The Trilby craze has overrun the land like the "grip"
bacillus or the seven-year locust. Here in America it has
become almost as disgusting as the plague of lice sent
upon Egypt to eat the chilled steel veneering off the heart
of Pharaoh the fickle. Everything is Trilby. We have Trilby
bonnets and bonbons, poses and plays, dresses and
drinks. Trilby sermons have been preached from prominent
pulpits, and the periodicals, from penny-post to pretentious
magazine, have Trilbyismus and have it bad. One would
think that the world had just found Salvation, so loud and
unctuous is its hosannah--that Trilby was some new Caaba-
stone or greater Palladium floated down from Heaven on
the wings of Du Maurier's transcendent genius; that after
waiting and watching for six thousand--or million--years, a
perfect exemplar had been bequeathed to the world.
I have read Du Maurier's foolish little book--as a
disagreeable duty. The lot of the critic is an unenviable
one. He must read everything, even such insufferable rot
as "Coin's Financial School," and those literary nightmares
turned loose in rejoinder--veritable Rozinantes, each
bearing a chop-logic Don Quixote with pasteboard helmet
and windmill spear. I knew by the press comments--I had
already surmised from its popularity with upper-tendom--
that "Trilby" was simply a highly spiced story of female
frailty; hence I approached it with "long teeth"'--like a
politician eating crow, or a country boy absorbing his first
glass of lager beer. I had received a surfeit of the
Camillean style of literature in my youth before I learned
with Ecclesiastes the Preacher--or even with Parkhurst--that
"all is vanity."
So far as my experience goes the only story of a fallen
woman that was worth the writing--and the reading--is that
of Mary Magdalen; and it is not French. Her affaires
d'amour appear to have ended with her repentance. She
did not try to marry a duke, elevate the stage or break into
swell society. After closing her maison de joie she
ceased to be "bonne camarade et bonne fille" in the
tough de tough quarter of the Judean metropolis. There
were no more strolls on the Battery by moonlight alone love
after exchanging her silken robe de chambre for an old-
fashioned nightgown with never a ruffle. When she applied
the soft pedal the Bacchic revel became a silent prayer. So
far as we can gather, the cultured gentlemen of Judea did
not fall over each other in a frantic effort to ensnare her
with Hymen's noose. If the Apostles recommended her life
to the ladies of their congregations as worthy emulation the
stenographer must have been nodding worse than Homer.
If the elite of Jerusalem named their daughters for her and
made her the subject of public discussion, that fact
has been forgotten. And yet it is reasonably certain that
she was beautiful--even more beautiful than Trilby, the
bones of whose face were so attractive, the pink of whose
tootsie-wootsies so irresistible. The Magdalen of St. Luke
appears to have been in many respects the superior of the
Magdalen of Du Maurier. She does not appear to have
been an ignorant and coarse-grained she-gamin who
frequented the students' quarter of the sacred city, posing
to strolling artists for "the altogether," being, in the crowded
atelier like Mother Eve in Eden "naked and not ashamed."
We may suppose that the sensuous blood of the Orient ran
riot in her veins--that she was swept into the fierce
maelstrom by love and passion and would have perished
there but for the infinite pity of our Lord, who cast out the
seven devils that lurked within her heart like harpies in a
Grecian temple, and stilled the storm that beat like
sulphurous waves of fire within her snowy breast.
"And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner,
when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's
house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at
his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet
with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head,
and kissed his feet and anointed them with ointment."
How stale, flat and unprofitable the modern stories of semi-
repentant prostitutes beside that pathetic passage, which
shears down into the very soul--penetrates to the
profoundest depths of the sacred Lake of Tears! And yet
this ultra-orthodox age--which would suppress the
ICONOCLAST if it could for poking fun at Poll Parrot
preachers--has not become crazed over Mary Magdalen--
has not so much as named a canal-boat or a cocktail for her.
Du Maurier says of his heroine: "With her it was lightly
come and lightly go and never come back again. . . .
