it all the more because he was once épris of that Garden woman. I
honestly believe the man is truly in love with me.” “Pooh! Sweetheart,
a music-critic has only ink and ice-water in his veins. Spoggs is in
love with his hifalutin’ phrases. All the rest is cannonading canaries.
If he saw you in the right key he would never speak of your second-act
Isolde. That’s just where you fall down, darling. Whereas my third-act
Tristan--” “Dear old boy. How you do run on. Always jealous when his
poor little wifie is praised.” “I jealous? Of--you!” Longa pausa!
Suddenly she exclaims: “Oh, you poor man! Did you read what he said of
your make-up last night? I hate that man now. He is so unjust--to you;
though he does admire me. Why, what’s the matter, baby? Where are you
going? Your coffee is cold--” He storms out of the room, stumbling over
Mildred on her knees near the door, either praying or polishing the
keyhole with her lustrous eyelashes. Familiarity may breed contempt,
but contiguity breeds, tout simple.
It really happened. In this instance I have transposed the key to
opera. The true story deals with a well-known actress and her first
husband, also her leading man. Two prima donnas under one roof. She
read him to his death with unfavorable criticisms. I know of a more
curious case. He was an idealist of an idealism so lofty that he often
stumbled over the stars, enmeshed himself in constellations and took
the sun for footstool. Her eyes, young as yesterday, were like an Irish
sea-green mountain lake; at dusk, a sombre pool, profound at dawn as
a sun-misted emerald. He painted. She sang. He painted her portrait.
Then he painted other women’s portraits. Each portrait he painted was
the portrait of his wife. She was beautiful. At first society was
amused, flattered, and finally resented the unsought compliment. Time
drove the enamored couple asunder. They were too happy. She married
again, happily. He remarried. I saw the last portrait he had painted of
his second wife, a lovely creature. As in a pictorial palimpsest the
features of his first wife showed in the new text; the expression of
her eyes peeped through the other woman’s eyes. A veritable obsession
this, comparable to the exquisite and melancholy tale of Georges
Rodenbach and the dear dead woman of Bruges-la-Morte.
What is the artistic temperament--so-called? Years ago I wrote to
great lengths of “The Artist and His Wife,” quoting ancient saws and
modern instances to fatten my argument that artistic people are,
in private life, very much like others; if anything, more human. I
proved, by a string of names beginning with the Robert Brownings and
the Robert Schumanns, that artists may marry or mix without fear of
sudden death, cross words, bad cookery, rocky behavior, or diminution
of their artistic powers. “There are no women of genius,” said that
crosspatch celibate, Edmond de Goncourt; “the only women of genius
are men.” A half-truth and a whole lie. Artistic men are as “catty”
as the “cattiest” women. But why dwell only upon the incompatibility
of artists? Doesn’t Mr. Worldly Wiseman sometimes weary of his stout
spouse? Why does the iceman in the adjacent alley beat the skinny
mother of his children? Or why does a woman who never heard of Nora
Helmer, Hedda Gabler, or Anna Karenina leave her husband, her family,
not for the love of a cheap histrion, but because she thinks she can
achieve fame as a “movie” actress? Is it not the call of the exotic,
the far-away and unfamiliar? A woman can’t live alone on stone without
the bread of life at intervals. The echoes of wanderlust are heard in
the houses of bankers, tailors, policemen, politicians, as well as in
the studies of artists, poets, and musicians.
But the artist’s misdemeanors get into print first. The news is
published early and often. A beautiful young actress, or a rising young
portrait-painter, a gifted composer, talented sculptor, rare poet,
brilliant pianist, versatile writer--when one of these strays across
the barrier into debatable territory, the watchmen on the moral towers
lustily beat their warning gongs. It is prime matter for headlines. To
the winds strong lungs bawl the naked facts. Depend upon it--no matter
who escapes the public hue and cry, the artist is always found out
and his peccadilloes proclaimed from pulpits or yawped over the roofs
of the world. Why, you ask, should a devotee of æsthetic beauty ever
allow his feet to lead him astray? Here comes in your much-vaunted,
too-much-discussed artistic temperament--odious phrase! Hawked about
the market-place, instead of reposing in the holy of holies, this
temperament has become a byword and a stench in the nostrils. Every
coney-catcher, prizefighter, or cocotte takes refuge behind “art.” It
is become a name accursed. When the tripesellers of literature wish
to rivet public attention upon their wares, they cry aloud: “Lo, the
artistic temperament!” If an unfortunate woman is arrested she is
usually described in the police-blotter as an “actress.” If a fellow
and his wife tire of too much bliss, their “temperaments” are aired in
the courts. Worse--“affinities” are dragged in. Decent folk shudder and
your genuine artist does not boast of his “artistic temperament.” It
has become gutter-slang. It is a synonym for rotten “nerves.”
