Hall_, and _L’Entrave_--are to be recommended without precaution.
They are very free; they describe a world beyond the precincts of
conventional morality, and they are also very Pagan. There is mighty
little inner life in the world of Colette Willy! But those who read
Mr Compton Mackenzie or Mr Maxwell will, after all, find nothing
more alarming in _La Vagabonde_, or even in _L’Entrave_. And they
will admire a natural and yet exquisite faculty of expression--it
is difficult to write with a more delicate exactness than Madame
Colette--and also a psychology, and a sort of disenchanted mansuetude,
that go hand in hand with a love of youth, a sense of youth, quite
extraordinary. For my part, I find the lady very taking; but I do not
recommend her to the more serious admirers of Paul Claudel.
In _La Vagabonde_, we see her as a music hall star, dropped from
the sphere of the woman of the world, and all the happier in her new
orbit, although aware she is a stranger there. Men, of course, pay
her court, and one of them, Maxime Dufferein-Chautel (whose tender,
bourgeois, authoritative nature is admirably depicted) comes very near
to being her lover, and proposes to make her his wife. But Max, good,
solid, faithful, is the least subtle of lovers--a great, affectionate
Newfoundland dog of a man. And Renée Néré, the vagabond, who has borne
so resentfully the yoke of her first husband’s heart, fears to suffer
as much from the narrowness of a second husband’s brain. She cannot
resign her liberty to an inferior, and, on the eve of their marriage,
she sends him a cruel little letter:--
‘Max, mon chéri, je m’en vais,’
and is off with her troupe on a tour to the New World.
On the first page of _L’Entrave_, she has met again with this old
lover, or rather, herself unrecognised, she has seen him pass, one
day at Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais, he, his young wife, and
his little child. He has not mourned her long! And Renée feels oddly
dispossessed: no one, nothing, belongs to her; she has no place in
the world for she is no longer a star of the stage. A convenient
inheritance has given her the means of liberty--that liberty she
coveted of old--and she strays from hotel to hotel on the Riviera
mixing with theatrical visitors, frequenting the better sort (which,
I suppose, means the wealthier sort?) of demi-monde, yet oddly out of
place among these amiable barbarians who have neither an idea nor an
ideal.
The most barbarian of all is little May, a young hetaira _à la mode_,
fresh, fair, and five-and-twenty. Renée is a dozen years older and
ought to know better; but she steals poor May’s lover away from her;
and she shackles herself with this uncultivated young man for life,
because she loves him; and it is the first time that she has loved.
Ah, she no longer asks herself: is he her equal?... Madame Colette,
like her heroine, has consented to the hobble, to the shackle, to
_L’Entrave_. She, too, has married, has found for herself again a place
in organised society, has seen open out before her unsuspected interior
horizons, and murmurs perhaps, like Renée Néré:--
‘Se peut-il, Beauté, que je te préfère l’âme qui t’habite?’
And I await her next novel with almost a tremulous expectation.
MADAME MARCELLE TINAYRE
When Madame Tinayre published her _Maison du Péché_, we thought in
France that we had discovered our George Eliot. We pitched our hopes
too high; Madame Tinayre is not even a George Sand. But she is a very
interesting and gifted novelist. If that first book was of a new and
veritable beauty, superior to any which has as yet followed it--but
Madame Tinayre is young--it is because the conception of the story
entailed a certain simplicity and order of composition, an art of
opposition and construction, a severity of style even--in fact, the
qualities in which our novelist is generally lacking. Her talent in
her subsequent works is no less rich and imaginative; but there is the
difference between a rose-tree covered with flowers trained over an
espalier, and the same lovely crimson rambler left without support, and
dropping half its fragrant burden in the dust.
Madame Tinayre, like most women writers, is endowed with an exact and
attentive faculty of observation; like very few women writers, she has
a sort of magic, similar to colour or melody, which often disguises
the poverty of her compositions; her art aspires to the condition of
music; she, too, might say with Saint Hildegard, ‘Symphonialis est
anima.’ She knows how to project, from her mind into ours, a violent,
an incomparable sentiment, as the waters in the marble fountains of
Versailles overlap and drop from one basin into another. And she has
the culture of a man.
