Part 13

The main thing doubtless to agree with M. Faguet about, however, is the wonder of the rate at which this genius for an infatuated grasp of the environment could multiply the creatures swarming, and swarming at their best to perfection, in that jungle of elements. A jungle certainly the environment, the rank many-coloured picture of France, would have been had it not really created in our observer the joy, thanks to his need of a clear and marked order, of its becoming so arrangeable. Nothing could interest us more than to note with our critic that such multiplications—taken after all at such a rush—have to be paid for by a sort of limitation of quality in each, the quality that, beyond a certain point and after a certain allowance, ever looks askance at any approach to what it may be figured as taking for _insolence_ of quantity. Some inquiry into the general mystery of such laws of payment would beckon us on had we the space—whereby we might glance a little at the wondrous why and wherefore of the sacrifice foredoomed, the loss, greater or less, of those ideals now compromised by the tarnished names of refinement and distinction, yet which we are none the less, at our decentest, still ashamed too entirely to turn our backs on, in the presence of energies that, shaking the air by their embrace of the common, tend to dispossess the rare of a certified place in it. Delightful to the critical mind to estimate the point at which, in the picture of life, a sense for the element of the rare ceases to consort with a sense, necessarily large and lusty, for the varieties of the real that super-abound. Reducible perhaps to some exquisite measure is this point of fatal divergence. It declared itself, the divergence, in the heart of Balzac’s genius; for nothing about him is less to be gainsaid than that on the other or further side of a certain line of rareness drawn his authority, so splendid on the hither or familiar side, is sadly liable to lapse. It fails to take in whatever fine truth experience may have vouchsafed to us about the highest kinds of temper, the inward life of the mind, the _cultivated_ consciousness. His truest and vividest people are those whom the conditions in which they are so palpably embedded have simplified not less than emphasised; simplified mostly to singleness of motive and passion and interest, to quite measurably finite existence; whereas his ostensibly higher spirits, types necessarily least observed and most independently thought out, in the interest of their humanity, as we would fain ourselves think them, are his falsest and weakest and show most where his imagination and his efficient sympathy break down.

To say so much as this is doubtless to provoke the question of where and how then, under so many other restrictions, he is so great—which question is answered simply by our claim for his unsurpassed mastery of the “middling” sort, so much the most numerous in the world, the middling sort pressed upon by the vast variety of their dangers. These it is in their multitude whom he makes individually living, each with a clustered bunch of concomitants, as no one, to our mind, has equalled him in doing—above all with the amount of repetition of the feat considered. Finer images than the middling, but so much fewer, other creative talents have thrown off; swarms of the common, on the other hand, have obeyed with an even greater air of multitude perhaps than in Balzac’s pages the big brandished enumerative wand—only with a signal forfeiture in this case of that gift of the sharply separate, the really rounded, personality which he untiringly conferred. Émile Zola, by so far the strongest example of his influence, mustered groups and crowds beyond even the master’s own compass; but as throughout Zola we live and move for the most part but in crowds (he thinking his best but in terms of crowdedness), so in Balzac, where he rises highest, we deal, whether or no more for our sense of ugliness than of beauty, but with memorable person after person. He thought, on his side—when he thought at least to good purpose—in terms the most expressively personal, in such as could even eventuate in monsters and forms of evil the most finished we know; so that if he too has left us a multitude of which we may say that it stands alone for solidity, it nevertheless exists by addition and extension, not by a chemical shaking-together, a cheapening or diminishing fusion.

