At last the day came, and with several trunks and boxes full of clothes,
books, and pictures, I started, accompanied by an English valet, for Paris
and Art.
We all know the great grey and melancholy Gare du Nord, at half-past six in
the morning; and the miserable carriages, and the tall, haggard city. Pale,
sloppy, yellow houses; an oppressive absence of colour; a peculiar
bleakness in the streets. The _ménagère_ hurries down the asphalte to
market; a dreadful _garçon de café_, with a napkin tied round his
throat, moves about some chairs, so decrepit and so solitary that it seems
impossible to imagine a human being sitting there. Where are the
Boulevards? where are the Champs Élysées? I asked myself; and feeling bound
to apologise for the appearance of the city, I explained to my valet that
we were passing through some by-streets, and returned to the study of a
French vocabulary. Nevertheless, when the time came to formulate a demand
for rooms, hot water, and a fire, I broke down, and the proprietress of the
hotel, who spoke English, had to be sent for.
My plans, so far as I had any, were to enter the beaux arts--Cabanel's
studio for preference; for I had then an intense and profound admiration
for that painter's work. I did not think much of the application I was told
I should have to make at the Embassy; my thoughts were fixed on the master,
and my one desire was to see him. To see him was easy, to speak to him was
another matter, and I had to wait three weeks, until I could hold a
conversation in French. How I achieved this feat I cannot say. I never
opened a book, I know, nor is it agreeable to think what my language must
have been like--like nothing ever heard under God's sky before, probably.
It was, however, sufficient to waste a good hour of the painter's time. I
told him of my artistic sympathies, what pictures I had seen of his in
London, and how much pleased I was with those then in his studio. He went
through the ordeal without flinching. He said he would be glad to have me
as a pupil....
But life in the beaux arts is rough, coarse, and rowdy. The model sits only
three times a week: the other days we worked from the plaster cast; and to
be there by seven o'clock in the morning required so painful an effort of
will, that I glanced in terror down the dim and grey perspective of early
risings that awaited me; then, demoralised by the lassitude of Sunday, I
told my valet on Monday morning to leave the room, that I would return to
the beaux arts no more. I felt humiliated at my own weakness, for much hope
had been centred in that academy; and I knew no other. Day after day I
walked up and down the Boulevards, studying the photographs of the
_salon_ pictures, and was stricken by the art of Jules Lefevre. True
it is that I saw it was wanting in that tender grace which I am forced to
admit even now, saturated though I now am with the aesthetics of different
schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work; but at the time I am writing of, my
nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional attractiveness
of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slender hips and hands, and
I accepted Jules Lefevre wholly and unconditionally. He hesitated, however,
when I asked to be taken as a private pupil, but he wrote out the address
of a studio where he gave instruction every Tuesday morning. This was even
more to my taste, for I had an instinctive liking for Frenchmen, and was
anxious to see as much of them as possible.
The studio was perched high up in the Passage des Panoramas. There I found
M. Julien, a typical meridional--the large stomach, the dark eyes, crafty
and watchful; the seductively mendacious manner, the sensual mind. We made
friends at once--he consciously making use of me, I unconsciously making
use of him. To him my forty francs, a month's subscription, were a godsend,
nor were my invitations to dinner and to the theatre to be disdained. I was
curious, odd, quaint. To be sure, it was a little tiresome to have to put
up with a talkative person, whose knowledge of the French language had been
acquired in three months, but the dinners were good. No doubt Julien
reasoned so; I did not reason at all. I felt this crafty, clever man of the
world was necessary to me. I had never met such a man before, and all my
curiosity was awake. He spoke of art and literature, of the world and the
flesh; he told me of the books he had read, he narrated thrilling incidents
in his own life; and the moral reflections with which he sprinkled his
conversation I thought very striking. Like every young man of twenty, I was
on the look-out for something to set up that would do duty for an ideal.