A true artist abhors the ascription of temperament, keeping within the
sanctuary of his soul the ideal that is the mainspring of his creation.
The true artist temperament is, in reality, the perception and
appreciation of beauty, whether in pigment, form, tone, words, nature,
or in the loftier region of moral rectitude. It may exist coevally with
a strong religious sense. And it may be gayly pagan. But always for
the serious artist the human body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, as
Mother Church, profoundest of psychologists, has taught. The dignity
of men and women dare be violated only at the peril of their immortal
souls. The artistic temperament adds new values to every-day life and
character. But its possessor must not parade this personal quality
as an excuse for self-indulgence. That he leaves to the third-rate
artisan, to the charlatan, to the buffoon who grins through a horse
collar, to the vicious who shield their vileness behind a torrid
temperament. Now, art and sex are correlated. Sex is the salt of life.
Art without sex is flavorless, hardly art at all, a frozen simulacrum.
All great artists are virile. And their greatness consists in the
victory over their temperaments; not in the triumph of mind over
matter--futile phrase--but in a synthesis, the harmonious comminglement
of intellect and artistic material. Sensualist your artist may be, but
if he is naught else, then his technical virtuosity avails him not. He
cannot achieve artistic grandeur. The noblest art is the triumph of
imagination over temperament.
Too often a rainbow mirage is this entering into wedlock of two
congenial souls.
When He whispers--it is the marrying month of June and the moon swims
above in the tender blue--“Why, dear, it is just as easy for two to
live as one on fifty dollars a week,” the recording angel smiles, then
weeps. Nor has the hardy young adventurer spiders on his ceiling.
He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the path of
wisdom. But She? Oh, She is enraptured. Naturally they will economize;
occasional descents into cheap Bohemias; sawdust, pink wine, pinker
wit, pinkest women. No new gowns. No balls. No theatres. No operas.
No society. It is only to be Art, Art, Art! So they bundle their
incompatible temperaments before an official and are made one. At least
they are legally hitched. She plays the piano. He paints. A wonderful
vista, hazy with dreams, spreads before them. She will teach a few
pupils, keep up her practice, and save enough to study some day with
a pupil of a pupil of Leschetizky. He will manfully paint, yes, a few
portraits, though landscape is his ambition. But it is hard to resist
the bribes of our dear common life. They try, they fail.
A year passes. What a difference! Gone are the dreams. There are
many spiders on the ceiling now. To pay for the food they eat, to
own the roof over their heads, are their ultimate desires. She looks
paler. He may or may not drink; it doesn’t much matter. There are
no portraits painted; an artist must be doubled by a society man to
capture commissions, to enjoy the velvet vulgarities of the new-rich.
And artists demand too much of their wives. She must be a social
success; also a combination of cook and concubine. Women are versatile.
Women are born actresses. It was a woman, not a man, who discovered
the art of leading a double life on ten dollars a week. But on thrice
that amount they can’t run a household, watch the baby--oh, wretched
intruder!--play like Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, and look like an houri.
To be a steam-heated American beauty, your father must be a billionaire.
The artist-woman is a finely attuned fiddle. You may mend a fiddle, but
not a bell, says Ibsen. True, but if you smash your fiddle the music
is mute. And every day of fault-finding snaps a string, or reduces its
tautness. How long does beauty endure? Begin misunderstandings. Pity,
the most subtly cruel of the Seven Deadly Virtues, stalks the studio.
Secretly She pities him. Secretly He pities her. Pity breeds hatred.
