Pierre Loti is a cosmopolitan. Halévy was a Parisian, Maupassant was a
Norman acclimated to the habitudes of Paris, and Daudet carried with
him throughout all his experiences in the French capital the dreamy
soul of Provence; but Loti is essentially a modern. Man of the world,
not alone by temperament but by reason of wide journeyings afield and
minglings with men and women of all lands, he typifies the spirit of
to-day in French literature as few other writers have done. He is a
poetic idealist, or, perhaps more precisely, an idealistic realist,
writing at a time when realism was most potent in France.
The externals of Loti’s life are soon recounted. Louis Marie Julien
Viaud was born in Rochefort, January 14, 1850, the same year that
gave Maupassant to the world of art. The name “Loti” is an invented
derivative of that seductive tropical flower, the lotus, and therefore
was not his by inheritance, but the affectionate gift of his South Sea
enchantress, Queen Pomaré, of Tahiti, when the young naval officer
visited the island in 1872.
The frail, prim, sensitive child described with so much self-insight
in his autobiographic _Le Roman d’un enfant_ not only inbreathed
his love for the sea in salt-scented Rochefort, but dreamed incessantly
of the far-off lands he was destined to visit. These visions were
stimulated, if not inspired, by early reading, and by the letters
of an older brother who had long been in the navy. So at seventeen
we naturally find him a midshipman, and in due course ensign and
lieutenant, serving with distinguished bravery--as his Cross of the
Legion of Honor testifies--in the Tonquin campaign, when France must
needs re-subdue her protectorates in Asia.
M. Loti’s later life has been spent mostly ashore, serving in the
Admiralty, yet the cravings of boyhood have been indulged so often as
might be, and foreign lands, by preference oriental, visited year by
year.
In 1891 M. Loti was elected to that all-coveted distinction, membership
in the Academy, where he occupies the chair once honored by Racine and
Scribe.
Loti’s portraits show us a Gallic face, a short, pointed beard,
tired, melancholy eyes, and a general air of earnestness not quite
substantiated by his pleasure-loving life. In stature somewhat below
medium height, in form slender, he early gave himself to those bodily
exercises which once caused a professional acrobat to wonder why our
author had not begun his gymnastics early enough to turn his steel-like
muscles to spectacular account!
So much for the more patent facts of his life. But how to make just
presentment of his mental and spiritual traits I do not know, for the
task gave pause even to Loti himself.
He never learned to write; his gift was native. With reading he had
at first small commerce, preferring to turn page after page in human
hearts, and to read deep in the tome of his own nature of bewildering
variety. A composite is Loti--almost a chameleon, not only entering
into the multi-life of lands and peoples where he chances to sojourn,
but taking on their colors, and even their garbs and customs. But of
this somewhat more in due order.
Here is a character inextricable from his work, much of which is
autobiographical, since in most of his twenty-seven volumes the author
himself appears either thinly disguised under some sobriquet, or
frankly named in _propria persona_. So while we are at no time at
a loss for material wherewith to make up an estimate, this material is
both embarrassingly rich and--contradictory. Still, no one can mistake
the main-travelled roads in this life, they are bold and distinct.
Loti wrote little verse, but he was a poet. He moved in the upper
layers of feeling--feeling for nature, for animals, for man, for
woman--and always he was the idealistic, though not the ideal lover.
His sympathies were positively unquenchable, and each new passion found
him fresh, tender, elemental--and as sincere as the temporary lover can
be. In elemental, primitive folk he found his personal loves and his
fictive characters; in the death of a little bird or in the lives of
two cats he centred a genuine interest; in the moods of the uncompassed
sea he felt a vast concern.
Inevitably, the religious life of such a temperament would not be
constant: Protestantism the Huguenot youth found to be cold; his test
of the ceremonial worship of Romanism satisfied him only for a little;
at last his faith was doubt.
Loti’s direct disregard of the interests of conventional life, in favor
of nature-children, constitutes one of his greatest literary charms.
Freshness, simplicity of viewpoint, naïve boyishness of spirit--these
excel all the accomplishments of the stylist’s art in an author whose
style is as subtle as gossamer, as varicolored as the evening sea he
painted with supernal beauty.
In all his work Loti greatly prefers description above dialogue. “Long
and quiet stretches of writing” abound, but their minuteness leaves us
unwearied, and though he repeats and re-repeats we are conjured into
accepting his pictures as ever new.
In style, in delicacy of nature-feeling, where in all literature will
you find aught to excel this passage from _Mon frère Yves_?
“Even the nights were luminous. When all was slumbering in
heavy immobility, in dead silence, the stars shone out above,
more dazzling than in any other region of earth, and the sea
also was illumined from beneath. There was a sort of immense
gleam diffused over the waters; the lightest motion, such as
the slow gliding of the boat, or a shark darting after it,
brought out upon the warm eddies flashes like the color of a
fire-fly. Then, over the great phosphorescent mirror of the
deep, there were millions of wild flames--they were like little
lamps lighting themselves everywhere, burning mysteriously for
a second or two, then dying out. These nights were swooning
with heat, full of phosphorescence; and in all this dim
immensity light was brooding, and all these seas held latent
life, in a rudimentary state, as did formerly the gloomy waters
of the primeval world.”