The world was to me, at this time, what a toy shop had been fifteen years
before: everything was spick and span, and every illusion was set out
straight and smart in new paint and gilding. But Julien kept me at a
distance, and the rare occasions when he favoured me with his society only
served to prepare my mind for the friendship which awaited me, and which
was destined to absorb some years of my life.
In the studio there were some eighteen or twenty young men, and among these
there were some four or five from whom I could learn; and there were also
there some eight or nine young English girls. We sat round in a circle, and
drew from the model. And this reversal of all the world's opinions and
prejudices was to me singularly delightful; I loved the sense of unreality
that the exceptionalness of our life in this studio conveyed. Besides, the
women themselves were young and interesting, and were, therefore, one of
the charms of the place, giving, as they did, that sense of sex which is so
subtle a mental pleasure, and which is, in its outward aspect, so
interesting to the eye--the gowns, the hair lifted, showing the neck; the
earrings, the sleeves open at the elbow. Though all this was very dear to
me I did not fall in love: but he who escapes a woman's dominion generally
comes under the sway of some friend who ever uses a strange attractiveness,
and fosters a sort of dependency that is not healthful or valid: and
although I look back with undiminished delight on the friendship I
contracted about this time--a friendship which permeated and added to my
life--I am nevertheless forced to recognise that, however suitable it may
have been in my special case, in the majority of instances it would have
proved but a shipwrecking reef, on which a young man's life would have gone
to pieces. What saved me was the intensity of my passion for Art, and a
moral revolt against any action that I thought could or would definitely
compromise me in that direction. I was willing to stray a little from my
path, but never further than a single step, which I could retrace when I
pleased.
One day I raised my eyes, and saw there was a new-comer in the studio; and,
to my surprise, for he was fashionably dressed, and my experience had not
led me to believe in the marriage of genius and well-cut cloth, he was
painting very well indeed. His shoulders were beautiful and broad; a long
neck, a tiny head, a narrow, thin face, and large eyes, full of
intelligence and fascination. And although he could not have been working
more than an hour, he had already sketched in his figure, and with all the
surroundings--screens, lamps, stoves, etc. I was deeply interested. I asked
the young lady next me if she knew who he was. She could give me no
information. But at four o'clock there was a general exodus from the
studio, and we adjourned to a neighbouring _café_ to drink beer. The
way led through a narrow passage, and as we stooped under an archway, the
young man (Marshall was his name) spoke to me in English. Yes, we had met
before; we had exchanged a few words in So-and-So's studio--the great
blonde man, whose Doré-like improvisations had awakened aspiration in me.
The usual reflections on the chances of life were of course made, and then
followed the inevitable "Will you dine with me to-night?" Marshall thought
the following day would suit him better, but I was very pressing. He
offered to meet me at my hotel; or would I come with him to his rooms, and
he would show me some pictures--some trifles he had brought up from the
country? Nothing would please me better. We got into a cab. Then every
moment revealed new qualities, new superiorities, in my new-found friend.
Not only was he tall, strong, handsome, and beautifully dressed, infinitely
better dressed than I, but he could talk French like a native. It was only
natural that he should, for he was born and had lived in Brussels all his
life, but the accident of birth rather stimulated than calmed my erubescent
admiration. He spoke of, and he was clearly on familiar terms with, the
fashionable restaurants and actresses; he stopped at a hairdresser's to
have his hair curled. All this was very exciting, and a little bewildering.
I was on the tiptoe of expectation to see his apartments; and, not to be
utterly outdone, I alluded to my valet.
His apartments were not so grand as I expected; but when he explained that
he had just spent ten thousand pounds in two years, and was now living on
six or seven hundred francs a month, which his mother would allow him until
he had painted and had sold a certain series of pictures, which he
contemplated beginning at once, my admiration increased to wonder, and I
examined with awe the great fireplace which had been constructed at his
orders, and admired the iron pot which hung by a chain above an artificial
bivouac fire. This detail will suggest the rest of the studio--the Turkey
carpet, the brass harem lamps, the Japanese screen, the pieces of drapery,
the oak chairs covered with red Utrecht velvet, the oak wardrobe that had
been picked up somewhere,--a ridiculous bargain, and the inevitable bed
with spiral columns. There were vases filled with foreign grasses, and
palms stood in the corners of the rooms. Marshall pulled out a few
pictures; but he paid very little heed to my compliments; and, sitting down
at the piano, with a great deal of splashing and dashing about the keys, he
rattled off a waltz.
