Part 14

Interesting revelation. “Les larmes lui vinrent aux yeux,” says Madame de Hausset. She was bourgeoise, you see, this poor Pompadour, with the homely instincts, the longing for the snug interior, the home, the family life which characterise the plainly-born. She had been a Mademoiselle Poisson. Poisson indeed! What had a Mademoiselle Poisson to do with a Fils de Saint-Louis, or in a Parc aux Cerfs? Nothing whatever in first intention, at least; rather she was all for love and the world well lost. She had had her dreams, wherein Louis was to be her “jo,” and they were to climb the hill together. The ideal remained with her, for ever unrealised, always, it seemed, just realisable; and her foreign and military adventures, the certain ruin of her country, were so many shifts to arrive--she and Louis together, hand in hand--at some Island of the Blest. No beautiful end will justify means so unbeautiful, but to some extent it excuses them.

Exactly on a level with that tale is one which I read somewhere lately: also a French tale. It was about the exorbitantly-loved mistress of some officer, who craved the rights of a wife, and worried him until she had them--with the result that she obtained also the wrongs. She in fact became what the man’s wife was at the moment: in her turn she was _trompée_. And what were the rights for which she risked, and indeed lost, everything she had? To preside at his breakfast-table, to dine _vis-à-vis_ at home instead of at a restaurant, to sleep with her head on his shoulder. That was all. And when she had it, her pride and joy became his ineffable weariness. He carried his vice elsewhere. There is the whole difference between two classes there--between Louis le Désiré and his Poisson; between two instincts--Sentiment and Curiosity; between two ideals--Distraction and Fulfilment. There is very nearly all the essential difference that exists between men and women, the active and the passive principle in human nature.

Behind the sentimental there is always a moral reality. It may not be all the sentimentalists believe it; they may mistake appearance of the thing for the thing itself; but there is a reality. To preside over a man’s tea-cups is symbolic; to be his wife is more than symbolic, for a symbol may be a sacrament--and that is a reality. The wedding-ring is a sacrament for those who seek fulfilment of their being. To those who seek distraction of it, it simply puts a point to their need. To the seekers of distraction there is neither end, nor symbol, nor sacrament. Mr. Hardy once wrote a parable upon the theme--the Pursuit of the Well-Beloved it was called; and after his manner he gave a mocking twist to it. In it a nympholept, a sort of Louis XV, pursued successively a woman, her daughter and her grand-daughter, and having caught them one after another, found that there was nothing in it. Last of all, the man died also, but not without feeling pretty sure that if he could have waited for the great-grand-daughter all would have been well with him. Such shadows we are, pursuing shadows. But women are realists. They can see detail and fulfil themselves with that, failing the great thing. That is a strength which is also a weakness, fatal to them in many cases. Only, even so, it is not always easy to decide which it is. Was it strength or weakness in Romney’s wife? She nursed him through a fever, herself then a young girl, and he married her for her pains. He lived with her for five years, gave her a family, and left her. He hardly saw her again for forty years, when he returned, broken and old, to Kendal, where he had left her, to be nursed once more out of illness. So far as we know, she had no reproaches for him. He died in her arms. What reality she may have found to support her constancy one can hardly say; but at least she had more than the nympholept had ever found in his forty years in the wilderness. Enough indeed to give her fulfilment at the last.

I have touched a thing there, or I am the more deceived, which Mr. Lucas has entirely overlooked in a recent book of his. By so doing he has turned what might have been a touching piece of sentiment into something which, luckily for us, exists mainly in club arm-chairs. We have had _Science from an Easy-Chair_, and none the worse for being so delivered. But arm-chair ethics is another matter. In Mr. Lucas’s _Rose and Rose_ a doctor, with a good cook (an important factor) and an Epicurean friend, who has the knack of making cynicisms sound true, by using a genial manner, becomes guardian of a child, who grows up into a nice girl, and in due course falls in love. She chooses a man whom the doctor dislikes, whom she, however, prefers to several other candidates, against whom there are really only nods and winks from the doctor and the Epicurean on the sofa. She marries, and isn’t happy. Her husband, without being a prig--he had not enough colour for that--was a precisian, careful of his money, who did his own housekeeping. He had not such a good cook as the doctor had, and may have felt that Rose’s education in housewifery had been neglected. Probably it had. A good cook will coddle her clients, but not impart her mystery. I daresay the husband was trying; but he seems to have been good-tempered and honourable; he paid his way, and he gave Rose I a Rose II. That at least should have been an asset on his side of the account. But not at all. After a time, not clearly illuminated, in which nothing particular seems to have happened--except one thing--Rose I ups and elopes with the one thing, leaving her husband and Rose II in the lurch. She had known her lover before marriage. He had very white teeth, and she had nursed him through an illness. Well, when she found him again, his teeth were still quite white, and he had another illness. So there you were. She went off with him, I think to Singapore, and did not reappear until the last chapter, by which time her ailing lover had cleaned his teeth for the last time. The doctor, who still had the good cook, and had adopted and brought up Rose II to the marriage-point, then received back with a beating heart his Rose I.

