IT is my wish to make a confession, an extraordinary one for an
American, to wit: I am no lover of Paris. This is putting it mildly.
I had never misery elsewhere of which I could not get, and hold, the
upper hand. Now we were there under pleasantest conditions, at good
headquarters, within reach of things I profess to love: the crowd,
the studios, the concerts and cafés, the lights of the Place de la
Concorde, the parks, the Louvre, the river-boats, the circuses, the old
schools, the National Library. We had sweet weather; we had health,
youth, leisure; we had a menu; O shade of Angry Cat! (which, you must
know, is French for the best of kings, Henry of Navarre) what a menu
we did have! But over me and my hitherto unperturbed jollity there
fell a deadly melancholy. My family shopped and sported, while I stood
amid a thousand wheels in the Carrefour Montmartre, or in the lee
of Molière’s fountained house-wall, with tears bursting down these
indignant and constitutionally arid cheeks. All day I wandered about
alone, like a lunatic or a lover; by night I slept little, and had
visions weird and gory. This lasted an entire autumn, which I count as
lost out of my life, and during which I never once could lay salt on
the tail of what had been myself. Something in that nervous latitude
knocked out my congenital stoicism; I began to have all manner of
unmanageable emotions, like an eighteenth-century heroine with the
spleen or the vapors; I was more sentient, more intelligent, more
humanistic, more capable of vast virtues and vices than would have
seemed credible to the New England which bred me upon her sacred bean.
A violent quarrelsomeness possessed me; whatever I saw and heard was
an irritation; I believe I could have offered, in all soberness, to
reform the Comédie Française, to unbuild the Tour Saint-Jacques, and to
fight the Immortals, man by man. The bearing and gesture of the polite
wee police were odious in my eyes, and the parlous Parisian nurslings
appeared insufferably like goblins. Frequently, I would fall literally
on the neck of that dear little bronze Faun tiptoeing at the entrance
to the Gardens of the Luxembourg, on the side of the Boule-Miche,
scolding him fiercely for being able to live and smile and dance in
fatal Paris!
And the unwonted behavior of me, the upside-downing and inside-outing
of whatever I had fondly supposed to be my “ways”! It is to be desired,
in general, that I were a less unspiritual creature; but there, at
least, I haunted the great churches, especially Saint-Sulpice, with
its solemn evensong borne on six hundred voices of seminarian men
and boys. Whereas I had ever the relish of a genuine antiquary for
tombs and epitaphs, I bolted incontinently from the beaded wreaths of
Père-la-Chaise, and paid with a fit of shuddering for my propinquity
to historic ashes in Saint-Denis. It would confound any of my
acquaintances to be told that I was a misanthrope or a royalist; yet
I used to look after the ominous, noisy, big-hatted, blue-chinned,
whip-cracking cabbies, and grind my teeth at them as at the whole
incarnate Revolution, which they instantly bring to mind. As for the
Louvre, it gave me no comfort; I crossed its threshold but seldom, for
it tore me in pieces with the unbearable glory on its walls.
In fine, Paris had about driven me mad. While I strolled the Quarter, I
had for company, step for step, now Abelard, now Jacques de Molay and
his Templars, now the Maid, now Coligny or Guise, now the Girondists
and André Chénier: the long procession of the wronging and the wronged,
the disillusioned, the slain, which belongs to those altered and
brightened streets. Strange theories inhabited me; I was no crass
optimist any more. My head hummed with the tragic warning of Bossuet,
which Persius uttered before him, that at the bottom of every knowable
thing was nothingness. And all this with a bun in one fist, and in the
other a gem of a duodecimo, bought at the quays for three sous, with a
cloudless sky above, and every incentive, including poverty, towards
fullest content and exhilaration.
In London I had been happy, and “clad in complete steel” against such
alien moods as these. And to London, eventually, I had to go back,
although M. S., who lives for art and Chicago, and who always knows
what’s what, compared me to a spook with no stomach for Paradise,
whimpering for Hades and the sooty company thereof. But in London I
was calm, normal, free, as by some eternal paradox.
