_At the fourth gate, the warder stripped her; he took off the jewels
that adorn her breast_....
I
Ulick Invern always declared that he was a New-Yorker born. This was
a mild exaggeration; his mother--she had been a Bartlett before her
marriage--was bred in the metropolis, but both her sons, Oswald, the
elder, and Ulick, were born in Paris, where their father was Secretary
at the American Legation. Needless to add, that under the American
flag, they were registered as Americans. The elder Invern was the
second son of a needy Irish peer, whose heir had retrieved the fallen
fortunes of the family, an ancient one in Kerry, by marrying the only
child of a wealthy Dublin iron-monger. Ulick's father through influence
was sent to Washington where he served a few years in the British
Embassy. But his marriage to Madge Bartlett, beautiful, brilliant girl,
rich in her own right, caused a change of plans and her husband not
only resigned his post, but in due course of time became a naturalized
citizen of the United States. He entered the New York banking house of
his father-in-law, who was not particularly impressed by his daughter's
husband nor his capacity as a business man.
The elder Bartlett saw clearly. Handsome, like all the Inverns, Ulick
Sr. became a pony-polo player of international renown; henceforward
Wall Street and the bank only saw him when he dropped in to negotiate
a domestic loan. No one could dislike this big, easy-going, young,
blue-eyed Celt; even his father-in-law succumbed--after intervals of
frigidity--to his personal charm. His wife adored him and wept over his
gaming debts. He was a loose fish. Wine, women, and the wheel well nigh
disrupted her family life. Paris offered him an escape from what he
called the puritanism of New York--where, fancy! one's club shut down
on you at 2 a.m.--and thus it happened that Ulick Invern, Jr., first
saw the light in the French capital. With his brother, two years his
senior, he received French training: The Ecole Normale, private tutors,
ending with the Sorbonne. Oswald's painting talent soon manifested
itself, and after eighteen the Paris of the Americans knew him no
longer. He went to live on the Left Bank, in the Impasse du Maine,
where, at his studio, he led the free, happy life of a monied artist.
He had plenty of money, thanks to his indulgent mother, who, from time
to time visited him, and, while he was on good terms with his brother,
they didn't have much in common except their love for the Mater. They
worshipped her. Their father they admired, but with well-defined
reservations. He was a nee'r-do-well to the last, and died an
aristocratic drunkard, leaving a malodorous memory, many mistresses and
a cloud of debts. His widow never mentioned his name--that is, unless
someone spoke disparagingly of him; then she betrayed resentment. The
old chap was good form, but a charming black-guard, all the same--that
was the verdict of his children, who speedily forgot him.
But his influence persisted beyond the grave, though the opposite of
what might have been expected. Ulick told people who wondered over his
abstinence that his father had drunk and smoked enough for a dozen
families. So he let liquour and tobacco alone; besides, Oswald kept
up the family tradition--a thirsty one. Following the mother's death,
which occurred a few years after her husband's--there was heart malady
in the history of the Bartletts--the two young men found themselves
with a comfortable income, though not too rich. They saw little of one
another. Tolerant as he was Ulick couldn't endure the sporting artistic
crowd of the Latin Quarter atelier, and Oswald, on his side, found
his brother a trifle pedantic, doctrinaire, even utopian. Wisely they
kept asunder. A Frenchman in externals and by culture Ulick knew the
men and women of the early nineties who made Paris a city of artistic
and intellectual light. He was too young to have remembered Flaubert,
but he visited Edmond de Goncourt at Auteuil and there encountered the
group that had forsworn Zola and Naturalism. He admired the polished
style of Edmond De Goncourt, a true aristocrat of letters; admired
his Japonisme, his bibelots, pictures, and all that went to make the
ensemble of that House Beautiful. A point of distain had begin to
pierce the speech of the superb old gentleman, who confided to the
sympathetic American youth that the younger generation didn't even
knock at his door, that he and his dear dead brother, the illustrious
Jules, had given those budding litterateurs a new opera-glass through
which to view contemporary life. It was true. Dandys in their prose
style, the De Goncourts had fashioned for themselves a personal vision
and speech, feverish, staccato, intense. Their chief preoccupation was
art, the pictorial, the tangible arts. No better book about artistic
life has been written than Manette Salomon. And Madame Gervaisais is
less an odyssey of a weak woman's soul, than an evocation of modern
Rome. Alone, Edmond had written those exquisite notations of a girl's
awakening consciousness to be found in the pages of Chérie. Ulick
felt that he would not long tarry in that finely-filed, but chilly
literature.
