The great merit of these books consists in the boldness with which
they force their way into a new and intricate sphere of psychological
study. They lay hold on woman in the hidden depths of her personality,
as one who stands alone and lives her own life--her life of the many
days, weeks, months, years, when she grows in herself, educates and
miseducates herself in the loneliness of her being, in that inner life
which is made up of wishes, dreams, hopes and disillusions, before
any appointed man and any appointed event appears on the horizon of
her soul. And should the appointed man and the appointed event come
at last, or should anything else, anything unexpected come into her
life, it very often happens that the entire spiritual construction is
already completed, the material hardened, and the feelings have lost
their power of adaptability. These phenomena and their offshoots have
as yet scarcely been taken into consideration by literature. Novels
have always begun with love when dealing with woman, and the subject
was always her relationship to man, or her preparation for that
relationship. But this is a simplification of the subject which rests
on the ingenuousness of an obsolete philosophy of life. Life is not as
simple as ruder minds would have us think; and before all else there is
one fact that deserves recognition: Life advances and humanity changes.
We are standing on the threshold of a new culture, the nature of which
depends on the mental and spiritual qualities of the individuals who
are its bearers. It may be like a mighty bird which spreads its broad
wings and soars into the darkest space of futurity, or it may be like
a misshapen monster that falls to the earth. We have never yet caught
sight of the bird with the broad wings, but of monsters we have already
seen several.
The contributions of French culture have hitherto been the forerunners
of a highly susceptible race. But the signs are not wanting to show
that the genuine stream of literary production in France is beginning
to wane.
Even in these books there are interesting and deep-rooted problems
leading up to the conventional _Chambre garnie_ love, which must never
be absent from any novel that is to satisfy the French public. The
French are conquerors, but they are not colonists.
It is left to the Teutonic intellect to force its way into these
preserves, to plough the ground and to enter into possession.
_An Author on the Mystery of Woman_
_Barbey D’Aurevilly_
In Paris for some time past, Lemerre has been publishing the collected
works of the Norman author, Barbey D’Aurevilly. They are edited by a
lady who was a friend of the author’s, and from time to time a new
volume falls like a heavy weight on the book-market. They march along
in two columns--the first is called _Les Oeuvres et les Hommes_, and
consists of reviews of books and plays long since forgotten. These
criticisms, most of which were written hurriedly during the many years
when he occupied the post of critic to a paper which exists no more,
are issued in a set of fine quarto volumes with beautiful, clear print.
The second series consists of his novels and short stories, containing
much imperishable matter belonging to that everlasting species that
was, is and will be as enduring as the primal laws of existence, and
these are published in the most fascinating little octavo volumes with
pearl lettering, so fine that after two hours’ reading our eyes are
quite worn out and our heads begin to whirl. It was thus ordained by
feminine wisdom. The ephemeral criticisms were to take their stand in
monumental form as appropriate counter-balance, while the imperishable
novels were to look as pretty and dainty as possible and to behave with
as much coyness as young maidens in the presence of the reader, because
it was thought that they possessed attraction enough, even when it was
necessary to enjoy them with the help of a microscope. Let us hope that
the cunning lady was not mistaken; but Barbey D’Aurevilly was not a
popular author in his lifetime, and it is to be feared that the trying
circumstances under which he has lately been placed within reach of the
public will serve to frighten away omnivorous readers and all who are
in the habit of reading quickly.
It may be that this young lady, now grown old, who nursed the man of
seventy and eighty with a mixture of motherly love and hero-worship,
who served and cheered him and now carefully guards herself from
appearing as the editor of his works, although the entire literary
world of Paris recognises her as such--it may be that in this she has
preserved the same course of exclusiveness which was the peculiar
characteristic of her author during his life-time. Perhaps she does not
wish that the common herd should read him? Perhaps she has chosen the
nonpareil type for the purpose of raising a protecting barrier between
him and the reading public? It may be her wish to admit only the strong
souls and genuine readers who can stand the test of small print, and
who have no objection to spoiling their eyes; readers of the kind who
never swallow any book, who only care to digest a couple of pages a
day. There are not more than two hundred such readers in Europe and
about as many in Boston and New York. But these two hundred will love
her author and carry his memory with them to the grave.
When Barbey D’Aurevilly died a few years ago in a small room in one
of the quiet side streets off the Bon Marché, little more was known
of him either in the history of literature or in his public life
than that he used to dress in a very eccentric and remarkable manner
in his younger days, and that both in his conversation and in his
writings he displayed an obsolete and antiquated form of Catholicism.
