A Japanese dressing gown, the ideality of whose tissue delights me, some
fresh honey and milk set by this couch hung with royal fringes; and having
partaken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack my great python that
is crawling about after a two months' fast. I tie up a guineapig to the
_tabouret_, pure Louis XV., the little beast struggles and squeaks,
the snake, his black, bead-like eyes are fixed, how superb are the
oscillations ... now he strikes, and slowly and with what exquisite
gourmandise he lubricates and swallows.
Marshall is at the organ in the hall, he is playing a Gregorian chant, that
beautiful hymn, the "Vexilla Regis," by Saint Fortunatus, the great poet of
the Middle Ages. And, having turned over the leaves of "Les Fêtes
Gallantes," I sit down to write.
My original intention was to write some thirty or forty stories varying
from thirty to three hundred lines in length. The nature of these stories
is easy to imagine: there was the youth who wandered by night into a
witches' sabbath, and was disputed for by the witches, young and old. There
was the light o' love who went into the desert to tempt the holy man; but
he died as he yielded, and the arms stiffening by some miracle to iron-like
rigidity, she was unable to free herself, and died of starvation, as her
bondage loosened in decay. And I had increased my difficulties by adopting
as part of my task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in many
cases extravagantly composed metres, and I had begun to feel that I was
working in sand, I could make no progress, the house I was raising crumbled
and fell away on every side. These stories had one merit: they were all, so
far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. For the art of telling a
story clearly and dramatically, _selon les procédés de M. Scribe_, I
had thoroughly learnt from old M. Duval, the author of a hundred and sixty
plays, written in collaboration with more than a hundred of the best
writers of his day, including the master himself, Gautier. I frequently met
M. Duval at breakfast at a neighbouring _café_, and our conversation
turned on _l'exposition de la pièce, préparer la situation, nous aurons
des larmes_, etc. One day, as I sat waiting for him, I took up the
_Voltaire_. It contained an article by M. Zola. _Naturalisme, la
vérité, la science_, were repeated some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able
to believe my eyes, I read that you should write, with as little
imagination as possible, that plot in a novel or in a play was illiterate
and puerile, and that the art of M. Scribe was an art of strings and wires,
etc. I rose up from breakfast, ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a
little dizzy, like one who has received a violent blow on the head.
Echo-augury! Words heard in an unexpected quarter, but applying
marvellously well to the besetting difficulty of the moment. The reader who
has followed me so far will remember the instant effect the word "Shelley"
had upon me in childhood, and how it called into existence a train of
feeling that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many years, until
it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the reader will
also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of the word
"France" awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how
the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the creation of a
mental existence.
And now for a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and
inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the
new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and
I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile
eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any
semblance of life, passionless in all their passion.
I had read a few chapters of the "Assommoir," as it appeared in _La
République des Lettres_; I had cried, "ridiculous, abominable," only
because it is characteristic of me to instantly form an opinion and assume
at once a violent attitude. But now I bought up the back numbers of the
_Voltaire_, and I looked forward to the weekly exposition of the new
faith with febrile eagerness. The great zeal with which the new master
continued his propaganda, and the marvellous way in which subjects the most
diverse, passing events, political, social, religious, were caught up and
turned into arguments for, or proof of the truth of naturalism astonished
me wholly. The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the
art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should
explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless
ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilisation, filled me
with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and
the towering height of the ambition. In my fevered fancy I saw a new race
of writers that would arise, and with the aid of the novel would continue
to a more glorious and legitimate conclusion the work that the prophets had
begun; and at each development of the theory of the new art and its
universal applicability, my wonder increased and my admiration choked me.
If any one should be tempted to turn to the books themselves to seek an
explanation of this wild ecstasy, they would find nothing--as well drink
the dregs of yesterday's champagne. One is lying before me now, and as I
glance through the pages listlessly I say, "Only the simple crude
statements of a man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision."
