as the "furious madman"; Puvis, as the "tranquil lunatic." Nine of his pictures were refused at the Salon, though in 1859 he exhibited there his Return from Hunting, and, in 1861, even received a second-cla.s.s medal. His fecundity was enormous. His princ.i.p.al work comprises the Life of Ste. Genevieve (the saint is a portrait of his princess), at the Pantheon; Summer and Winter at the Hotel de Ville, the decorations for the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, the decorations at Rouen, Inter Artes et Naturam; at Rouen, The Sacred Wood, Vision Antique, The Rhone, The Saone; the decorations at Amiens, War, Peace, Rest, Labour, Ave Picardia Nutrix, and two smaller grisailles, Vigilance and Fancy; at Ma.r.s.eilles, the Ma.r.s.eilles, Porte d' Orient, and Ma.r.s.eilles, the Greek Colony; the decorations for the Boston Public Library, and his easel picture, The Poor Fisherman, now in the Luxembourg. As to this latter, the painter explained that he had found the model in the person of a wretchedly poor fisherman at the estuary of the Seine; the young girl is a sister, and the landscape is that of the surroundings, though, as is the case with Puvis, greatly generalised. The above is but a slender list. New York has at the Metropolitan Museum at least one of his works, and in the collection here of John Quinn, Esq., there is the brilliant masterpiece, The Beheading of John the Baptist, and two large mural decorations, The River and The Vintage. They were painted in 1866. They are magnificent museum pictures.

All his frescoes are applied canvases. He didn't worry much over antique methods, nor can it be said that his work is an attempt to rehabilitate the Italian Primitives. On the contrary, Puvis is distinctly modern, and that is his chief offence in the eyes of official French art; while the fact that his "modernity" was transposed to decorative purposes, and appeared in so strange a guise, caused the younger men to eye him suspiciously. (Just as some recalcitrant music-critics refuse to recognise in certain compositions of Johannes Brahms the temperamental romantic.) Thus in the estimation of rival camps Puvis fell between two stools. He has been styled a latter-day Domenico Ghirlandajo, but this attribution rings more literary than literal.

Mr. Brownell with his accustomed sense of critical values has to our notion definitely summed up the question: "His cla.s.sicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does not exist--in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives evidently on a high plane, dwells habitually in the delectable highlands of the intellect. The fact that his work is almost wholly decorative is not at all accidental. His talent, his genius, if one chooses, requires large s.p.a.ces, vast dimensions. There has been a good deal of profitless discussion as to whether he expressly imitates the Primitives or reproduces them sympathetically; but really he does neither, he deals with their subjects occasionally, but always in a completely modern as well as a thoroughly personal way. His colour is as original as his general treatment and composition."

His men and women are not precisely pagan, nor are they biblical. But they reveal traits of both strained through a drastic "modern"

intellect. They are not abstractions; the men are virile, the women maternal. There is the spirit of humanity, not of decadence. Puvis, like Moreau, did not turn his back to the rising sun. He admired Degas, Manet, Monet. At first he patterned after his friend Cha.s.seriau, a fine and too-little-known painter, and at one time a mural decorator before he became immersed in Oriental themes. The lenten landscapes of Puvis are not merely scenic backgrounds, but integral parts of the general decorative web, and they are not conceived in No Man's Land, but selected from the vicinity of Paris.

Puvis is by no means a virtuoso. His pace is usually andante; but he knows how to evoke a mood, summon the solemn music of mural s.p.a.ces.

His is a theme with variations. The wall or ceiling is ever the theme.

His crabbed fugues soon melt into the larger austere music of the wall. His choral walls are true epopees. He is a master harmonist. He sounds oftener the symphonic than the lyric note. He gains his most moving effects without setting in motion the creaking allegorical machinery of the academy. He shows the simple att.i.tudes of life transfigured without rhetoric. He avoids frigid allegory, yet employs symbols. His tonal attenuations, elliptical and syncopated rhythms, his atmosphere of the remote, the mysterious--all these give the spectator the sense of serenity, momentary freedom from the feverishness of every-day life, and suggest the lofty wisdom of the cla.s.sic poets. But the serpent of futile melancholy, of the brief cadence of mortal dreams, and of the vanishing seconds that defile down the corridor of time, has stolen into this Garden of the Hesperides. Puvis de Chavannes, no more than Gustave Moreau, could escape the inquietude of his times. He is occasionally Parisian and often pessimist.