It was not likely that a man such as he would be considered a great
author; Hugo and Gautier, Dumas fils and Zola were very different
people. They occupied themselves with “modern problems,” they were
liberal and radical, pessimists and writers who described the habits
and customs of the day. None of them were reactionary, least of all
orthodox Catholics. And latterly, when the Church has regained her
influence, and devotion has increased to so great an extent that even
the profoundly sceptical Bourget finds it convenient to become more and
more Catholic in every new book that he writes,--even this did not make
any appreciable difference to Barbey. He is too strong, too liberal,
too radical and too terribly realistic to be welcomed by modern piety.
In these days of exploding bombs, the anxious souls who take refuge
under the dreamy arches of the Church do not want to be still more
terrified by the reading of books. Times may change as they like, but
Barbey D’Aurevilly never was in harmony with the spirit of the age,
he is not in harmony with it now, and in the form that his friend has
published his books, there is ample prospect of his continuing to
remain out of harmony with it.
A man who has such a difficult and doubtful prospect of fame must be
already a great author--or nothing at all.
Paul Bourget was of the former opinion when, after Barbey’s death, he
wrote a clever and valuable essay upon him, aided by the advantage of
a personal acquaintance. This essay is now out of print; he omitted
to republish it in his _Etudes Psychologiques_ on celebrities of the
age, like the Goncourts, Amiel, Turgenev, even Taine and Stendhal. For
Barbey is too strong, he leaves the Renaissance figure of Stendhal far
behind.
It was a sad, quiet worshipper of Barbey’s who first turned my
attention to his works. The author had dedicated a small book to her,
almost with his dying hand; the dedication was one of those graceful,
pathetic inscriptions which are now a lost art. When I began to read
him his style influenced me like the sharp, bitter smell and the
infinite breadth of the sea, while his descriptions of life’s mystery
ran through me like the stab of a knife, causing me to shudder with
a suppressed cry as only a woman can cry when she sees the innermost
sanctuary of her womanhood exposed to the public gaze. Shakespeare is
the only one who has this greatness without mercy, this self-sufficing
completeness of a human being, this pride which is justice, moral law,
religion and a world to itself. There is nothing so vile, nothing so
horrible but would necessarily experience a shudder of exaltation when
exposed to the world’s gaze. Barbey D’Aurevilly belongs to the race of
Shakespeare.
He belongs to it in the actual sense of the word and also on account
of his Norman descent. There is nothing of the Gaul in him either in
his moral judgment, in his views of life, or in his sympathies and
antipathies. He is a landscape painter, which no truly French writer
has ever been, he is a lover of solitude in remote country districts,
a lover of nature on the lonely seashore. He is not a townsman and
he escapes as often as he can from Paris, the centre which is looked
upon by every successful Frenchman as the only beautiful, honourable,
interesting and pleasurable place in which to dwell. He has no
frivolity, he does not care for pleasure, but on the contrary he has a
grandiose mood and an iron grasp of the situations which he describes.
He seeks the more veiled sides of human nature, but there is a modesty
in his descriptions known only to Northerners, and not to Italians
and Gauls. He is the fellow-countryman of Flaubert and Maupassant,
but he has none of the plebeian exclusiveness of the first or the
Rabelais Gallicism of the second. He is of pure race to an extent that
is unheard of and inconceivable--a Scandinavian Norman without any of
the ponderous blood of the Anglo-Saxon, so often found in Shakespeare
and his contemporaries, but which the course of centuries has served to
dissipate until it has completely vanished.
When we look at his portrait we are unconsciously reminded of
certain pictures by the younger Holbein in the Windsor Gallery and
in the collection at Bâle; there is the same peculiar combination
of refinement and strength scarcely ever met with among his
contemporaries, the same sharp, subtle moulding of the features which
is only produced in a race of long standing. His head recalls to our
memory another, the head of one who is not long dead, more massive
perhaps, less developed, more thoughtful, but with an equally calm
expression; a head belonging to the same racial type, with the same
proud, princely features, the same prominent nose with the large
eyes of a discoverer--the head of a Normandy peasant, of Millet, his
fellow-countryman, the creator of a new feeling for nature and a new
aspect of nature in art.