It is not that the series of the Rougon-Macquart has not several distinct men and women to show—though they occur, as a fact, almost in “L’Assommoir” alone; it is not either that Zola did not on occasion try for the cultivated consciousness, a thing of course, so far as ever achieved anywhere, necessarily separate and distinguished; it is that he tried, on such ground, with a futility only a shade less marked than Balzac’s, and perhaps would have tried with equal disaster had he happened to try oftener. If we find in his pages no such spreading waste as Balzac’s general picture of the classes “enjoying every advantage,” that is of the socially highest—to the elder writer’s success in depicting particularly the female members of which Sainte-Beuve, and Brunetière in his footsteps, have rendered such strange and stupefying homage—the reason may very well be that such groups could not in the nature of the case figure to him after the fashion in which he liked groups to figure, as merely herded and compressed. To Balzac they were groups in which individualisation might be raised to its very finest; and it is by this possibility in them that we watch him and his fertile vulgarity, his peccant taste, so fallible for delicacies, so unerring for simplicities, above all doubtless the homeliest, strongest and grimmest, wofully led astray. But it is fairly almost a pleasure to our admiration, before him, to see what we have permitted ourselves to call the “chunks” of excision carted off to the disengagement of the values that still live. The wondrous thing is that they live best where his grand vulgarity—since we are not afraid of the word—serves him rather than betrays; which it _has_ to do, we make out, over the greater part of the field of any observer for whom man is on the whole cruelly, crushingly, deformedly conditioned. We grant _that_ as to Balzac’s view, and yet feel the view to have been at the same time incomparably active and productively genial; which are by themselves somehow qualities and reactions that redress the tragedy and the doom. The vulgarity was at any rate a force that simply got nearer than any other could have done to the whole detail, the whole intimate and evidenced story, of submission and perversion, and as such it could but prove itself immensely human. It is on all this considered ground that he has for so many years stood firm and that we feel him by reason of it and in spite of them, in spite of all that has come and gone, not to have yielded, have “given,” an inch.

Footnote 5:

Balzac. Par Émile Faguet, de l’Académie Française. Les Grands Écrivains Français. Paris, Hachette, 1913.

GEORGE SAND 1897

I have been reading in the Revue de Paris for November 1st, 1896, some fifty pages, of an extraordinary interest, which have had in respect to an old admiration a remarkable effect. Undoubtedly for other admirers too who have come to fifty year—admirers, I mean, once eager, of the distinguished woman involved—the perusal of the letters addressed by George Sand to Alfred de Musset in the course of a famous friendship will have stirred in an odd fashion the ashes of an early ardour. I speak of ashes because early ardours for the most part burn themselves out, while the place they hold in our lives varies, I think, mainly according to the degree of tenderness with which we gather up and preserve their dust; and I speak of oddity because in the present case it is difficult to say whether the agitation of the embers results at last in a returning glow or in a yet more sensible chill. That indeed is perhaps a small question compared with the simple pleasure of the reviving emotion. One reads and wonders and enjoys again, just for the sake of the renewal. The small fry of the hour submit to further shrinkage, and we revert with a sigh of relief to the free genius and large life of one of the greatest of all masters of expression. Do people still handle the works of this master—people other than young ladies studying French with La “Mare au Diable” and a dictionary? Are there persons who still read “Valentine”? Are there others capable of losing themselves in “Mauprat”? Has “André,” the exquisite, dropped out of knowledge, and is any one left who remembers “Teverino”? I ask these questions for the mere sweet sound of them, without the least expectation of an answer. I remember asking them twenty years ago, after Madame Sand’s death, and not then being hopeful of the answer of the future. But the only response that matters to us perhaps is our own, even if it be after all somewhat ambiguous. “André” and “Valentine” then are rather on our shelves than in our hands, but in the light of what is given us in the “Revue de Paris” who shall say that we do not, and with avidity, “read” George Sand? She died in 1876, but she lives again intensely in these singular pages, both as to what in her spirit was most attaching and what most disconcerting. We are vague as to what they may represent for the generation that has come to the front since her death; nothing, I dare say, very imposing or even very pleasing. But they give out a great deal to a reader for whom thirty years ago—the best time to have taken her as a whole—she was a high clear figure, a great familiar magician. This impression is a strange mixture, but perhaps not quite incommunicable; and we are steeped as we receive it in one of the most curious episodes in the annals of the literary race.

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It is the great interest of such an episode that, apart from its proportionate place in the unfolding of a personal life it has a wonderful deal to say on the relation between experience and art at large. It constitutes an eminent special case, in which the workings of that relation are more or less uncovered; a case too of which one of the most striking notes is that we are in possession of it almost exclusively by the act of one of the persons concerned. Madame Sand at least, as we see to-day, was eager to leave nothing undone that could make us further acquainted than we were before with one of the liveliest chapters of her personal history. We cannot, doubtless, be sure that her conscious purpose in the production of “Elle et Lui” was to show us the process by which private ecstasies and pains find themselves transmuted in the artist’s workshop into promising literary material—any more than we can be certain of her motive for making toward the end of her life earnest and complete arrangements for the ultimate publication of the letters in which the passion is recorded and in which we can remount to the origin of the volume. If “Elle et Lui” had been the inevitable picture, postponed and retouched, of the great adventure of her youth, so the letters show us the crude primary stuff from which the moral detachment of the book was distilled. Were they to be given to the world for the encouragement of the artist-nature—as a contribution to the view that no suffering is great enough, no emotion tragic enough to exclude the hope that such pangs may sooner or later be esthetically assimilated? Was the whole proceeding, in intention, a frank plea for the intellectual and in some degree even the commercial profit, to a robust organism, of a store of erotic reminiscence? Whatever the reasons behind the matter, that is to a certain extent the moral of the strange story.