He had encountered at one of the reunions in the famous Concourt
grenier, Henry James and also Joris-Karel Huysmans, whose names in
baptism were Charles Marie-George. For this misanthropic writer he
had shown such a preference that he attracted the attention of his
idol and was invited to call upon him at his home in the rue de Sèvres
on the rive gauche. A friendship began which greatly influenced the
development of the younger man's character. His father had been what
is facetiously called a "hickory" Catholic. He went to church when
the spirit moved him. Yet, Irish-like, he never let the lustral week
preceding Easter pass without confessing and communicating, usually
going to the Trinity church on the boulevard Malsherbes, where he
found a friend in a little Irish priest long stationed there for the
convenience and edification of English-speaking residents. But Ulick's
mother had been a High Church Episcopalian, and while she was not a
fervent church woman she had consented to the baptism of her sons in
the Roman Catholic religion. It is not so far away from my faith, she
had told her fashionable English friends when they remonstrated with
her over this backsliding from the principles of the Church of England.
She, too, lacked true moral fibre though her association with her
characterless husband may have been the chief contributing cause.
Ulick, however, was not of the temperament religious. He believed,
of course, in a deity, an immanent deity; his was a pleasing sort of
personal pantheism. Oswald was become a Manichean, a devil-worshipper.
He did not repudiate the authority of the Church. But, then, Oswald
drank absinthe, and long before that artists' apotheosis, he had
hitched his artistic wagon to the saturnine canvases of Paul Cézanne.
Ulick, on the contrary, never indulged in parti-pris. He was born, if
such a thing were possible, with an indifferent temperament concerning
any particular religion. All gods were divine to him, from the fetish
of a South-Sea islander to the sublime doctrine of transubstantiation.
He would have agreed with Baudelaire that it is neither permissible
nor prudent to mock at any idol. A deity may have once made its abode
in the wood or stone. Not cynical, Ulick was never convinced that
any act of his could alter the inflexible law of causality. He had
absorbed from Taine his deterministic leaning, luckily tempered by a
sensible toleration. Whatever God is, he certainly can't exist outside
of my brain-cells, argued Ulick. Each man creates a god after his
own image. If I stop thinking of my particular deity-concept then he
ceases to exist--for me; and that is the history of every god, every
religion. All the rest is theology. Mother Church with her magnificent
ceremonial, her liturgy, music, painting, sculpture, above all,
architecture--for him, Gothic--appealed to his imagination, historic
and aesthetic. Ulick was principally aesthetic; morals played a minor
rôle in his existence.
But M. Huysmans had traversed the seven dolorous stations of his own
crucified spirit and he at once made a searching examination into the
conscience of his youthful admirer. He related, not without a certain
muted pride, the advice of Barbey d'Aurevilly, the same advice Barbey
had given Charles Baudelaire: that either the author of Là-Bas must
prostrate himself at the feet of Jesus crucified, or else blow out his
brains. "C'est fait," added Huysmans. It was shortly after the epoch of
En route that he told Ulick of his conversion, not an unexpected one to
those who knew the umbrageous, slender writer. Had it not been for the
curiously beautiful literature it produced the various states of soul
of M. Huysmans would not have riveted the fancy of Invern. The mordant
epithet, picturesque phrase, the lenten rhythms of this multicolored
prose, its sharp, savoury imagery--Huysmans' spiritual landscapes
are painted with the gusto of a hungry man at a banquet where the
plates are composed by a chef of genius--all these and the vision of a
profoundly pessimistic soul, attracted him to Huysmans as to no other
modern writer. Only to Petronius Arbiter among earlier penmen would he
accord an equal value. Also to St. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis. He
did not apologize for this versatility in tastes.
