I don't know how much people care for my work, but they like my studio
(of which indeed I am exceedingly fond myself), as they show by their
inclination to congregate there at dusky hours on winter afternoons, or
on long dim evenings when the place looks well with its rich
combinations and low-burning lamps and the bad pictures (my own) are not
particularly visible. I won't go into the question of how many of these
are purchased, but I rejoice in the distinction that my invitations are
never declined. Some of my visitors have been good enough to say that on
Sunday evenings in particular there is no pleasanter place in
Paris--where so many places are pleasant--none friendlier to easy talk
and repeated cigarettes, to the exchange of points of view and the
comparison of accents. The air is as international as only Parisian air
can be; women, I surmise, think they look well in it; they come also
because they fancy they are doing something Bohemian, just as many of
the men come because they suppose they are doing something correct. The
old heraldic cushions on the divans, embossed with rusty gold, are
favourable both to expansion and to contraction--that of course of
contracting parties--and the Italian brocade on the walls appeals to
one's highest feelings. Music makes its home there--though I confess I
am not quite the master of _that_ house, and when it is going on in a
truly receptive hush I enjoy the way my company leans back and gazes
through the thin smoke of cigarettes up at the distant Tiepolo in the
almost palatial ceiling. I make sure the piano, the tobacco and the tea
are all of the best.
For the conversation, I leave that mostly to take care of itself. There
are discussions of course and differences--sometimes even a violent
circulation of sense and sound; but I have a consciousness that beauty
flourishes and that harmonies prevail in the end. I have occasionally
known a visitor to be rude to me because he disliked another visitor's
opinions--I had seen an old habitué slip away without bidding me good
night on the arrival of some confident specimen of _les jeunes_; but as
a general thing we have it out together on the spot--the place is really
a chamber of justice, a temple of reconciliation: we understand each
other if we only sit up late enough. Art protects her children in the
long run--she only asks them to trust her. She is like the Catholic
Church--she guarantees paradise to the faithful. Music moreover is a
universal solvent; though I've not an infallible ear I've a sufficient
sense of the matter for that. Ah, the wounds I've known it to heal--the
bridges I've known it to build--the ghosts I've known it to lay! Though
I've seen people stalk out I've never observed them not to steal back.
My studio in short is the theatre of a cosmopolite drama, a comedy
essentially "of character."
One of the liveliest scenes of the performance was the evening, last
winter, on which I became aware that one of my compatriots--an American,
my good friend Alfred Bonus--was engaged in a controversy somewhat
acrimonious, on a literary subject, with Herman Heidenmauer, the young
composer who had been playing to us divinely a short time before and
whom I thought of neither as a disputant nor as an Englishman. I
perceived in a moment that something had happened to present him in this
combined character to poor Bonus, who was so ardent a patriot that he
lived in Paris rather than in London, who had met his interlocutor for
the first time on this occasion, and who apparently had been misled by
the perfection with which Heidenmauer spoke English--he spoke it really
better than Alfred Bonus. The young musician, a born Bavarian, had spent
a few years in England, where he had a commercial step-brother planted
and more or less prosperous--a helpful man who had watched over his
difficult first steps, given him a temporary home, found him publishers
and pupils, smoothed the way to a stupefied hearing for his first
productions. He knew his London and might at a first glance have been
taken for one of its products; but he had, in addition to a genius of
the sort that London fosters but doesn't beget, a very German soul. He
brought me a note from an old friend on the other side of the Channel,
and I liked him as soon as I looked at him; so much indeed that I could
forgive him for making me feel thin and empirical, conscious that _he_
was one of the higher kind whom the future has looked in the face. He
had met through his gold spectacles her deep eyes, and some mutual
communication had occurred. This had given him a confidence which passed
for conceit only with those who didn't know the reason.
I guessed the reason early, and, as may be imagined, he didn't grudge me
the knowledge. He was happy and various--as little as possible the mere
long-haired musicmonger. His hair was short--it was only his legs and
his laughter that were long. He was fair and rosy, and his gold
spectacles glittered as if in response to the example set them by his
beautiful young golden beard. You would have been sure he was an artist
without going so far as to decide upon his particular passion; for you
would have been conscious that whatever this passion might be it was
acquainted with many of the others and mixed with them to its profit.