Still, although eager and anxious for the fray, I did not see how I was to
participate in it. I was not a novelist, not yet a dramatic author, and the
possibility of a naturalistic poet seemed to me not a little doubtful. I
had clearly understood that the lyrical quality was to be for ever
banished; there were to be no harps and lutes in our heaven, only drums;
and the preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the simple
enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen, did, I could not
help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), sound not unlike
rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had declared that the
Republic would fall if it did not become instantly naturalistic; he would
not, he could not pass over in silence so important a branch of literature
as poetry, no matter how contemptible he might think it. If he could find
nothing to praise, he must at least condemn. At last the expected article
came. It was all that could be desired by one in my fever of mind. Hugo's
claims had been previously disproven, but now Banville and Gautier were
declared to be warmed up dishes of the ancient world; Baudelaire was a
naturalist, but he had been spoilt by the romantic influence of his
generation. _Cependant_ there were indications of the naturalistic
movement even in poetry. I trembled with excitement, I could not read fast
enough. Coppée had striven to simplify language; he had versified the
street cries, _Achetez la France, le Soir, le Rappel_; he had sought
to give utterance to humble sentiments as in "Le Petit Epicier de
Montrouge," the little grocer _qui cassait le sucre avec mélancolie_;
Richepin had boldly and frankly adopted the language of the people in all
its superb crudity. All this was, however, preparatory and tentative. We
are waiting for our poet, he who will sing to us fearlessly of the rude
industry of dustmen and the comestible glories of the marketplaces. The
subjects are to hand, the formula alone is wanting.
The prospect was a dazzling one; I tried to calm myself. Had I the stuff in
me to win and to wear these bays, this stupendous laurel crown?--bays,
laurel crown, a distinct _souvenir_ of Parnassus, but there is no
modern equivalent, I must strive to invent a new one, in the meantime let
me think. True it is that Swinburne was before me with the "Romantiques."
The hymn to Proserpine and Dolores are wonderful lyrical versions of Mdlle.
de Maupin. In form the Leper is old English, the colouring is Baudelaire,
but the rude industry of the dustmen and the comestible glories of the
market-place shall be mine. _A bas "Les Roses de Minuit"_!
I felt the "naturalisation" of the "Roses of Midnight" would prove a
difficult task. I soon found it an impossible one, and I laid the poems
aside and commenced a volume redolent of the delights of Bougival and Ville
d'Avray. This book was to be entitled "Poems of 'Flesh and Blood.'"
"_Elle mit son plus beau chapeau, son chapeau bleu_" ... and then?
Why, then picking up her skirt she threads her way through the crowded
streets, reads the advertisements on the walls, hails the omnibus, inquires
at the _concierge's_ loge, murmurs as she goes upstairs, "_Que c'est
haut le cinqième_," and then? Why, the door opens, and she cries, "_Je
t'aime_."
But it was the idea of the new æstheticism--the new art corresponding to
modern, as ancient art corresponded to ancient life--that captivated me,
that led me away, and not a substantial knowledge of the work done by the
naturalists. I had read the "Assommoir," and had been much impressed by its
pyramid size, strength, height, and decorative grandeur, and also by the
immense harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal treatment of the
different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new--the washhouse, for
example: the fight motive is indicated, then follows the development of
side issues, then comes the fight motive explained; it is broken off short,
it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the fight motive is again
taken up, and now it is worked out in all its fulness; it is worked up to
_crescendo_, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme is
given forth. And I marvelled greatly at the lordly, river-like roll of the
narrative, sometimes widening out into lakes and shallowing meres, but
never stagnating in fen or marshlands. The language, too, which I did not
then recognise as the weak point, being little more than a boiling down of
Chateaubriand and Flaubert, spiced with Goncourt, delighted me with its
novelty, its richness, its force. Nor did I then even roughly suspect that
the very qualities which set my admiration in a blaze wilder than wildfire,
being precisely those that had won the victory for the romantic school
forty years before, were very antagonistic to those claimed for the new
art; I was deceived, as was all my generation, by a certain externality, an
outer skin, a nearness, _un approchement_; in a word, by a
substitution of Paris for the distant and exotic backgrounds so beloved of
the romantic school. I did not know then, as I do now, that art is eternal,
that it is only the artist that changes, and that the two great
divisions--the only possible divisions---are: those who have talent, and
those who have no talent. But I do not regret my errors, my follies; it is
not well to know at once of the limitations of life and things. I should be
less than nothing had it not been for my enthusiasms; they were the saving
clause in my life.