These are great gifts, sometimes impaired by a certain warmth and
coarseness in the treatment of love,--an offence rare in male writers,
however libertine, but which hurts our taste occasionally even in a Mrs
Browning (for instance, in _Aurora Leigh_); and sometimes her fault is
a lack of measure and order which lets her books meander in a perpetual
flux, branching hither and thither, instead of moulding and rounding
them into the fore-established harmony of a perfect sphere. In brief,
Madame Tinayre is a romantic. But just once, as it were by accident,
she consented to the classic discipline. And nothing in literature is
so charming, so touching, so delightful, as a romantic who submits to
be a classic.
That ‘once’ was, of course, when she wrote _La Maison du Péché_. Her
art, so often too literal, and, as it were, photographed from reality
without arrangement (as in the greater part of _La Rebelle_), at other
moments excessive and satiating in its lyrism, found on that occasion
the exact middle path between experience and imagination. There is not
only passion in the book and beauty, but solidity, balance, meditation,
reason; there is not only spontaneity and grace, but a large and firm
knowledge of life, a perspicacity, a sincerity beyond praise. It has
the qualities of poetry and the virtues of prose.
In this novel, Madame Tinayre shows us the clash and the conflict,
the attraction and the repulsion, which cause a continual contest
between the two halves of France, equally important and irreducibly
different. Born into one of these spheres, married into the other,
Madame Tinayre is at home in either. Her Augustin, so pure and grave
and true, so narrow, so weak, so passionate, is the brother of M.
Rolland’s Antoinette, is the great-nephew of Pascal. He is a type
which has always existed in France, admirable but dangerous, for he
is incapable of understanding his contrary. Among French Protestants,
Jansenists, strict proverbial Catholics, in certain austere university
circles, there are many variations on the type of Augustin. And Fanny,
the charming Bohemian, light-hearted Fanny, an artist to the tips of
her fingers but only very dimly conscious of being an immortal soul (a
pretension which Augustin never abandons for an hour), is not Fanny
the very flower of a different, a more frivolous, a lighter, brighter
France?
The contact and the conflict of these two natures, their ill-starred,
impossible love, is all the story of _La Maison du Péché_: one of the
most moving stories of our times. There are readers, there are even
critics, who prefer Madame Tinayre’s subsequent novel, _La Rebelle_.
I have some difficulty, I admit, in catching their point of view. I
prefer not only _La Maison du Péché_, but even that exquisite piece of
still-life, _François Barbazanges_, which some have condemned on the
ground that, though it was art, it was not life. _La Rebelle_ is much
more life than art. The background, a fresco of popular Paris, is vast,
living, and exact; indeed it is too vast, too living, too exact, for it
distracts our attention from the rather ordinary characters who occupy
the foreground.
And yet there is a great charm in the drawing of Josanne Valentin, the
brave young woman-worker married to a neurasthenic invalid--that charm
of poignant sincerity which sometimes, in a woman’s work, makes the
reader’s heart beat quicker, as though he had suddenly stumbled on a
private confession. Josanne is so courageous, so tender, so kind, that
we forgive her conjugal infidelity, and chiefly regret that her lover
should be so obviously unworthy of her.
He abandons her--we knew it!--and how pathetic is the scene of their
parting--out of doors, in the street, poor Josanne encumbered with
the _filet_--the net--in which she is carrying home the materials for
the family dinner. That parting scene is unlike any other in fiction
in its heart-piercing realism! But Josanne is young, and when the
morphino-maniac of a husband (tenderly nursed to the last) departs this
life; when Josanne falls in with a high-minded radical philanthropist
of the most advanced views, we murmur, much relieved: ‘Tout s’arrange.’
For Noël Delysle and Josanne Valentin are alike apostles of a
magnanimous democracy: he, a social reformer, author of that notable
work, _La Travailleuse_; she, herself a woman-worker, the feminist
reporter of a ladies’ newspaper, in constant contact with the poor
in need of help, and the fevered, fussy world of philanthropy.
Self-subsisting, ‘generous’ in the wide sense which Descartes gives to
the word, Noël Delysle and Josanne Valentin alike reject the tyrannous
old dictum of Arnolphe:--
‘Bien qu’on soit deux moitiés de la société
Ces deux moitiés pourtant n’ont pas d’égalité.’
