HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Little French Masterpieces
By
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Edited by
Alexander Jessup
An Introduction by
Ferdinand Brunetière
The Translation by
George Burnham Ives
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1903
Contents
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
THE UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE
A SEASHORE DRAMA
AN EPISODE UNDER THE TERROR
LA GRANDE BRETÈCHE
THE CONSCRIPT
A PASSION IN THE DESERT
INTRODUCTION
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
(1799-1850)
Balzac's short stories, which we call in French _nouvelles_, are,
generally speaking, not the best-known or the most popular part of his
work; nor are they the part best fitted to give a true and complete
idea of his genius. But some of them are none the less masterpieces in
their kind; they have characteristics and a significance not always
possessed by their author's long novels, such as _Eugénie Grandet_ or
_Cousin Pons;_ and finally, for this very reason, they hold in the
unfinished structure of _The Human Comedy_ a place which it will be
interesting to try to determine. That is all that will be attempted in
this Introduction.
Some of the stories contained in the present volume were written
under curious circumstances. In the first place it is to be noted
that they all date from 1830, 1831, and 1832[1] and therefore precede
the conception and planning of _The Human Comedy_. Their value is far
from being diminished by that fact. _An Episode under the Terror_
(1830), for instance, was composed as an introduction to the _Memoirs_
of Sanson--that executioner who of all executioners in the world's
history probably despatched the fewest criminals and yet shed the most
blood; and the _Memoirs_ themselves, which are entirely apocryphal,
are also in part Balzac's own work. But, though composed in this way,
to order and as a piece of hack work, _An Episode under the Terror_ is
in its artistic brevity one of Balzac's most tragic and most finished
narratives. _La Grande Bretèche_ (1832) was at first only an episode
inserted among the more extended narratives of which it made part, as
in the old-fashioned novel of tales within tales of which _Gil Blas_
is the type; and brief as it is, Balzac nevertheless rewrote it three
or four times. It is therefore anything but an improvisation. Yet no
other of these short stories can give more vividly than _La Grande
Bretèche_ the impression of a work sprung at once in full completeness
from its author's brain, and conceived from the very first in its
indivisible unity. But, precisely, it is one of the characteristic
traits of Balzac's genius that we hardly need to know when or for
what purpose he wrote this or that one of his novels or stories.
He bore them all within him at once--we might say that the germ of
them was preëxistent in him before he had any conscious thought of
objectivising them. His characters were born in him, as though from
all eternity, before he knew them himself; and before he himself
suspected it, _The Human Comedy_ was alive, was confusedly moving,
was slowly shaping itself, in his brain. This point must be clearly
seen before he can be understood or appreciated at his true value.
However much interest a monograph on some animal or plant may have in
itself--and that interest, no doubt, is often great--it has far more
through the relations it bears to other monographs and to the whole
field of knowledge of which its subject is only a fragmentary part. So
it is with Balzac's novels and stories. Their interest is not limited
to themselves. They bring out one another's value and significance,
they illustrate and give importance to each other; they have, outside
themselves, a justification for existence. This will become clear if we
compare Mérimée's _Mateo Falcone_, for instance, with _A Seashore
Drama_ (1835). The subject is the same: in each case it is a father who
constitutes himself justiciary of the honour of his race. But while
Mérimée's work, though perhaps better written or at least engraved with
deeper tooling, is after all nothing but an anecdote, a sensational
news-item, a story of local manners, Balzac's is bound up with a
whole mass of ideas, not to say a whole social philosophy, of which it
is, properly speaking, only a _chapter;_ and of which _The Conscript_
(1831) is another.
But why did Balzac confine some of his subjects within the narrow
limits of the _nouvelle_, while he expanded others to the dimensions
of epic, we might say, or of history? It was because, though analogies
are numerous between natural history and what we may call social
history or the natural history of society, yet their resemblance is
not complete nor their identity absolute. There are peculiarities or
variations of passion which, though physiologically or pathologically
interesting, are _socially_ insignificant and can be left out of
account: for instance, _A Passion in the Desert_ (1830), or _The
Unknown Masterpiece_ (1831). It is rare, in art, for the passionate
pursuit of progress to result only, as with Frenhofer, in jumbling the
colours on a great painter's canvas; and, even were this less rare,
artists are not very numerous! So, if the writer gave to his narrative
of this painful but infrequent adventure as full a development, if he
diversified and complicated it with as many episodes and details as
the adventures of Baron Hulot in _Cousin Bette_ or those of Madame
de Mortsauf in _The Lily in the Valley_, he would thereby attribute
to it, _socially_ or _historically_, an importance it does not
possess. He would err, and would make us err with him, regarding the
true proportions of things. He would represent the humanity which
he was attempting to depict, in a manner far from consistent with
reality. Hence may be deduced the æsthetics of the _nouvelle_, and its
distinction from the _conte_, and also from the _roman_ or novel.