It may be objected that this moral is qualified to come home to us only when the relation between art and experience really proves a happier one than it may be held to have proved in the combination before us. The element in danger of being most absent from the process is the element of dignity, and its presence, so far as that may ever at all be hoped for in an appeal from a personal quarrel, is assured only in proportion as the esthetic event, standing on its own feet, represents a noble gift. It was vain, the objector may say, for our author to pretend to justify by so slight a performance as “Elle et Lui” that sacrifice of all delicacy which has culminated in this supreme surrender. “If you sacrifice all delicacy,” I hear such a critic contend, “show at least that you were right by giving us a masterpiece. The novel in question is no more a masterpiece,” I even hear him proceed, “than any other of the loose liquid lucid works of its author. By your supposition of a great intention you give much too fine an account on the one hand of a personal habit of incontinence and on the other of a literary habit of egotism. Madame Sand, in writing her tale and in publishing her love-letters, obeyed no prompting more exalted than that of exhibiting her personal (in which I include her verbal) facility, and of doing so at the cost of whatever other persons might be concerned; and you are therefore—and you might as well immediately confess it—thrown back for the element of interest on the attraction of her general eloquence, the plausibility of her general manner and the great number of her particular confidences. You are thrown back on your mere curiosity or sympathy—thrown back from any question of service rendered to ‘art.’ ” One might be thrown back doubtless still further even than such remarks would represent if one were not quite prepared with the confession they propose. It is only because such a figure is interesting—in every manifestation—that its course is marked for us by vivid footprints and possible lessons. And to enable us to find these it scarcely need have aimed after all so extravagantly high. George Sand lived her remarkable life and drove her perpetual pen, but the illustration that I began by speaking of is for ourselves to gather—if we can.

I remember hearing many years ago in Paris an anecdote for the truth of which I am far from vouching, though it professed to come direct—an anecdote that has recurred to me more than once in turning over the revelations of the Revue de Paris, and without the need of the special reminder (in the shape of an allusion to her intimacy with the hero of the story) contained in those letters to Sainte-Beuve which are published in the number of November 15th. Prosper Mérimée was said to have related—in a reprehensible spirit—that during a term of association with the author of “Lélia” he once opened his eyes, in the raw winter dawn, to see his companion, in a dressing-gown, on her knees before the domestic hearth, a candlestick beside her and a red _madras_ round her head, making bravely, with her own hands, the fire that was to enable her to sit down betimes to urgent pen and paper. The story represents him as having felt that the spectacle chilled his ardour and tried his taste; her appearance was unfortunate, her occupation an inconsequence and her industry a reproof—the result of all of which was a lively irritation and an early rupture. To the firm admirer of Madame Sand’s prose the little sketch has a very different value, for it presents her in an attitude which is the very key to the enigma, the answer to most of the questions with which her character confronts us. She rose early because she was pressed to write, and she was pressed to write because she had the greatest instinct of expression ever conferred on a woman; a faculty that put a premium on all passion, on all pain, on all experience and all exposure, on the greatest variety of ties and the smallest reserve about them. The really interesting thing in these posthumous _laideurs_ is the way the gift, the voice, carries its possessor through them and lifts her on the whole above them. It gave her, it may be confessed at the outset and in spite of all magnanimities in the use of it, an unfair advantage in every connection. So at least we must continue to feel till—for our appreciation of this particular one—we have Alfred de Musset’s share of the correspondence. For we shall have it at last, in whatever faded fury or beauty it may still possess—to that we may make up our minds. Let the galled jade wince, it is only a question of time. The greatest of literary quarrels will in short, on the general ground, once more come up—the quarrel beside which all others are mild and arrangeable, the eternal dispute between the public and the private, between curiosity and delicacy.