For them, the woman-worker, self-supporting, independent, has attained
a moral and social equality with man, and should be judged by the
standard of what Mr Shaw, we believe, has called the New Morality.
They both possess that ‘vraie générosité’ which consists in
self-reliance, strength of will, endurance, contempt for opinion, and
respect for the liberty of others. Descartes thought nothing more
useful than to foster a race of such generous individuals, ‘sachant
subsister par soi-même ... pour ce qu’ils n’estiment rien de plus grand
que de faire du bien aux autres et de mépriser son propre intérêt.’
And, despite one secret blemish in her past, Josanne feels herself a
member of this _élite_, a factor of progress. Nor does she attach any
great importance to a back-sliding which is not esteemed too damnable
by the men and the women of the New Morality. She makes her confession
to Noël Delysle in much the same spirit as Tess of the D’Urbervilles
unbosoms herself to Angel Clare.
For reformers are prompt to forget that what was human nature in
the past, what may be human nature in the future (should they and
others persist in their modern ideal), is not human nature _now_. The
mind of man has modified all things around him and within. From the
seeding-grasses in the hay he has produced the varieties of corn; from
the small and acid crab-fruit in the hedge, the rennet and the Ribston
pippin; and from the poisonous roots of foreign forests our daily
domestic potato. Our morality is another product; we may modify it yet
further; such as it is, at present it remains our staff of life. And
the staunchest feminist in the world, if he be a man and in love, will
expect his wife to be tender, chaste, and faithful, and care little
enough whether or no she be self-reliant, generous, and brave.
Noël Delysle is a stronger man than Angel Clare, and proportionately
less hard and dour; but he receives the shock of Josanne’s confession
with little less dismay. He learns then that the little stepson who
will share their home--the child, he imagined naturally, of the
unfortunate Valentin--is in reality the son of Josanne’s lover. In
treating such a situation, Madame Tinayre is at her best. The central
fact of all her novels is the struggle between nature and nurture,
between instinct and convention. Deep, deep below the intellectual
superstructure, the primitive man, the primitive woman, stir in her
heroes. His virtues and tolerances fall from Noël Delysle, leaving him
jealous and passionate; her valour and self-reliance fade in Madame
Valentin, and Josanne, the rebel, becomes the merest woman.
_La Rebelle_ is an interesting book, but how much do I prefer (though
its faults he thick upon it) _L’Ombre de l’Amour_![2] The tale rambles
on as it pleases, independent of design or composition, poorly
constructed enough with its two long parallel lines, as monotonous, if
as impressive, as those low, even cliffs which enclose between their
grassy walls some Limousin or Gascon valley.
_Bis repetita placent_ is a good motto if we wish to amuse; for (as
Bergson has pointed out) there is something comic in reiteration,
in a repeated misadventure, and especially in a double fall--every
clown knows that! In spite of the rare beauty and sincerity of the
character-drawing, this tale of two pure girls stumbling, one after
the other, in the same secret slip, does produce an effect of painful
ludicrousness.
The defilement of a young girl in her innocence is the most pathetic
of themes, but it is its singularity alone that makes it touching.
Mephistopheles, in his cleverness, degrades the misery of poor Gretchen
when he observes: ‘Sie ist nicht die Erste.’ We must imagine no angel
ever tripped before; we must have very present in our sight the state
of innocence from which she is thrust out. So the wise Walter Scott
places beside his sad Effie the peerless Jeanie Deans. So George Eliot
relieves the abasement of Hetty by the pure brilliance of Dinah. But in
this novel of Madame Tinayre’s, there are but two young girls, and, by
an inconceivable error, she involves them both in the same miserable
mystery. Involuntarily we protest. I, for my part, protested, and the
novelist replied:--
‘Il me semble que votre principale objection porte sur le
double effet d’une double aventure, qui vous paraît un artifice
littéraire. Mais, dans ma pensée, il fallait que Fortunade
complétât Denise, que la pitié spirituelle pour le maudit aboutit
au même échec que la pitié plus physique pour le malade. Fortunade,
c’est, en tout petit, Eloa. Je crois que ces ‘doubles’ ne sont pas
sans exemples dans les grandes œuvres de la littérature, et que de
glorieux précédents auraient pu m’enhardir, si j’avais hésité. Dans
la réalité même on voit des âmes de même nature se deviner et se
rapprocher.’