Huysmans prodded his conscience to such good effect that he accompanied
the master to St. Sulpice, and also went with him when he made the
rounds of the bookstalls along the Left Bank of the Seine. It was
during one of these fascinating excursions in pursuit of ancient Latin
hymnal literature that Ulick was presented to Remy de Gourmont, another
of his favorite writers. A second friendship began, that long outlived
the death of Huysmans. Maurice Barrès and his deification of the ego,
was to be the third and principal _étape_ in his moral development.
There was one thing, nevertheless, that M. Huysmans could not persuade
him to do; to make peace with his church. Urged to the confessional,
there to cleanse his soul, to the communion-table to assuage his thirst
for the infinite, Ulick would reply with a shoulder-shrug. The truth
was that his sceptical analytical mind and his passion for women kept
him from taking the final leap-off into piety and purity. My friend,
Huysmans would insist, it is so easy! But if I relapse, as I am sure
to do? would query Ulick. Then, he was assured that there was always
further grace for the sinner. The waters of purification were always
on tap. He could lave himself weekly--and begin over again; even the
very next day. It's too easy, and it elevates religion to the dignity
of a Turkish-bath, Ulick retorted. M. Huysmans, in turn, shrugged his
shoulders, and the evening would end in tobacco smoke and furious
discussions about art and literature.
And what evenings of ambrosia they were, mingled with the venom of the
Master's critiques! He spared no one. He called Monseigneur d'Hulot,
a bellicose booby, that same erudite and amiable churchman, who later
wrote so discriminatingly of his bitter-tongued friend. An arsenal
of opinions passed into the possession of the neophyte. But even at
that early age, the formative period, his general culture was wider,
more generous than the Master's. Ulick had been a student from the
precocious age of seven when he was discovered by his nurse reading La
Fontaine's Fables and Pickwick Papers. This bi-lingual training had
produced admirable results. He knew two literatures thoroughly; in
addition to a fair acquaintance with German and Italian. His mother
had insisted on a German university and he selected Jena because of
its propinquity to Weimar. Those four years in Germany had been the
white stones in his studious career. There he had learned and loved
Bach and Beethoven; there he learned to know Goethe, the greatest
among moderns--he detested Bismarck and the hard positivism of the
Prussian pan-Germanists; Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were to
come later. His reactions to the system, or lack of system in the case
of Nietzsche, was like a crisis in a dangerous fever. He alternated
between languour and exaltation. Schopenhauer cooled off his naturally
buoyant temperament, but Nietzsche gave him ecstasy as if poured from
an overflowing goblet.
He went twice weekly to Weimar there to study pianoforte and theory
with a pupil of Franz Liszt. The drowsy old town on the Ilm, once the
Athens of Germany, laid his imagination under a spell. He wandered
through the deserted gardens on long summer afternoons, Faust in hand,
or he would go to Liszt's house in the woods, hardly a quarter hour's
stroll from the garden-house of Goethe, and ponder the extraordinary
activities of poet and pianist. In this same Weimar Goethe had led
an active, practical life, he, the pagan hedonist, accused by the
ignorant of day-dreaming, of being a butterfly voluptuary. He was
the real political ruler and administrator of Saxe-Weimar. Liszt,
after a life that was Caesarian in its triumphs, had calmly entered
into his hermitage, where he taught, prayed and composed. And this
is the end of every man's desire, thought the young man, who greatly
aspired, though not for the prizes of the market-place. Yonder, at
Jena, in Dr. Bingswanger's sanitorium, was hidden the poet-philosopher
Nietzsche whose melodious thunder-words had stirred to the core the
self-satisfied materialism of his native land. But he was wounded, his
eagle wings of rhapsody and rage were broken; they no longer supported
him in his flights through the vasty firmament of ideas. Later he
was to come to his last asylum in Upper Weimar there to be soothed
and watched over by his devoted sister Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche.
For Ulick he was a living presence, though the soul was absent from
his body at Jena. Zarathustra and Faust, and the exquisite art of
Frédéric Chopin were henceforth to be the three guiding stars in his
constellation of thinkers and artists. Indeed, it was the difficulty of
finding a suitable interpreter of Chopin that drove him back to Paris.
His Weimar teacher believed in the motto: Aut Lizst, aut nihil! Ulick
preferred the Pole to the Hungarian: besides, a teutonized Chopin was
inconceivable.