FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.
It is many days since I wrote to you, and but for your delightful note
just received, reproaching me for silence, I should still be under the
spell of that awe which certain words of M. Savarin were well fitted to
produce. Chancing to ask him if he had written to you lately, he said,
with that laugh of his, good-humouredly ironical, "No, Mademoiselle, I am
not one of the _Facheux_ whom Moliere has immortalized. If the meeting
of lovers should be sacred from the intrusion of a third person, however
amiable, more sacred still should be the parting between an author and
his work. Madame de Grantmesnil is in that moment so solemn to a genius
earnest as hers,--she is bidding farewell to a companion with whom, once
dismissed into the world, she can never converse familiarly again; it
ceases to be her companion when it becomes ours. Do not let us disturb
the last hours they will pass together."
These words struck me much. I suppose there is truth in them. I can
comprehend that a work which has long been all in all to its author,
concentrating his thoughts, gathering round it the hopes and fears of his
inmost heart, dies, as it were, to him when he has completed its life for
others, and launched it into a world estranged from the solitude in which
it was born and formed. I can almost conceive that, to a writer like
you, the very fame which attends the work thus sent forth chills your own
love for it. The characters you created in a fairyland, known but to
yourself, must lose something of their mysterious charm when you hear
them discussed and cavilled at, blamed or praised, as if they were really
the creatures of streets and salons.
I wonder if hostile criticism pains or enrages you as it seems to do such
other authors as I have known. M. Savarin, for instance, sets down in
his tablets as an enemy to whom vengeance is due the smallest scribbler
who wounds his self-love, and says frankly, "To me praise is food,
dispraise is poison. Him who feeds me I pay; him who poisons me I break
on the wheel." M. Savarin is, indeed, a skilful and energetic
administrator to his own reputation. He deals with it as if it were a
kingdom,--establishes fortifications for its defence, enlists soldiers to
fight for it. He is the soul and centre of a confederation in which each
is bound to defend the territory of the others, and all those territories
united constitute the imperial realm of M. Savarin. Don't think me an
ungracious satirist in what I am thus saying of our brilliant friend. It
is not I who here speak; it is himself. He avows his policy with the
_naivete_ which makes the charm of his style as writer. "It is the
greatest mistake," he said to me yesterday, "to talk of the Republic of
Letters. Every author who wins a name is a sovereign in his own domain,
be it large or small. Woe to any republican who wants to dethrone me!"
Somehow or other, when M. Savarin thus talks I feel as if he were
betraying the cause of, genius. I cannot bring myself to regard
literature as a craft,--to me it is a sacred mission; and in hearing this
"sovereign" boast of the tricks by which he maintains his state, I seem
to listen to a priest who treats as imposture the religion he professes
to teach. M. Savarin's favourite _eleve_ now is a young contributor to
his journal, named Gustave Rameau. M. Savarin said the other day in my
hearing, "I and my set were Young France; Gustave Rameau and his set are
New Paris."
"And what is the distinction between the one and the other?" asked my
American friend, Mrs. Morley.
"The set of 'Young France,'" answered M. Savarin, "had in it the hearty
consciousness of youth; it was bold and vehement, with abundant vitality
and animal spirits; whatever may be said against it in other respects,
the power of thews and sinews must be conceded to its chief
representatives. But the set of 'New Paris' has very bad health, and
very indifferent spirits. Still, in its way, it is very clever; it can
sting and bite as keenly as if it were big and strong. Rameau is the
most promising member of the set. He will be popular in his time,
because he represents a good deal of the mind of his time,--namely, the
mind and the time of 'New Paris.'"
Do you know anything of this young Rameau's writings? You do not know
himself, for he told me so, expressing a desire, that was evidently very
sincere, to find some occasion on which to render you his homage. He
said this the first time I met him at M. Savarin's, and before he knew
how dear to me are yourself and your fame. He came and sat by me after
dinner, and won my interest at once by asking me if I had heard that you
were busied on a new work; and then, without waiting for my answer, he
launched forth into praises of you, which made a notable contrast to the
scorn with which he spoke of all your contemporaries,--except indeed M.
Savarin, who, however, might not have been pleased to hear his favourite
pupil style him "a great writer in small things." I spare you his
epigrams on Dumas and Victor Hugo and my beloved Lamartine. Though his
talk was showy, and dazzled me at first, I soon got rather tired of it,
even the first time we met. Since then I have seen him very often, not
only at M. Savarin's, but he calls here at least every other day, and we
have become quite good friends. He gains on acquaintance so far that one
cannot help feeling how much he is to be pitied. He is so envious! and
the envious must be so unhappy. And then he is at once so near and so
far from all the things that he envies. He longs for riches and luxury,
and can only as yet earn a bare competence by his labours. Therefore he
hates the rich and luxurious. His literary successes, instead of
pleasing him, render him miserable by their contrast with the fame of the
authors whom he envies and assails. He has a beautiful head, of which he
is conscious, but it is joined to a body without strength or grace. He
is conscious of this too,--but it is cruel to go on with this sketch.
You can see at once the kind of person who, whether he inspire affection
or dislike, cannot fail to create an interest, painful but compassionate.