The _nouvelle_ differs from the _conte_ in that it always claims
to be a picture of ordinary life; and it differs from the novel in
that it selects from ordinary life, and depicts by preference and
almost exclusively, those examples of the strange, the rare, and the
extraordinary which ordinary life does in spite of its monotony
nevertheless contain. It is neither strange nor rare for a miser to
make all the people about him, including his wife and children, victims
of the passion to which he is himself enslaved; and that is the subject
of _Eugénie Grandet_. It is nothing extraordinary for parents of
humble origin to be almost disowned by their children whom they have
married too far above them, in another class of society; and that is
the subject of _Father Goriot_. But for a husband, as in _La Grande
Bretèche_, to wall up his wife's lover in a closet, and that before her
very eyes; and, through a combination of circumstances in themselves
quite out of the ordinary, for neither one of them to dare or be able
to make any defence against his vengeance--this is certainly somewhat
rare! Then read _The Conscript_, or _An Episode under the Terror;_
the plot is no ordinary one, and perhaps, with a little exaggeration,
we may say it can have occurred but once. Such, then, is the field of
the _nouvelle_. Let us set off from it the fantastic, in the style
of Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe, even though Balzac sometimes tried
that also, as in _The Wild Ass's Skin_, for instance, or in _Melmoth
Converted;_ for the fantastic belongs to the field of the _conte_.
But unusual events, especially such as result from an unforeseen
combination of circumstances; and really tragic adventures, which, like
Monsieur and Madame de Merret's in _La Grande Bretèche_ or Cambremer's
in _A Seashore Drama_, make human conscience hesitate to call the crime
by its name; and illogical variations, deviations, or perversions of
passion; and the pathology of feeling, as in _The Unknown Masterpiece;_
and still more generally, if I may so express myself, all those things
in life which are out of the usual run of life, which happen _on its
margin_, and so are beside yet not outside it; all that makes its
surprises, its differences, its _startlingness_, so to speak--all this
is the province of the _nouvelle_, bordering on that of the novel yet
distinct from it. Out of common every-day life you cannot really make
_nouvelles_, but only novels--miniature novels, when they are brief,
but still novels. In no French writer of the last century, I think, is
this distinction more evident or more strictly observed than it is in
_The Human Comedy;_ and unless I am much mistaken, this may serve to
solve, or at least to throw light on, the vexed question of Honoré de
Balzac's _naturalism_ or _romanticism_.
In the literal and even the etymological sense of the word
_naturalism_--that is, without taking account of the way in which Émile
Zola and some other Italians have _perverted its nature_--no one can
question that Balzac was a naturalist. One might as well deny that
Victor Hugo was a romanticist! Everybody to-day knows that neither
the freedom of his vocabulary, nor some very detailed descriptions
in _Notre Dame de Paris_ and especially in _Les Misérables_, nor his
coarse popular jokes, often in doubtful taste if not sometimes worse,
nor yet the interest in social questions which characterised him from
the very first--that nothing of all this, I say, prevents Victor Hugo
from having been, up to the day of his death, _the_ romanticist; we may
rest assured that in whatever way romanticism shall be defined, he will
always be, in the history of French literature, its living incarnation.
Balzac, on the other hand, will always be the living incarnation of
naturalism. And surely, if to be a naturalist is to confine the field
of one's art to the observation of contemporary life, and to try to
give a complete and adequate representation thereof, not drawing back
or hesitating, not abating one tittle of the truth, in the depiction of
ugliness and vice; if to be a naturalist is, like a portrait-painter,
to subordinate every æsthetic and moral consideration to the law
of likeness--then it is impossible to be more of a naturalist than
Balzac. But with all this, since his imagination is unruly, capricious,
changeable, with a strong tendency to exaggeration, audacious, and
corrupt; since he, as much as any of his contemporaries, feels the
need of startling us; since he habitually writes under the dominion of
a kind of hallucinatory fever sufficient of itself to mark what we may
call the romantic state of mind--romanticism is certainly not absent
from the work of this naturalist, but on the contrary would fill and
inspire the whole of it, were that result not prevented by the claims,
or conditions, of observation. A romantic imagination, struggling to
triumph over itself, and succeeding only by confining itself to the
study of the model--such may be the definition of Balzac's imagination
or genius; and, in a way, to justify this definition by his work we
need only to distinguish clearly his _nouvelles_ from his novels.
Balzac's _nouvelles_ represent the share of romanticism in his work.
_La Grande Bretèche_ is the typical romantic narrative, and we may say
as much of _The Unknown Masterpiece_. The observer shuts his eyes; he
now looks only within himself; he imagines "what might have been"; and
he writes _An Episode under the Terror_. It is for him a way of escape
from the obsession of the real:
"The real is strait; the possible is vast."
His unbridled imagination takes free course. He works in dream. And,
since of course we can never succeed in building within ourselves
perfectly water-tight compartments, entirely separating dream from
memory and imagination from observation, reality does find its way into
his _nouvelles_ by way of exactness in detail, but their conception
remains essentially or chiefly romantic; just as in his long novels,
_Eugénie Grandet, A Bachelor's Establishment (Un Ménage de Garçon),
César Birotteau, A Dark Affair, Cousin Pons_, and _Cousin Bette_, his
observation remains naturalistic, and his imagination perverts it, by
magnifying or exaggerating, yet never intentionally or systematically
or to the extent of falsifying the true relations of things. Shall
I dare say, to English readers, that by this fact he belongs to
the family of Shakespeare? His long novels are his _Othello_, his
_Romeo_, his _Macbeth_, his _Richard III._, and _Coriolanus;_ and his
_nouvelles_, his short stories, are his _Tempest_, his _Twelfth Night_,
and his _Midsummer Night's Dream_.