Yet these discoveries had not been fully made by Alfred Bonus, whose
occupation was to write letters to the American journals about the way
the "boys" were coming on in Paris; for in such a case he probably would
not have expected such nebulous greatness to condense at a moment's
notice. Bonus is clever and critical, and a sort of self-appointed
emissary or agent of the great republic. He has it at heart to prove
that the Americans in Europe _do_ get on--taking for granted on the part
of the Americans at home an interest in this subject greater, as I often
assure him, than any really felt. "Come, now, do _I_ get on?" I often
ask him; and I sometimes push the inquiry so far as to stammer: "And
you, my dear Bonus, do _you_ get on?" He is apt to look a little injured
on such occasions, as if he would like to say in reply: "Don't you call
it success to have Sunday evenings at which I'm a regular attendant? And
can you question for a moment the figure I make at them?" It has even
occurred to me that he suspects me of painting badly on purpose to spite
him--that is to interfere with his favourite dogma. Therefore to spite
me in return he's in the heroic predicament of refusing to admit that
I'm a failure. He takes a great interest in the plastic arts, but his
intensest sympathy is for literature. This sentiment is somewhat
starved, as in that school the boys languish as yet on a back seat. To
show what they are doing Bonus has to retreat upon the studios, but
there is nothing he enjoys so much as having, when the rare chance
offers, a good literary talk. He follows the French movement closely and
explains it profusely to our compatriots, whom he mystifies, but who
guess he's rather loose.
I forget how his conversation with Heidenmauer began--it was, I think,
some difference of opinion about one of the English poets that set them
afloat. Heidenmauer knows the English poets, and the French, and the
Italian, and the Spanish, and the Russian--he is a wonderful
representative of that Germanism which consists in the negation of
intellectual frontiers. It is the English poets that, if I'm not
mistaken, he loves best, and probably the harm was done by his having
happened to say so. At any rate Alfred Bonus let him have it, without
due notice perhaps, which is rather Alfred's way, on the question (a
favourite one with my compatriot) of the backward state of literature in
England, for which after all Heidenmauer was not responsible. Bonus
believes in responsibility--the responsibility of others, an attitude
which tends to make some of his friends extremely secretive, though
perhaps it would have been justified--as to this I'm not sure--had
Heidenmauer been, under the circumstances, technically British. Before
he had had time to explain that he was not, the other persons present
had become aware that a kind of challenge had passed--that nation, in a
sudden startled flurry, somehow found itself pitted against nation.
There was much vagueness at first as to which of the nations were
engaged and as to what their quarrel was about, the question coming
presently to appear less simple than the spectacle (so easily
conceivable) of a German's finding it hot for him in a French house, a
house French enough at any rate to give countenance to the idea of his
quick defeat.
How could the right cause fail of protection in any house of which
Madame de Brindes and her charming daughter were so good as to be
assiduous frequenters? I recollect perfectly the pale gleam of joy in
the mother's handsome face when she gathered that what had happened was
that a detested German was on his defence. She wears her eternal
mourning (I admit it's immensely becoming) for a triple woe, for
multiplied griefs and wrongs, all springing from the crash of the
Empire, from the battlefields of 1870. Her husband fell at Sedan, her
father and her brother on still darker days; both her own family and
that of M. de Brindes, their general situation in life, were, as may be
said, creations of the Empire, so that from one hour to the other she
found herself sinking with the wreck. You won't recognise her under the
name I give her, but you may none the less have admired, between their
pretty lemon-coloured covers, the touching tales of Claude Lorrain. She
plies an ingenious, pathetic pen and has reconciled herself to effort
and privation for the sake of her daughter. I say privation, because
these distinguished women are poor, receive with great modesty and have
broken with a hundred of those social sanctities than are dearer to
French souls than to any others. They have gone down into the
market-place, and Paule de Brindes, who is three-and-twenty to-day and
has a happy turn for keeping a water-colour liquid, earns a hundred
francs here and there. She is not so handsome as her mother, but she has
magnificent hair and what the French call a look of race, and is, or at
least was till the other day, a frank and charming young woman. There is
something exquisite in the way these ladies are earnestly,
conscientiously modern. From the moment they accept necessities they
accept them all, and poor Madame de Brindes flatters herself that she
has made her dowerless daughter one of us others. The girl goes out
alone, talks with young men and, although she only paints landscape,
takes a free view of the _convenances_. Nothing can please either of
them more than to tell them they have thrown over their superstitions.
They haven't, thank heaven; and when I want to be reminded of some of
the prettiest in the world--of a thousand fine scruples and pleasant
forms, and of what grace can do for the sake of grace--I know where to
go for it.
