Part 15
Lemaître died where, whenever he could, he had lived, at Tavers in the Loiret, the heart of France. He was always writing about Tavers, though he never named it by its name. In describing the far-off cruises of Loti and the indefatigable touristry of Bourget he says:—“There is somewhere a big orchard that goes down to a brook edged with willows and poplars. It is for me the most beautiful landscape in the world, for I love it, and it knows me.” To understand Lemaître you must keep that little _vignette_ affectionately in your mind, as he did. M. Henry Bordeaux, in his charming little monograph “Jules Lemaître,” rightly insists upon Lemaître’s passionate love for his native countryside. But you never can tell; his insistence seems only to have bored a recent reviewer of the book. “The insistence on Lemaître’s patriotism and on his being ‘l’homme de sa terre’ is a little wearying; of course he was ‘l’homme de sa terre,’ but he was many other things, or we should never have heard of him.” As who should say, of course Cyrano had a nose, but he had many other things, or we should never have heard of him. But Cyrano’s nose was a conspicuous feature, and, if we are not told of it, we shall not fully understand Cyrano. So with Lemaître’s love of his countryside by the Loire.
It made him, to begin with, an incorrigible stay-at-home. In this, as in so many other things, he was a typical Frenchman. We English, born roamers as we are, take for granted the educative influence of travel. Places and people, we know by elementary experience, are only to be realized by being seen on the spot. Lemaître thought otherwise. Why, he asked, need I go to England? I can get all England out of Dickens and George Eliot and my friend Bourget’s “Impressions de Voyage.” And then he drew a picture of England, as he confidently believed it to be, that is about as “like it” as, say, the average untravelled Englishman’s notion of Tavers. He was never tired of quoting a passage of the “Imitation” about the variety of changing sky and scene. But a cloistered monk is not exactly an authority on this subject.
Again, the fact that Lemaître was “l’homme de sa terre” is of vital literary importance; it affected not only the spirit, but the actual direction of his criticism. It inclined him to ignore or to misapprehend those features in a foreign author that precisely marked how he also, in his turn, was the man of his countryside, and that very different from the banks of the Loire. Some of his comments on Shakespeare, for instance, are of a Gallicism almost Voltairean. And it fostered illusions like that which possessed him about the “Northern literatures”—Ibsen, Hauptmann, Strindberg, and so forth—that they were mere belated imitators of the French romantics. The fact that Lemaître was essentially a man of his province involved the fact that his criticism now and then was also provincial.
Indeed, his very provincialism heightened his enjoyment of Paris and sharpened his sense of Parisianism. Things which the born Parisian takes for granted were delightful novelties for him, challenging observation and analysis. “Il est,” said Degas, “toujours bien content d’être à Paris.” He was “bien content” because he was “the young man from the country,” the man from Tavers. The phenomenon is familiar all the world over.
Further, the fact that Lemaître remained “l’homme de sa terre,” still getting his clothes from the village tailor, never so much at home as among the farmers, country schoolmasters, and peasants he had known from his infancy, gives a quite peculiar savour to his remarks on “le monde”—the great fashionable scene, which he describes and analyses, to be sure, as a philosopher, but as a philosopher who is, consciously and indeed defiantly, an “outsider.”
These are all integral parts of Lemaître’s critical individuality. Without them he would have been another man altogether—a point so obvious to all lovers of Lemaître that it would never have occurred to me to mention it, had it not been for our reviewer’s weariness of being reminded that he was “l’homme de sa terre.” Evidently the reviewer cannot forgive Lemaître for his treatment of the “décadents” and the “symbolistes,” and other cranks. “Think of the people Lemaître missed.” The people include, it seems, Moréas, Laforgue, Samain, and Rimbaud. Well, after thinking of these people, many of us will be resigned to “missing” them with Lemaître.