This comparison, which really is not a comparison but a mere
analogy, such as might be drawn between Musset and Byron, may serve
to bring out one more characteristic of Balzac's _nouvelles_--they
are philosophic; in his _The Human Comedy_ it is under the title of
_Philosophic Studies_ that he brought together, whatever their origin,
such stories as _A Seashore Drama, The Unknown Masterpiece_, and even
_The Conscript_. By so doing he no doubt meant to imply that the
sensational stories on which they are based did not contain their whole
significance; that he was using them merely as a means of stating a
problem, of fixing the reader's attention for a moment on the vastness
of the mysterious or unknown by which we are, so to speak, enwrapped
about. "We might add this tragic story," he writes at the end of his
_The Conscript_, "to the mass of other observations on that sympathy
which defies the law of space--a body of evidence which some few
solitary scholars are collecting with scientific curiosity, and which
will one day serve as basis for a new science, a science which till now
has lacked only its man of genius." These are large words, it would
seem, with which to point the moral of a mere historical anecdote. But
if we consider them well, we shall see that, whatever we may think
of this "new science," Balzac wrote his _The Conscript_ for the sole
purpose of ending it with that sentence. Read, too, _A Seashore Drama_.
It is often said that "A fact is a fact"--and I scarcely know a more
futile sophism, unless it be the one which consists in saying that
"Of tastes and colours there is no disputing." Such is not Balzac's
opinion, at any rate. He believes that a fact is more than a fact, that
it is the expression or manifestation of something other or more than
itself; or again, that it is a piece of evidence, a _document_, which
it is not enough to have put on record, but in which we must also seek,
through contrasts and resemblances, its deep ulterior meaning. And this
is what he has tried to show in his _nouvelles_.
Thus we see what place they hold in his _The Human Comedy_. Balzac's
short stories are not, in his work, what one might be tempted to call
somewhat disdainfully "the chips of his workshop." Nor are they even,
in relation to his long novels, what a painter's sketches, rough
drafts, and studies are to his finished pictures. He did not write them
by way of practice or experiment; they have their own value, intrinsic
and well-defined. It would be a mistake, also, to consider them as
little novels, in briefer form, which more time or leisure might have
allowed their author to treat with more fullness. He conceived them for
their own sake; he would never have consented to give them proportions
which did not befit them. The truth of the matter is that by reason
of their dealing with the exceptional or extraordinary, they are, in
a way, the element of _romantic drama_ in Balzac's _Comedy;_ and by
reason of their philosophic or symbolic significance, they add the
element of mystery to a work which but for them would be somewhat
harshly illumined by the hard light of reality. Once more, that is why
he did not classify his _The Conscript_ with the _Scenes of Political
Life_, or his _A Seashore Drama_ with the _Scenes of Country Life_.
That, too, is what gives them their interest and their originality.
That is what distinguishes them from the stories of Prosper Mérimée,
or, later, those of Guy de Maupassant. So much being made clear, it
is not important now to ask whether they really have as much depth of
meaning as their author claimed for them. That is another question; and
I have just indicated why I cannot treat it in this brief Introduction.
Only in a complete study of Balzac could his _nouvelles_ be adequately
judged. Then their due place would be assigned to them, in the full
scheme of _The Human Comedy_. I shall be happy if the English reader
remembers this; and if the reading of these _nouvelles_, after having
for a moment charmed him, shall also inspire him with the wish to know
more closely and completely the greatest of French novelists.
F. Brunetière
[Footnote 1: According to Lovenjoul, _A Seashore Drama_ was first
published in the fourth edition of the _Philosophic Studies_, in
1835. But this fact in no wise lessens the force of M. Brunetière's
argument.--Ed.]
The Unknown Masterpiece
TO A LORD:
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
1845.
I
GILLETTE
Late in the year 1612, one cold morning in December, a young man whose
garments seemed very thin was walking before the door of a house on Rue
des Grands-Augustins, Paris. After pacing that street for a long time,
with the indecision of a lover who dares not pay a visit to his first
mistress, however kind she may be, he at last crossed the threshold
of the door and asked if Master François Porbus was at home. Upon
receiving an affirmative reply from a woman who was sweeping a room on
the lower floor, the young man went slowly up-stairs, hesitating from
stair to stair, like a courtier of recent creation, apprehensive of the
greeting which he was to receive from the king. When he reached the
top of the winding staircase, he stood for a moment on the landing,
uncertain whether he should lift the grotesque knocker affixed to the
door of the studio where the painter of Henri IV., cast aside for
Rubens by Marie de Medici, was doubtless at work. The young man felt
that profound emotion which must cause the hearts of all great artists
to beat quickly, when, in the prime of youth and of their love for art,
they approach a man of genius, or some noble masterpiece.
