A countryman of Lafayette and Bartholdi, this gentleman is not unknown
to some Americans, more especially perhaps, to some of us New Yorkers.
He is an honorary member of most of the Fifth Avenue clubs, anything but
unwelcome at their chance gatherings, while at their premeditated
banquets his appearance--and he always happily times it--is commonly
hailed by a plausive clapping of hands simultaneous with the vocal
salutation. But a person of genial temper is not only very likely to be
a popular man’s man, but also, and beyond that, a favourite with the
ladies. For it is something less venial than mere error in the old
philosopher penally branded with a horrible name--misogynist, I
think--and a soggy soul he must have been; it was something less venial
than error in him to say, as he did, that women, however apt to that
grand passion which makes the one divine rapture of life, have
nevertheless a constitutional incapacity for good-fellowship, that is,
in the masculine acceptation of the term. Assuredly, Hymen knows, too
few of them practically demonstrate their capacity for it. Some musky
dew-drops from the Garden expelled Eve unwillingly carried away
quivering in her hair. More than man, she partakes of the paradisiac
spirit. Under favourable conditions evincing a quicker aptitude to
pleasure than man. How alert to twine the garland for the holiday! How
instinctively prompt for that faint semblance of Eden, the picnic in the
greenwood!
Now there is something in the fine, open, cheery aspect of the Marquis
de Grandvin that conveys a thrill to these frames so exquisitely strung
to happiness. Not invariably running the risk of incurring dark clouds
from their lords, the dames and sisters of the Benedicks of the clubs,
at their balls and parties, cast upon the Marquis that kindled merry
glance which, according to the old French epic whose theme is
Roncesvalles, the ladies bestowed upon Roland; not alone smitten by the
fame and taken with the person of that noble accredited nephew of
Charlemagne, but rightly inferring him to be not more a David against
the Saracen than a champion against still more flagitious infidels,
impugners of the sex. Yes, it is by instinct that all superior women
recognise in this gentleman a cordial friend. Nor do they approve him
the less for his friendly alliance with his charming sphere. This is a
verity not out of keeping with another, namely, this feminine
appreciation of the Marquis, gracious though it be, hardly extends to
such of his qualities as partake of the Grand Style, as one may say, the
highly elevated style; a style apparently demanding for its due
appreciation a robust habit, in short, the masculine habit. For the most
part, it is for his less exalted qualities that the ladies approve de
Grandvin. They approve him for the way in which he contributes to those
amenities and gaieties in which the sexes upon common ground
participate, and wherein, thanks to their gallantry of good-nature, the
countrymen of the Marquis de Grandvin have always excelled.
The foregoing hints as to what is the standing in America, or at least
among some of us Americans, of the genial foreigner here ushered into a
regard less exclusive; that, by patriotic intention goes before the
recital, show that not alone in his own sweet France are the blended
suavity and power of his genius estimated at their just rate, but that
in the high circles of every European capital he is received with even
more than good-will.
Though the subject of this theme, de Grandvin, be a patrician of
hereditary mark, he was not consulted in the matter of his progenitors.
At any rate, his cosmopolitan sympathies, transcending his class, go out
to mankind. Under auspicious circumstances make his acquaintance, and
whatever your degree in the social scale, you will find him friendly
company, cordial and frank; without condescension, a solemn popery he
was never guilty of.
As to his title, if here he be introduced as the Marquis, it is only
because his troops of friends on both sides of the water, not excluding
even the Levellers among them, insist upon retaining for him an
inherited prefix which he himself long ago renounced; and doubtless for
the reason that any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is
unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.
In defence of their insistent employment of the title, a caprice hardly
compatible with their political principles, the Levellers of his
acquaintance, candid in inconsistency, freely admit that somehow there
is something in it felicitously befitting the character innately noble
of de Grandvin.
But some fuller account of this genial paragon, upon whom are concentred
the otherwise diverging suffrages of the divers parties in Church and
State--some account less restricted by considerations of space--is in
course of preparation, and if clamorously demanded, may hereafter
appear. For the present purpose it will be enough, perhaps, if an
outlined picture or two serve to suggest the filled portrait.
Though not so plentiful as our peaches in a good year, there are men of
such noble quality that being in their company enriches and mellows one.
The wisdom they by contact give out is not celibate and sterile like
Solomon’s, but wedded to enjoyment, and hence productive. They would
seem to be a confirmation of the otherwise disputable maxim of Spinoza,
that every advance in joy implies an ascent in the scale of intelligence
and capability. The influence of such a man insensibly disposes one to
gentle charities, brave conceptions, heroic virtues. They have a
suggestion of the potentialities in the unvitiated Adam, a creature,
according to hallowed authority, originally created but a little lower
than the angels. Almost invariably these men have physical beauty; and
the moral charm is in keeping with that, apparently a spontaneous
emanation from it. It is as golden wine down in a golden chalice, where,
seen through the lustre suffusing the shadow, the delicious fluid looks
to be the exuded gathered sap of the precious metal.