This discussion is precisely all the sharper because it takes place for each of us within as well as without. When we wish to know at all we wish to know everything; yet there happen to be certain things of which no better description can be given than that they are simply none of our business. “What _is_ then forsooth of our business?” the genuine analyst may always ask; and he may easily challenge us to produce any rule of general application by which we shall know when to push in and when to back out. “In the first place,” he may continue, “half the ‘interesting’ people in the world have at one time or another set themselves to drag us in with all their might; and what in the world in such a relation is the observer that he should absurdly pretend to be in more of a flutter than the object observed? The mannikin, in all schools, is at an early stage of study of the human form inexorably superseded by the man. Say that we are to give up the attempt to understand: it might certainly be better so, and there would be a delightful side to the new arrangement. But in the name of common-sense don’t say that the continuity of life is not to have some equivalent in the continuity of pursuit, the renewal of phenomena in the renewal of notation. There is not a door you can lock here against the critic or the painter, not a cry you can raise or a long face you can pull at him, that are not quite arbitrary things. The only thing that makes the observer competent is that he is neither afraid nor ashamed; the only thing that makes him decent—just think!—is that he is not superficial.” All this is very well, but somehow we all equally feel that there is clean linen and soiled and that life would be intolerable without some acknowledgment even by the pushing of such a thing as forbidden ground. M. Émile Zola, at the moment I write, gives to the world his reasons for rejoicing in the publication of the physiological _enquête_ of Dr. Toulouse—a marvellous catalogue or handbook of M. Zola’s outward and inward parts, which leaves him not an inch of privacy, so to speak, to stand on, leaves him nothing about himself that is _for_ himself, for his friends, his relatives, his intimates, his lovers, for discovery, for emulation, for fond conjecture or flattering deluded envy. It is enough for M. Zola that everything is for the public and no sacrifice worth thinking of when it is a question of presenting to the open mouth of that apparently gorged but still gaping monster the smallest spoonful of truth. The truth, to his view, is never either ridiculous or unclean, and the way to a better life lies through telling it, so far as possible, about everything and about every one.

There would probably be no difficulty in agreeing to this if it didn’t seem on the part of the speaker the result of a rare confusion between give and take, between “truth” and information. The true thing that most matters to us is the true thing we have most use for, and there are surely many occasions on which the truest thing of all is the necessity of the mind, its simple necessity of feeling. Whether it feels in order to learn or learns in order to feel, the event is the same: the side on which it shall most feel will be the side to which it will most incline. If it feels more about a Zola functionally undeciphered it will be governed more by that particular truth than by the truth about his digestive idiosyncrasies, or even about his “olfactive perceptions” and his “arithmomania or impulse to count.” An affirmation of our “mere taste” may very supposedly be our individual contribution to the general clearing up. Nothing often is less superficial than to ignore and overlook, or more constructive (for living and feeling at all) than to want impatiently to choose. If we are aware that in the same way as about a Zola undeciphered we should have felt more about a George Sand unexposed, the true thing we have gained becomes a poor substitute for the one we have lost; and I scarce see what difference it makes that the view of the elder novelist appears in this matter quite to march with that of the younger. I hasten to add that as to being of course asked why in the world with such a leaning we have given time either to M. Zola’s physician or to Musset’s correspondent, this is only another illustration of the bewildering state of the subject.

When we meet on the broad highway the rueful denuded figure we need some presence of mind to decide whether to cut it dead or to lead it gently home, and meanwhile the fatal complication easily occurs. We have _seen_, in a flash of our own wit, and mystery has fled with a shriek. These encounters are indeed accidents which may at any time take place, and the general guarantee in a noisy world lies, I judge, not so much in any hope of really averting them as in a regular organisation of the struggle. The reporter and the reported have duly and equally to understand that they carry their life in their hands. There are secrets for privacy and silence; let them only be cultivated on the part of the hunted creature with even half the method with which the love of sport—or call it the historic sense—is cultivated on the part of the investigator. They have been left too much to the natural, the instinctive man; but they will be twice as effective after it begins to be observed that they may take their place among the triumphs of civilisation. Then at last the game will be fair and the two forces face to face; it will be “pull devil, pull tailor,” and the hardest pull will doubtless provide the happiest result. Then the cunning of the inquirer, envenomed with resistance, will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything we to-day conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years.

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