You will be pleased to hear that Dr. C. considers my health so improved
that I may next year enter fairly on the profession for which I was
intended and trained. Yet I still feel hesitating and doubtful. To give
myself wholly up to the art in which I am told I could excel must
alienate me entirely from the ambition that yearns for fields in which,
alas! it may perhaps never appropriate to itself a rood for culture,--
only wander, lost in a vague fairyland, to which it has not the fairy's
birthright. O thou great Enchantress, to whom are equally subject the
streets of Paris and the realm of Faerie, thou who hast sounded to the
deeps that circumfluent ocean called "practical human life," and hast
taught the acutest of its navigators to consider how far its courses are
guided by orbs in heaven,--canst thou solve this riddle which, if it
perplexes me, must perplex so many? What is the real distinction between
the rare genius and the commonalty of human souls that feel to the quick
all the grandest and divinest things which the rare genius places before
them, sighing within themselves, "This rare genius does but express that
which was previously familiar to us, so far as thought and sentiment
extend"? Nay, the genius itself, however eloquent, never does, never
can, express the whole of the thought or the sentiment it interprets; on
the contrary, the greater the genius is, the more it leaves a something
of incomplete satisfaction on our minds,--it promises so much more than
it performs; it implies so much more than it announces. I am impressed
with the truth of what I thus say in proportion as I re-peruse and
re-study the greatest writers that have come within my narrow range of
reading; and by the greatest writers I mean those who are not exclusively
reasoners (of such I cannot judge), nor mere poets (of whom, so far as
concerns the union of words with music, I ought to be able to judge), but
the few who unite reason and poetry, and appeal at once to the common-
sense of the multitude and the imagination of the few. The highest type
of this union to me is Shakspeare; and I can comprehend the justice of no
criticism on him which does not allow this sense of incomplete
satisfaction augmenting in proportion as the poet soars to his highest.
I ask again, In what consists this distinction between the rare genius
and the commonalty of minds that exclaim, "He expresses what we feel, but
never the whole of what we feel"? Is it the mere power over language, a
larger knowledge of dictionaries, a finer ear for period and cadence, a
more artistic craft in casing our thoughts and sentiments in well-
selected words? Is it true what Buffon says, "that the style is the
man"? Is it true what I am told Goethe said, "Poetry is form"? I cannot
believe this; and if you tell me it is true, then I no longer pine to be
a writer. But if it be not true, explain to me how it is that the
greatest genius is popular in proportion as it makes itself akin to us by
uttering in better words than we employ that which was already within us,
brings to light what in our souls was latent, and does but correct,
beautify, and publish the correspondence which an ordinary reader carries
on privately every day between himself and his mind or his heart. If
this superiority in the genius be but style and form, I abandon my dream
of being something else than a singer of words by another to the music of
another. But then, what then? My knowledge of books and art is
wonderfully small. What little I do know I gather from very few books
and from what I hear said by the few worth listening to whom I happen to
meet; and out of these, in solitude and revery, not by conscious effort,
I arrive at some results which appear to my inexperience original.
Perhaps, indeed, they have the same kind of originality as the musical
compositions of amateurs who effect a cantata or a quartette made up of
borrowed details from great masters, and constituting a whole so original
that no real master would deign to own it. Oh, if I could get you to
understand how unsettled, how struggling my whole nature at this moment
is! I wonder what is the sensation of the chrysalis which has been a
silkworm, when it first feels the new wings stirring within its shell,--
wings, alas! they are but those of the humblest and shortest-lived sort
of moth, scarcely born into daylight before it dies. Could it reason, it
might regret its earlier life, and say, "Better be the silkworm than the
moth."
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
Have you known well any English people in the course of your life? I say
well, for you must have had acquaintance with many. But it seems to me
so difficult to know an Englishman well. Even I, who so loved and
revered Mr. Selby,--I, whose childhood was admitted into his
companionship by that love which places ignorance and knowledge, infancy
and age, upon ground so equal that heart touches heart, cannot say that I
understand the English character to anything like the extent to which I
fancy I understand the Italian and the French. Between us of the
Continent and them of the island the British Channel always flows. There
is an Englishman here to whom I have been introduced, whom I have met,
though but seldom, in that society which bounds the Paris world to me.
Pray, pray tell me, did you ever know, ever meet him? His name is Graham
Vane. He is the only son, I am told, of a man who was a _celebrite_ in
England as an orator and statesman, and on both sides he belongs to the
haute aristocratic. He himself has that indescribable air and mien to
which we apply the epithet 'distinguished.' In the most crowded salon
the eye would fix on him, and involuntarily follow his movements. Yet
his manners are frank and simple, wholly without the stiffness or reserve
which are said to characterize the English. There is an inborn dignity
in his bearing which consists in the absence of all dignity assumed. But
what strikes me most in this Englishman is an expression of countenance
which the English depict by the word 'open,'--that expression which
inspires you with a belief in the existence of sincerity. Mrs. Morley
said of him, in that poetic extravagance of phrase by which the Americans
startle the English, "That man's forehead would light up the Mammoth
Cave." Do you not know, Eulalie, what it is to us cultivators of art--
art being the expression of truth through fiction--to come into the
atmosphere of one of those souls in which Truth stands out bold and
beautiful in itself, and needs no idealization through fiction? Oh, how
near we should be to heaven could we live daily, hourly, in the presence
of one the honesty of whose word we could never doubt, the authority of
whose word we could never disobey! Mr. Vane professes not to understand
music, not even to care for it, except rarely, and yet he spoke of its
influence over others with an enthusiasm that half charmed me once more
back to my destined calling; nay, might have charmed me wholly, but that
he seemed to think that I--that any public singer--must be a creature
apart from the world,--the world in which such men live. Perhaps that is
true.