"What waltz is that?" I asked.
"Oh, nothing; something I composed the other evening. I had a fit of the
blues, and didn't go out. What do you think of it?"
"I think it beautiful; did you really compose that the other evening?"
At this moment a knock was heard at the door, and a beautiful English girl
entered. Marshall introduced me. With looks that see nothing, and words
that mean nothing, an amorous woman receives the man she finds with her
sweetheart. But it subsequently transpired that Alice had an appointment,
that she was dining out. She would, however, call in the morning, and give
him a sitting for the portrait he was painting of her.
I had hitherto worked very regularly and attentively at the studio, but now
Marshall's society was an attraction I could not resist. For the sake of
his talent, which I religiously believed in, I regretted he was so idle;
but his dissipation was winning, and his delight was thorough, and his gay,
dashing manner made me feel happy, and his experience opened to me new
avenues for enjoyment and knowledge of life. On my arrival in Paris I had
visited, in the company of my taciturn valet, the Mabille and the
Valentino, and I had dined at the Maison d'Or by myself; but now I was
taken to strange students' _cafés_, where dinners were paid for in
pictures; to a mysterious place, where a _table d'hôte_ was held under
a tent in a back garden; and afterwards we went in great crowds to
_Bullier_, the _Château Rouge_, or the _Élysée Montmartre_.
The clangour of the band, the unreal greenness of the foliage, the
thronging of the dancers, and the chattering of women, whose Christian
names we only knew. And then the returning in open carriages rolling
through the white dust beneath the immense heavy dome of the summer night,
when the dusty darkness of the street is chequered by a passing glimpse of
light skirt or flying feather, and the moon looms like a magic lantern out
of the sky.
Now we seemed to live in fiacres and restaurants, and the afternoons were
filled with febrile impressions. Marshall had a friend in this street, and
another in that. It was only necessary for him to cry "Stop" to the
coachman, and to run up two or three flights of stairs....
"_Madame--, est-elle chez elle?_"
"_Oui, Monsieur; si Monsieur veut se donner la peine d'entrer._" And
we were shown into a handsomely furnished apartment. A lady would enter
hurriedly, and an animated discussion was begun. I did not know French
sufficiently well to follow the conversation, but I remember it always
commenced _mon cher ami_, and was plentifully sprinkled with the
phrase _vous avez tort_. The ladies themselves had only just returned
from Constantinople or Japan, and they were generally involved in
mysterious lawsuits, or were busily engaged in prosecuting claims for
several millions of francs against different foreign governments.
And just as I had watched the chorus girls and mummers, three years ago, at
the Globe Theatre, now, excited by a nervous curiosity, I watched this
world of Parisian adventurers and lights o' love. And this craving for
observation of manners, this instinct for the rapid notation of gestures
and words that epitomise a state of feeling, of attitudes that mirror forth
the soul, declared itself a main passion; and it grew and strengthened, to
the detriment of the other Art still so dear to me. With the patience of a
cat before a mouse-hole, I watched and listened, picking one characteristic
phrase out of hours of vain chatter, interested and amused by an angry or
loving glance. Like the midges that fret the surface of a shadowy stream,
these men and women seemed to me; and though I laughed, danced, and made
merry with them, I was not of them. But with Marshall it was different:
they were my amusement, they were his necessary pleasure. And I knew of
this distinction that made twain our lives; and I reflected deeply upon it.
Why could I not live without an ever-present and acute consciousness of
life? Why could I not love, forgetful of the harsh ticking of the clock in
the perfumed silence of the chamber?