The inability of his contemporaries to understand his profound decorative genius, his tact in the handling of the great problem of lighting--the key is always higher because of the different or softer light of public buildings and the gloom of churches--and his feeling for the wall, purely as wall, a flat s.p.a.ce, not to be confounded with the pseudo art that would make the picture like an open window in the wall, but based on the flatness of the material and the aerial magic of his s.p.a.cing, sorely troubled him for half a century. Doubtless it was his refusal to visit Boston and study there the architectural conditions of the Public Library that resulted in the hang-fire of his decorations, though they are of an exalted order. One at least served as a spring-board for the decorative impulse of Besnard, as may be noted in his frescoes on the ceiling at the Hotel de Ville, Paris.

That Puvis de Chavannes was not an unfeeling Bonze of art, but a man of tender heart and warm affections was proved after the death of his much-loved Princess Marie Cantacuzene. Two months later sorrow over her loss killed him. He had painted the thousand and one expressive moments in the life of our species as a hymn to humanity, and their contours are eternal. Eternal? A vain phrase; but eternal till the canvas fades and the walls decay, that is nearer the truth. Art is long and appreciation sometimes a chilly consolation. Let us stick to the eternal verities. As D'Annunzio has it: Quella musica silenziosa delle linee immobili era cos possente che creava il fantasma quasi visibile di una vita piu ricca e piu bella.

XVIII

THREE DISAGREEABLE GIRLS

I

HEDDA

Hazlitt tells us in a delightful essay about the whimsical notion of Charles Lamb that he would rather see Sir Thomas Browne than Shakespeare. A pleasant recreation is this same picking out "of persons one would wish to have seen." Causing great annoyance to Ayrton at an evening party, Lamb rejected the names of Milton and Shakespeare, selecting those of Browne and Fulke Greville--the friend of Sir Philip Sidney. For the prince of essayists there was mystery hovering about the personalities of this pair. I have often wondered if the most resounding names in history are the best beloved. Or in fiction. What is the name of your favourite heroine? Whom should you like to meet in that long corridor of time leading to eternity, the walls lined with the world's masterpieces of portraiture? I can answer for myself that no Shakespearian lovely dame or Balzacian demon in petticoats would ever be taken off the wall by me. They are either too remote or too unreal, though a word might be said for Valerie Marneffe. In the vasty nebula of the Henry James novel there are alluringly strange women, but if you summon them they fade and resolve themselves into everlasting phrases. In a word, they are not tangible enough to endure the change of moral climate involved in such a game as that played by Charles Lamb and his friends.

But Emma Bovary might come if you but ardently desired. And the fascinating Anna Karenina. Or Becky Sharp with her sly graces. Perhaps some of Dostoevsky's enigmatic, bewildering girls should be included in the list, for they brim over with magnetism, very often a malicious magnetism, and their glances are eloquent with suffering, haunt like the eyes one sees in a gallery of old masters. I do not speak of Sonia, but of the pa.s.sionate Natasia Philipovna in The Idiot, or Aglaya Epanchin, in the same powerful novel, or Paulina in The Gambler. However, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of so many favourites, even if they are only made of paper and ink. I confess I am an admirer of Emma Bovary. To the gifted young critics of to-day the work, and its sharply etched characters, has become a mere stalking horse for a new-fangled philosophy of Jules Gaultier, called Bovarysme, but for me it will always be the portrait of that unhappy girl with the pallid complexion, velvety dark eyes, luxuriant hair, and languid charm. Anna Karenina is more aristocratic; above all, she knew what happiness meant; its wing only brushed the cheek of Emma.

Her death is more lamentable than Anna's--one can well sympathise with Flaubert's mental and physical condition after he had written that appalling chapter describing the poisoning of Emma. No wonder he thought he tasted a.r.s.enic, and couldn't sleep. Balzac, d.i.c.kens, and Thackeray were thus affected by their own creations, yet Flaubert is to this day called "impersonal," "cold," because he never made concessions to sentimentalism, never told tales out of his workshop for gaping indifferents.

As for Becky Sharp, that kittenish person seldom arouses in me much curiosity. I agree with George Moore that Thackeray, in the interests of mid-Victorian morality, suppressed many of her characteristics, telling us too little of her amatory temperament. Possibly, Mr. Moore may err, Becky may have had no "temperament," notwithstanding her ability to twist men around her expressive digits. That she was disagreeable when she set herself out to be I do not doubt; in fact, she is the protagonist of a whole generation of disagreeable heroines in English fiction. Bernard Shaw did not overlook her pertness and malevolence, though all his girls are disagreeable, even--pardon the paradox--his agreeable ones. But they are as portraiture far too "papery," to borrow a word from painters' jargon, for my purpose.

They are not alive, they only are mouthpieces for the author's rather old-time ideas.