The literary doubles of which our author speaks are a charming device
when the novelist treats of what is normal, salutary, or pleasant: we
love to see Rosalind by the side of Celia, or the Two Gentlemen of
Verona; but we should not care to look at two Quilps, or two Deformed
Transformed, or two Gretchens, or even two dumb girls of Portici. The
abnormal does not suffer repetition.
So I persist in my protestation, and all the more because I love
and admire the two sweet girls, so pure, so devoted; ruined and
debased, the one by pity for a man’s bodily sufferings, the other by
compassion for his moral state. For Madame Tinayre, following the
theories of Spinoza and Nietzsche, looks on pity as a debilitating
emotion, relaxing the fibres of the soul and predisposing to an ignoble
self-surrender.
But how charming is the first half of this novel; the opening scene
in the country doctor’s dining-room, with the two girls seated in the
red-paved parlour that smells of damp bricks and freshly-washed linen
and ripe apples. Denise, the young lady of the house, is the soul of a
home:--
‘A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command----’
a large human type, as easily imagined in England or Scotland as
in Central France. But the girl who sews at her side is essentially
Limousine, her very name, Fortunade, recalls the pathetic head of the
girl-saint of the Corrèze whom she resembles--pensive and slim, with
the pursed, plaintive mouth, the suffering grace of her profile, and
the something dreamy, sweet, yet almost sullen that makes her appear
half a Gothic angel and half a scolded child.
Fortunade Brandou is only a little peasant, the daughter of the village
innkeeper, who goes out sewing by the day to the few gentlemen’s
houses in the countryside. But all the dreams, all the visions, all
the missionary fervours and superstitious fears of a Celtic race are
locked beneath the smooth black braids of her roundly projecting brow.
Her longing is not to be happy, but to expiate, to redeem, to fly to
the rescue of the oppressed. She must up and grapple with sin and
sorrow. She cannot let the evil-doer perish before her eyes. Fortunade,
with her feeble body full of suffering grace, her doleful smile, her
plaintive voice, has the soul of Corneille’s Pauline, destroying the
idols of the Temple and braving the Proconsul; has the faith and the
fervour of a Joan of Arc, letting slip her shepherd’s crook to grasp an
enchanted sword.
And, even as she must suffer and struggle for the moral welfare of
her fellow-mortals, so Dr Cayrol must needs overcome and stamp out
disease. Each of these personages is a type--complete, rare, and
living--animated with an extraordinary racial truth. In describing the
peasants and the mountain of Corrèze, Madame Tinayre puts us in contact
with her own familiar country. There are few more beautiful in France
as scenery; none more noble as a focus of human character.
Those who have studied the deep wave of moral feeling which broke
over France between the fall of the First and the rise of the Second
Empire--students of the Saint-Simonians, historians of ‘48--have
always been struck by the great proportion of men from the southern
centre--from Auvergne and Corrèze--generous, philanthropic, active
sons of Utopia, brusque and kind, avid for justice as the prophets of
Israel. These minds, less intellectually or theoretically great than
large and magnanimous, form one of the finest categories of the French
character.
In no novel have we come across so adequate a presentment of them as in
the village doctor--worthy _confrère_ of Mrs Gaskell’s country surgeon
and of Balzac’s _médecin de campagne_--the rustic _savant_, interested
in the scientific and social movement of his times yet homely in his
private tastes and standards of life; parsimonious in pence, and
liberal with his rare gold pieces; distrustful of all strangers, yet
quick to harbour a fresh chimera; prompt to anger; to all appearance
just a son of the soil, a hearty meat-fed man, fond of his glass, fond
of his pipe, fond of his gun, striding at ease in his strong solid
shoes and his old country clothes--but a sage for all that, and nearly
a saint; a man, at least, in the best sense of the word, with the root
of the matter in him. Such a man, choleric, proud, and kind, is Étienne
Cayrol, at once the hero and the father of the heroine in _L’Ombre de
l’Amour_.
We recognise him at once and love him from his very entrance on the
twelfth page, when he comes in, out of the mud, and the dark, whistling
the air of a country reel, and greeting, with kind, quizzical observant
eyes, the two young girls mending the linen in his parlour.