But although I am apt to love too dearly the art of my day, and at the cost
of that of other days, I did not fall into the fatal mistake of placing the
realistic writers of 1877 side by side with and on the same plane of
intellectual vision as the great Balzac; I felt that that vast immemorial
mind rose above them all, like a mountain above the highest tower.
And, strange to say, it was Gautier that introduced me to Balzac; for
mention is made in the wonderful preface to "Les Fleurs du Mal" of
Seraphita: Seraphita, Seraphitus; which is it?--woman or man? Should
Wilfred or Mona be the possessor? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal lily
and aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up
and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff's side; the straight white
feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure,
strange soul continues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision,
a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the
apocalypse, the colour of heaven; the closing of the stupendous allegory
when Seraphita lies dead in the rays of the first sun of the nineteenth
century.
I, therefore, had begun, as it were, to read Balzac backwards; instead of
beginning with the plain, simple, earthly tragedy of the Père Goriot, I
first knelt in a beautiful but distant coigne of the great world of his
genius--Seraphita. Certain _nuances_ of soul are characteristic of
certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led him to Norway in quest of
this fervent soul? The instincts of genius are unfathomable; but he who has
known the white northern women with their pure spiritual eyes, will aver
that instinct led him aright. I have known one, one whom I used to call
Seraphita; Coppée knew her too, and that exquisite volume, "L'Exilé," so
Seraphita-like in the keen blond passion of its verse, was written to her,
and each poem was sent to her as it was written. Where is she now, that
flower of northern snow, once seen for a season in Paris? Has she returned
to her native northern solitudes, great gulfs of sea water, mountain rock,
and pine?
Balzac's genius is in his titles as heaven is in its stars: "Melmoth
Reconcilié," "Jésus-Christ en Flandres," "Le Revers d'un Grand Homme," "La
Cousine Bette." I read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was the
greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pascal. Of Pascal's
claim to be a great thinker I confess I cannot judge. No man is greater
than the age he lives in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the legitimate
children of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the existence of
God strikes us in just the same light as the logical proof of the existence
of Jupiter Ammon. "Les Pensées" could appear to me only as infinitely
childish; the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and sterile to one of
such modern and exotic taste as myself. Still, I accept thankfully, in its
sense of two hundred years, the compliment paid to Balzac; but I would add
that personally he seems to me to have shown greater wings of mind than any
artist that ever lived. I am aware that this last statement will make many
cry "fool" and hiss "Shakespeare!" But I am not putting forward these
criticisms axiomatically, but only as the expressions of an individual
taste, and interesting so far as they reveal to the reader the different
developments and the progress of my mind. It might prove a little tiresome,
but it would no doubt "look well," in the sense that going to church "looks
well," if I were to write in here ten pages of praise of our national bard.
I must, however, resist the temptation to "look well;" a confession is
interesting in proportion to the amount of truth it contains, and I will,
therefore, state frankly I never derived any profit whatsoever, and very
little pleasure from the reading of the great plays. The beauty of the
verse! Yes; he who loved Shelley so well as I could not fail to hear the
melody of--
"Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy."
Is not such music as this enough? Of course but I am a sensualist in
literature. I may see perfectly well that this or that book is a work of
genius, but if it doesn't "fetch me," it doesn't concern me, and I forget
its very existence. What leaves me cold to-day will madden me to-morrow.
With me literature is a question of sense, intellectual sense if you will,
but sense all the same, and ruled by the same caprices--those of the flesh?
