Recollections of My Childhood and Youth Part 23

I had then read two of h.e.l.lo's books, _Le Style_ and _M. Renan, L'Allemagne et l'Atheisme au 19me Siecle_. Such productions are called books, because there is no other name for them. As a matter of fact, idle talk and galimatias of the sort are in no wise literature.

h.e.l.lo never wrote anything but Roman Catholic sermons, full of theological sophistries and abuse of thinking men. In those years his books, with their odour of incense, made the small, flat inhabitants of the sacristy wainscotting venture out of their c.h.i.n.ks in the wall in delight; but they obtained no applause elsewhere.

It was only after his death that it could occur to a morbid seeker after originality, with a bitter almond in place of a heart, like Huysmans, to make his half-mad hero, Des Esseintes, who is terrified of the light, find satisfaction in the challenges to common sense that h.e.l.lo wrote.

h.e.l.lo was a poor wretch who, in the insane conviction that he himself was a genius, filled his writings with a.s.sertions concerning the marvellous, incomprehensible nature of genius, and always took up the cudgels on its behalf. During the Empire, his voice was drowned. It was only a score of years later that the new Catholic reaction found it to their advantage to take him at his word and see in him the genius that he had given himself out to be. He was as much a genius as the madman in the asylum is the Emperor.

III.

A few days after my arrival, I called upon Taine and was cordially received. He presented me with one of his books and promised me his great work, _De l'Intelligence_, which was to come out in a few days, conversed with me for an hour, and invited me to tea the following evening. He had been married since I had last been at his house, and his wife, a young, clear-skinned lady with black plaits, brown eyes and an extremely graceful figure, was as fresh as a rose, and talked with the outspoken freedom of youth, though expressing herself in carefully selected words.

After a few days, Taine, who was generally very formal with strangers, treated me with conspicuous friendliness. He offered at once to introduce me to Renan, and urgently advised me to remain six months in Paris, in order to master the language thoroughly, so that I might enlighten Frenchmen on the state of things in the North, as well as picture the French to my fellow-countrymen. Why should I not make French my auxiliary language, like Turgenieff and Hillebrandt!

Taine knew nothing of German belles lettres. As far as philosophy was concerned, he despised German Aesthetics altogether, and laughed at me for believing in "Aesthetics" at all, even one day introducing me to a stranger as "A young Dane who does not believe in much, but is weak enough to believe in Aesthetics." I was not precisely overburdened by the belief. But a German Aesthetic, according to Taine's definition, was a man absolutely devoid of artistic perception and sense of style, who lived only in definitions. If you took him to the theatre to see a sad piece, he would tear his hair with delight, and exclaim: "_Voila das Tragische!_"

Of the more modern German authors, Taine knew only Heine, of whom he was a pa.s.sionate admirer and whom, by reason of his intensity of feeling, he compared with Dante. A poem like the _Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ roused his enthusiasm. Goethe's shorter poems, on the other hand, he could not appreciate, chiefly no doubt because he did not know German sufficiently well. He was not even acquainted with the very best of Goethe's short things, and one day that I asked him to read one poem aloud, the words in his mouth rang very French.

_Lieber dur Laydenn mocht ee mee schlag'e, als so feel Frodenn des Laybengs airtrah'ge_, was intended to be--

Lieber durch Leiden, Mocht ich mich schlagen Als so viel Freuden Des Lebens ertragen.

Goethe's prose he did not consider good, but heavy and prolix, and lacking in descriptive power. He would praise Voltaire's prose at his expense. "You perceive the figure and its movements far more clearly,"

he said. The German romanticists disgusted him; their style, also, was too inartistic for him (_ils ne savent pas ecrire, cela me degoute d'eux_).