There exists in all human sentiments a primitive flower, engendered
by a noble enthusiasm which grows constantly weaker and weaker,
until happiness ceases to be more than a memory and glory more than
a lie. Among these transitory sentiments, nothing bears so close a
resemblance to love as the youthful passion of an artist just beginning
to experience the delicious torture of his destiny of renown and of
misfortune, a passion full of audacity and shyness, of vague beliefs
and of certain discouragement. The youthful genius, with empty
pockets, whose heart has not throbbed upon appearing before a master,
will always lack one chord in his heart, some indefinable touch of the
brush, some feeling in his work, some shade of poetical expression.
If some boasters, puffed out with conceit, believe too early in the
future, they are considered people of intellect by fools alone. In this
regard, the young stranger seemed to possess real merit, if talent
is to be measured by that early timidity, that indescribable modesty
which people destined to glory gradually lose in the exercise of their
art, as pretty women lose theirs in the manoeuvring of coquetry. The
habitude of triumph lessens doubt, and modesty perhaps is a form of
doubt.
Overwhelmed by surprise and distress at that moment of his overweening
presumption, the poor neophyte would not have entered the studio of
the painter to whom we owe the admirable portrait of Henri IV., except
for an extraordinary reinforcement sent him by chance. An old man
ascended the stairs. From the oddity of his costume, the magnificence
of his lace ruff, the ponderous self-assurance of his gait, the young
man divined that he was either the painter's patron or his friend;
he drew back against the wall to make room for him, and gazed at him
curiously, hoping to find in him the kindly nature of an artist, or the
obliging disposition of those who love art; but he detected something
diabolical in that face, and above all that indefinable expression
which artists dote upon. Imagine a bald, prominent, even protuberant
forehead, overshadowing a small, flattened nose, turned up at the
end like Rabelais's or Socrates's; a smiling mouth, wrinkled at the
corners; a short chin, proudly raised, and adorned with a gray beard
trimmed to a point; sea-green eyes, apparently dulled by age, which,
however, by virtue of the contrast of the pearly-white in which the
pupils swam, sometimes emitted magnetic glances under the spur of
wrath or enthusiasm. The face was woefully ravaged by the fatigues of
age, and even more by the thoughts which tire mind and body alike. The
eyes had no lashes, and one could barely detect a trace of eyebrows
over their protruding arches. Place that head upon a slender and
fragile body, surround it with a lace ruff of snowy whiteness and of a
pattern as elaborate as that of a silver fish-knife, throw a heavy gold
chain over the old man's black doublet, and you will have an imperfect
image of that individual, to whom the dim light of the hall imparted
an even stranger colouring. You would have said that it was one of
Rembrandt's canvases, walking silently, without a frame, through the
dark atmosphere which that great painter made his own. The old man cast
a sagacious glance at the young one, tapped thrice on the door, and
said to a sickly-looking personage of about forty years, who opened it:
"Good morning, master."
Porbus bowed respectfully; he admitted the young man, thinking that
he had come with the other, and paid the less heed to him because the
neophyte was evidently under the spell which a born painter inevitably
experiences at the aspect of the first studio that he sees, where some
of the material processes of art are revealed to him. A window in
the ceiling lighted Master Porbus's studio. The light, concentrated
upon a canvas standing on the easel, which as yet bore only a few
light strokes, did not reach the dark recesses in the corners of that
enormous room; but a few stray gleams lighted up the silver bull's-eye
in the centre of a cavalryman's cuirass hanging on the wall in the
ruddy shadow; illuminated with a sudden beam the carved and polished
cornice of an old-fashioned sideboard, laden with curious vessels; or
studded with dazzling points of light the rough woof of certain old
curtains of gold brocade, with broad, irregular folds, scattered about
as drapery. Plaster casts, busts, and fragments of antique goddesses,
fondly polished by the kisses of centuries, lay about upon tables and
consoles. Innumerable sketches, studies in coloured chalk, in red lead,
or in pen and ink, covered the walls to the ceiling. Boxes of colours,
bottles of oil and of essences, and overturned stools, left only a
narrow path to the sort of halo projected by the high stained-glass
window, through which the light fell full upon Porbus's pale face and
upon the ivory skull of his strange visitor. The young man's attention
was soon exclusively absorbed by a picture which had already become
famous even in that epoch of commotion and revolution, and which was
visited by some of those obstinate enthusiasts to whom we owe the
preservation of the sacred fire during evil days. That beautiful canvas
represented _St. Mary the Egyptian_ preparing to pay for her passage in
the boat. That masterpiece, painted for Marie de Medici, was sold by
her in the days of her destitution.
"I like your saint," the old man said to Porbus, "and I would give you
ten golden crowns above the price that the queen is to pay; but meddle
in her preserves! the deuce!"
"You think it is well done, do you?"
"Hum!" said the old man, "well done? Yes and no. Your saint is not
badly put together, but she is not alive. You fellows think that you
have done everything when you have drawn a figure correctly and put
everything in its place according to the laws of anatomy. You colour
this feature with a flesh-tint prepared beforehand on your palette,
taking care to keep one side darker than the other; and because you
glance from time to time at a nude woman standing on a table, you think
that you have copied nature, you imagine that you are painters, and
that you have discovered God's secret! Bah! To be a great poet, it is
not enough to know syntax, and to avoid errors in grammar.