I mention the four heroines of a former period, Valerie, Becky, Emma, Anna, not because they are all disagreeable, but because they are my pets in fiction. Thoroughly disagreeable girls are Hedda Gabler, Mildred Lawson, and Undine Spragg. Of course, in a certain sense old Wotan Ibsen is the father of the latter-day Valkyrie brood. The "feminist" movement is not responsible for them; there were disagreeable females before the flood, yet somehow the latter part of the last and the beginning of the present century have produced a big flock in painting, music (Richard Strauss's operas), drama, and literature. Hedda boldly carved out of a single block stands out as the very Winged Victory of her species. In her there is a hint of Emma Bovary; both are incorrigible romanticists, sn.o.bs, girls for whom the present alone exists. She is decadent inasmuch as her nerves rule her actions, and at the rising of the curtain her nerves are in rags.

Henry James finds in Ibsen a "charmless fascination," but by no means insists on the point that Hedda is disagreeable. Nor is he so sure that she is wicked, though he admits her perversity. The late Grant Allen once said to William Archer that Hedda was "nothing more nor less than the girl we take down to dinner in London, nineteen times out of twenty," which, to put it mildly, is an exaggeration. The truth is, Hedda is less a type than a "rare case," but to diagnose her as merely neurasthenic is also to go wide of the mark. Doubtless her condition may have added bitterness to her already overflowing cup; nevertheless Hedda is not altogether a pathological study.

Approaching motherhood is not a veil for her mult.i.tude of sins. How soon are we shown her cruel nature in the dialogue with devoted Thea Rysing, whose hair at school had aroused envy in Hedda! She pulled it whenever she got a chance, just as she pulled from its hiding-place the secret of the timid Thea. Simply to say that Hedda is the incarnation of selfishness is but a half-truth. She is that and much more.

Charmless never, disagreeable always, she had the serpent's charm, the charm that slowly slays its victim. Her father succ.u.mbed to it, else would he have permitted her to sit in corners with poet Eiljert Lovborg and not only hold hands but listen to far from edifying discourses? Not a nice trait in Hedda--though a human, therefore not a rare one--is her curiosity concerning forbidden themes. She was sly.

She was morbid. Last of all she was cowardly. Yes, largely cerebral was her interest in nasty things, for when Eiljert attempted to translate his related adventures into action she promptly threatened him with a pistol. A demi-vierge before Marcel Prevost. Not as admirable as either Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler married George Tesman for speculation. He had promised her the Falk villa--the scene plays up in Christiania--and he expected a professorship; these, with a little ready money and the selflessness of Aunt Julia, were so many bribes for the anxious Hedda, whose first youth had been heedlessly danced away without matrimonial success.

Mark what follows: Ibsen, the sternest moralist since old John Knox, doesn't spare his heroine. He places her between the devil of Justice Brack, libertine and house friend, and the deep sea of the debauched genius, Lovborg. To make a four-square of ineluctable fate she is flanked on either side by her mediocre husband and the devoted bore, Thea Rysing--Elvsted. Like a high-strung Barbary mare--she was of good birth and breeding--her nerves tugging in their sheaths, her heart a burnt-out cinder, Hedda saw but one way to escape--suicide. She took that route and really it was the most profound and significant act of her life, cowardly as was the motive. She was discontented, shallow, the victim of her false upbringing. In a more intellectual degree Eiljert, her first admirer, is her counterpart. Both could have consorted with Emma Bovary and found her "ideals" sympathetic. Emil Reich has called Hedda Gabler the tragedy of mesalliance. It is a memorial phrase. George Tesman and Charles Bovary are brothers in misfortune. They belong to those husbands "predestined" to betrayal, as Balzac puts it. Councillor Karenin completes the trio and Anna hated his large ears; but before Karenin, Charles Bovary was despised by Emma because of his clumsy feet and inexpressive bearing, and his habit of breathing heavily during dinner. George Tesman with his purblind faculties, amiable ways, and semi-idiotic exclamations will go down in the history of fiction with Georges Dandin, Bovary, and Karenin. As for Hedda, her psychological index is clear reading. In Peer Gynt one of the characters is described thus: "He is hermetically sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the wells of self. Each one shuts himself in the cask of self, plunges deep down in the ferment of self." Imperfect sympathies, misplaced egoism--for there is a true as well as a false egoism--a craze for silly pleasures, no matter the cost, and a mean little vanity that sacrificed lives when not appeased. She is the most disagreeable figure in modern drama. Were it not for her good looks and pity for her misspent life and death she would be absolutely unendurable. The dramatic genius of Ibsen makes her credible. But what was the matter with George Tesman?