Now we enter on very subtle distinctions. No doubt that there is the
brain-judgment and the sense-judgment of a work of art. And it will be
noticed that these two forces of discrimination exist sometimes almost
independently of each other, in rare and radiant instances confounded and
blended in one immense and unique love. Who has not been, unless perhaps
some dusty old pedant, thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action of a
book that penetrates to and speaks to you of your most present and most
intimate emotions. This is of course pure sensualism; but to take a less
marked stage. Why should Marlowe enchant me? why should he delight and
awake enthusiasm in me, while Shakespeare leaves me cold? The mind that can
understand one can understand the other, but there are affinities in
literature corresponding to, and very analogous to, sexual affinities--the
same unreasoned attractions, the same pleasures, the same lassitudes. Those
we have loved most we are most indifferent to. Shelley, Gautier, Zola,
Flaubert, Goncourt! how I have loved you all; and now I could not, would
not, read you again. How womanly, how capricious; but even a capricious
woman is constant, if not faithful to her _amant de coeur_. And so
with me; of those I have loved deeply there is but one that still may
thrill me with the old passion, with the first ecstacy--it is Balzac. Upon
that rock I built my church, and his great and valid talent saved me often
from destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new aestheticisms,
the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and sickly surf of the
symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit and
not the flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the first
instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought that
shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and sublimity of
Balzac's thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest heights, and his range
is limitless; there is no passion he has not touched, and what is more
marvellous, he has given to each in art a place equivalent to the place it
occupies in nature; his intense and penetrating sympathy for human life and
all that concerns it enabled him to surround the humblest subjects with awe
and crown them with the light of tragedy. There are some, particularly
those who are capable of understanding neither and can read but one, who
will object to any comparison being drawn between the Dramatist and the
Novelist; but I confess that I--if the inherent superiority of verse over
prose, which I admit unhesitatingly, be waived--that I fail, utterly fail
to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the poet's
thought is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be
greater than the novelist's. On these points we will cry quits, and come at
once to the vital question--the creation. Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet? Is
Eugénie Grandet inferior to Desdemona? Is her father inferior to Shylock?
Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin? Can it be said that the apothecary in the
"Cousine Bette," or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine Bette herself is
inferior to anything the brain of man has ever conceived? And it must not
be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage
of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of
the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of
gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more
vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were
equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I
speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist
seems to me richer than that of the dramatist. Who shall forget those
terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house?
Speaking of Vautrin she says, "His look frightens me as if he put his hand
on my dress;" and another epigram from the same book, "Woman's virtue is
man's greatest invention." Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes
more incisively to the truth of things. One more; here I can give the exact
words: "_La gloire est le soleil des morts._" It would be easy to
compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all "Maximes" and
"Pensées," even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and
shallow.
Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated
in the "Comédie Humaine." I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other
books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any
important or lasting impression upon my mind. The rest was like walnuts and
wine, an agreeable aftertaste.
But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship of
any kind; for save life I could never learn anything correctly. I am a
student only of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have read
very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I
remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my
utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave
inquietude,--study as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of
ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to frequent the
haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my
nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it
uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the
generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and sterile, and
it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the
composition of my unfortunate "Roses of Midnight."
Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces! conversation, oh the
magic of it! It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is
washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can carry.
Two old ladies discussing the peerage? Much may be learned, it is gold;
poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into jewels,
and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the diamond and
the glow of the ruby.
I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to the "Nouvelle
Athènes." What is the "Nouvelle Athènes"? He who would know anything of my
life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. Not the official
stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the
_café_. The "Nouvelle Athènes" is a _café_ on the Place Pigale.
Ah! the morning idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer
illusion, the grey moonlights on the Place where we used to stand on the
pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to separate, thinking
of what we had left said, and how much better we might have enforced our
arguments. Dead and scattered are all those who used to assemble there, and
those years and our home, for it was our home, live only in a few pictures
and a few pages of prose. The same old story, the vanquished only are
victorious; and though unacknowledged, though unknown, the influence of the
"Nouvelle Athènes" is inveterate in the artistic thought of the nineteenth
century.