Difference develops discontent. At breakfast, the most trying time of
the twenty-four hours--oh, the temperamental breakfasts when we were
young and delightfully miserable!--even when you haven’t anything to
eat--at breakfast, He pities her flushed face as She runs in from the
kitchen with eggs and coffee. No longer is She a sylph in his eyes. The
fifty dollars a week seem shrunken, not enough for one to live upon,
much less two or three. She pities him because He is flushed from his
night’s outing. His appetite, like his temper, is capricious. In her
eyes He is the ordinary male brute (feed the brute!). Then He becomes
imprudent and flings Schopenhauer at her head. That old humbug of a
misogynist, who was always elbow-deep in woman scrapes! But She has
no time to retort with Ibsen and Shaw for his swift discomfiture. The
milkman is dunning her, and as baby must have pure milk She smiles at
her foolish young man and teases him for the money. He looks blankly
at her as He dives into empty pockets. This sort of thing may last for
years. In reckless despair He may throw his lamp at the moon, She her
bonnet over the windmill. Female suffrage will make such conditions
impossible in the future by forbidding men the ballot. Like a sensible
shoemaker let him stick to his last, or, to shift the image, let him
grind the handle of the domestic barrel-organ while She collects the
coppers.
It is when the lean years are upon the philandering artist, the years
of thin thoughts and bleak regrets, that he may miss the loving wives
of his past. Then will he cry in the stillness of his heart: O Time!
Eternal shearer of souls, spare me thy slow clippings. Shear me in
haste, shear me closely! You see, he remains the literary artist, and
in the face of death he wears his shop mask. His artistic affinity,
encountered late in their earthly pilgrimage, congratulates herself
that her latter lonesome years won’t be burdened by the ills and whims
and senile vanity of an old man. She may be a spinster and boast
the artistic temperament. Or she may escape that fate by marrying a
sensible business or professional man, who pays the freight and admires
her pasty painting, her facile, empty music-making, her unplayed
plays, unread verse and novels--that are privately printed. Thus doth
Nature hit the happy mean. He who could hold hands with a pretty girl
in eleven languages consoles himself with his corroded memories.
After all, has he not been a success, has he not eluded entangling
matrimonial alliances? Ah, the artistic temperament!
During a certain London silly season some enterprising imbecile posed
this query: Can a woman on the boards remain virtuous? This absurd
question set Great Britain buzzing. His Grace the Archbishop answered,
and every Tom, Dick, and Harry rushed into type to record their
precious opinions. The theatrical profession rose as a single woman.
Mrs. Kendal and Mary Anderson were held up as shining patterns, which
they are. But there were many sceptics. George Moore’s Mummer Worship
was hurled at the camp of the optimists. Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, and
Duse were adduced by the pessimists. Finally it occurred to the one
intelligent person in all London to interview George Bernard Shaw.
“Mr. Shaw, do you think a woman can be virtuous in the theatre?”
“Why should she be?” asked St. George, and then and there the moral
symposium went up in a burst of uncontrolled laughter. Mr. Shaw is like
the little candid girl in the crowd; for him the truth is always naked.
So is the artistic temperament.
VII
THE PASSING OF OCTAVE MIRBEAU
Octave Mirbeau was a prodigious penman. When Remy de Gourmont called
Paul Adam “a magnificent spectacle” he might have said with equal
propriety the same of Mirbeau. A spectacle and a stirring one it
is to watch the workings of a powerful, tumultuous brain such as
Mirbeau’s. He was a tempestuous force. His energy electric. He could
have repeated the exclamation of Anacharsis Clootz: “I belong to
the party of indignation!” His whole life Mirbeau was in a ferment
of indignation over the injustice of life, of literature, of art.
His friends say that he was not a revolutionist born; nevertheless,
he ever seemed in a pugnacious mood, whether attacking society, the
Government, the Institutes, the theatre, the army or religion. There
is no doubt that certain temperaments are uneasy if not in opposition
to existing institutions, and while his sincerity was indisputable--an
imperious sincerity, a sincerity that was perilously nigh an
obsession--Mirbeau seemed possessed by the mania of contradiction.
After his affiliations with Jules Vallès and the anarchistic group he
was nicknamed “Mirabeau,” and, indeed, there was in him much of the
fiery and disputatious, though he never in oratory recalled the mighty
revolutionist. Nevertheless, he was a prodigious penman.
He was born in Normandy, 1850 (Ernest Gaubert says 1848), the country
of those two giants, Gustave Flaubert and Barbey d’Aurevilly. He
died early in 1917. His Odyssey, apart from his writings, was not an
exciting one. Well born and well educated, he took a violent dislike to
his clerical instructors, and as may be noted in Sébastien Roch (1890),
he suffered from the result of a shock to his sensibilities because of
an outrageous occurrence in the course of his school years. He early
went to Paris, like many another ambitious young man, and began as an
art-critic, but his first article on Monet, Manet, and Cézanne was
also his last in the journal _l’Ordre_; it created so much scandal by
its attack on those mud-gods of art, Meissonier, Cabanel, Lefebvre
and Bouguereau, that he was drafted into the dramatic department.