"Look at your saint, Porbus. At first glance she seems admirable; but
at the second, one sees that she is glued to the canvas, and that it
is impossible to walk about her body. She is a silhouette with but a
single face, a figure cut out of canvas, an image that can neither turn
nor change its position. I am not conscious of the air between that
arm and the background of the picture; space and depth are lacking.
However, everything is right so far as perspective is concerned, and
the gradation of light and shade is scrupulously observed; but, despite
such praise-worthy efforts, I am unable to believe that that beautiful
body is animated with the warm breath of life. It seems to me that,
if I should put my hand upon that firm, round breast, I should find
it as cold as marble. No, my friend, the blood does not flow beneath
that ivory skin; life does not swell with its purple dew the veins
and fibres which intertwine like network beneath the transparent,
amber-hued temples and breast. This place throbs with life, but that
other place is motionless; life and death contend in every detail; here
it is a woman, there a statue, and there a corpse. Your creation is
incomplete. You have been able to breathe only a portion of your soul
into your cherished work. The torch of Prometheus has gone out more
than once in your hands, and many parts of your picture have not been
touched by the celestial flame."
"But why, my dear master?" Porbus respectfully asked the old man, while
the young man had difficulty in repressing a savage desire to strike
him.
"Ah! it is this way," replied the little old man. "You have wavered
irresolutely between the two systems, between drawing and colour,
between the phlegmatic minuteness, the stiff precision of the old
German masters, and the dazzling ardour and happy plenitude of the
Italian painters. You have tried to imitate at the same time Hans
Holbein and Titian, Albert Dürer and Paul Veronese. Assuredly that was
a noble ambition! But what has happened? You have achieved neither the
severe charm of precision, nor the deceitful magic of the chiaroscuro.
In this spot, like melted bronze which bursts its too fragile mould,
the rich, light colouring of Titian brings out too prominently the
meagre outlines of Albert Dürer in which you moulded it. Elsewhere,
the features have resisted and held in check the superb polish of
the Venetian palette. Your face is neither perfectly drawn nor
perfectly painted, and bears everywhere the traces of that unfortunate
indecision. If you did not feel strong enough to melt together in
the flame of your genius the two rival systems, you should have
chosen frankly one or the other, in order to obtain the unity which
represents one of the conditions of life. You are accurate only in the
surroundings, your outlines are false, do not envelop each other, and
give no promise of anything behind.
"There is a touch of truth here," said the old man, pointing to the
saint's breast; "and here," he added, indicating the point where the
shoulder came to an end. "But here," he said, reverting to the middle
of the throat, "all is false. Let us not attempt to analyse anything;
it would drive you to despair."
The old man seated himself on a stool, put his face in his hands, and
said no more.
"Master," said Porbus, "I studied that throat very carefully in the
nude figure; but, unfortunately for us, there are true effects in
nature which seem improbable upon canvas."
"The mission of art is not to copy nature, but to express it! You
are not a vile copyist, but a poet!" cried the old man, hastily
interrupting Porbus with an imperious gesture. "Otherwise a sculptor
would reach the end of his labours by moulding a woman! But try to
mould your mistress's hand and to place it before you; you will find a
horrible dead thing without any resemblance, and you will be obliged to
resort to the chisel of the man who, without copying it exactly, will
impart motion and life to it. We have to grasp the spirit, the soul,
the physiognomy of things and of creatures. Effects! effects! why,
they are the accidents of life and not life itself.
"A hand--as I have taken that example--a hand does not simply belong to
the body; it expresses and carries out a thought, which you must grasp
and represent. Neither the painter, nor the poet, nor the sculptor
should separate the effect from the cause, for they are inseparably
connected! The real struggle is there! Many painters triumph by
instinct, without realising this axiom of art. You draw a woman, but
you do not see her! That is not the way that one succeeds in forcing
the secrets of nature. Your hand reproduces, without your knowledge,
the model that you have copied at your master's studio. You do not go
down sufficiently into the inmost details of form, you do not pursue it
with enough enthusiasm and perseverance in its windings and its flights.
"Beauty is a stern and exacting thing which does not allow itself to be
caught so easily; we must await its pleasure, watch for it, seize it,
and embrace it closely, in order to compel it to surrender. Form is a
Proteus much more difficult to seize and more fertile in evasions than
the Proteus of fable; only after long struggles can one compel it to
show itself in its real guise. You are content with the first aspect
under which it appears to you, or at most with the second or third;
that is not true of the victorious fighters! The invincible painters
do not allow themselves to be deceived by all these subterfuges; they
persevere until nature is reduced to the point where she must stand
forth naked and in her real shape.