One door in Paris I regretted to leave, for I went almost daily, like
Little Billee and his cheerful colleagues, to the Morgue. I should have
become a great novelist, had I taken my chances there a bit longer!
Next to the Morgue, I was loath to part with the bridges, over which
goes so much laughing and shining life, under which so much mystery is
forever being fished up by aid of the torch and the prong. Ah, those
men and women, stung, from the beginning, by the scorpions in that
smooth, clean, treacherous air, and asking of the Seine water that it
should quench immaterial fires!
So long as I have an eye to my own longevity and peace, I shall never
put foot in Paris. Moreover, the place is painful, as having shaken to
the base my smug opinion of myself. It taught me my moral ticklishness,
and shrunk me into less than a cosmopolite; though I make puns again,
I do so humbly, and out of a psychic experience. Nor must the item
go unrecorded that I had a French ancestor, an unimportant personage
remembered not then so much as since. He was born on the borders of
Provence; what Paris was to him, or whether he ever beheld it, I know
not. It is possible that he may have burned his fingers there, and that
his bullying spirit imposed upon mine this fantastic attraction of
repulsion, this irrational hatred of what I knew all the time to be the
most animated, the most consistent, and the most beautiful city in the
world.
“Trilby”
_By_ Louise Imogen Guiney
“TRILBY”
“TRILBY” is two things. It is a little, simple, light-hearted story,
lop-sided, discursive, having breaks and patches; and it is also
already a masterpiece _hors concours_, so that when you come before it,
the only sage remark you can make is dumb-show: that is, you may with
great propriety take off your hat. Its background is so treated that
it takes rank as a new thing in English fiction. Others since Mürger
have attempted to draw the life of the Quarter, but none with this
blitheness and winning charm, not even Mr. Henry Harland (Sidney Luska)
in his idyllic “Land of Love,” which deserves to be better known. The
spirit of “Trilby” is the very essence of the best old English humor,
as if Fielding, Steele, and Thackeray had collaborated upon it in
Paradise (forgetting just a little the rules of their mundane grammar,
the conditions of their mundane style!) and transfused into it their
robust manly gayety and their understanding tenderness of heart.
Indeed, its every page seems to breathe forth Thackeray’s darling
axiom: “Fun is good; Truth is better; Love is best of all.” It is a
capital illustration of the capital French thesis that a subject counts
for nothing, but that the treatment of a subject counts for everything.
Let the average readeress, a person of conventions, go through “Trilby”
from cover to cover. Her attitude at the end is Mrs. Bagot’s own:
affectionate and bewildered surrender. “Trilby” itself is what its
heroine ingenuously calls the “altogether.” It is an elemental human
book, staged without costumes, attractive for no spurious attribute,
but only through its gentleness and candor. It constrains talk, only
because it has so strengthened feeling.
As for the tone of it, it has escaped mysticism, by great good fortune.
Hypnotism, apprehended and faintly feared from the first, is used with
an exquisitely abstinent touch. There is nowhere too much of it, and
therefore it becomes credible and tragic. Svengali’s evil influence
hangs over the victim whom it glorifies, like a premonition of the
Greeks, formless, having no precisely indicated end or beginning. His
soul passes; and the music in her forsakes her on the instant, and
passes with him. You are not told this; you gather it. The tale is
crowded with these inferences, and the dullest or cleverest reader is
alike flattered at finding them. So with the relationship of Little
Billee and his stricken Trilby, fading away among the cheery and loyal
painters who take pleasure yet in her perfections: there is not, in
the written record, so much as a private look or sigh between the two
any more; only Trilby’s saddened confession to a third person that her
girlish bosom had subdued itself at last to a meek, motherly yearning
over her wild little worshipper, who nearly won her at the nineteenth
asking.
The final chapters are out of proportion; chance, or weariness, led
the author to hurry his thoroughly interesting hero off the scene in
a few nervous paragraphs. But even this is no serious defect, for the
general impression must be maintained; a prolonged soft orchestral
strain for Little Billee would be mere sentiment, and episodic, the
significance of “Trilby” having ended in Trilby’s dying with the wrong
name upon her lips. Every part of the wonderful story is unconsciously
managed with artistic reference to the whole; its incidents are as
rich in meaning as you care to consider them. Trilby opens her heart
to the Laird, and is most lover-like with him who is most brotherly.