There he did not last long. After a violent diatribe against the
House of Molière he found himself with several duels on his hands
and enjoyed the distinction of a personal reply from Coquelin. He
wrote for a little review _Les Grimaces_, and in 1891 defended Jean
Grave’s La Société Mourante and composed a preface for that literary
firebrand. He had dipped into the equivocal swamp of politics and had
been a sous-préfet (at St. Girons, 1877), but the experience did not
lend enchantment to his patriotism. He saw the inner machinery of a
democracy greasy with corruption and it served him as material for his
political polemics.
His first decade in Paris he wrote for such publications as _Chroniques
Parisiennes_, _La France_, _Gaulois_, and _Figaro_. The entire gamut
of criticism was achieved by him. He was fearless. His pen was
vitriolic and also a sledge-hammer. Like old Dr. Johnson, if his weapon
missed fire he brained his adversary with its butt-end. A formidable
antagonist, yet the obverse of his medal shows us a poet of abnormal
sensibilities, a leather of all injustice, a Quixote tilting at genuine
giants, not missing windmills; also a man of great literary endowment
and achievement. His critics speak of a period of discouragement during
which he smoked opium, though without ill consequences. His was not a
passive temperament to endure inaction. Like others, he had perversely
imitated Baudelaire and De Quincey, but soon gave up the attempt. A
nature trembling on the verge of lytic pantheism and truculent satire,
Mirbeau had a hard row to hoe, and it is gratifying to learn that as
he conquered in his art so he conquered himself. He waged war against
Octave Mirbeau to the last. And no wonder. He has written stories that
would bring a crimson blush to the brow of Satan.
Turning the pages of the principal Paris reviews to which he copiously
contributed we find him calling the financial press blackmailers;
the law reporters “vermine judiciaire”; French journalism decidedly
decadent: “The press kills literature, art, patriotism; it aggrandizes
the shop and develops the shopkeeping spirit. It exalts the mediocre
painters, sculptors, writers. Its criticism is venal.” As for the
theatre--from the frying-pan into the fire! The theatre is the prey of
mediocrity, wherein Le Maître de Forges is pronounced a masterpiece!
The comedians (“les tripots revenus; cabotinisme”) of La Comédie
Française come in for their share. Emile Zola, naturally enough, has
his allegiance, but he dealt hard raps on the skulls of his followers,
the Zolaettes, who hung on the fringe of the novelist’s dressing-gown.
He admired Barbey d’Aurevilly and Elémir Bourges, as well he might; he
attacked Daudet, Paul Bourget, Ohnet, Legouvé, Feuillet, Sarcey--dear
old Uncle Sarcey, how Huysmans and Mirbeau did pound him!--and, last
and worst, the art-critic of the _Figaro_, Albert Wolff. But he
deserved the flaying.
In _La Presse_ Mirbeau saluted the genius of Rodin, Maupassant, and
praised Paul Hervieu. He adored Victor Hugo, not only as supreme
poet but as humanitarian--the very quality that to-day so many
find monotonous in his lyrics. But there was more than a strain of
humanitarianism in Mirbeau. He was truly a Brother to Man, but he never
exploited it as do sentimental socialists. It was the spectacle of
poverty, of the cruelty of man to man, of the cruelty to animals--he
wrote a novel about a dog--that set the blood boiling in his veins
and forced him to utter terrible, regrettable phrases. His friends
grieved, yet the spectacle was not unlike a volcano in action. That all
this was prejudicial to the serenity of his art is not to be doubted.
Mirbeau cared little. Let art perish if he accomplished a reform! Yet
he has written some almost perfect pages, and in the presence of nature
his angry soul was soothed, ennobled. A poet was slain in him before
his vision became voice. He loved the figure of Christ and he drifted
into the mystic and lovable theories of Kropotkine, Elisée Reclus, and
Tolstoy. Their influence is manifested in his Lettres de ma Chaumière
(1886). These tales overflow with sympathy and indignation. The French
peasant as he is, neither idealized by Millet nor caricatured by Zola,
is painted here with an intimate brush--it is painted miasma, one is
tempted to add. That he was an unyielding Dreyfusard is a matter of
history.