"That was the process adopted by Raphael," said the old man, removing
his black velvet cap to express the respect inspired by the king of
art; "his great superiority comes from the secret perception which,
in him, seems determined to shatter form. In his figures form is what
it really is in us, an interpreter for the communication of ideas
and sensations, a vast poetic conception. Every figure is a world, a
portrait, whose model has appeared in a sublime vision, tinged with
light, indicated by an inward voice, disrobed by a divine figure, which
points out the sources of expression in the past of a whole life. You
give your women lovely robes of flesh, lovely draperies of hair; but
where is the blood which engenders tranquillity or passion, and which
causes special effects? Your saint is a dark woman, but this one, my
poor Porbus, is a blonde! Your figures are pale, coloured spectres
which you parade before our eyes, and you call that painting and art!
"Because you have made something which looks more like a woman than
like a house, you think that you have attained your end; and, overjoyed
because you no longer have to write beside your figures, _currus
venustus_, or _pulcher homo_, like the first painters, you fancy that
you are marvellous artists! Ah, no! you are not that yet, my good
fellows; you will have to use up more pencils and cover many canvases
before you reach that point! To be sure, a woman carries her head
like that, she wears her skirts as this one does, her eyes languish
and melt with that air of mild resignation, the quivering shadow of
the eyelashes trembles thus upon her cheek! That is accurate and it is
not accurate. What does it lack? A mere nothing, but that nothing is
everything. You produce the appearance of life, but you do not express
its overflow, that indefinable something which perhaps is the soul, and
which floats cloud-like upon the outer envelope; in a word, that flower
of life which Titian and Raphael discovered.
"Starting from the farthest point that you have reached, an excellent
painting might perhaps be executed; but you grow weary too soon.
The common herd admires, but the connoisseur smiles. O Mabuse, O my
master," added this extraordinary individual, "you are a thief; you
carried life away with you!--However," he continued, "this canvas is
worth more than the painting of that mountebank of a Rubens, with his
mountains of Flemish flesh powdered with vermillion, his waves of
red hair, and his wilderness of colours. At all events, you have here
colouring, drawing, and sentiment, the three essential parts of art."
"But that saint is sublime, my good man!" cried the young man, in a
loud voice, emerging from a profound reverie. "Those two figures,
of the saint and the boatman, have a delicacy of expression utterly
unknown to the Italian painters; I don't know a single one of them who
could have achieved the hesitation of the boatman."
"Does this little knave belong to you?" Porbus asked the old man.
"Alas! pray excuse my presumption, master," replied the neophyte,
blushing. I am a stranger, a dauber by instinct, only lately arrived in
this city, the source of all knowledge."
"To work!" said Porbus, handing him a pencil and a sheet of paper.
In a twinkling the stranger copied the _Mary_.
"O-ho!" cried the old man. "Your name?"
The young man wrote at the foot of the drawing: _Nicolas Poussin_.
"That is not bad for a beginner," said the strange creature who
harangued so wildly. "I see that we can safely talk painting before
you. I don't blame you for admiring Porbus's saint. It is a masterpiece
for the world, and only those who are initiated in the most profound
secrets of art can discover wherein it offends. But since you are
worthy of the lesson and capable of understanding, I will show you
how little is necessary to complete the work. Be all eyes and all
attention; such an opportunity for instruction will never occur again
perhaps.--Your palette, Porbus!"
Porbus went to fetch palette and brushes. The little old man turned
up his sleeves with a convulsive movement, passed his thumb over the
palette laden with colours, which Porbus handed to him, and snatched
rather than took from his hands a handful of brushes of all sizes;
his pointed beard twitched with the mighty efforts that denoted the
concupiscence of an amorous imagination. As he dipped his brush in the
paint, he grumbled between his teeth:
"These colours are good for nothing but to throw out of the window,
with the man who made them! They are disgustingly crude and false! How
can one paint with such things?"
Then, with feverish vivacity, he dipped the point of the brush in
different mounds of colour, sometimes running through the entire scale
more rapidly than a cathedral organist runs over his keyboard in
playing the _O Filii_ at Easter.
Porbus and Poussin stood like statues, each on one side of the canvas,
absorbed in the most intense contemplation.
"You see, young man," said the old man, without turning--"you see how,
by means of three or four touches and a little blue varnish, one can
make the air circulate around the head of the poor saint, who surely
must be stifling and feel imprisoned in that dense atmosphere! See how
that drapery flutters about now, and how readily one can realise that
the wind is raising it! Formerly it looked like starched linen held in
place by pins. Do you see how perfectly the satinlike gloss with which
I have touched the breast represents the supple plumpness of a maiden's
flesh, and how the mixture of reddish brown and ochre warms the gray
coldness of that tall ghost, in which the blood congealed instead of
flowing? Young man, young man, what I am showing you now, no master
could teach you! Mabuse alone possessed the secret of imparting life to
figures. Mabuse had but one pupil, and that was I. I have had none, and
I am growing old! You have intelligence enough to guess the rest from
this glimpse that I give you."
While he spoke, the strange old man touched all the parts of the
picture: here two strokes of the brush and there only one; but always
so opportunely that one would have said that it was a new painting,
but a painting drenched with light. He worked with such impassioned
zeal that the perspiration stood upon his high forehead; he moved so
swiftly, with such impatient, jerky little movements, that to young
Poussin it seemed as if there must be in that strange man's body a
demon acting through his hands and guiding them erratically, against
his will. The superhuman gleam of his eyes, the convulsions which
seemed to be the effect of resistance, gave to that idea a semblance of
truth, which was certain to act upon a youthful imagination. The old
man worked on, saying:
"Paff! paff! paff! this is how we do it, young man! Come, my little
touches, warm up this frigid tone for me! Come, come! pon! pon! pon!"
he said, touching up the points where he had indicated a lack of life,
effacing by a few daubs of paint the differences of temperament, and
restoring the unity of tone which a warm-blooded Egyptian demanded.