The one feature that separates Millet from all other artists, in his
drawings far more than in his heavy, dull-coloured paintings, is that
he saw his people as one with nature. Where is the difference in
Millet’s picture between the flock of ravens alighting on the autumnal
field in the midst of the grey eternity of a damp day, and the man
and woman who, with rake and spade stuck in the ground beside them,
stand praying at the sound of the Angelus in a position which is of
itself a silent devotion at the approach of darkness? Just as the
forms of the flying ravens break the great self-sufficiency of the
landscape and thereby attract attention to it, so the powerful simple
outlines of the man and woman are only a more emphatic expression of
the solemn silence which the evening casts over the land. Just as
Millet places his people in the landscape, as an inseparable part of
nature, one with her, so Barbey D’Aurevilly places his characters on
the great, lonely sea-coast, on the yellow sands and the long, flat,
green meadows of storm-bound Normandy. The outlines here are the same
as there, standing out great and simple in their solemnity, silent and
weird as fate against the great, simple, peaceful landscape. In the
same way that Millet’s women stand firm and immoveable as a mountain
against the everlasting heavens, so Barbey D’Aurevilly’s defiant yet
submissive women stand in relief against the eternal landscape of their
native country, with the same powerful simplicity of Millet’s pictures,
inflexible as regards strange and transitory laws, but submissive to
the laws that appeal to them from the depths of their own natures.
Just as Millet’s peasant woman strides across the melancholy field,
weak yet unhesitating, individualistic, yet ever the same woman who
yesterday was, to-day is, and to-morrow will be, so _L’Ensorcelée_,
the large-proportioned, plain-thinking daughter of an ancient and
aristocratic house, wanders home from church across the fields in
spring, with the glow of an eternal flame in her honest face--the
glow of a passion conceived in church when in the pulpit she descried
the man whom she is proud to own as her master at the first glance.
This woman is the childless wife of a rich plebeian at the time of
the French Revolution; and the man--is he any different from that
peasant of Millet’s who draws on his coat, standing alone on the
broad plains after a hard day’s work? The mantle of an emperor in the
picture of a coronation is not more imposing than this raised arm,
standing in relief against the grey heavens, and commanding respect
as though it were engaged in the performance of a fearful and holy
action, instead of being merely the outline of a strong, rough, tired
figure in a lonely field. And what is it but the peasant strength and
peasant greatness of this former _Chouan_, now a priest of Barbey’s,
that attracts the nobleman’s daughter, wife of the _parvenu_, when
she sees him in church during the procession and catches sight of his
face hidden beneath the cowl,--a face that has been unrecognisably
lacerated in battle against the soldiers of the French Revolution,--at
the sight of which she is consumed with a mad, wild, passionate
love. She was a woman in whom her own sub-conscious strength called
for the strongest man, and felt with a shudder of injured pride: This
one is the strongest! And he is the strongest, for this inflexible
conspirator will not allow himself to be led astray by any woman,
and _L’Ensorcelée_, conscious of the destruction of her womanhood,
conscious also of the ignominy of having married beneath her, drowns
herself.
This is one of Barbey’s women who perished, a woman with the nature
of a mighty ancestress whose pride in her race and family was long
suppressed by a marriage repugnant to her inmost instincts, till at
last, in a moment of fearful agitation, she revolted. The same primal
instinct accompanied by the same horrible, unrelenting spirit, where
the conscience is dead during the perpetration of a crime, appears in
that unparalleled story, called _Le Bonheur dans le Crime_. A proud,
pure girl poisons the wife of the man whom she loves, and poisons her
with as much ease as a lover might have done in the days of the early
Italian Renaissance--(one of those incomprehensible women with the
passionate lips, as Botticelli paints them)--she poisons the wife under
his very eyes, with his silent consent, and then, in the same house,
with the same furniture, surrounded by the same solitary sequestered
nature, these two celebrate their honeymoon, which lasts without
interruption for weeks, months, years, scores of years, and they are
true to one another and happy for a whole life-time; not only do they
feel no remorse, but they are able to live without giving a single
thought to the past. This would not suit Protestant standards, yet
these are people such as Shakespeare depicted, figures such as Millet
in his pictures placed against the horizon, beings of whom Burkhardt
writes in his work on the Italian Renaissance. Conventional characters
they are not, but conventional characters are frequently incomplete
natures, whereas an individual character is a complete being, a being
who is fully developed and who possesses a standard of his own.
How else are we to describe that daughter of the _bourgeoisie_ who
comes home from the convent where she was educated, to be watched by
her parents with a severity that is now unknown? She steals away night
after night with bared feet along the stone passages, passes through
the bedroom where her parents are and goes to the young officer who
is quartered in their house, and one night she dies in his arms, dies
so silently and suddenly that she is dead before he has recovered his
self-possession. What men are able to transport women into such an
ungovernable passion of love? Woman does not create her own passion
like man; she is what man makes her. He either binds her instincts or
loosens them, he makes her good or bad, cold or passionate, according
to the manner in which his temperament affects hers, and according to
how great or how small a degree he himself is the man. Barbey’s men are
a race peculiar to themselves; they in their various characters, ages,
and persons are always himself--natures without lead and sand in their
veins, with the fire, the tension, the nervous energy of a full-blooded
race.