It may be said in passing that Mirbeau had not the stuff in him to make
a sound or satisfactory critic of the Fine Arts. He was too one-sided
in his Salons, his enthusiasms were often ill-placed, and he resembled
Zola in his vocabulary of abuse if any one disagreed with him. M.
Durand-Ruel, where he was liked for his sterling qualities, has a
pamphlet of Mirbeau’s on the Impressionists. Published here it would
have resulted either in a libel suit or a prosecution for obscenity.
His definition of a certain art-critic is unprintable. When he hated
he stopped short of nothing. A true Celt. But how he could tune down
the peg of the false heroic to make sound the mean music of mean
souls! There are a dozen men in Paris who were riddled by his shot and
shell. He did not spare the Government and told some wholesome truths
about the Tonkin affair. But he was not all fire and fury. He had
intellectual charity, and the artist in him often prevailed. He was
destructive, and he could be constructive. He could be charming and
tender, too, and his style ranged from thunder-words to supple-sweet
magic.
The constructive in him was artistic, but when the propagandist reins
were between his teeth his judgments were muddied by his turbulence.
And how clearly he could judge was proved by his clairvoyant article in
_Le Figaro_ on an unknown Belgian, by name Maurice Maeterlinck (1890).
Mirbeau literally discovered Maeterlinck; and while we now smile over
the title of “Belgian Shakespeare,” there is no denying the flair of
the Parisian critic. Certainly he made a better guess than the amusing
Max Nordau, who once described the author of The Treasures of the
Humble as “a pitiable mental cripple.” In 1888 L’Abbé Jules appeared.
It was Mirbeau’s first novel. For the chief character he went to his
uncle, a priest of rather singular traits. The book became a burning
scandal.
Le Calvaire (1887) confirmed the reputation of the young writer.
He certainly had a predilection “pour la poésie de la pourriture,”
as one critic puts it. But Calvary is a masterpiece and his least
offensive fiction. The story of the little soldier who shoots an Uhlan
in the war of 1870 and then tries to revive the dead man, finally
kissing him on the forehead as a testimony of his fraternal feeling,
is touching. Sébastien Roch, the third novel, is full of verity
and power only marred by a page, one of the most hideous in French
fiction (irrespective of avowedly crapulous stories). But Mirbeau has
testified to its truth elsewhere. The hero becomes a victim to aboulia,
or the malady of doubt. Happiness is not for him and he dies in the
Franco-Prussian conflict. Le Jardin des Supplices (1899) set Paris
cynically shivering with a new sensation. This garden of tortures is
the most damnably cruel book in contemporary fiction. It was conceived
by a Torquemada of sadism. Yet Mirbeau disclaimed any notion of writing
for mere notoriety. These sombre pages of blood and obscenity were
printed to show the cruelty and injustice of all Governments. The
Chinese were selected as masters of the most exquisite tortures. A
vile nightmare is the result. It demands strong nerves to read it once
through; a rereading would seem incredible. Swift is in comparison an
ironical comedian.
Les Mémoires d’une Femme de Chambre (1901) is backstairs gossip,
though the purpose is not missing; again satire of the better classes,
so-called. Les vingt-et-un jours d’un Neurasthénique (1902) need not
detain us, nor such one-act pieces as Vieux Ménage (1901), Amanto
(1901), Scrupules (1902), or Le Foyer, with Natanson (1908). He also
wrote a preface to Margaret Andoux’s story, Marie Claire. The first
important dramatic work of Mirbeau was Les Mauvais Bergers, in five
acts, produced at the Théâtre de la Renaissance (December 14, 1897). We
can still evoke the image of Sarah Bernhardt in the last act, an act
charged with pity and irony. The play, because of its political and
social currents, created a dolorous and profound impression. The work
has in it something of both The Conquest of Bread and The Weavers. In
Les Affaires sont les Affaires, produced at the Théâtre Français (April
20, 1903), Mirbeau is at his satirical best. The play has been shown
here, but in a colorless, unconvincing style. In De Feraudy’s hands
the character of Isidore Lechat, both a type and an individual--one
of our modern captains of industry (in the old days, a chevalier of
industry?)--was perfectly exhibited. After witnessing in June of the
same year a performance of this bitterly satirical comedy I met the
author, who appeared as mild-mannered a pirate as ever cut a poet or
scuttled a ship of State.