Sheer gayety of heart and genial good fellowship, the
difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading . . . so little did
she know of love's heartaches and raptures and torments
and clingings and jealousies," etc. A woman who had
never been in love, yet confessed to criminal intimacy with
three men--and was not yet at the end of her string! Not
even the pride of dress, the scourge of need, the fire-whips
of passion to urge her on, she sinned, as the Yankees
would say, simply "to be a-doin' "--broke the Seventh
Commandment "more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie
than anything else." That's the way we used to kill people
in Texas. Still I opine that when a young woman gets so
awfully jolly that she distributes her favors around
promiscuously just to put people in a good humor, she's a
shaky piece of furniture to make a fad of--a doubtful
example to be commended from the pulpit to America's
young daughters. The French enthusiasts once crowned a
courtesan in Notre Dame as Goddess of Reason and
worshiped her; but I was hardly prepared to see the
American people enthrone another as Goddess of
Respectability and become hysterical in their devotion. I
am no he-prude. I have probably said as many kindly
things of fallen womanhood as Du Maurier himself, but I
dislike to see a rotten drab deified. I dislike to see a great
publishing house like that of Harper & Bros. so indifferent to
decency, so careless of moral consequences, that, for the
sake of gain, it will turn loose upon this land the foul
liaisons of the French capital. I dislike to see the mothers
of the next generation of Americans trying to "make up" to
resemble the counterfeit presentment of a brazen bawd. It
indicates that our entire social system is sadly in need of
fumigation--such as Sodom and Gomorrah received.
Trilby, the child of a bummy preacher and a bastard bar-
maid, was born and bred in the slum of the wickedest
city in the world. Little was to be expected of such
birth and breeding. We are not surprised that she regards
fornication as but a venial fault--like cigarette smoking--and
sins "capriciously, desultorily, more in a frolicsome spirit of
camaraderie than anything else." Girls so reared are apt to
be a trifle frolicsome. We are not shocked to see her
stripped stark naked in Carrel's atelier in the presence of
half a hundred hoodlums of the Latin quarter--seeming as
unconcerned as a society belle at opera or ball with half her
back exposed, her bust ready to spill itself out of her
corsage if she chance to stoop. We even feel that it is in
perfect accord with the eternal fitness of things when these
wild sprouts of Bohemia, "with kindly solicitude, help her on
with her clothes." We can even pause to admire the
experienced skill with which they put each garment in its
proper place--and deftly button it. That she should have
the ribald slang of the free-and-easy neighborhood at her
tongue's end and be destitute of delicacy as a young cow
might be expected; but we are hardly prepared to see one
grown up among such surroundings so unutterably stupid
as not to know when her companions are "guying" her.
Trilby croaking "Ben Bolt" for the edification of les trois
Angliches were a sight worthy of a lunatic asylum. It was
even more ridiculous than the social performance of that
other half-wit, Little Billee, in Carrel's atelier. Stupidity
covers even more sins than charity, hence we should not
judge Du Maurier's heroine too harshly. As weak intellects
yield readily to hypnotic power, Svengali had an easy
victim. I have no word of criticism for the poor creature. I
do not blame Du Maurier for drawing her as he found--or
imagined--her, nor can I blame popular preachers, "able
editors" and half-wit women for worshiping the freckled and
faulty grisette as a goddess; for does not Carlyle truly tell
us that "what we see, and can not see over, is good
as Infinity?" Still I cannot entertain an exalted opinion of
either the intelligence or morals of a people who will place
such a character on a pedestal and prostrate themselves
before it.
I confess my surprise at the phenomenal popularity of the
book among people familiar with Dickens, Scott and
Thackeray, triune transcendent of fiction. I had hoped
when "Ben Hur" made its great hit that the golden age of
flash fiction was past--that it could henceforth count among
its patrons only stable boys and scullions; but the same
nation that received "Ben Hur" with tears of thankfulness--
thankfulness for a priceless jewel of spotless purity ablaze
with the immortal fire of genius--has gone mad with joy over
a dirty tale of bawdry that might have been better told by a
cheap reporter bordering on the jimjams. Has the
American nation suddenly declined into intellectual dotage--
reached the bald-head and dizzy soubrette finale in the
mighty drama of life?