A doctor of seventy, with a good cook and digestion, an arm-chair and a rather good cellar of port, fortified also by the caustic wit of an epicurean patient, is capable of much. He might think (as Mr. Lucas’s did) that it was all right. He would be for the line of least resistance, and that would certainly be the baby. He happened to like them--which put him in a strong position. But his Rose I went much further than even Jean-Jacques had gone. He took his superfluous children to the _Enfants Trouvés_. Rose simply dropped hers. “De Charon pas un mot!” And so far as I can find out not a word afterwards, until she came home in the last chapter, as if nothing had happened. Then, if you please, Rose II takes the prodigal mother to her bosom, and they all lived happily ever after. Life is not so simple as all that. It could not be while women were women.

The poor “unfortunate females” with whom I began this article are against it. Mrs. Romney is against it. To the best of my belief the middle-class, to which the Roses belong, is still against it. Many marriages are unhappy, and many children left to shift; but not yet in the middle-class to any dangerous extent. A doctor in an easy-chair, with a good cook and cellar, does not count. His cook has unclassed him.

ART AND HEART

GEORGE SAND AND FLAUBERT

Flaubert is, or was, the fashion in high-art circles; George Sand was never that, and to-day is little more than a name in any circle. Yet in the familiar letters, lately published in translation, translated by Aimée McKenzie, between a pair so ill-assorted in temperament, so far apart in the pigeon-holes of memory, it is she who proves herself the better man.

Gustave Flaubert will live for times to come less by what he did than by his gesture in doing it. He was, before all, the explicit artist, the art-for-art’s-sake, neck-or-nothing artist; and as such he will stand in history when these strange creatures come up for review. He made the enormous assumption of an aristocracy of intelligence. As, once upon a time, Venice, and later on we British, claimed to hold the gorgeous East in fee, so Flaubert, and the handful of poets, novelists and playwrights whom he admitted as his equals, looked upon the world at large with its hordes of busy people as so much stuff for the workshop. Bourgeois all, Philistines all. They were the quarry; upon them as they went about their affairs he would peep and botanise. He would lay bare their hearts in action, their scheming brains, their secret longings, dreams, agonies of remorse, desire, fear. All this as a god might do it, a being apart, and for the diversion of a select Olympus. It was useless to write for the rest, for they could not even begin to understand you. More, it was an unworthy condescension. It exposed you either to infamy, as when they prosecuted you for an outrage against morals, or to ridicule, as when they asked you what your novel “proved.” Write for ever, wear yourself to a thread, hunting word or _nuance_; but write for the Olympians, not for the many. Such was the doctrine of Flaubert, gigantic, bald, cavern-eyed, with the moustaches of a Viking, and the voice of a bull; and so Anatole France saw him in 1873:

“I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand bourgeois with their throats cut. Striding to and fro, the honest giant ground under his heels the brains of the municipal councillors of Rouen.”

That was the sort of man who, in 1863, struck up a friendship with George Sand.

And she, the overflowing, mannish, brown old woman, his antithesis; her vast heart still smouldering like a sleepy volcano; she who had kicked over all the traces, sown all the wild oats, made spillikins of the Ten Commandments, played leapfrog with the frying-pan and the fire; written a hundred novels, as many plays, a thousand reviews, ten thousand love-letters; grandmother now at Nohant, with a son whom she adored, a little Aurore whom she idolised; still enormously busy, writing a novel with each hand, a play with each foot, and reviews (perhaps) with her nose; she of _Elle et Lui_, of _Consuelo_ and _Valentine_ and _François le Champi_--how on earth came she to cope with the Berserk of Croisset, who hated every other person in the world, took four years to write a novel, and read through a whole library for the purpose? The answer is easy. She made herself his grandmother, took him to her capacious bosom, and handled him as he had never been handled before. Affectionately--to him she was “cher maitre,” to her he was her “pauvre enfant” or her “cher vieux”--but she could poke fun at him too. She used to send him letters from imaginary bourgeois, injured by his attacks, or stimulated by them, as might be. One was signed, “Victoire Potelet, called Marengo Lirondelle, Veuve Dodin”:

“I have read your distinguished works, notably Madame Bavarie, of which I think I am capable of being a model to you.... I am well preserved for my advanced age and if you have a repugnance for an artist in misfortune I should be content with your ideal sentiments. You can then count on my heart not being able to dispose of my person being married to a man of light character who squandered my wax cabinet wherein were all figures of celebrities, Kings, Emperors ancient and modern and celebrated crimes....”

A delicious letter to write and to receive.

With all that, in spite of her impulse to love, to admire, to fall at his feet, she saw what was the matter with her “pauvre enfant.” _Madame Bovary_ hurt her because it was heartless. She understood the prosecution of that dreadful book; she saw that the passionless analysis of passion may be exceedingly indecent. She is guarded in her references to it, but she saw quite well that the book was condemned, not because it was indecent (though it was indecent), but because it was cruel. She thought _L’Education Sentimentale_ a failure; ugly without being reasonable:

“All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with ... when people do not understand us it is always our fault.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.”

Not a doubt but she was right. You cannot with impunity leave your heart out of your affair. I will not say that a good book cannot be written with the intellect and the will; but I am convinced that a great book was never yet so written. The greatest books in the world’s history are those which the world at large knows to be good; and to the making of such books goes the heart of a man as well as his brain.

But eighteen-seventy was at hand. Isidore, as they called him, was diddled into war. Everything went badly. French armies blew away like smoke, France was invaded, the Prussians were at Rouen, and there was no time to theorise about art. Sedan; the Prussians in Paris; then the senseless rage of the Commune. Flaubert took it all _à sa manière_:

“I shall not tell you all I have suffered since September. Why didn’t I die from it?... And I cannot get over it! I am not consoled! I have no hope!”

And in another letter:

“Ah! dear and good master, _if you could only hate!_ That is what you lack--hate.... Come now. Cry out! Thunder! Take your lyre and touch the brazen string; the monsters will flee.”

Poor wretch, with the only remedy of the arrogant! But the fine old priestess of another heaven and earth did as he bid her; cried out, thundered, in a noble letter, which should be engraved on gold plates and hung up on the Quai d’Orsay:

“What then, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible, hateful, that it has always been and will always be so?... You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the priest always a hypocrite, the bourgeois a coward, the soldier a brigand, the peasant a beast?... The people, you say? The people is yourself and myself.... Whoever denies the people cheapens himself, and gives the world the shameful spectacle of apostasy....”

That is plain speaking; but she goes on to be prophetic. It would seem as if she had foreseen a war and its aftermath infinitely more terrible than that of 1870:

“We shall have to pity the German nation for its victories as much as ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun.... It will move very quickly.... _Well, the moral abasement of Germany is not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to return to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will not give us back her life._”

Is not that nobly said? And then her great cry:

“Frenchmen, let us love one another ... let us love one another or we are lost.”

She was but five years off her death-bed when she wrote that. In a sense it was her swan-song. Had she never loved so blindly, she might have been a better woman it may be. But she loved kindly, too, and will be forgiven no doubt because she loved much. Love at any rate inspired her to better purpose than Flaubert’s hate could have done. The world is not to be advantaged by intellectual arrogance; nor does it appear from these letters that poor Flaubert was at all advantaged either. It served him but ill in literature and not at all in the adventure of life. One must be a man before one can be an artist. Whether George Sand was an artist or not, she neither knew nor cared. There is no doubt at all, though, of her manliness.

A NOVEL AND A CLASSIC

LA PRINCESS DE CLÈVES

The first novelist in the world as we know it (I say nothing of the Greeks and Romans) was, I believe, a Pope--Pius II. It is not what we have come to expect from the Vatican; but his novel, I ought to add, was “only a little one.” The second, if I don’t mistake, was Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who did the thing on a large scale. _Artamène, ou Le Grand Cyrus_ is in twenty volumes; and though men be so strong (some of them) as to have read it, it is not unkind to say that, for the general, it is as dead as King Pandion. “Works,” then, won’t secure more for an author than his name in a dictionary. You must have quality to do that. The little _Princesse de Clèves_, written by a contemporary of Mademoiselle’s, all compact in a small octavo of 170 pp., has quality. First published in 1678, at this hour, says Mr. Ashton, in his study of its author,[2] “there are preparing simultaneously an art edition, a critical edition, and an édition de luxe, to say nothing of the popular edition, which has just appeared.” Here is “that eternity of fame,” or something like it, hoped for by the poet. I suppose the nearest we can approach to that would be _Robinson Crusoe_.