It was of the Marquis de Grandvin that the landscape painter, B. Hobbema
Brown, an inoffensive sort of theoretical misanthrope, with a
treacherous flow of loving-kindness in him--to borrow one of his own
eccentric phrases; the same B. Hobbema who, were his significant
reticence on the point, no unwise thing in him, by the way,
conjecturally rendered into words, would seem in his own private
judgment to have been treated illiberally enough by the art-dealers,
art-critics, and academic hanging-committees, to say nothing of the art
public; well, it was of some other than the Marquis that Hobbema B.,
returning in moonlight from a choice assemblage, where he had been
introduced to him, and undergone the inevitable fascination of the
contact; it was of him that Brown enthusiastically exclaimed to his
companion: ‘What a godsend to meet such a man! He is a set-off against
the battalions of his contraries. Between you and me, mankind taken in a
lump are the gods’ job-lot; but, by heaven, the race that can produce a
Marquis de Grandvin is not promiscuously to be contemned!’
See there how the talismanic something in the sort of nature here
indicated can operate upon another nature though of a temper not
favourably disposed to receive its benign influence.
In the casual outcome of such a character, gay fancies and suggestions
without stint, sallies of wit and bonhomie, all sharing more or less in
a certain lyric glow; herein the spiritual bounty to us would seem to be
an unconsciousness in the almoner, involving, too, an indifference or
unconcern as to who may appropriate, or as to what purpose the
appropriation may be applied. In this particular, what recks the Marquis
de Grandvin, for example? He is the ripe peach-tree shedding its
abundance, careless of the garner; he is the Prince of Golconda at the
ball, some of whose innumerable diamond buttons drop from his raiment
unheeded by him in the chance fleeting rubs and collisions of the dance.
But how transitory these prodigal improvident ones can prove!--and once
gone, how soon all but good as forgotten! True, were an example here
demanded, one adapted for popular illustration, not readily could it be
supplied. Literature will not furnish it, since these natures, never
directly expressing themselves in literature, have no memorial place in
its records. Neither are they Alexanders and Napoleons that the fame
which is all but independent of literature should trumpet them.
Nevertheless, in local tradition, and comparatively recent, I do find a
citable instance which, though below the grade, say, of a de Grandvin,
and but in a minor way to the purpose, may perhaps for these reasons
serve the better to actualise the general truth, in a measure bring it
home.
Rufus Choate, the Boston advocate, when inspired to his best before an
audience, how he exhilarated and elevated and transported his hearers.
But he is gone; and all those fireworks of elfish passion and wit, where
are they? Vainly in the Ceramicus of the libraries will you seek any
enduring monument of that oratorical pyrotechnist. As well ransack the
museums of Natural History for the bottled-up tail of Encke’s comet.
What shall we say, then? Are there natures strong to draw and enthrall,
yet whose influence is like that of the magnet, only operative as a
bodily presence? Yes, withdraw the magnet and all is over. And holds
this true as to the Marquis de Grandvin? Yea, and shall he also at last
vanish, sailing into the boundless Nil, leaving no phosphorescent wake
or magic moon-glade behind? Shall naught remain of his cherub sparkle
and spirit?--nothing of all those ineffable qualities that make him what
Raphael, Milton’s affable archangel, would be seen to be were he
commissioned hither to dissuade mankind from ever perpetrating an
inhumanity or a pun? And, oh, thou Admirable Crichton, nay, a
thousandfold more admirable than he, for art thou not kindly as
wise?--of all thy more sustained sallies of bright fantasy and humour,
let alone thy erratic coruscations, shall nothing be crystallised into
permanence? Nothing at last remain of our Lord Bountiful but the empty
larder and void dusty bin? When we laud thee departed, shall the infidel
twit us with--What were his assets? If the very plenitude and variety of
thy shining gifts, and the preoccupation of thy social charm, if these
indispose thee to drudge it as an ‘author,’ or operate as
disqualifications; will no painstaking aspirant for the literary fame
essay the task of methodising thee, or some little segment of thee, into
the literary form? But even thy foremost disciple, Jack Gentian, though
out of humble emulation he strive to follow thy devious footing, yet thy
brow is among the stars; he ventures not to lift his head to thy height.
But I--ah, brimmed with thy genial flood--I, here, in the small hour,
not long returned from a richer than Plato’s ‘Banquet,’ where thou didst
pour from thy cornucopia, with a hand redundant as that of Millet’s
seed-sower, the profusion of thy good things; I, audacious as I am,
resolved upon an emprise.
The Marquis, methought, though glorious, is not of the gods, the more
reproach to their synod; but I will make them yield a place for him on
their golden benches; I will make him an Immortal! How? Monumentalise
him to the remotest posterity in a book fragrant as violets, yet lasting
as the Pyramids!
Yes, and as the prophets of old, announcing the mind of their deity, in
some instances dramatically put on his personality, even so will I
assume that of de Grandvin. How otherwise, indeed? since he it is that
kindles me, inspires me, usurps me. I will snatch at those themes--New
Italy and the Old Masters--wherein this very night we heard him so
sportively romance. I will render the fine festivity of his tone, as
well as the loftier touch; catch the rhythm of the waves of his seas of
invention; swim out there; in short, I did by implication say to myself
an insane thing--I will imitate the inimitable!
The issue of the temerarious resolve, how humiliating! And no wonder.
The inordinate aim, and the inadequate achievement! The soaring ambition
of the balloon, and its abrupt drop at a fatal puncture!
You who have basked in the vital beams of the Marquis, place not in
contrast his own radiant aspect side by side with the dim delineation of
him in the preceding sketch. And, for the attempted rendering of his
thought and style in the piece to follow, take charitable example from
the Persian, who in his comment upon the Icelandic version of the fervid
orientalisms of Sadi and Hafiz, made humane allowance for the inherent
difficulties and presumably numb fingers of the translator in penning
it.
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