I can account for the success of Du Maurier's book only on
the hypothesis that "like takes to like"--that the world is full
of frail Trilbys and half-baked duffers like Little Billee, who,
Narcissuslike, worship their own image. They don't mind
the contradictions and absurdities with which the book
abounds; in fact, those who read up-to-date French novels
are seldom gifted with sufficient continuity of thought to
detect contradictions if they appear two pages apart. The
book is ultra-bizarre, a thin intellectual soup served in
grotesque, even impossible dishes and highly flavored with
vulgar animalism--just the mental pabulum craved by those
whose culture is artificial, mentality weak and morals mere
matter of form. The plot was evidently loaded to scatter. It
is about as probable as Jack and the Beanstalk, and is
worked out with the skill of a country editor trying to
"cover" a national convention. The story affords
about as much food for thought as one of Talmage's plate-
matter sermons--is fully as "fillin' " as drinking the froth out
of a pop-bottle, and equally as exhilarating. Like other sots,
the more the literary bacchanal drinks the more he thirsts--
appetite increased by what it feeds upon. We can forgive
Byron and Boccaccio the lax morals of their productions
because of their literary excellence, just as we wink at the
little social lapses of Sarah Bernhardt because of her
unapproachable genius; but Du Maurier's book is wholly
bad. It could only have been made worse by being made
bigger. It is a moral crime, a literary abortion. The style is
faulty and the narrative marred--if a bad egg can be
spoiled--by slang lugged in from the slums of two
continents with evident labor. Employed naturally, slang
may serve--in a pinch--for Attic salt; but slang for its own
sake is smut on the nose instead of a "beauty-spot" on the
cheek of Venus--sure evidence of a paucity of ideas. A
trite proverb, a non-translatable phrase from a foreign
tongue may be permissible; but the writer who jumbles two
languages together indiscriminately is but a pedantic prig.
It were bad enough if Du Maurier mixed good English with
better French; but he employs in his bilingual book the very
worst of both--obsolete American provincialisms and the
patois of the quartier latin side by side. To the
cultured American who knows only the English of Lindley
Murray and scholastic French, the book is about as
intelligible as Greek to Casca or the "dog-latin" of the
American schoolboy to Julius Caesar.
His characters resemble the distorted freaks of nature in a
dime museum. They may all be possible, but not one of
them probable. Taffy and Gecko are the best of the lot.
The first is a big, good-natured Englishman who wants to
see his sweetheart married to his friend, weds another and
supports her quite handsomely by painting pictures
he cannot sell; the latter a Pole with an Italian's
temperament, yet who sees the woman he loves in the
power of a demon--by whom she is presumably
debauched--and makes no effort to rescue her, is not even
jealous. Svengali is the greatest musician in the world, yet
cannot make a living in Paris, the modern home of art. He
is altogether and irretrievably bad--despite the harmony in
which his soul is steeped! Think of a hawk outwarbling a
nightingale--of a demon flooding the world with melody
most divine! We may now expect Mephistopheles to
warble "Nearer My God to Thee" between the acts! Trilby
can sing no more than a burro. Like the useful animal, she
has plenty of voice, and, like him, she can knock the horns
off the moon with it or send it on a hot chase after the
receding ghost of Hamlet's sire; but she is "tone-deaf"--
can't tell Ophelia's plaint from the performance of Thomas'
orchestra. Svengali hypnotizes her, and, beneath his magic
spell she becomes the greatest cantatrice in Europe.
Hypnotism is a power but little understood; so we must
permit Du Maurier to make such Jules Verne's excursions
into that unknown realm as may please him. Had Svengali
made a contortionist of the stiff old Devonshire vicar we
could not cry "impossible." The Laird of Cockpen is a
good-natured fellow to whom Trilby tells her troubles
instead of pouring them into the capacious ear of a
policeman. He is a kind of bewhiskered Sir Galahad who
goes in quest of Trilby instead of the Holy Grail, and having
found her, sits down on her bed and cheers her up while
she kisses and caresses him. As she is in love with his
friend, the performance is eminently proper, quite platonic.
The Laird advises Trilby to give up sitting for "the
altogether"; yet Du Maurier assures us that "nothing is so
chaste as nudity"--that "Venus herself, as she drops her
garments and steps on to the model-throne, leaves
behind her on the floor every weapon by which she can
pierce to the grosser passions of men."
Then he informs us that a naked woman is such a fright
"that Don Juan himself were fain to hide his eyes in sorrow
and disenchantment and fly to other climes." How thankful
Cupid must be that he was born blind! Still the most of us
are willing to risk one eye on the average "altogether"
model. Du Maurier--who is a somewhat better artist than
author--illustrates his own book. He gives us several
portraits of Trilby, all open-mouthed, with a vacant stare.