"You see, my boy, it is only the last stroke of the brush that counts.
Porbus has given a hundred, but I give only one. Nobody gives us credit
for what is underneath. Be sure to remember that!"
At last the demon paused, and, turning to Porbus and Poussin, who were
dumb with admiration, he said to them:
"This doesn't come up to my _Belle Noiseuse_; however, a man could
afford to put his name at the foot of such a work. Yes, I would sign
it," he added, rising and taking a mirror in which he looked at it.
"Now let us go to breakfast," he said. "Come to my house, both of you.
I have some smoked ham and some good wine! Despite the evil times, we
will talk painting. We are experts. This little man," he added, tapping
Nicolas Poussin on the shoulder, "has a facile touch."
Noticing the Norman's shabby jacket at that moment, he took from his
belt a goat-skin purse, opened it, took out two gold-pieces and said,
offering them to him:
"I will buy your sketch."
"Take it," said Porbus to Poussin, seeing him start and blush with
shame, for the young neophyte had all the pride of the poor man. "Take
it, he has the ransom of two kings in his wallet."
All three went down from the studio, and, discoursing on art as
they walked, bent their steps to a handsome wooden house near Pont
St.-Michel, the decorations of which, the knocker, the window-frames,
and the arabesques, aroused Poussin's wondering admiration. The
painter in embryo suddenly found himself in a room on the lower floor,
before a bright fire, beside a table laden with appetising dishes,
and, by incredible good fortune, in the company of two great artists
overflowing with good nature.
"Young man," said Porbus, seeing that he stood in open-mouthed
admiration before a picture, "don't look at that canvas too closely, or
you will be driven to despair."
It was the _Adam_ which Mabuse painted in order to obtain his release
from the prison in which his creditors kept him so long. In truth,
that face was of such startling reality that Nicolas Poussin began at
that moment to understand the true meaning of the old man's confused
remarks. The latter glanced at the picture with a satisfied expression,
but without enthusiasm, and seemed to say: "I have done better than
that!"
"There is life in it," he said; "my poor master surpassed himself; but
it still lacks a little truth in the background. The man is thoroughly
alive; he is about to rise and walk towards us. But the air, the sky,
the wind, which we breathe and see and feel, are not there. And then
there is only a man! Now the only man that ever came forth from the
hands of God ought to have something of the divine, which he lacks.
Mabuse himself said so with irritation, when he was not drunk."
Poussin glanced at the old man and Porbus in turn, with restless
curiosity. He approached the latter as if to ask him the name of their
host; but the painter put his finger to his lips with a mysterious air,
and the young man, intensely interested, kept silence, hoping that
sooner or later some chance remark would enable him to discover the
name of his host, whose wealth and talent were sufficiently attested
by the respect which Porbus manifested for him and by the marvellous
things collected in that room.
Seeing a superb portrait of a woman upon the oaken wainscoting, Poussin
exclaimed:
"What a beautiful Giorgione!"
"No," replied the old man; "you are looking at one of my first daubs."
"_Tu-dieu!_ then I must be in the house of the god of painting!" said
Poussin, ingenuously.
The old man smiled like one long familiar with such praise.
"Master Frenhofer!" said Porbus, "couldn't you send for a little of
your fine Rhine wine for me?"
"Two casks!" replied the old man; "one to pay for the pleasure which I
enjoyed this morning in seeing your pretty sinner, and the other as a
friendly gift."
"Ah! if I were not always ill," rejoined Porbus, "and if you would let
me see your _Belle Noiseuse_, I might be able to paint a picture, high
and wide and deep, in which the figures would be life-size."
"Show my work!" cried the old man, intensely excited. "No, no! I still
have to perfect it. Yesterday, towards night," he said, "I thought
that it was finished. The eyes seemed to me moist, the flesh quivered;
the tresses of the hair moved. It breathed! Although I have discovered
the means of producing upon flat canvas the relief and roundness of
nature, I realised my error this morning, by daylight. Ah! to attain
that glorious result, I have thoroughly studied the great masters of
colouring, I have analysed and raised, layer by layer, the pictures
of Titian, that king of light; like that sovereign painter, I have
sketched my figure in a light shade, with soft, thick colour--for
shading is simply an accident, remember that, my boy!--Then I
returned to my work, and by means of half-tints, and of varnish, the
transparency of which I lessened more and more, I made the shadows more
and, more pronounced, even to the deepest blacks; for the shadows of
ordinary painters are of a different nature from their light tones;
they are wood, brass, whatever you choose, except flesh in shadow. One
feels that, if a figure should change its posture, the shaded places
would not brighten, and would never become light. I have avoided that
fault, into which many of the most illustrious artists have fallen, and
in my work the whiteness of the flesh stands out under the darkness of
the deepest shadow.