It is odd that the reviewer, while hunting for objections to Lemaître’s criticism, as criticism, should have “missed” the really valid one—that it is often not so much critical as “high fantastical.” Lemaître was apt to be carried away by his imagination, and to run through a varied assortment of comparisons, associations, and parallels that coloured rather than cleared the issue. The rigorist Croce has, in passing, laid his finger upon this. He quotes Lemaître on Corneille. Polyeucte, says the critic, recalls at once “St. Paul, Huss, Calvin, and Prince Kropotkine,” and awakes “the same curiosity as a Russian Nihilist, of the kind to be seen in Paris in bygone years, in some _brasserie_ ... of whom the whisper went round that at St. Petersburg he had killed a general or a prefect of police.” Croce dismisses this sort of thing as _ricami di fantasia_, and certainly, from the point of view of strict criticism, it is a weakness of Lemaître’s.
After all, however (as the counsel in “Pickwick” pleaded about something else), it is an amiable weakness; it makes him such incomparably good reading! Heaven forbid that I should reopen the old stupid, stale controversy about “impressionist” and “judicial” criticism; but it is obvious that the one sort does explicitly acknowledge and glory in what is implicit in the other—the individual temperament and talent of the critic himself. If the “impressionist” who gives free play to his temperament is apt sometimes to get out of bounds—to be substituting _ricami di fantasia_ for strict analysis—he may be all the more stimulating to the reader. He may be giving the reader not scrupulous criticism, but something better. It all depends, of course, on the temperament and the talent. Lemaître’s _ricami di fantasia_ are part, if not the best part, of his charm.
JANE AUSTEN
The amusing parlour-game of Jane Austen topography is always being played somewhere. A few years ago there was a correspondence in the _Literary Supplement_ about the precise position of Emma’s Highbury on the map. Some Austenites voted for Esher, others for Cobham, others again for Bookham. There has been another correspondence about Mansfield Park. Lady Vaux of Harrowden “identifies” it with Easton Neston, near Towcester. Sir Francis Darwin and the Master of Downing are for Easton in Huntingdonshire. People have consulted Paterson’s Roads about it. Mr. Mackinnon, K.C., points out that it must have been about four miles north of Northampton. But I like him best when he says, “I do not suppose any actual park was in Jane Austen’s mind.” _Brigadier, vous avez raison!_ I do not suppose any actual place was in Jane Austen’s mind when she assigned her personages a home or a lodging. You might as well try to fix the number of the house in Gracechurch Street where Elizabeth’s uncle lived. Are we not shown the “real” Old Curiosity Shop? And the “real” Bleak House? And Juliet’s tomb at Verona? And the exact point of the Cobb where Louisa Musgrove fell?
It is easy to see why Jane Austen lends herself more readily than most writers to this topographical game. She was very fond of topographical _colour_, giving not only real place-names to the neighbourhood of the fictitious homes, but exact distances in miles. It was so many miles from Highbury to Kingston market-place, and so many to Box Hill. Yet she was always vague about the exact spot from which these distances were calculated. For there her imagination had its home, it was her private Paradise of Dainty Devices; she wanted a free hand there, unhampered by maps, road books, and other intrusions from the actual world. In fact, she did with real places just what Scott, say, did with historical people, kept them to surround the imaginary centre of the tale. You can “identify” Charles Edward, but not Waverley. You can “identify” Nottingham, but not Mansfield Park.
It is a mercy that Jane Austen never describes houses—never describes them, I mean, with the minute (and tedious) particularity of a Balzac—or the topographical game would have been supplemented by an architectural one, and we should have had the “real” Mansfield Park pointed out to us from its description, like Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. Indeed, she never, in the modern sense, describes anything, never indulges in description for its own sake. She never even expatiated on the beauties of nature, taking them for granted and, indeed, on at least one famous occasion—when strawberries were being picked while the apple trees were still in bloom at Donwell Abbey—rather mixing them up. Her descriptions always had a practical purpose. If it rained in Bath, it was in order that Anne might, or might not, meet Captain Wentworth. We know that Sir Thomas’s “own dear room” at Mansfield Park was next to the billiard-room, because the novelist wanted us to know how he came plump upon the ranting Mr. Yates. But that detail, thank goodness, won’t enable us to “identify” Mansfield Park.