‘Il avait un visage de vieux chef gaulois, coloré, couperosé aux
pommettes, les cheveux gris, l’œil bleu saillant, le nez aquilin,
la mâchoire solide sous une longue moustache dédorée. Comme il
inclinait la tête, on voyait l’attache puissante du cou, et
cette forme du crâne qui s’unit à la nuque par une ligne droite,
caractéristique chez les gens du Plateau central. Les épaules
étaient carrées, le torse trapu; les jambes un peu arquées devaient
peser lourd sur le sol. Toute la personne--sans finesse mais non
pas sans noblesse--d’Étienne Cayrol, révélait l’origine paysanne.
Elle exprimait la force, une force stable, lente, réfléchie, sûre
d’elle même.’
And yet (an observation admirably in accordance with the history of
the type) some secret defect of judgment condemns the dearest schemes
of the doctor (so well considered, so unselfish in their working out,
so noble and yet practical in their aim), but destined none the less,
to miscarry and ‘gang aft agley.’ His unfinished sanatorium scars the
hill-top with the mean unsightly ruins of uncompleted work; and the
consumptive youth, whom he takes into his own home to nurse back to
health, not only dies, but seduces the doctor’s only daughter: the girl
who was the pride of his heart, as the sanatorium was the dream of his
mind.
Denise Cayrol is a noble creature, strong, kind, and pure. At
twenty-seven years of age she no longer thinks of herself as a young
girl; she is not concerned with love and marriage, and it is rather
with a half-maternal, half-sisterly devotion that she tends the young
consumptive, a few years younger than herself, who is so eager to
live, so ardent in loving, and whom her clear, reasonable judgment and
pitiful heart see from the first as marked with the signs of his doom.
Denise attracts the hapless Jean with all the force and promise of
her health. When the doctor suspects the secret engagement that binds
his daughter to his patient, he is both jealous and indignant (for
he cannot conceive how a woman can love a consumptive), and he sends
Jean away into a sanatorium. But Jean falls ill; Denise rushes to his
death-bed, and then and there (in a wild pitiful desire to pour out all
the best of life, in one moment, while there is time) she yields to his
fevered desire; she succumbs.
There were two girls seated in the red-paved parlour, that smelt of
damp bricks and freshly-washed linen and ripe apples, when the doctor
strode in from the dark night outside, on the winterly evening which
opens the novel. The second is Fortunade Brandou, the little village
dressmaker, the mystic; an ill-judged pity lures her, too, to her
undoing. When Veydrenne, the poacher, the outlaw, breaks his leg,
Fortunade tends the village miscreant in his illness and strives to
save his soul:--
‘Ce serait si beau de sauver cette âme!’
Alas, when did the wolf listen to the voice of Little Red Riding Hood?
The sweet, the mystical, the charitable Fortunade fell prey to a wild
beast, and the deep gorges of the mountain torrent received the soiled,
childish body that dared no longer affront the light of the sun.
‘Morte, morte! non par le hasard d’un faux pas, non par un chagrin
d’amour, elle n’avait jamais aimé que Dieu, la chaste fille:
Dieu et ses pauvres! morte pour être allée vers celui que tous
haïssaient; morte pour avoir tenté l’entreprise folle de sauver une
âme perdue!... Perdue elle-même sans doute, brutalement outragée,
deux fois victime, elle avait payé de sa pudeur et de sa vie
l’imprudence sublime de sa pitié.’
These characters are conceived with the sure and intimate reality
that comes of kinship; we feel that Madame Tinayre is of their race
and their habitation. Here, her foot is on her native heath, and she
compels our interest far more powerfully than when she writes of Paris
(her Paris is always a little too ‘Rive gauche’); when she pictures her
Corrèze, when she evokes the mountain scenery round Brives or Tulle, I
think no French novelist since George Sand has possessed so masterly
a touch in peopling a living landscape with living beings. Indeed,
remembering the pastoral novels of Our Lady of Nohant, recalling ‘Marie
Claire,’ comparing them and this book of Madame Tinayre’s with _The
Mill on the Floss_ and _Adam Bede_, it seems to me possible that one of
the greatest gifts of woman as a novelist may lie in her singular power
of rendering country life in all the variety of its personages, its
customs, and its natural background.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Translated into English under the title: _The Shadow of Love_.
MLLE. MARIE LENÉRU