"I have not, like a multitude of ignorant fools, who fancy that they
draw correctly because they make a carefully shaded stroke, marked
distinctly the outer lines of my figure and given prominence to the
most trivial anatomical details, for the human body does not end in
lines. In that regard, sculptors can approach the truth more nearly
than we can. Nature demands a succession of rounded outlines which
shade into one another. Strictly speaking, drawing does not exist!--Do
not laugh, young man! However strange that remark may seem to you, you
will understand its meaning some day.--The line is the means by which
man interprets the effect of light upon objects; but there are no lines
in nature, where everything is full; it is in modelling that one draws,
that is to say, that one removes things from the surroundings in which
they are; the distribution of light alone gives reality to the body!
So that I have not sharply outlined the features; I have spread over
the outlines a cloud of light, warm half-tints, the result being that
one cannot place one's finger upon the exact spot where the outline
ends and the background begins. Seen at close quarters, the work seems
cottony and to lack precision; but two yards away, everything becomes
distinct and stands out; the body moves, the forms become prominent,
and one can feel the air circulating all about. However, I am not
satisfied yet; I still have doubts.
"Perhaps I should not have drawn a single line; perhaps it would be
better to attack a figure in the middle, devoting one's self first to
the prominences which are most in the light, and passing then to the
darker portions. Is not that the way in which the sun, that divine
painter of the universe, proceeds? O Nature, Nature! who has ever
surprised thee in thy flights? I tell you that too much knowledge, like
ignorance, ends in a negation. I doubt my work!"
The old man paused, then continued:
"For ten years, young man, I have been working, but what are ten short
years when it is a question of contending with nature? We have no idea
how long a time Pygmalion employed in making the only statue that ever
walked!"
The old man fell into a profound reverie, and sat with staring eyes,
mechanically toying with his knife.
"He is conversing with his _spirit_ now!" said Porbus in an undertone.
At that word Nicolas Poussin became conscious of the presence of an
indefinable artistic curiosity. That old man with the white eyes,
staring and torpid, became in his eyes more than a man; he assumed the
aspect of an unreal genius living in an unknown sphere. He stirred a
thousand confused ideas in his mind. The mental phenomenon of that
species of fascination can no more be defined than one can define the
emotion aroused by a ballad which recalls the fatherland to the exile's
heart. The contempt which that old man affected to express for the
most beautiful works of art, his wealth, his manners, the deference
with which Porbus treated him, that work kept secret so long--a work
of patience and of genius doubtless, judging by the head of a _Virgin_
which young Poussin had so enthusiastically admired, and which, still
beautiful, even beside Mabuse's _Adam_, bore witness to the imperial
workmanship of one of the princes of art--everything, in short, about
the old man went beyond the bounds of human nature.
The one point which was perfectly clear and manifest to Nicolas
Poussin's fertile imagination was a complete image of the artistic
nature, of that irresponsible nature to which so many powers are
entrusted, and which too often misuses them, leading cold reason,
the honest bourgeois, and even some experts, through innumerable
rock-strewn paths, where there is nothing so far as they are concerned;
whereas that white-winged damsel, unreasoning in her fancies, discovers
these epic poems, châteaux, and works of art. A sardonic but kindly
nature; fertile but sterile. Thus, to the enthusiastic Poussin, that
old man had become, by an abrupt transfiguration, art itself, art with
its secrets, its unruly impulses, and its reveries.
"Yes, my dear Porbus," Frenhofer resumed, "I have failed thus far to
meet an absolutely flawless woman, a body the outlines of which are
perfectly beautiful, and whose colouring--But where is she to be found
in real life?" he asked, interrupting himself, "that undiscoverable
Venus of the ancients, so often sought, of whom we find only a few
scattered charms? Oh! to see for an instant, but a single time, that
divine, complete, in a word, ideal nature, I would give my whole
fortune. Aye, I would seek thee in the abode of the dead, O divine
beauty! Like Orpheus, I would go down into the hell of art to bring
life back thence."
"We may go away," said Porbus to Poussin; "he neither hears nor sees us
now."
"Let us go to his studio," suggested the wonder-struck youth.
"Oh! the old fellow knows how to keep people out. His treasures are too
well guarded for us to obtain a glimpse of them. I have not awaited
your suggestion and your longing before attacking the mystery."
"So there is a mystery?"
"Yes," Porbus replied. "Old Frenhofer is the only pupil whom Mabuse
would ever consent to take. Having become his friend, his saviour, his
father, Frenhofer sacrificed the greater part of his property to humour
Mabuse's passions; in exchange Mabuse bequeathed to him the secret
of _relief_, the power of imparting to figures that extraordinary
appearance of life, that touch of nature, which is our never-ending
despair, but of which he was such a thorough master that one day,
having sold and drunk the flowered damask which he was to wear on the
occasion of Charles V.'s entry into Paris, he attended his master in a
garment of paper painted to represent damask. The peculiar brilliancy
of the fabric worn by Mabuse surprised the Emperor, who, when he
attempted to compliment the old drunkard's patron, discovered the fraud.