It is not the Frenchwoman whom Barbey describes, and no Frenchman
either could or would describe her as he has done. He is no more of a
Gaul than Millet, any more than the Italians of the early Renaissance
were real Romans. Like the author Tolstoy, in whom the Mongolian blood
is more clearly manifested as he grows older, so with Barbey and
Millet, the two great Normans, the Teutonic element appears on the
surface, the same element that we recognise in the pictures of the
Pre-Raphaelites, and which was afterwards set aside by the intrusion
of the Spaniards and the Classics. Millet’s landscapes represent the
Teutonic aspect of nature; while Barbey’s writings are the essence
of the Teutonic style, with its characteristic expansion, its abrupt
pauses, its utter indifference with regard to the main point, its
dislike of concluding the story as soon as the climax is reached. It
is here that we find the Teutonic sense for the infinite--a feeling
that is the peculiar property of a people who dwell near the sea--a
kind of absorption into nature, whither men vanish like black spots.
Both are equally possessed of that feeling for the real which has not
existed anywhere in the same degree since the days of the early Italian
Renaissance. Millet shews it in the reality of his drawing, Barbey in
the reality of individualism in the sexes. It is in this that Barbey
stands alone and unequalled by any of the authors of the present day or
of the past, and it is this that reminds us that three hundred years of
physical and spiritual refinement of human feeling and comprehension
lie between him and the age of Shakespeare.
His first youthful work, _Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas_ is broad as a novel by
Bulwer and as full of feeling as a poem by Lamartine; already here he
strikes the key in which woman’s inmost soul vibrates, resounds and
awakens to a sense of its most intimate and complicated delight in man.
_Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas_ is woman’s eternal affection, which eternally
manifests itself, even when the woman is no longer young; she is the
beloved mother whom the man, especially when he is quite young, loves
more ardently than he could possibly love a young girl, and through
him she becomes a mother--a matron already in her soul. Both in his
aphorisms and in the most popular of his novels, _Vieille Maîtresse_,
Barbey continually returns to this deepest of all man’s passions for
the woman whom he sees growing old beside him, and who for him grows
young again; the woman to whom he is bound by a thousand inextricable
memories, memories of his childhood when his own mother was young,
memories of youthful happiness and of his own youthful manhood spent
with this same woman, whom he still loves. A refined man expects a
great deal from woman, and in her who binds him with the cords of love,
he will always love the whole woman--the girl, the wife, the mother.
Woman is for Barbey the tragic, by reason of her inevitable destiny.
Woman’s age is more sharply defined than man’s; her youth is more
limited. She is unconscious of her own being, and when she realises
it, she also realises her destiny. She stands so strong and fearless
beneath the pressure of nature, that man cannot think of it without a
shudder of intense compassion like that which inspired the deepest of
Barbey’s stories, called by him _Une Histoire Sans Nom_. The subject
of this extraordinary story is a woman who becomes a mother without
wishing, without even knowing it. Kleist has described a case somewhat
similar in one of his novels, only there the woman is experienced
and understands what has happened. Kleist shows little sympathy in
his development of the plot, which he describes from the man’s point
of view, and the novel ends happily; Barbey, on the contrary, lays a
peculiar stress on the tragic element, on the woman’s passiveness,--the
reason of her eternal subjection to man--which renders her unable to
do anything towards the furtherance or the hindrance of her inevitable
destiny. An innocent young girl of sixteen lives alone in the old
family mansion with her mother, by whom she is sternly watched, and
where no one is admitted save a missionary preacher of the strictest
order who is going his round from church to church. This unsuspecting
child has begun to wander in her sleep without attracting the notice
either of her mother or the maid, and one night, while she is in
a somnambulant condition, the monk meets her on the doorstep and
through him she becomes a mother. The following day he goes off on his
mission, and both mother and daughter congratulate themselves that the
melancholy man has departed. Time passes, until there is no longer any
doubt, and the mother begins to torture the daughter, determined to
discover how and through whom this can have occurred; the miserable
child is terrified and can explain nothing. In this dreadful condition,
under circumstances which woman only of all creatures of the earth
has to endure, the poor girl’s mind undergoes a terrible trial which
results in idiotcy.
Barbey’s descriptions are physical rather than psychical, and only
women can judge of the truth of his psychological divinations, and
judge--not with words, but with the quivering of their nervous fibres.