As in the foregoing, so in the following, see how this necromancer
of words accomplishes the impossible--“the planks of the ship” are
the only solid, palpable substances in this atmospheric delicacy from
_Pecheur d’Islande_ (An Iceland Fisherman):
“Outside it was daylight, perpetual daylight. But it was
a pale, pale light, resembling nothing else; it threw dim
reflections over everything, as of a dead sun, and beyond
these, all was an immense void without color; everything
outside the planks of the ship seeming diaphanous, impalpable,
unreal.
“The eye could scarcely distinguish the sea. First it took
on the aspect of a sort of trembling mirror, with no image
reflected in it; as it spread further it seemed to become a
vaporous plain, and beyond this there was nothing--no outline
nor horizon.
“The damp freshness of the air was more intense, more
penetrating, than actual cold; and in breathing it one was
conscious of a taste of brine. All was calm, and it was no
longer raining; above, formless, colorless clouds seemed to
hold that latent, unexplained light; one could see plainly,
while conscious all the time that it was night, and all these
pallors were of no shade that can be named.”
This is not description--it is miracle; it is, in the fine phrase of M.
Doumic, “evocation;” it is music, color, subtlety, spirit, all thrown
upon the soul’s retina and sensed in some magic manner that refuses to
be classified. No one but a pantheist, sensitive to all the moods of
nature--and especially those of that abysmal enigma, the sea--could
have evoked such visions, such realities, where other eyes see--water.
In form our author’s books are varied, following rarely any
preconceived plan, we may well suppose--only this, that the literary
wanderer with his new book every year takes us by the hand and shows us
the intimacies of his own life-experiences, discloses the little-known
beauties and sadnesses he has uncovered everywhere, and turns into
simple yet exquisitely wrought fictions the poignant truths that have
entered his own heart. Not one novel, technically considered, did he
write, but sketches strung like pearls upon a thread: vivid impressions
of home and foreign life, longer or shorter stories of simple folk
whose days dawned to labor and were twilit with weariness, colorful
pictures of men and women living under eastern skies--and beneath and
about all, the many-spirited sea.
It would require a volume to deal adequately with Loti’s many books;
but one point invites mention: each new annual volume for a score of
years discloses his life in some new land, or in the Brittany of his
affection.
His first volume, _Aziyadé_ (1879), is the record of his love for
a beautiful Circassian slave while he sojourned in Turkey--the record,
too, of how she died of grief after his departure. _Rarahu_--later
issued as _Le Mariage de Loti_--recounts his loves in Tahiti,
and much of charm and beauty besides. _Le Roman d’un Spahi_
transports us to the Sahara and Senegal, _Fleurs d’ennui_ to
Montenegro, _Madame Chrysanthème_ to Japan, _Au Maroc_ to
Fez and Tangier, and _Le désert_, and _Jérusalem_, and _La
Galilée_, to Palestine.
I name these volumes not to attempt a catalogue of Loti’s works, but to
show how world-broad were the scenes he chose for his impressionistic
brush. Naturally, all of the foregoing works are more or less oriental
in tone, and the moral code revealed is not that of “the most approved
families.” But three masterpieces there are which breathe a more
wholesome air--though heavy, each one, with the tragedy of life.
_Mon frère Yves_ is the plotless account of “a splendid
Breton sailor and the author, his officer.” They enjoy “a sort
of companionship which finds its analogy--in a way--in the
friendly relations formerly [held] between young master and slave
in our Southern States.” No picture of the robust rollicking
sailor--superstitious, drink-loving, adventurous, warm-hearted--could
be more real, none more pathetic, and none more rich in fragments of
narrative.
In _Le livre de la pitié et de la mort_ eleven stories are brought
together to harmonize with the saddening title--“The Book of Pity
and of Death!” One of these, “The Sorrow of an Old Convict” is an
impressionistic tale of an old highwayman who is being shipped away to
exile. His only solace is a caged bird with a broken wing, and when
one day the door is opened the little bird falls into the sea. That is
all--but to read it is to feel with Yves the heart-break of that bereft
old man.
“The Wall Opposite” is a study of human tendencies. A mother, a
daughter, and an aged aunt are compelled by reverses to let out those
rooms of their apartments that faced out upon the street, but their own
little back suite had a cozy and intimate air. Its windows overlooked a
court whose walls were covered with honeysuckle and roses. One day they
were told that in the court a high wall was to be built which would
steal away the air and hide the sun. They had no money wherewith to buy
off the project, so in one short month a grayish-white wall--almost
like a twilight sky of November--shut them in.
Long they had looked for an inheritance which would some day come to
them. Then they would buy the house and tear down that wall--and always
the old aunt used to pray that she might live to see that day. But the
bequest was long in coming.
One day a young man came, introduced by friends, and for a while he sat
at the table of these “three ladies without fortune.” He was handsome
and high-spirited, and the young girl loved him, but she was poor, and
for lack of sunlight the color had begun to fade from her cheeks. So he
went away and never returned.
Twenty years passed--the aunt had died, the mother had grown gray, and
the daughter was now past forty. Then at last the inheritance came.
