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: "_Voilà
das Tragische!_"
Of the more modern German authors, Taine knew only Heine, of whom he
was a passionate 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 Laydénn möcht ee mee schlag'e, als so feel Frödenn des
Laybengs airtrah'ge_, was intended to be--
Lieber durch Leiden,
Möcht 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 écrire, cela me dégoûte
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 title is _Lost
Illusions_. There is more strength in the painting, much reproduced in
engraving, of a Roman army, conquered by Divico the Helvetian, passing
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 êtes
imprudent, c'est de votre âge_). 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 Châtenay, 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
pass 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 Embassy
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 entrée 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 nobility, 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.