And so my friend became to me a study, a subject for dissection. The
general attitude of his mind and its various turns, all the apparent
contradictions, and how they could be explained, classified, and reduced to
one primary law, were to me a constant source of thought. Our confidences
knew no reserve. I say our confidences, because to obtain confidences it is
often necessary to confide. All we saw, heard, read, or felt was the
subject of mutual confidences: the transitory emotion that a flush of
colour and a bit of perspective awakens, the blue tints that the sunsetting
lends to a white dress, or the eternal verities, death and love. But,
although I tested every fibre of thought and analysed every motive, I was
very sincere in my friendship, and very loyal in my admiration. Nor did my
admiration wane when I discovered that Marshall was shallow in his
appreciations, superficial in his judgments, that his talents did not
pierce below the surface; _il avait se grand air_; there was
fascination in his very bearing, in his large, soft, colourful eyes, and a
go and dash in his dissipations that carried you away.
To any one observing us at this time it would have seemed that I was but a
hanger-on, and a feeble imitator of Marshall. I took him to my tailor's,
and he advised me on the cut of my coats; he showed me how to arrange my
rooms, and I strove to copy his manner of speech and his general bearing;
and yet I knew very well indeed that mine was a rarer and more original
nature. I was willing to learn, that was all. There was much that Marshall
could teach me, and I used him without shame, without stint. I used him as
I have used all those with whom I have been brought into close contact.
Search my memory as I will, I cannot recall a case of man or woman who ever
occupied any considerable part of my thoughts and did not contribute
largely towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, and in very
colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me. From
this crude statement of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once
judge me rapacious, egotistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I may be
all this and more, but not because all who have known me have rendered me
eminent services. I can say that no one ever formed relationships in life
with less design than myself. Never have I given a thought to the advantage
that might accrue from being on terms of friendship with this man and
avoiding that one. "Then how do you explain," cries the angry reader, "that
you have never had a friend whom you did not make a profit out of? You must
have had very few friends." On the contrary, I have had many friends, and
of all sorts and kinds--men and women: and, I repeat, none took part in my
life who did not contribute something towards my well-being. It must, of
course, be understood that I make no distinction between mental and
material help; and in my case the one has ever been adjuvant to the other.
"Pooh, pooh!" again exclaims the reader; "I for one will not believe that
chance has only sent across your way the people who were required to assist
you." Chance! dear reader, is there such a thing as chance? Do you believe
in chance? Do you attach any precise meaning to the word? Do you employ it
at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it may? Chance! What a field for
psychical investigation is at once opened up; how we may tear to shreds our
past lives in search of--what? Of the Chance that made us. I think, reader,
I can throw some light on the general question, by replying to your taunt:
Chance, or the conditions of life under which we live, sent, of course,
thousands of creatures across my way who were powerless to benefit me; but
then an instinct of which I knew nothing, of which I was not even
conscious, withdrew me from them, and I was attracted to others. Have you
not seen a horse suddenly leave a corner of a field to seek pasturage
further away?
Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my
mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind asked,
received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much expelled; then,
after a season, similar demands were made, the same processes were repeated
out of sight, below consciousness, as is the case in a well-ordered
stomach. Shelley, who fired my youth with passion, and purified and upbore
it for so long, is now to me as nothing: not a dead or faded thing, but a
thing out of which I personally have drawn all the sustenance I may draw
from him; and, therefore, it (that part which I did not absorb) concerns me
no more. And the same with Gautier. Mdlle. de Maupin, that godhead of
flowing line, that desire not "of the moth for the star," but for such
perfection of hanging arm and leaned thigh as leaves passion breathless and
fain of tears, is now, if I take up the book and read, weary and ragged as
a spider's web, that has hung the winter through in the dusty, forgotten
corner of a forgotten room. My old rapture and my youth's delight I can
regain only when I think of that part of Gautier which is now incarnate in
me.
