Chapter 22

At the town theatre, Hebbel's _Judith_ was being performed, with Clara Ziegler in the leading part. At that time this lady enjoyed a considerable reputation in Germany, and was, too, a tall, splendid-looking female, with a powerful voice, a good mimic, and all the rest of it, but a mere word-machine. The acting showed up the want of taste in the piece. Holofernes weltered knee-deep in gore and bragged incessantly; Judith fell in love with his "virility," and when he had made her "the guardian of his slumbers" murdered him, from a long disremembered loyalty to the God of Israel.

At the Thalia Theatre, Raupach's _The School of Life_ was being produced, a lot of silly stuff, the theme of it, for that matter, allied to the one dealt with later by Drachmann in _Once upon a Time_. A Princess is hard-hearted and capricious. To punish her, the King, her father, shuts a man into her bedroom, makes a feigned accusation against her, and actually drives her out of the castle. She becomes a waiting-maid, and passes through various stages of civil life. The King of Navarra, whose suit she had haughtily rejected, disguised as a goldsmith, marries her, then arrays himself in silks and velvets, to tempt her to infidelity. When she refuses, he allows every possible injustice to be heaped upon her, to try her, makes her believe that the King, on a false accusation, has had her husband's eyes put out, and then himself goes about with a bandage before his eyes, and lets her beg. She believes everything and agrees to everything, until at last, arrived at honour and glory, she learns that it has all been only play-acting, trial, and education.

This nonsense was exactly on a par with taste in Germany at the time, which was undeniably considerably below the level of that in France and Denmark, and it was acted by a group of actors, some very competent, at the chief theatre of Hamburg. Slowly though business life pulsated in Denmark, we were superior to Germany in artistic perception.

The low stage of artistic development at which Hamburg had then arrived could not, however, efface the impression its superiority over Copenhagen in other respects had made upon me. Take it all together, my few days in Hamburg were well spent.

II.

And then I set foot once more in the country which I regarded as my second fatherland, and the overflowing happiness of once more feeling French ground under my feet returned undiminished and unchanged. I had had all my letters sent to Mlle. Louise's address, so fetched them shortly after my arrival and saw the girl again. Her family invited me to dinner several times during the very first week, and I was associated with French men and women immediately upon my arrival.

They were well-brought-up, good-natured, hospitable bourgeois, very narrow in their views. Not in the sense that they took no interest in politics and literature, but in that questions for them were decided once and for all in the clerical spirit. They did not regard this as a party standpoint, did not look upon themselves as adherents of a party; their way of thinking was the right one; those who did not agree with them held opinions they ought to be ashamed of, and which they probably, in private, were ashamed of holding and expressing.

Mlle. Louise had a cousin whom she used to speak of as a warm-hearted man with peculiar opinions, eager and impetuous, who would like to make the acquaintance of her friend from the North. The aunts called him a passionate Catholic, and an energetic writer in the service of the Church Militant. Shortly after my arrival, I met him at dinner. He was a middle-aged, pale, carelessly dressed man with ugly, irregular features, and a very excitable manner. With him came his wife, who though pale and enthusiastic like himself, yet looked quite terrestrial. He introduced himself as Ernest Hello, contributor to Veuillot's then much talked of Romish paper, _L'Univers_, which, edited with no small talent by a noted stylist, adopted all sorts of abusive methods as weapons in every feud in which the honour of the Church was involved. It was against Veuillot that Augier had just aimed the introduction to his excellent comedy, _Le Fils de Giboyer_, and he made no secret of the fact that in the Déodat mentioned in the piece he had had this writer of holy abuse in his mind. Hello was in everything Veuillot's vassal.

He was one of the martial believers who despised and hated the best free research men, and who knew himself in a position to confute them. He possessed some elements of culture, and had early had thoroughly drilled into him what, in comparison with the views of later times on History and Religion, was narrow and antiquated in Voltaire's education, and for this reason regarded, not only Voltaire's attack on the Church, but all subsequent philosophy inimical to the Church, as belonging to a bygone age. He was a fanatic, and there was a sacristy odour about all that he said. But there was in his disposition an enthusiastic admiration for weakness in fighting against external strength, and for courage that expressed itself in sheer defiance of worldly prudence, that made him feel kindly towards the young Dane. Denmark's taking up arms, with its two million inhabitants, against a great power like Prussia, roused his enthusiasm. "It is great, it is Spartan!" he exclaimed. It must certainly be admitted that this human sympathy was not a prominent characteristic, and he wearied me with his hateful verdicts over all those whom I, and by degrees, all Europe, esteemed and admired in France.

As an instance of the paradoxicalness to which Huysmans many years later became addicted, the latter tried to puff up Hello as being a man of remarkable intellect; and an instance of the want of independence with which the new Catholic movement was carried on in Denmark is to be found in the fact that the organ of Young Denmark, _The Tower_, could declare: "Hello is one of the few whom all men of the future are agreed to bow before.... Hello was,--not only a Catholic burning with religious ardour,--but a genius; these two things explain everything."

When Hello invited me to his house, I regarded it as my duty to go, that I might learn as much as possible, and although his circle was exceedingly antipathetic to me, I did not regret it; the spectacle was highly instructive.

Next to Hello himself, who, despite his fanaticism and restlessness, impressed one as very inoffensive at bottom, and not mischievous if one steered clear of such names as Voltaire or Renan, the chief member of his circle was the black doctor, (_le Docteur noir_,) so much talked of in the last years of the Empire, and who is even alluded to in Taine's _Graindorge_. His real name was Vries. He was a negro from the Dutch West Indies, a veritable bull, with a huge body and a black, bald physiognomy, made to stand outside a tent at a fair, and be his own crier to the public. His conversation was one incessant brag, in atrocious French. Although he had lived seventeen years in France, he spoke almost unintelligibly.