How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth. With what
strange, almost unnatural clearness do I see and hear,--see the white face
of that _café_, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up
to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of those two
streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass-door of the
_café_ grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every
hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent
cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o'clock the fragrant odour of
absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen; and as
the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak
beer. A partition, rising a few feet or more over the hats, separates the
glass front from the main body of the _café_. The usual marble tables
are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticised till two o'clock in the
morning. But who is that man? he whose prominent eyes flash with
excitement. That is Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. The last or the supposed last
of the great family. He is telling that girl a story--that fair girl with
heavy eyelids, stupid and sensual. She is, however, genuinely astonished
and interested, and he is striving to play upon her ignorance. Listen to
him. "Spain--the night is fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the
orange trees, you know--a midnight of stars and dreams. Now and then the
silence is broken by the sentries challenging--that is all. But not in
Spanish but in French are the challenges given; the town is in the hands of
the French; it is under martial law. But now an officer passes down a
certain garden, a Spaniard disguised as a French officer; from the balcony
the family--one of the most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a
thousand years, long before the conquest of the Moors--watches him. Well
then"--Villiers sweeps with a white feminine hand the long hair that is
falling over his face--he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in the
opening of the story, and he is striving in English to "scamp," in French
to _escamoter_. "The family are watching, death if he is caught, if he
fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague sound
attracts the sentry, he turns; all is lost. The Spaniard is seized. Martial
law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French general is a man of
iron." (Villiers laughs, a short hesitating laugh that is characteristic of
him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain way), "man of iron; not only he
declares that the spy must be beheaded, but also the entire family--a man
of iron that, ha, ha; and then, no you cannot, it is impossible for you to
understand the enormity of the calamity--a thousand years before the
conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard alone could--there is no one here, ha,
ha, I was forgetting--the utter extinction of a great family of the name,
the oldest and noblest of all the families in Spain, it is not easy to
understand that, no, not easy here in the 'Nouvelle Athènes'--ha, ha, one
must belong to a great family to understand, ha, ha.
"The father beseeches; he begs that one member may be spared to continue
the name--the youngest son--that is all; if he could be saved, the rest
what matter; death is nothing to a Spaniard; the family, the name, a
thousand years of name is everything. The general is, you know, a 'man of
iron.' 'Yes, one member of your family shall be respited, but on one
condition.' To the agonised family conditions are as nothing. But they
don't know the man of iron is determined to make a terrible example, and
they cry, 'Any conditions.' 'He who is respited must serve as executioner
to the others.' Great is the doom; you understand; but after all the name
must be saved. Then in the family council the father goes to his youngest
son and says, 'I have been a good father to you, my son; I have always been
a kind father, have I not? answer me; I have never refused you anything.
Now you will not fail us, you will prove yourself worthy of the great name
you bear. Remember your great ancestor who defeated the Moors, remember.'"
(Villiers strives to get in a little local colour, but his knowledge of
Spanish names and history is limited, and he in a certain sense fails.)
"Then the mother comes to her son and says, 'My son, I have been a good
mother, I have always loved you; say you will not desert us in this hour of
our great need.' Then the little sister comes, and the whole family kneels
down and appeals to the horror-stricken boy....
"'He will not prove himself unworthy of our name,' cries the father. 'Now,
my son, courage, take the axe firmly, do what I ask you, courage, strike
straight.' The father's head falls into the sawdust, the blood all over the
white beard; then comes the elder brother, and then another brother; and
then, oh, the little sister was almost more than he could bear, and the
mother had to whisper, 'Remember your promise to your father, to your dead
father.' The mother laid her head on the block, but he could not strike.
'Be not the first coward of our name, strike; remember your promise to us
all,' and her head was struck off."
"And the son," the girl asks, "what became of him?"
"He never was seen, save at night, walking, a solitary man, beneath the
walls of his castle in Granada."
"And whom did he marry?"
"He never married."
Then after a long silence some one said,--
"Whose story is that?"
"Balzac's."