As I picked up books, so I picked up my friends. I read friends and books
with the same passion, with the same avidity; and as I discarded my books
when I had assimilated as much of them as my system required, so I
discarded my friends when they ceased to be of use to me. I use the word
"use" in its fullest, not in its limited and twenty-shilling sense. This
reduction of the intellect to the blind unconsciousness of the lower organs
will strike some as a violation of man's best beliefs, and as saying very
little for the particular intellect that can be so reduced. But I am not
sure these people are right. I am inclined to think that as you ascend the
scale of thought to the great minds, these unaccountable impulses,
mysterious resolutions, sudden, but certain knowings, falling whence, or
how it is impossible to say, but falling somehow into the brain, instead of
growing rarer, become more and more frequent; indeed, I think that if the
really great man were to confess to the working of his mind, we should see
him constantly besieged by inspirations ... inspirations! Ah! how human
thought only turns in a circle, and how, when we think we are on the verge
of a new thought, we slip into the enunciation of some time-worn truth. But
I say again, let general principles be waived; it will suffice for the
interest of these pages if it be understood that brain instincts have
always been, and still are, the initial and the determining powers of my
being.
* * * * *
But the studio, where I had been working for the last three or four months
so diligently, became wearisome to me, and for two reasons. First, because
it deprived me of many hours of Marshall's company. Secondly--and the
second reason was the graver--because I was beginning to regard the
delineation of a nymph, or youth bathing, etc., as a very narrow channel to
carry off the strong, full tide of a man's thought. For now thoughts of
love and death, and the hopelessness of life, were in active fermentation
within me and sought for utterance with a strange unintermittingness of
appeal. I yearned merely to give direct expression to my pain. Life was
then in its springtide; every thought was new to me, and it would have
seemed a pity to disguise even the simplest emotion in any garment when it
was so beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness. The creatures whom I met in
the ways and by ways of Parisian life, whose gestures and attitudes I
devoured with my eyes, and whose souls I hungered to know, awoke in me a
tense irresponsible curiosity, but that was all,--I despised, I hated them,
thought them contemptible, and to select them as subjects of artistic
treatment, could not then, might never, have occurred to me, had the
suggestion to do so not come direct to me from the outside.
At the time I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned hotel on the
Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian had lately bought and was
endeavouring to modernise; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its
ancient character in the presence of half a dozen old people, who, for
antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on certain well-specified days at
the _table d'hôte_. Fifteen years have passed away, and these old
people, no doubt, have joined their ancestors; but I can see them still
sitting in that _salle à manger_; the _buffets en vieux chêne_;
the opulent candelabra _en style d'empire_; the waiter lighting the
gas in the pale Parisian evening. That white-haired man, that tall, thin,
hatchet-faced American, has dined at this _table d'hôte_ for the last
thirty years--he is talkative, vain, foolish, and authoritative. The clean,
neatly-dressed old gentleman who sits by him, looking so much like a French
gentleman, has spent a great part of his life in Spain. With that piece of
news, and its subsequent developments, your acquaintance with him begins
and ends; the eyes, the fan, the mantilla, how it began, how it was broken
off, and how it began again. Opposite sits another French gentleman, with
beard and bristly hair. He spent twenty years of his life in India, and he
talks of his son who has been out there for the last ten, and who has just
returned home. There is the Italian comtesse of sixty summers, who dresses
like a girl of sixteen and smokes a cigar after dinner,--if there are not
too many strangers in the room. She terms a stranger any one whom she has
not seen at least once before. The little fat, neckless man, with the great
bald head, fringed below the ears with hair, is M. Duval. He is a dramatic
author--the author of a hundred and sixty plays. He does not intrude
himself on your notice, but when you speak to him on literary matters he
fixes a pair of tiny, sloe-like eyes on you, and talks affably of his
collaborateurs.