The authoress of the little classic was Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, who was born in 1634. She was of _petite noblesse_ on both sides, but her mother’s remarriage to the Chevalier Renaud de Sévigné lifted her into high society, and brought her acquainted with the incomparable Marquise. If it had done nothing else for her, in doing that it served two delightful women, and the world ever after. But it did more. It procured for Mlle. de La Vergne her entry to the Hôtel de Rambouillet; it gave her the wits for her masters; it gave her the companionship of La Rochefoucauld; and it gave _us_ the Princesse de Clèves. She married, or was married to, a provincial seigneur of so little importance that everybody thought he was separated from his wife some twenty years before he was. When separation did come, it was only that insisted on by death; and through Mr. Ashton’s diligence we now know when he died. Nothing about him, however, seems to matter much, except the bare possibility that the relations between him, his wife, and La Rochefoucauld, which may have been difficult and must have been delicate, may also have given Madame de Lafayette the theme of her novels.

She wrote three novels altogether, and it is a curious thing about them that they all deal with the same subject--namely, jealousy. Love, of course, the everlasting French triangular love, is at the bottom of them: inclination and duty contend for the heroine. But the jealousy which consumes husband and lover alike is the real theme. Only in the _Princesse de Clèves_ is the treatment fresh, the subject deeply plumbed, the _dénoument_ original and unexpected. Those valuable considerations, and the eloquence with which they are brought to bear, may account for its instant popularity. It has another quality which recommends it to readers of to-day--psychology. To a surprising extent, considering its epoch, it does consider of men and women from within outwards--not as clothes-props to be decked with rhetoric, but as reasonable souls in human bodies, and sometimes as unreasonable souls.

Here’s the story. Mademoiselle de Chartres, a high-born young beauty of the Court of Henri II--is there any other novel in the world the name of whose heroine is never revealed?--is married by her mother in the opening pages to the Prince de Clèves, without inclination of her own, or any marked distaste. The prince, we are told, is “parfaitement bien fait,” brave, splendid, “with a prudence which is not at all consistent with youth.” I do not learn that he was, in fact, a youth. All goes well, nevertheless, until the return to Court of a certain Duc de Nemours, a renowned breaker of hearts, more brave, more splendid, more “bien fait,” and much less prudent, certainly, than the Prince de Clèves. He arrives during a ball at the Louvre; Madame de Clèves nearly steps into his arms by accident; their eyes meet; his are dazzled, hers troubled, and the seed is sown. For a space of time she does not know that she loves, or guess that _he_ does: the necessary discoveries are provided for by some very good inventions. An accident to Nemours in a tournament, in the trouble which it causes her, reveals him the truth; his stealing of her picture, which she happens to witness, reveals it to her.

Discovery of the state of affairs, naturally, spurs the young man; but it terrifies the lady. Greatly agitated, she prevails upon her unsuspecting lord to take her into the country. Nemours follows them, as she presently learns. Then, when her husband insists on her return with him to Paris and the daily intercourse with the person she dreads, driven into a corner, she confesses that she dare not obey him, since her heart is not her own. Nothing will induce her to say more; and the prince, disturbed as he is, is greatly touched by the nobility and candour of her avowal. Unfortunately, he is not the only one to be touched; for Nemours, who had been on the point of paying a visit to his enchantress, stands in the ante-room and overhears the whole conversation. He knew it all before, no doubt--but wait a moment. He is so exalted by the sense of his mistress’s virtue that, on his way back to Paris, he casts the whole story into a tale of “a friend” of his, but with such a spirit of conviction thrilling in his tones, that it is quite easy for him who receives it to be certain that “the friend” was Nemours himself. That is really excellent invention, quite unforced, and as simple as kissing. Naturally the tale is repeated, and puts husband and wife at cross-purposes, since it makes either suspect the other of having betrayed the secret. More, it tells the husband the name of his wife’s lover. Further misunderstandings ensue, and last of all, the husband dies of it. I confess that that seems to me rather stiff. Men have died and worms have eaten them--but not the worms of jealousy.