It was a part of this pious heresy--much more august in the way they
presented it than some of the aspects of the old faith--that Paule
should have become "engaged," quite like a _jeune mees_, to my brilliant
friend Félix Vendemer. He is such a votary of the modern that he was
inevitably interested in the girl of the future and had matched one
reform with another, being ready to marry without a penny, as the
clearest way of expressing his appreciation, this favourable specimen of
the type. He simply fell in love with Mademoiselle de Brindes and
behaved, on his side, equally like one of us others, except that he
begged me to ask her mother for her hand. I was inspired to do so with
eloquence, and my friends were not insensible of such an opportunity to
show that they now lived in the world of realities. Vendemer's sole
fortune is his genius, and he and Paule, who confessed to an answering
flame, plighted their troth like a pair of young rustics or (what comes
for French people to the same thing) young Anglo-Saxons. Madame de
Brindes thinks such doings at bottom very vulgar; but vulgar is what she
tries hard to be, she is so convinced it is the only way to make a
living. Vendemer had had at that time only the first of his successes,
which was not, as you will remember--and unfortunately for Madame de
Brindes--of this remunerative kind. Only a few people recognised the
perfection of his little volume of verse: my acquaintance with him
originated in my having been one of the few. A volume of verse was a
scanty provision to marry on, so that, still like a pair of us others,
the luckless lovers had to bide their time. Presently however came the
success (again a success only with those who care for quality, not with
the rough and ready public) of his comedy in verse at the Français.
This charming work had just been taken off (it had been found not to
make money), when the various parties to my little drama met Heidenmauer
at my studio.
Vendemer, who has, as indeed the others have, a passion for music, was
tremendously affected by hearing him play two or three of his
compositions, and I immediately saw that the immitigable German quality
was a morsel much less bitter for him than for the two uncompromising
ladies. He went so far as to speak to Heidenmauer frankly, to thank him
with effusion, an effort of which neither of the quivering women would
have been capable. Vendemer was in the room the night Alfred Bonus
raised his little breeze; I saw him lean on the piano and listen with a
queer face looking however rather wonderingly at Heidenmauer. Before
this I had noticed the instant paleness (her face was admirably
expressive) with which Madame de Brindes saw her prospective son-in-law
make up, as it were, to the original Teuton, whose national character
was intensified to her aching mind, as it would have been to that of
most Frenchwomen in her place, by his wash of English colour. A German
was bad enough--but a German with English aggravations! Her senses were
too fine to give her the excuse of not feeling that his compositions
were interesting, and she was capable, magnanimously, of listening to
them with dropped eyes; but (much as it ever cost her not to be
perfectly courteous), she couldn't have made even the most superficial
speech to him about them. Marie de Brindes could never have spoken to
Herman Heidenmauer. It was a narrowness if you will, but a narrowness
that to my vision was enveloped in a dense atmosphere--a kind of sunset
bloom--of enriching and fortifying things. Herman Heidenmauer himself,
like the man of imagination and the lover of life that he was, would
have entered into it delightedly, been charmed with it as a fine case of
bigotry. This was conspicuous in Marie de Brindes: her loyalty to the
national idea was that of a _dévote_ to a form of worship. She never
spoke of France, but she always made me think of it, and with an
authority which the women of her race seem to me to have in the question
much more than the men. I dare say I'm rather in love with her, though,
being considerably younger, I've never told her so--as if she would in
the least mind that! I have indeed been a little checked by a spirit of
allegiance to Vendemer; suspecting always (excuse my sophistication)
that in the last analysis it is the mother's charm that he feels--or
originally felt--in the daughter's. He spoke of the elder lady to me in
those days with the insistence with which only a Frenchman can speak of
the objects of his affection. At any rate there was always something
symbolic and slightly ceremonial to me in her delicate cameo-face and
her general black-robed presence: she made me think of a priestess or a
mourner, of revolutions and sieges, detested treaties and ugly public
things. I pitied her, too, for the strife of the elements in her--for
the way she must have felt a noble enjoyment mutilated. She was too good
for that, and yet she was too rigid for anything else; and the sight of
such dismal perversions made me hate more than ever the stupid terms on
which nations have organised their intercourse.
When she gathered that one of my guests was simply cramming it down the
throat of another that the English literary mind was not even literary,
she turned away with a vague shrug and a pitiful look at her daughter
for the taste of people who took their pleasure so poorly: the truth in
question would be so obvious that it was not worth making a scene about.
Madame de Brindes evidently looked at any scene between the English and
the Americans as a quarrel proceeding vaguely from below stairs--a
squabble sordidly domestic. Her almost immediate departure with her
daughter operated as a lucky interruption, and I caught for the first
time in the straight, spare girl, as she followed her mother, a little
of the air that Vendemer had told me he found in her, the still
exaltation, the brown uplifted head that we attribute, or that at any
rate he made it visible to me that he attributed, to the dedicated Maid.