I was soon deeply interested in M. Duval, and I invited him to come to the
_café_ after dinner. I paid for his coffee and liqueurs, I offered him
a choice cigar. He did not smoke; I did. It was, of course, inevitable that
I should find out that he had not had a play produced for the last twenty
years, but then the aureole of the hundred and sixty was about his poor
bald head. I thought of the chances of life, he alluded to the war; and so
this unpleasantness was passed over, and we entered on more genial subjects
of conversation. He had written plays with everybody; his list of
collaborateurs was longer than any list of lady patronesses for an English
county ball; there was no literary kitchen in which he had not helped to
dish up. I was at once amazed and delighted. Had M. Duval written his
hundred and sixty plays in the seclusion of his own rooms, I should have
been less surprised; it was the mystery of the _séances_ of
collaboration, the rendezvous, the discussion, the illustrious company,
that overwhelmed me in a rapture of wonder and respectful admiration. Then
came the anecdotes. They were of all sorts. Here are a few specimens: He,
Duval, had written a one-act piece with Dumas _père_; it had been
refused at the Français, and then it had been about, here, there, and
everywhere; finally the _Variétés_ had asked for some alterations, and
_c'était une affaire entendue_. "I made the alterations one afternoon,
and wrote to Dumas, and what do you think,--by return of post I had a
letter from him saying he could not consent to the production of a one-act
piece, signed by him, at the _Variétés_, because his son was then
giving a five-act piece at the Gymnase." Then came a string of indecent
witticisms by Suzanne Lagier and Dejazet. They were as old as the world,
but they were new to me, and I was amused and astonished. These
_bon-mots_ were followed by an account of how Gautier wrote his Sunday
feuilleton, and how he and Balzac had once nearly come to blows. They had
agreed to collaborate. Balzac was to contribute the scenario, Gautier the
dialogue. One morning Balzac came with the scenario of the first act. "Here
it is, Gautier! I suppose you can let me have it back finished by to-morrow
afternoon?" And the old gentleman would chirp along in this fashion till
midnight. I would then accompany him to his rooms in the Quartier
Montmartre--rooms high up on the fifth floor--where, between two pictures,
supposed to be by Angelica Kaufmann, M. Duval had written unactable plays
for the last twenty years, and where he would continue to write unactable
plays until God called him to a world, perhaps, of eternal cantatas, but
where, by all accounts, _l'exposition de la pièce selon la formule de M.
Scribe_ is still unknown.
How I used to enjoy these conversations! I remember how I used to stand on
the pavement after having bid the old gentleman good-night, regretting I
had not demanded some further explanation regarding _le mouvement
Romantique_, or _la façon de M. Scribe de ménager la situation_.
Why not write a comedy? So the thought came. I had never written anything
save a few ill-spelt letters; but no matter. To find a plot, that was the
first thing to do. Take Marshall for hero and Alice for heroine, surround
them with the old gentlemen who dined at the _table d'hôte_, flavour
with the Italian countess who smoked cigars when there were not too many
strangers present. After three weeks of industrious stirring, the
ingredients did begin to simmer into something resembling a plot. Put it
upon paper. Ah! there was my difficulty. I remembered suddenly that I had
read "Cain," "Manfred," "The Cenci," as poems, without ever thinking of how
the dialogue looked upon paper; besides, they were in blank verse. I hadn't
a notion how prose dialogue would look upon paper. Shakespeare I had never
opened; no instinctive want had urged me to read him. He had remained,
therefore, unread, unlooked at. Should I buy a copy? No; the name repelled
me--as all popular names repelled me. In preference I went to the Gymnase,
and listened attentively to a comedy by M. Dumas _fils_. But strain my
imagination as I would, I could not see the spoken words in their written
form. Oh, for a look at the prompter's copy, the corner of which I could
see when I leaned forward! At last I discovered in Galignani's library a
copy of Leigh Hunt's edition of the old dramatists, and after a month's
study of Congreve Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, I completed a comedy
in three acts, which I entitled "Worldliness." It was, of course, very bad;
but, if my memory serves me well, I do not think it was nearly so bad as
might be imagined.
No sooner was the last scene written than I started at once for London,
confident I should find no difficulty in getting my play produced.