Her mother, poor lass, was an aristocrat with the bar sinister; her
clerical father, a bibulous character enchantingly outlined, was her
only authority for her disbelief in dogma. No stress is laid on these
characteristics and conditions; but they tell. Taffy preserves an
English silence when Gecko speaks his soulful and spills over. You half
resent the hearty postlude, through your own too acute memory of what
is past. Yet the book was bound to end in a _tempo primo_, in a strain
of peace and hope as like as possible to what was hushed forever, the
jocund dance-measure of art and friendship and Latin-Quarter youth.
For “Trilby” is comedy, after all, genuine comedy, and it is so to be
named, albeit with a scandalous lump in the throat. As it is, we take
it; we covet it; we will pay any price for it; we cannot get along
without it. “_Je prong!_”
Mr. Du Maurier is not the first artist in England who has come over the
border into literature with victorious results. Opie and Fuseli were
among the most suggestive of thinkers and talkers; Sir Joshua lectured
with academic vigor and graceful persuasiveness; Haydon had an almost
unequalled eye for character, and a racy, biting, individual manner
with his pen. But no artist has so endowed the world of romance. Mr.
Du Maurier’s achievement is not of malice prepense. As Dian stole to
Endymion sleeping, so has immortal luck come upon him, chiefly because
he did not, like the misguided Imlac in “Rasselas,” “determine to
become”—a classic. “Trilby,” born of leisure and pastime, is vagrant;
heedless of means to the end; profoundly modest and simple; told for
what it is worth, as if it were, at least, something real and dear to
the teller. Out of this easy, pleasure-giving mood, from one who is no
trained expert, who has no idea to broach of disturbance or reform, out
of genial genius, in short, which hates the niggardly hand and scatters
roses, comes a gift of unique beauty. It crowns the publishers’ year,
as do “Lord Ormont and his Aminta,” “Perleycross,” and “The Jungle
Book.” With these great works of great writers, it stands, oddly
enough, as tall as any; fresh, wide, healthful, curative, like them;
and like them, a terrible punch on the head to a hundred little puling
contemporaneous novels, with their crude and cowardly theories of life.
The “Trilby” pictures, haphazard and effectual as is their text, can
bear no more direct praise than that they are verily Mr. Du Maurier’s.
The masterly grouping, the multitude of fine lines, the spirited
perspective, are here as of old. Some of these illustrations, not
necessarily the best, stay on the retina; among such, surely, is the
ludicrous, dripping funeral procession of the landlady’s vernacular
lie; that huge procession filing up-street, with one belated, civic
infant on the reviewing-stand! Hardly second to it as a spectacle
is the high-born rogue of a Zouave, enacting the trussed fowl at
midnight on the studio floor, or the companion gem, set in the dubious
out-of-doors of the great original Parisian Carry-hatide. Of the
serious drawings, there is a memorable one among the three of Trilby
singing, with her delicately advanced foot, and falling hair, and the
luminous Ellen-Terry-like look in her kind eyes. Above all, who can
forget the pathetic, pleading figure of the little boy Jeannot, in his
pretty Palm Sunday clothes, losing his holiday, losing faith in his
sister; and of Trilby over him, revoking her promise, and compassing
what was in very truth the “meanest and lowest deed” of her brief,
unselfish life? She cried herself to sleep often, remembering it, but
to Mrs. Bagot it was monstrous trivial: “the putting-off of a small
child.” Her too typical phrase, “wrong with the intense wrongness of
a right-minded person,” as Ruskin says, gives you a pang. So does the
inscription under the last glimpse we have of Little Billee, poignant
enough without the “_Quae nunc abibis in loca_,” which rushes its sweet
pagan heart-break into the Rector’s mind. In these casual intolerable
thrusts deep into the nerve of laughter or of tears, Mr. Du Maurier
demonstrates his right of authorship; these, and not vain verbal
felicities, constitute his literary style.