I frequently met friends at his house, amongst others, Marcelin, who had been his friend from boyhood, and upon whom, many years later, he wrote a melancholy obituary. This man, the proprietor of that supremely worldly paper, _La Vie Parisienne_, was a powerful, broad- shouldered, ruddy-cheeked man, who looked the incarnation of health and very unlike one's preconception of the editor of the most frivolous and fashionable weekly in Paris. He was a draughtsman and an author, had studied the history of the last few centuries in engravings, and himself owned a collection of no fewer than 300,000. What Taine had most admired in him was the iron will with which, left, at nineteen years of age, penniless, and defectively educated, as head of his family, he had kept his mother and brothers and sisters by his work. Next to that Taine admired his earnestness. Marcelin, who was generally looked upon as belonging to gay Paris, was a solitary-minded man, an imaginative recreator of the peoples of the past, as they were and went about, of their ways and customs. He it was who opened Taine's eyes to the wealth of contributions to history locked up in collections of engravings, more especially perhaps as regarded people's external appearance, and what the exterior revealed. Another friend who came to Taine at all sorts of times was Gleyre, the old painter, who had been born in French Switzerland, but was otherwise a Parisian. And he was not the only deeply idealistic artist with whom Taine was connected in the bonds of friendship. Although a fundamental element of Taine's nature drew him magnetically to the art that was the expression of strength, tragic or carnal strength, a swelling exuberance of life, there was yet room in his soul for sympathy with all artistic endeavour, even the purely emotional. That which drew him to the idealistic painters was, at bottom, the same quality as drew him to Beethoven and Chopin.

Gleyre's best-known picture is the painting in the Louvre, somewhat weak in colouring, but showing much feeling, a Nile subject representing a man sitting on the banks of the river and watching the dreams of his youth, represented as beautiful women, fleeing from him on a decorated dahabeah, which is disappearing. The t.i.tle is _Lost Illusions_.

There is more strength in the painting, much reproduced in engraving, of a Roman army, conquered by Divico the Helvetian, pa.s.sing under the yoke --a picture which, as an expression of the national pride of the Swiss, has been placed in the Museum at Lausanne.

Still, it was the man himself, rather than his pictures, that Taine thought so much of. Intellectually, Taine was in his inmost heart an admirer of the Italian and the English Renaissance, when most pagan and most unrestrained; his intellectual home was the Venice of the sixteenth century; he would have been in his right place at one of the festivals painted by Veronese, and should have worn the rich and tasteful costume of that period. But socially, and as a citizen, he was quite different, was affectionate and subdued and calm, excessively conventional; temperate in all his judgments, as in his life.

If I succeeded in winning his good-will, it was most emphatically not because I had written a book about him, which, for that matter, he could not understand; he barely glanced through it; he read, at most, the appreciative little review that Gaston Paris did me the honour to write upon it in the _Revue Critique_. But it appealed to him that I had come to France from pure love of knowledge, that I might become acquainted with men and women and intellectual life, and that I had spent my youth in study.

He grew fond of me, advised me as a father or an elder brother might have done, and smiled at my imprudences--as for instance when I almost killed myself by taking too strong a sleeping draught--(_vous etes imprudent, c'est de votre age_). He sometimes reproached me with not jotting down every day, as he did, whatever had struck me; he talked to me about his work, about the projected Essay on Schiller that came to nothing on account of the war, of his _Notes sur l'Angleterre_, which he wrote in a little out-of-the-way summer-house containing nothing save the four bare whitewashed walls, but a little table and a chair. He introduced into the book a few details that I had mentioned to him after my stay in England.

When we walked in the garden at his country-house at Chatenay, he sometimes flung his arm round my neck--an act which roused great astonishment in the Frenchmen present, who could scarcely believe their eyes. They knew how reserved he usually was.

It quite irritated Taine that the Danish Minister did nothing for me, and introduced me nowhere, although he had had to procure me a free pa.s.s to the theatre. Again and again he reverted to this, though I had never mentioned either the Minister or the Legation to him. But the revolutionary blood in him was excited at what he regarded as a slight to intellectual aristocracy. "What do you call a man like that? A Junker?" I said no. "Never mind! it is all the same. One feels that in your country you have had no revolution like ours, and know nothing about equality. A fellow like that, who has not made himself known in any way whatever, looks down on you as unworthy to sit at his table and does not move a finger on your behalf, although that is what he is there for. When I am abroad, they come at once from the French Emba.s.sy to visit me, and open to me every house to which they have admittance. I am a person of very small importance in comparison with Benedetti, but Benedetti comes to see me as often as I will receive him. We have no lording of it here."