Doesn’t it argue a rather matter-of-fact frame of mind—I say it with all respect to the correspondents of the _Literary Supplement_—this persistent tendency to “identify” the imaginary with the actual, the geographical, the historical? There is a notable instance of it in the Letters of Henry James. The novelist had described in “The Bostonians” a certain veteran philanthropist, “Miss Birdseye.” Forthwith all Boston identified the imaginary Miss Birdseye with a real Miss Peabody. “I am quite appalled,” writes Henry James to his brother William, “by your note in which you assault me on the subject of my having painted a ‘portrait from life’ of Miss Peabody! I was in some measure prepared for it by Lowell’s (as I found the other day) taking it for granted that she had been my model, and an allusion to the same effect in a note from aunt Kate. Still, I didn’t expect the charge to come from you. I hold that I have done nothing to deserve it.... Miss Birdseye was conceived entirely from my moral consciousness, like every other person I have ever drawn.” It is odd that a man like William James, a professed student of the human mind and its workings, should have made such a mistake. I remember a saying attributed, years ago, to Jowett about the two brothers: one, he remarked, was a writer of fiction and the other a psychologist, and the fiction was all psychology and the psychology all fiction. Anyhow, I think if any one had written to Jane Austen to tax her with Highbury being Esher or Mansfield Park Easton Neston, she would have been able to reply that they were conceived entirely from her moral consciousness. And I fancy she would have smiled at her little trick of giving the exact mileage from her imaginary centre to real places having “sold” so many worthy people. Very likely she would have brought the topographical game into the Hartfield family circle, as a suitable alternative for Mr. Elton’s enigmas, charades, conundrums, and polite puzzles, or for Mr. Woodhouse’s “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” which made him think of poor Isabella—who was very near being christened Catherine, after her grandmamma.
The truth, surely, is that this place-hunting, this seeking to “identify” the imaginary with the actual map-marked spot, is only a part of the larger misconception of imaginative work—the misconception which leads to a perpetual search for the “originals” of an author’s personages, especially when these personages have a full, vivid life of their own. Jane Austen has often been compared to Shakespeare, ever since Macaulay set the fashion. Well, it is naturally upon Shakespeare that this misconception has wreaked its worst. Commentators have gravely presented us with the “original” of Falstaff, of Sir Toby Belch, of Dogberry—nay, of Iago. Surely, the only “originals” of these people were Shakespeare himself? What were they but certain Shakespearean moods, humours, intimate experiences, temptations felt, but resisted, impulses controlled in actual life but allowed free play in imaginative reverie? No one that I know of has been foolish enough to charge Jane Austen with “copying” any of her characters from actual individuals, but, if you are in quest of “identifications,” is it not possible to “identify” many of them, the women at any rate—for, of course, her women bear the stamp of authentic reality much more plainly than her men—is it not possible to identify them with sides, tendencies, moods of Jane Austen herself? Here, I know, I am at variance with a distinguished authority, from whom it is always rash to differ. Professor Raleigh says:—“Sympathy with her characters she frequently has, identity never. Not in the high-spirited Elizabeth Bennet, not in that sturdy young patrician Emma, not even in Anne Elliot of ‘Persuasion,’ is the real Jane Austen to be found. She stands for ever aloof.” Pass, for Emma and Elizabeth! But the “even” in the case of Anne gives me courage. We are not, of course, talking of identity in regard to external circumstances. Jane Austen was not the daughter of a Somersetshire baronet and did not marry a captain in the navy. But that Jane only “sympathized” with the heart and mind of Anne Elliot is to my thinking absurdly short of the truth. That the adventures of Anne’s soul, her heart-beatings, misgivings and intimate reassurances about Wentworth’s feeling for her had been Jane Austen’s own is to me as certain as though we had the confession under her own hand and seal. The woman who drew Anne’s timid, doubting, wondering love must have been in love herself and in that way. One short sentence settles that for me. The consciousness of love disposes Anne “to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.” What lover does not know that secret feeling? And if he had never loved, would he have guessed it by “sympathy”? (You will find, by the way, the very same secret divulged by Balzac in one of his love-letters to Mme. Hanska—among the feelings she inspires him with is “I know not what disdain in contemplating other men.”) In the face of this, what need to go ransacking Jane Austen’s Letters or Memoir for evidence that she had a love affair? No, it is because there is most of Jane Austen’s spiritual “identity” in Anne that “Persuasion” is the sweetest, tenderest, and truest of her books. I apologize for having wandered from Mansfield Park and Easton Neston and the other engaging futilities of the parlour game.