It relates not to this one case only, but to thousands of other cases,
which to a man would appear quite human and endurable,--cases, not of
violence, but merely of error and self-deception.
There is one thing that is known only to ourselves, and that is that
woman’s most inexorable task-master is woman, as in this instance, when
the otherwise irreproachable mother torments her dearly-loved child.
If only on account of this one novel, Barbey may be said to belong to
the future, when there will exist a psychology of man and woman and
human conditions, of which the germs are only just beginning to show
themselves in him and in one or two others.
But what of his Catholicism? He lets the monk die after having
undergone a severe penance in a Trappist monastery, after which he
receives absolution and is duly reconciled with Heaven. Everything that
has broken with nature can be reconciled in nature, because all life
is only a fragment and a groping in the darkness, and in the deepest
sense there exists no immutable link between cause and effect, crime
and punishment. The innocent must suffer more than human martyrdom,
while the guilty escapes with an insignificant, but as he supposes,
just penance. Barbey’s Catholicism is that great, deep, intuitive
understanding that fathoms all humanity.
_How do we Stand?_
In this book I have tried to draw a characteristic sketch of the eight
most remarkable heads among the legion of authors belonging to the
nineteenth century. I have not stopped to make any literary estimates,
as these are of no lasting importance, because they vary with the
change of standards. What I have done is to uncover and expose to view
the subject-matter of their productions. I have tried to drag forward
the personality of the author, in order that the man may be measured by
his work, and the work by the man; for a man’s work is no fortuitous
incident. The man and his work are one; the work of a manly man is
man’s work, the work of an effeminate man is fancy work, and the work
of a half man is half work.
Now I ask: What is it that we women have to demand from the men of
this century who have offered to be our guides, teachers, deliverers,
cavaliers and religious teachers? And this is our reply: We ask that
they should be men, nothing more. The more manly they are, the more
womanly we shall be--preaching and education, rivalry and competition,
boasting and flattery are all of no good, only the manly man can
redeem the womanly in woman; all else is make-believe.
Let us consider these eight representative men in relation to their
work. We must confess that the oldest and the two youngest among them
have bequeathed man’s work, by which we mean lasting work which will
be valued more highly as time goes on. The manliness of their work is
proved by the fact that they looked neither to the right nor to the
left, nor hearkened to the course of time, nor winked at the women, but
said what they had to say--neither more nor less--and wrote what they
were obliged to write, owing to their personal temperament. None of
them wrote for us, neither Keller, Barbey nor Maupassant, nor did they
stop writing to wonder what we should say. They never thought about us
at all, and that is why they are the greatest of women’s authors, not
the authors for the women of yesterday, to-day or to-morrow, but the
interpreters of woman, authors from whom we can learn to understand
ourselves as we gaze upon the reflection of our own images in the soul
of man.
The authors who were young about the middle of this century form
a group apart, and they treat both us and themselves with equal
solemnity. How excellent are their intentions, and how deep their
interest in us! They want to raise us, purify and deliver us, and they
want to do it so thoroughly that they would rejoice if they could
deliver us from our womanhood. They write for us, they appeal to
us--Björnson, Ibsen, Heyse, Tolstoy, Strindberg--each in his own way.
The one would have us be intellectual women, the other sexless women,
and the third (in his latter years) would like to make us into apple
dumplings with whipped cream, the fourth into men-haters, etc. We have
their permission to be anything we like--doctor, professor, and a lady
to the tips of our fingers, only not the mother of future generations
to whom nothing human is strange, because she carries humanity at her
breast.
It is thus that the half man seeks to create woman in the likeness of
his own image, to make her only half a woman.
There have never been so many books written in any century as in ours,
when so much is written that men have long ceased to read at all, and
they are by no means the worst men who do not care for literature. But
women read for two; and the authors, who live by being read, write
for the cultivated, thinking, studious woman--for the woman with the
adjective.
Time passes, the century is drawing to a close, and the bankruptcy of
its “intellectual attainments” becomes ever more apparent. Are we women
to allow ourselves to be the only ones who are duped into the next
century by these same intellectual attainments? Or shall we take our
fate into our own hands and measure our being by a higher standard than
that of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?”
In order to do that there is no necessity for us to read the books that
are written for women--it were better to read those that are written
for men. Reading is a substitute for “living.” If we would build up for
ourselves a life out of our own womanhood, we need have no recourse to
authors, thinkers and prophets, such as this anæmic century produces;
we must turn to our own natures--not to our intellect, for that will
not bring us very far, but to our instinct. And it seems to me that
the first signs are already to hand, that woman will again determine
to be nothing more, but also nothing less, than the mother of future
generations.