At that moment the glass door of the _café_ grated upon the sanded
floor, and Manet entered. Although by birth and by art essentially
Parisian, there was something in his appearance and manner of speaking that
often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it was his dress--his clean-cut
clothes and figure. That figure! those square shoulders that swaggered as
he went across a room and the thin waist; and that face, the beard and
nose, satyr-like shall I say? No, for I would evoke an idea of beauty of
line united to that of intellectual expression--frank words, frank passion
in his convictions, loyal and simple phrases, clear as well-water,
sometimes a little hard, sometimes, as they flowed away, bitter, but at the
fountain head sweet and full of light. He sits next to Degas, that
round-shouldered man in suit of pepper and salt. There is nothing very
trenchantly French about him either, except the large necktie; his eyes are
small and his words are sharp, ironical, cynical. These two men are the
leaders of the impressionist school. Their friendship has been jarred by
inevitable rivalry. "Degas was painting 'Semiramis' when I was painting
'Modern Paris,'" says Manet. "Manet is in despair because he cannot paint
atrocious pictures like Durant, and be fêted and decorated; he is an
artist, not by inclination, but by force. He is as a galley slave chained
to the oar," says Degas. Different too are their methods of work. Manet
paints his whole picture from nature, trusting his instinct to lead him
aright through the devious labyrinth of selection. Nor does his instinct
ever fail him, there is a vision in his eyes which he calls nature, and
which he paints unconsciously as he digests his food, thinking and
declaring vehemently that the artist should not seek a synthesis, but
should paint merely what he sees. This extraordinary oneness of nature and
artistic vision does not exist in Degas, and even his portraits are
composed from drawings and notes. About midnight Catulle Mendès will drop
in, when he has corrected his proofs. He will come with his fine paradoxes
and his strained eloquence. He will lean towards you, he will take you by
the arm, and his presence is a nervous pleasure. And when the _café_
is closed, when the last bock has been drunk, we shall walk about the great
moonlight of the Place Pigale, and through the dark shadows of the streets,
talking of the last book published, he hanging on to my arm, speaking in
that high febrile voice of his, every phrase luminous, aerial, even as the
soaring moon and the fitful clouds. Duranty, an unknown Stendal, will come
in for an hour or so; he will talk little and go away quietly; he knows,
and his whole manner shows that he knows that he is a defeated man; and if
you ask him why he does not write another novel, he will say, "What's the
good, it would not be read; no one read the others, and I mightn't do even
as well if I tried again." Paul Alexis, Léon Diex, Pissarro, Cabaner, are
also frequently seen in the "Nouvelle Athènes."
Cabaner! the world knows not the names of those who scorn the world:
somewhere in one of the great populous churchyards of Paris there is a
forgotten grave, and there lies Cabaner. Cabaner! since the beginning there
have been, till the end of time there shall be Cabaners; and they shall
live miserably and they shall die miserable, and shall be forgotten; and
there shall never arise a novelist great enough to make live in art that
eternal spirit of devotion, disinterestedness, and aspiration, which in
each generation incarnates itself in one heroic soul. Better than those who
stepped to opulence and fame upon thee fallen thou wert; better,
loftier-minded, purer; thy destiny was to fall that others might rise upon
thee, thou wert one of the noble legion of the conquered; let praise be
given to the conquered, for the brunt of victory lies with the conquered.
Child of the pavement, of strange sonnets and stranger music, I remember
thee; I remember the silk shirts, the four sous of Italian cheese, the roll
of bread, and the glass of milk;--the streets were thy dining-room. And the
five-mile walk daily to the suburban music hall where five francs were
earned by playing the accompaniments of comic songs. And the wonderful room
on the fifth floor, which was furnished when that celebrated heritage of
two thousand francs was paid. I remember the fountain that was bought for a
wardrobe, and the American organ with all the instruments of the orchestra,
and the plaster casts under which the homeless ones that were never denied
a refuge and a crust by thee slept. I remember all, and the buying of the
life-size "Venus de Milo." Something extraordinary would be done with it, I
knew, but the result exceeded my wildest expectation. The head must needs
be struck off, so that the rapture of thy admiration should be secure from
all jarring reminiscence of the streets.