These outbursts startled me, first, because I had never in the least expected or even wished either to be received by the Danish Minister or to be helped by him; secondly, because it revealed to me a wide difference between the point of view in the Romance countries, in France especially, and that in the North. In Denmark, I had never had the entree to Court or to aristocratic circles, nor have I ever acquired it since, though, for that matter, I have not missed it in the least. But in the Romance countries, where the aristocratic world still occasionally possesses some wit and education, it is taken as a matter of course that talent is a patent of n.o.bility, and, to the man who has won himself a name, all doors are open, indeed, people vie with one another to secure him. That a caste division like that in the North was quite unknown there, I thus learnt for the first time.

IV.

Through Taine, I very soon made the acquaintance of Renan, whose personality impressed me very much, grand and free of mind as he was, without a trace of the unctuousness that one occasionally meets in his books, yet superior to the verge of paradox.

He was very inaccessible, and obstinately refused to see people. But if he were expecting you, he would spare you several hours of his valuable time.

His house was furnished with exceeding simplicity. On one wall of his study hung two Chinese water-colours and a photograph of Gerome's _Cleopatra before Caesar_; on the opposite wall, a very beautiful photograph of what was doubtless an Italian picture of the Last Day.

That was all the ornamentation. On his table, there always lay a Virgil and a Horace in a pocket edition, and for a long time a French translation of Sir Walter Scott.

What surprised me most in Renan's bearing was that there was nothing solemn about it and absolutely nothing sentimental. He impressed one as being exceptionally clever and a man that the opposition he had met with had left as it found him. He enquired about the state of things in the North. When I spoke, without reserve, of the slight prospect that existed of my coming to the front with my opinions, he maintained that victory was sure. (_Vous l'emporterez! vous l'emporterez_!) Like all foreigners, he marvelled that the three Scandinavian countries did not try to unite, or at any rate to form an indissoluble Union. In the time of Gustavus Adolphus, he said, they had been of some political importance; since then they had retired completely from the historical stage. The reason for it must very probably be sought for in their insane internecine feuds.

Renan used to live, at that time, from the Spring onwards, at his house in the country, at Sevres. So utterly unaffected was the world-renowned man, then already forty-seven years of age, that he often walked from his house to the station with me, and wandered up and down the platform till the train came.

His wife, who shared his thoughts and worshipped him, had chosen her husband herself, and, being of German family, had not been married after the French manner; still, she did not criticise it, as she thought it was perhaps adapted to the French people, and she had seen among her intimate acquaintances many happy marriages entered into for reasons of convenience. They had two children, a son, Ary, who died in 1900 after having made a name for himself as a painter, and written beautiful poems (which, however, were only published after his death), and a daughter, Noemi (Madame Psichari) who, faithfully preserving the intellectual heritage she has received from her great father, has become one of the centres of highest Paris, a soul of fire, who fights for Justice and Truth and social ideas with burning enthusiasm.

V.

A source of very much pleasure to me was my acquaintance with the old author and College de France Professor, Philarete Chasles. Gregoire introduced me to him and I gradually became at home, as it were, in his house, was always a welcome visitor, and was constantly invited there.

In his old age he was not a man to be taken very seriously, being diffusive, vague and vain. But there was no one else so communicative, few so entertaining, and for the s.p.a.ce of fifty years he had known everybody who had been of any mark in France. He was born in 1798; his father, who was a Jacobin and had been a member of the Convention, did not have him baptised, but brought him up to believe in Truth, (hence the name Philarete,) and apprenticed him to a printer. At the Restoration of the Royal Family, he was imprisoned, together with his father, but released through the influence of Chateaubriand; he then went to England, where he remained for full seven years (1819-1826), working as a typographer, and made a careful study of English literature, then almost unknown in France. After having spent some further time in Germany, he returned to Paris and published a number of historical and critical writings.

Philarete Chasles, as librarian to the Mazarin Library, had his apartments in the building itself, that is, in the very centre of Paris; in the Summer he lived in the country at Meudon, where he had had his veranda decorated with pictures of Pompeian mosaic. He was having a handsome new house with a tower built near by. He needed room, for he had a library of 40,000 volumes.