He considered that his intended bore a striking resemblance to Jeanne
d'Arc, and he marched after her on this occasion like a
square-shouldered armour-bearer. He reappeared, however, after he had
put the ladies into a cab, and half an hour later the rest of my
friends, with the sole exception of Bonus, having dispersed, he was
sitting up with me in the empty studio for another _bout de causerie_.
At first perhaps I was too occupied with reprimanding my compatriot to
give much attention to what Vendemer might have to say; I remember at
any rate that I had asked Bonus what had induced him to make so grave a
blunder. He was not even yet, it appeared, aware of his blunder, so that
I had to inquire by what odd chance he had taken Heidenmauer for a
bigoted Briton.
"If I spoke to him as one he answered as one; that's bigoted enough,"
said Alfred Bonus.
"He was confused and amused at your onslaught: he wondered what fly had
stung you."
"The fly of patriotism," Vendemer suggested.
"Do _you_ like him--a beast of a German?" Bonus demanded.
"If he's an Englishman he isn't a German--_il faut opter_. We can hang
him for the one or for the other, we can't hang him for both. I was
immensely struck with those things he played."
"They had no charm for me, or doubtless I too should have been
demoralised," Alfred said. "He seemed to know nothing about Miss
Brownrigg. Now Miss Brownrigg's great."
"I like the things and even the people you quarrel about, you big babies
of the same breast. _C'est à se tordre!_" Vendemer declared.
"I may be very abject, but I _do_ take an interest in the American
novel," Alfred rejoined.
"I hate such expressions: there's no such thing as the American novel."
"Is there by chance any such thing as the French?"
"_Pas davantage_--for the artist himself: how can you ask? I don't know
what is meant by French art and English art and American art: those seem
to me mere cataloguers' and reviewers' and tradesmen's names,
representing preoccupations utterly foreign to the artist. Art is art in
every country, and the novel (since Bonus mentions that) is the novel in
every tongue, and hard enough work they have to live up to that
privilege, without our adding another muddle to the problem. The reader,
the consumer may call things as he likes, but we leave him to his little
amusements." I suggested that we were all readers and consumers; which
only made Vendemer continue: "Yes, and only a small handful of us have
the ghost of a palate. But you and I and Bonus are of the handful."
"What do you mean by the handful?" Bonus inquired.
Vendemer hesitated a moment. "I mean the few intelligent people, and
even the few people who are not----" He paused again an instant, long
enough for me to request him not to say what they were "not," and then
went on: "People in a word who have the honour to live in the only
country worth living in."
"And pray what country is that?"
"The land of dreams--the country of art."
"Oh, the land of dreams! I live in the land of realities!" Bonus
exclaimed. "What do you all mean then by chattering so about _le roman
russe?_"
"It's a convenience--to identify the work of three or four, _là-bas_,
because we're so far from it. But do you see them _writing_ 'le roman
russe?'"
"I happen to know that that's exactly what they want to do, some of
them," said Bonus.
"Some of the idiots, then! There are plenty of those everywhere.
Anything born under that silly star is sure not to count."
"Thank God I'm not an artist!" said Bonus.
"Dear Alfred's a critic," I explained.
"And I'm not ashamed of my country," he subjoined.
"Even a critic perhaps may be an artist," Vendemer mused.
"Then as the great American critic Bonus may be the great American
artist," I went on.
"Is that what you're supposed to give us--'American' criticism?"
Vendemer asked, with dismay in his expressive, ironic face. "Take care,
take care, or it will be more American than critical, and then where
will _you_ be? However," he continued, laughing and with a change of
tone, "I may see the matter in too lurid a light, for I've just been
favoured with a judgment conceived in the purest spirit of our own
national genius." He looked at me a moment and then he remarked: "That
dear Madame de Brindes doesn't approve of my attitude."
"Your attitude?"
"Toward your German friend. She let me know it when I went down stairs
with her--told me I was much too cordial, that I must observe myself."
"And what did you reply to that?"
"I answered that the things he had played were extraordinarily
beautiful."
"And how did she meet that?"
"By saying that he's an enemy of our country."
"She had you there," I rejoined.
"Yes, I could only reply '_Chère madame, voyons!_'"
"That was meagre."
"Evidently, for it did no more for me than to give her a chance to
declare that he can't possibly be here for any good and that he belongs
to a race it's my sacred duty to loathe."
"I see what she means."
"I don't then--where artists are concerned. I said to her: '_Ah, madame,
vous savez que pour moi il n'y a que l'art!_'"
"It's very exciting!" I laughed. "How could she parry that?"
"'I know it, my dear child--but for _him_?' That's the way she parried
it. 'Very well, for him?' I asked. 'For him there's the insolence of
the victor and a secret scorn for our incurable illusions!'"
"Heidenmauer has no insolence and no secret scorn."