Then the wonderful story of the tenor, the pork butcher, who was heard
giving out such a volume of sound that the sausages were set in motion
above him; he was fed, clothed, and educated on the five francs a day
earned in the music hall in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet; and when he made
his _début_ at the Théâtre Lyrique, thou wert in the last stage of
consumption and too ill to go to hear thy pupil's success. He was
immediately engaged by Mapleson and taken to America.
I remember thy face, Cabaner; I can see it now--that long sallow face
ending in a brown beard, and the hollow eyes, the meagre arms covered with
a silk shirt, contrasting strangely with the rest of the dress. In all thy
privation and poverty, thou didst never forego thy silk shirt. I remember
the paradoxes and the aphorisms, if not the exact words, the glamour and
the sentiment of a humour that was all thy own. Never didst thou laugh; no,
not even when in discussing how silence might be rendered in music, thou
didst say, with thy extraordinary Pyrenean accent, "_Pour rendre le
silence en music il me faudrait trois orchestres militaires._" And when
I did show thee some poor verses of mine, French verses, for at this time I
hated and had partly forgotten my native language--
"My dear Dayne, you always write about love, the subject is nauseating."
"So it is, so it is; but after all Baudelaire wrote about love and lovers;
his best poem...."
"_C'est vrai, mais il s'agissait d'une charogne et cela relève beaucoup
la chose._"
I remember, too, a few stray snatches of thy extraordinary music, "music
that might be considered by Wagner as a little too advanced, but which
Liszt would not fail to understand;" also thy settings of sonnets where the
_melody_ was continued uninterruptedly from the first line to the
last; and that still more marvellous feat, thy setting, likewise with
unbroken melody, of Villon's ballade "Les Dames du Temps Jadis;" and that
Out-Cabanering of Cabaner, the putting to music of Cros's "Hareng Saur."
And why didst thou remain ever poor and unknown? Because of something too
much, or something too little? Because of something too much! so I think,
at least; thy heart was too full of too pure an ideal, too far removed from
all possible contagion with the base crowd.
But, Cabaner, thou didst not labour in vain; thy destiny, though obscure,
was a valiant and fruitful one; and, as in life, thou didst live for others
so now in death thou dost live in others. Thou wert in an hour of wonder
and strange splendour when the last tints and lovelinesses of romance
lingered in the deepening west; when out of the clear east rose with a
mighty effulgence of colour and lawless light Realism; when showing aloft
in the dead pallor of the zenith, like a white flag fluttering faintly,
Symbolists and Decadents appeared. Never before was there so sudden a flux
and conflux of artistic desire, such aspiration in the soul of man, such
rage of passion, such fainting fever, such cerebral erethism. The roar and
dust of the daily battle of the Realists was continued under the flush of
the sunset, the arms of the Romantics glittered, the pale spiritual
Symbolists watched and waited, none knowing yet of their presence. In such
an hour of artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wert, and thou
wert a magnificent rallying point for all comers; it was thou who didst
theorise our confused aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us
from all base commercialism, from all hateful prostitution; thou wert ever
our high priest, and from thy high altar turned to us the white host, the
ideal, the true and living God of all men.
Cabaner, I see you now entering the "Nouvelle Athènes;" you are a little
tired after your long weary walk, but you lament not and you never cry out
against the public that will accept neither your music nor your poetry. But
though you are tired and footsore, you are ready to aestheticise till the
_café_ closes; for you the homeless ones are waiting: there they are,
some three or four, and you will take them to your strange room, furnished
with the American organ, the fountain, and the decapitated Venus, and you
give them a crust each and cover them with what clothes you have; and, when
clothes are lacking, with plaster casts, and though you will take but a
glass of milk yourself, you will find a few sous to give them _lager_
to cool their thirsty throats. So you have ever lived--a blameless life is
yours, no base thought has ever entered there, not even a woman's love; art
and friends, that is all.
Reader, do you know of anything more angelic? If you do you are more
fortunate than I have been.