His niece kept house for him; she was married to a German from Cologne, Schulz by name, who was a painter on gla.s.s. The pair lived apart. Madame Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter, the fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was charmed with her, and it was always full of guests, young students from Alsace and Provence, young negroes from Hayti, young ladies from Jerusalem, and poetesses who would have liked to read their poems aloud and would have liked still better to induce Chasles to make them known by an article.

Chasles chatted with everyone, frequently addressing his conversation to me, talking incessantly about the very men and women that I most cared to hear about, of those still living whom I most admired, such as George Sand, and Merimee, and, in fact, of all the many celebrities he had known. As a young man, he had been taken to the house of Madame Recamier, and had there seen Chateaubriand, an honoured and adored old man, and Sainte-Beuve an eager and attentive listener, somewhat overlooked on account of his ugliness, in whom there was developing that lurking envy of the great, and of those women cl.u.s.tered round, which he ought to have combatted, to produce just criticism.

Chasles had known personally Michelet and Guizot, the elder Dumas and Beyle, Cousin and Villemain, Musset and Balzac; he knew the Comtesse d'Agoult, for so many years the friend of Liszt, and Madame Colet, the mistress, first of Cousin, then of Musset, and finally of Flaubert, of whom my French uncle, who had met her on his travels, had drawn me a very unattractive picture. Chasles was on terms of daily intimacy with Jules Sandeau; even as an old man he could not forget George Sand, who had filched the greater part of his name and made it more ill.u.s.trious than the whole became. Sandeau loved her still, forty years after she had left him.

Chasles was able, in a few words, to conjure up very vividly the images of the persons he was describing to his listener, and his anecdotes about them were inexhaustible. He took me behind the scenes of literature and I saw the stage from all its sides. The personal history of his contemporaries was, it is quite true, more particularly its chronicle of scandals, but his information completed for me the severe and graceful restraint of all Taine said. And side by side with his inclination for gay and malicious gossip, Chasles had a way of sketching out great synopses of intellectual history, which made one realise, as one reflected,' the progress of development of the literatures with which one was familiar. Those were pleasant evenings, those moonlight Spring evenings in the open veranda out there at Meudon, when the old man with the sharp-pointed beard and the little skull-cap on one side of his head, was spokesman. He had the aptest and most amusing way of putting things. For instance, to my question as to whether Guizot had really been as austere by nature as he was in manner, he replied: "It is hard to say; when one wishes to impress, one cannot behave like a harlequin."

Although I had a keen enough eye for Philarete Chasles' weaknesses, I felt exceedingly happy in his house. There I could obtain without difficulty the information I wished for, and have the feeling of being thoroughly "in Paris." Paris was and still is the only city in the world that is and wishes to be the capital not only of its own country but of Europe; the only one that takes upon itself as a duty, not merely to meet the visitor half-way by opening museums, collections, buildings, to him, but the only one where people habitually, in conversation, initiate the foreigner in search of knowledge into the ancient, deep culture of the nation, so that its position with regard to that of other races and countries is made clear to one.

VI.

I had not let a single day elapse before I took my seat again in the _Theatre Francais_, to which I had free admission for an indefinite period. The first time I arrived, the doorkeeper at the theatre merely called the sub-officials together; they looked at me, noted my appearance, and for the future I might take my seat wherever I liked, when the man at the entrance had called out his _Entree_. They were anything but particular, and in the middle of the Summer, after a visit of a month to London, I found my seat reserved for me as before.

The first evening after my arrival, I sat, quietly enjoying _Hernani_ (the lyric beauty of which always rejoiced my heart), with Mounet-Sully in the leading role, Bressant as Charles V, and as Dona Sol, Mlle. Lloyd, a minor actress, who, however, at the conclusion of the piece, rose to the level of the poetry. The audience were so much in sympathy with the spirit of the piece that a voice from the gallery shouted indignantly: "_Le roi est un lache!_" Afterwards, during the same evening, I saw, in a transport of delight, Mme. de Girardin's charming little piece, _La Joie fait Peur_. A certain family believe that their son, who is a young naval officer, fallen in the far East, has been cruelly put to death. He comes back, unannounced, to his broken-hearted mother, his despairing bride, his sister, and an old man- servant. This old, bent, faithful retainer, a stock dramatic part, was played by Regnier with the consummate art that is Nature itself staged.