T. W. ROBERTSON
Fifty years ago to-morrow (February 3rd, 1871) died Thomas William Robertson, a great reformer of the English drama in his day, but now, like so many other reformers, little more than a name. His plays have ceased to hold the stage. Very few of them still allow themselves to be read. To-day their matter seems, for the most part, poor, thin, trivial, and their form somewhat naïve. “Robertsonian” has become for the present generation a meaningless epithet, and “teacup and saucer school” an empty gibe. Even within a few years of Robertson’s death George Meredith could only say of him: “In a review of our modern comedies, those of the late Mr. Robertson would deserve honourable mention.” As the old tag says, times change and we in them. Robertson is now a “back number.” His comedies are not classics, for classics are live things; they are merely historical documents. Yet you have only to turn to such a record as “The Bancrofts’ Recollections” to see how live these comedies once were, how stimulating to their time, how enthusiastically they were hailed as a new birth, a new portent, a new art. Indeed, for my part, when I read the glowing eulogies of John Oxenford and Tom Taylor and the other critics of that time I am filled with something like dismay. All that warm (and rather wordy—it was the way of the ’sixties) appreciation gone dead and cold! I wonder how many of our own judgments will stand the test of fifty years. Br—r—r!
Well, to understand Robertson’s success, we have to think ourselves back into his time. We have to ignore what followed him and to see what he displaced. Up to his date the theatre, under the great French influence of the ’thirties, still remained romantic. But that influence was wearing out. A new influence was making itself felt in France, through the dialectics of Dumas _fils_ and Augier’s commonsense, though the new influence still bore trace of the old romanticism, as we can see at least to-day. _La Dame aux Camélias_, so romantic to-day, was greeted in 1855 as a masterpiece of realism! And it _was_ comparatively realistic, realistic for its time. But the English theatre, a second-hand theatre, still stuck to the old French romantic tradition. It lived largely on adaptations from Scribe. Robertson himself adapted a Scribe play (and not a bad one), _Bataille de Dames_. He had, however, come under the newer, the realistic, or romantico-realistic influence. He adapted Augier’s _L’Aventurière_. Tom Stylus’s pipe in the ballroom (in _Society_) had previously been dropped by Giboyer in _Les Effrontés_. I cannot help thinking that the new French reaction had a good deal to do with the Robertsonian reaction, certainly as much as the influence of Thackeray to which Sir Arthur Pinero traces it.
But I must let Sir Arthur speak for himself. In a letter in which he has been so good as to remind me of to-morrow’s date he says:—
“I look upon Robertson as a genius. Not that he wrote anything very profound, or anything very witty, but because, at a time when the English stage had sunk to even a lower ebb than it is usually credited with reaching; when the theatres stank of stale gas and orange-peel and the higher drama was represented mainly by adaptations from Scribe by Leicester Buckingham; he had the vision to see that a new public could be created, and an old and jaded one refreshed, by invoking for dramatic purposes the spirit, and using some part of the method, of Thackeray.”