They sent away their lodgers, but somehow the two women remained in the
little back _salon_. They had come to love it. At last the wall
which for twenty years they had endured would be torn down. At twilight
of the second day the wall was razed, but the mother and daughter
sitting at their table were bewildered at seeing so clearly. The wall
was gone--they had the light, the roses and vines! For twenty years
they had hoped for this happiness, yet now--they were uneasy, something
seemed to have gone wrong. A sort of melancholy had come over them.
The mother, looking into her daughter’s eyes, saw tears. “It can be
built up again,” she says. “It seems to me they can try, can they not,
to make it the same again?”
“I, too, thought of that,” replied the daughter. “But no, don’t you
see? _It would never be the same!_”
And this was the secret: more than the power of custom in her Life was
the fact that the wall had been the background of a picture--the face
of a young man which she had watched through one short spring-time.
This is one of Loti’s few technically perfect short-stories. His
sketchy, rambling, loosely-plotted “novels” and travel-reflections
differ greatly in manner from the compact story of plot, but his
writings do abound in easily separable fragments, or episodes--as to
which a word must now be set down, before we take up the plot and the
final scenes of Loti’s greatest work, _Pecheur d’Islande_.
Fortunately for the spontaneity of the novel, many authors are more
concerned for the vividness of their narration than for mere technical
form. Hence they feel free to introduce incidents which are related
more or less loosely to the plot, and serve rather as auxiliaries
than as vital parts of the action. The purpose may be to develop a
tone, suggest an atmosphere, illustrate certain traits of character,
or, it may be, to amplify an organic part of the plot. This narrative
by-path, this illuminating side-light, we technically call an episode.
It was most in vogue among the early English novelists; Defoe,
Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith followed it so habitually
that all of their novels are episodic in form. But even in the more
highly organized French romances of plot--_Les Miserables_ and
_Les Mystères de Paris_, for example--we find frequent episodes.
This tendency is naturally more marked in the tale and in the prolonged
sketch than in the closely plotted novel. Indeed, it is only in the
very _long_ plot-novel that the episode can find room, since the
prosperity of the short plot-novel lies largely in the close and rapid
sequence of its incidents.
Even though “The Marriage to the Sea”--as I have ventured to entitle
this climacteric close of _An Iceland Fisherman_--is an essential
plot incident, and therefore an organic part of the whole, still,
considered solely for its own sake, it is easily detachable. So we
may regard it as _almost_ a typical specimen of the episode;
that is to say, we need only have some slight prior knowledge of the
setting and the relation of the characters to invest it with the
completeness and unity of a perfect short-story. True, the crisis
has occurred--unknown to the fisherman’s wife--before this episode
begins, but that could scarcely have been arranged more artistically,
with regard to suspense, had Loti purposed to use the episode as a
separate story. Here we have the carefully laid groundwork of tone,
environment, and characters. Here, too, are the breathless expectancy,
the increasing suspense (which constitutes the complication), two false
anticipations of a happy dénouement, and then the actual dénouement,
with the artistic close.
_An Iceland Fisherman_ is Pierre Loti’s most perfect work, and
it is gratifying to note that it is also his most popular, as witness
some three hundred and fifty French editions, and an unknown number
of translations. In form, it is less a typical novel than a brilliant
impressionistic tale. A major episode is the story of Sylvestre,
which, woven closely in its earlier part with the life of Yann and his
sweetheart Gaud, at length diverges, when the fisherboy passes into
the navy, fights a good fight in Cochin-China, and dies amid pathetic
circumstances in far-off Singapore.
The plot is very simple. It is laid in Paimpol, in Brittany, whose
dwellers rely solely upon the Iceland fisheries. Every year these hardy
Vikings of Northern France fare away to the Iceland waters and return
only after a long season there. The chief characters are Yann Gaos, a
great splendid young fisherman with handsome brown curls, and Gaud,
the daughter of “the great man” of the town. The two are in love, and
Yann ventures some hesitating advances; but her father’s wealth deters
the fisherman from making a full avowal. However, when Gaud’s father
dies she is found to be penniless; still Yann unaccountably holds back,
much to Gaud’s secret sorrow. Homeless, she goes to live with Granny
Moan, the grandmother of the ill-fated young Sylvestre, who had been
betrothed to Yann’s sister. At length, in the little hut where Gaud
lives as the bereft old woman’s foster-grandchild, she and Yann are
married.
Only a few days after their wedding, the bridegroom sails away on the
fine new _Léopoldine_ for the Iceland fisheries. When autumn comes
the boat does not return with the others. All that is heard of her is
from the crew of the _Marie-Jeanne_, who report a mystic meeting
with the _Léopoldine_ in a dense fog, when each vessel loomed up
to the other out of the mist and then passed spectre-like away, with
time for only a few quick cries of recognition from fellow-townsmen.
The final scene opens with all the town awaiting the return of the
fishers. One vessel has already come in, and then opens this closing
episode.
THE MARRIAGE TO THE SEA
AN EPISODE FROM “AN ICELAND FISHERMAN”
(_PECHEUR D’ISLANDE_)