He has hidden the returned son behind a curtain for fear that his mother, seeing him unexpectedly, should die of joy. The sister comes in.

Humming, the servant begins to dust, to prevent her going near the curtain; but unconsciously, in his delight, his humming grows louder and louder, until, in a hymn of jubilation, tratara-tratara! he flings the broom up over his head, then stops short suddenly, noticing that the poor child is standing there, mute with astonishment, not knowing what to think. Capital, too, was the acting of a now forgotten actress, Mlle.

Dubois, who played the young girl. Her exclamation, as she suddenly sees her brother, "_Je n'ai pas peur, va_!" was uttered so lightly and gaily, that all the people round me, and I myself, too, burst into tears.

I was much impressed by Edmond Thierry, then director of the _Theatre Francais_. I thought him the most refined man I had so far met, possessed of all the old French courtesy, which seemed to have died out in Paris. A conversation with him was a regular course in Dramaturgy, and although a young foreigner like myself must necessarily have been troublesome to him, he let nothing of this be perceptible. I was so charmed by him that nearly two years later I introduced a few unimportant words of his about Moliere's _Misanthrope_ into my lectures on the first part of _Main Currents in European Literature_, simply for the pleasure of mentioning his name.

It was, moreover, a very pleasant thing to pay him a visit, even when he was interrupted. For actors streamed in and out of his house. One day, for instance, the lovely Agar burst into the room to tell her tale of woe, being dissatisfied with the dress that she was to wear in a new part. I saw her frequently again when war had been declared, for she it was who, every evening, with overpowering force and art, sang the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_ from before the footlights.

The theatrical performances were a delight to me. I had been charmed as much only by Michael Wiehe and Johanne Luise Heiberg in my salad days when they played together in Hertz's _Ninon_. But my artistic enjoyment went deeper here, for the character portrayal was very much more true to life. The best impressions I had brought with me of Danish art were supremely romantic, Michael Wiehe as Henrik in _The Fairies_, as the Chevalier in _Ninon_, as Mortimer in Schiller's _Mary Stuart_. But this was the real, living thing.

One evening I saw _Ristori_ play the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth with thrilling earnestness and supreme virtuosity. You felt horror to the very marrow of your bones, and your eyes filled with tears of emotion and anxiety. Masterly was the regular breathing that indicated slumber, and the stiff fingers when she washed her hands and smelt them to see if there were blood upon them. But Mme. Favart, who with artistic self-restraint co-ordinated herself into the whole, without any virtuosity at all, produced no less an effect upon me. As the leading character in Feuillet's _Julie_, she was perfection itself; when I saw her, it seemed to me as though no one at home in Denmark had any idea of what feminine characterisation was. What had been taken for such (Heiberg's art, for instance,) only seemed like a graceful and brilliant convention, that fell to pieces by the side of this.

The performances at the _Theatre Francais_ lasted longer than they do now. In one evening you could see Gozlan's _Tempete dans un verre d'Eau_, Augier's _Gabrielle_, and Banville's _Gringoire_.

When I had seen Mme. Favart and Regnier in _Gabrielle_, Lafontaine as Louis XI, his wife as Loyse, Mlle. Ponsin as Nicole, and Coquelin, at that time still young and fresh, as Gringoire, I felt that I had enjoyed one of the greatest and most elevating pleasures the world had to offer.

I went home, enraptured and enthusiastic, as much edified as the believer returning from his church. I could see _Gringoire_ a dozen times in succession and find only one expression for what I felt: "This is holy."

The piece appealed to me so much, no doubt, because it was more in agreement than the rest with what in Denmark was considered true poetry.

But during the three years since I had last seen him, Coquelin had made immense strides in this role. He rendered it now with an individuality, a heartfelt sincerity and charm, that he had not previously attained; in contrast to harsh King Louis and unfeeling Loyse, was so poor, and hungry, and ill and merry and tender and such a hero and such a genius-- that I said to myself: "Who, ever has seen this, has lived."