This is admirable, and I only wish our dramatists would more often be tempted into the region of dramatic criticism. All the same I confess that (after going through all Robertson’s plays) it seems to me to overrate the Thackerayan influence. There is a little sentimental cynicism in Robertson and there is much in Thackeray. There is a tipsy old reprobate in _Pendennis_ and there is another in _Caste_. Tom Stylus helped to found a newspaper and so did George Warrington. Esther D’Alroy tried vainly to buckle on her husband’s sword-belt when he was ordered on service, and Amelia Osborne hovered helplessly about her husband with his red sash on the eve of Waterloo. But such matters as these are common property, _communia_, and the artist’s business, which Horace said was so difficult, is _proprie communia dicere_, to give them an individual turn. Drunkenness apart I don’t think Eccles is a bit like Costigan. As to the Thackerayan spirit, would that Robertson had “invoked” it! His plays might then be classics still, as Thackeray is, instead of merely documents.
If we are to connect Robertson with some typical Victorian novelist, I would myself, with all deference to Sir Arthur, suggest Trollope. His young women, his Naomi Tighes and Bellas, his Polly and Esther Eccles, strike me as eminently Trollopean. There are traces of Mrs. Proudie in both Mrs. Sutcliffe and Lady Ptarmigant. But, probably, these also are only instances of _communia_. Probably the young ladies (and, for all I know, the old ones, too) were real types of the ’sixties, as we see them in Leech’s drawings. Bless their sweet baby-faces and their simple hearts and their pork-pie hats!
The Robertsonian way is often spoken of as a “return to nature.” It is, in fact, a common eulogy of most reactions in art. “Don Quixote” was a return to nature, compared with the romances of chivalry, and “Tom Jones” was a return to nature, compared with “Don Quixote.” The world gradually changes its point of view and sees the facts of life in a new light. Artists change with the rest of the world, and give expression to the new vision. They are hailed as reformers until the next reformation; they seem to have returned to nature, until the world’s view of “nature” again changes. I think, as I have said, that Robertson’s work is to be related to the general anti-romantic reaction that started in France in mid-nineteenth century. But all reactions keep something of what they react against, and Robertson’s reaction retains a good deal of romance. _School_ is as romantic as the German Cinderella-story, on which it was founded. The central situation of _Caste_—the return home of the husband given up for dead—is essentially romantic, not a jot less romantic than in _La joie fait peur_. The scenes at the “Owl’s Roost” in _Society_, applauded for their daring realism, are realistic presentations of the last stronghold of the romantic Murger tradition, literary “Bohemia.” Robertson’s dialogue was often the high-flown lingo of the old romance. (In dialogue we have “returned to nature” several times over since his day.) But more often it was not. He astonished and delighted his contemporaries by making many of his people speak in the theatre as they spoke out of it. He invented sentimental situations that were charming then and would be charming now—love-passages in London squares and over milk-jugs in the moonlight. He had been an actor and a stage manager and knew how to make the very most of stage resources. Take the scene of George’s return in _Caste_. There is a cry of “milkaow” and a knock at the door. “Come in,” cries Polly to the milkman—and in walks with the milk-can one risen from the dead! This thrilling _coup de théâtre_ is followed, however, by something much better, the pathetic scenes of Polly’s hysterical joy and her tender artifice in breaking the news to Esther. I confess that I cannot read these scenes without tears. There was a quality of freshness and delicate simplicity in Robertson’s work at its best that was a true “return to nature.” No need, is there? to speak of the luck his work had in finding such interpreters as the Bancrofts and their company or of the luck the actors had in finding the work to interpret—the Bancrofts themselves have already told that tale. But it all happened half a century ago and I suppose we are not to expect a future Robertson revival. The past is past. Life is perpetual change. The more reason for not neglecting occasions of pious commemoration. Let us, then, give a friendly thought to “Tom” Robertson to-morrow.
VERSATILITY