Strange that he did not draw his heroine nude as she sat
on the bed hugging and kissing the Laird--that he did not
hang up "on the floor every weapon" by which Venus
herself "can pierce to the grosser passions of men." But
perchance he was afraid the Laird would "hide his eyes in
sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." He
could not be spared just yet. Despite his plea for the nude,
I think he exercised excellent judgment in leaving Trilby
"clothed and in her right mind"--such as it was--while the
Laird roosted on her couch in that attic bedroom and was--
to us a Tennysonianism--mouthed and mumbled. Even
New York's "four hundred" might have felt a little
squeamish at seeing this pair of platonic turtle doves hid
away in an obscure corner of naughty Paris in puris
naturalibus even if "there is nothing so chaste as nudity."
Du Maurier says that Trilby never sat to him for "the
altogether," and adds: "I would as soon have asked the
Queen of Spain to let me paint her legs." If nudity be so
chaste, and Trilby didn't mind the exposure even a little bit,
why should he hesitate? And why should he not paint the
legs of the Queen of Spain--or even the underpinning of the
Queen of Hawaii--as well as her arms? But if we
pause to point out all the absurd contradictions in this
flake of ultra-French froth we shall wear out more than one
pencil.
Little Billee is a very nice young man who has been kept
too close to his mother's apron-strings for his own good--a
girlish, hysterical kind of boy, who should be given spoon-
victuals and put to bed early. Of course he wants to marry
Trilby, for he is of that age when the swish of a petticoat
makes us seasick. She is perfectly willing to become his
mistress--although she had "repented" of her sins and
been "forgiven" but a few days before. She has sense
enough--despite Du Maurier's portraits of her--to know that
she is unworthy to become a gentleman's wife, to be mated
with a he-virgin like Little Billee. But she is overpersuaded--
as usual--and consents. Then the young calf's mother
comes on the scene and asks her to spare her little pansy
blossom--not to blight his life with the frost of her follies.
And of course she consents again. She's the great
consenter--always in the hands of friends, like an American
politician. "The difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading"
prevents a mesalliance. Trilby skips the trala and Little
Billee--who has no chance to secure a reconsideration cries
himself sick, but recovers,--comes up smiling like a cotton-
patch after a spring shower. He is taken to England, but
fails to find that "absence makes the heart grow fonder."
He gets wedded to his art quite prettily, and even thinks of
turning Mormon and taking the vicar's daughter for a
second bride, but slips up on an atheistical orange peel,
something has gone wrong with his head. Where his bump
of amativeness should stick out like a walnut there is a
discouraging depression which alarms him greatly, and
worries the reader not a little. But finally he sees Trilby
again, and, the wheel in his head, which has stuck fast for
five years, begins to whizz around like the internal
economy of an alarm clock--or a sky terrier with a
clothespin on his tail.
Of course there is now nothing for Trilby to do but to die.
They could be paired off in a kind of morganatic marriage;
but it is customary in novels where the heroine has been
too frolicsome, for her to get comfortably buried instead of
happily married,--and perhaps it is just as well. Even a
French novelist must make some little mock concession to
the orthodox belief that the wage of sin is death. So Trilby
sinks into the grave with a song like the dying swan, and
Little Billee follows suit--upsets the entire Christian religion
by dying very peaceably as an Atheist, without so much as
a shudder on the brink of that outer darkness where there's
supposed to be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Svengali has also fallen by the wayside, a number of
characters have been very happily forgotten, so the story
drags along to the close on three not very attractive legs,
Taffy, the Laird and Gecko. It is a bad drama worse
staged, with an ignorant bawd for heroine, a weak little
thing for leading man, an impossible Caliban for heavy
villain and Atheism for moral. Such is the wonderful work
that has given this alleged land of intelligence a case of
literary mania a potu, set it to singing the praises of a
grimy grisette more melodiously than she warbled,
"mironton, mirontaine" at the bidding of the villainous
Svengali. Such is this new lion of literature who has set
American maids and matrons to paddling about home
barefoot and posing in public with open mouths--flattering
themselves that they resemble a female whom they would
scald if she ventured into their back yard.