He persuaded himself, or at least others, that he had discovered perpetual motion, vowed that he had made a machine which, "by a simple mechanism," could replace steam power and had been declared practicable by the first engineers in Paris; but of course he declined to speak freely about it. Columbus and Fulton only were his equals; he knew all the secrets of Nature. He had been persecuted--in 1859 he had been imprisoned for eleven months, on a charge of quackery--because all great men were persecuted; remember our Lord Jesus Christ! He himself was the greatest man living. _Moi vous dire le plus grand homme d'universe_. Hello and the ladies smiled admiringly at him, and never grew tired of listening to him. This encouraged him to monopolise the conversation: He, Vries, was a man possessed of courage and wisdom; he understood Phrenology, Allopathy, Homoeopathy, Engineering Science, Metereology--like Molière's doctors and Holberg's Oldfux. His greatest and most special gift was that of curing cancer. Like writing-masters, who hang out specimens of how people wrote when they came to them, and of their caligraphy after they had benefited by their instruction, he had his cancer patients photographed before and after his treatment, looking ghastly the first time, and as fresh as a flower the second, and these pictures hung on view in his house. No wonder, therefore, that Napoleon III--so Vries said--had his portrait in an album containing, besides, only portraits of European sovereigns.

He pretended that he had made many important prophecies. This was a bond between him and Hello, who claimed the same extraordinary power, and had foretold all sorts of singular events. He performed miraculous cures; this appealed to Hello, who was suspicious of all rational Science and ready to believe any mortal thing. He could read everybody's characters in their faces. This was a pretext for the most barefaced flattery of Hello, his wife, and their friends of both sexes, and of course everything was swallowed with alacrity. To me he said: "Monsieur is gentle, very calm, very indulgent, and readily forgives an injury."

Hideous though he was, his powerful brutality had a great effect on the ladies of the circle. They literally hung upon his words. He seized them by the wrists, and slid his black paws up their bare arms. The married women whispered languishingly: "You have a marvellous power over women." The husbands looked on smilingly.

Now when Hello and he and their friends and the ladies began to talk about religious matters and got steam up, it was a veritable witches' Sabbath, and no mistake, every voice being raised in virulent cheap Jack denunciation of freedom, and common sense. Satan himself had dictated Voltaire's works; now Voltaire was burning in everlasting fire. Unbelievers ought to be exterminated; it would serve them right. Renan ought to be hanged on the first tree that would bear him; the Black Doctor even maintained that in Manila he would have been shot long ago. It was always the Doctor who started the subject of the persecution of heretics. Hello himself persecuted heretics with patronising scorn, but was already ready to drop into a hymn of praise to the Madonna.

I had then read two of Hello's books, _Le Style_ and _M. Renan, L'Allemagne et l'Athéisme au 19me Siècle_. Such productions are called books, because there is no other name for them. As a matter of fact, idle talk and galimatias of the sort are in no wise literature. Hello never wrote anything but Roman Catholic sermons, full of theological sophistries and abuse of thinking men. In those years his books, with their odour of incense, made the small, flat inhabitants of the sacristy wainscotting venture out of their chinks in the wall in delight; but they obtained no applause elsewhere.

It was only after his death that it could occur to a morbid seeker after originality, with a bitter almond in place of a heart, like Huysmans, to make his half-mad hero, Des Esseintes, who is terrified of the light, find satisfaction in the challenges to common sense that Hello wrote. Hello was a poor wretch who, in the insane conviction that he himself was a genius, filled his writings with assertions concerning the marvellous, incomprehensible nature of genius, and always took up the cudgels on its behalf. During the Empire, his voice was drowned. It was only a score of years later that the new Catholic reaction found it to their advantage to take him at his word and see in him the genius that he had given himself out to be. He was as much a genius as the madman in the asylum is the Emperor.

III.

A few days after my arrival, I called upon Taine and was cordially received. He presented me with one of his books and promised me his great work, _De l'Intelligence_, which was to come out in a few days, conversed with me for an hour, and invited me to tea the following evening. He had been married since I had last been at his house, and his wife, a young, clear-skinned lady with black plaits, brown eyes and an extremely graceful figure, was as fresh as a rose, and talked with the outspoken freedom of youth, though expressing herself in carefully selected words.

After a few days, Taine, who was generally very formal with strangers, treated me with conspicuous friendliness. He offered at once to introduce me to Renan, and urgently advised me to remain six months in Paris, in order to master the language thoroughly, so that I might enlighten Frenchmen on the state of things in the North, as well as picture the French to my fellow-countrymen. Why should I not make French my auxiliary language, like Turgenieff and Hillebrandt!

Taine knew nothing of German belles lettres. As far as philosophy was concerned, he despised German Aesthetics altogether, and laughed at me for believing in "Aesthetics" at all, even one day introducing me to a stranger as "A young Dane who does not believe in much, but is weak enough to believe in Aesthetics." I was not precisely overburdened by the belief. But a German Aesthetic, according to Taine's definition, was a man absolutely devoid of artistic perception and sense of style, who lived only in definitions. If you took him to the theatre to see a sad piece, he would tear his hair with delight, and exclaim: "_Voilà das Tragische!_"

Of the more modern German authors, Taine knew only Heine, of whom he was a passionate admirer and whom, by reason of his intensity of feeling, he compared with Dante. A poem like the _Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ roused his enthusiasm. Goethe's shorter poems, on the other hand, he could not appreciate, chiefly no doubt because he did not know German sufficiently well. He was not even acquainted with the very best of Goethe's short things, and one day that I asked him to read one poem aloud, the words in his mouth rang very French.

_Lieber dur Laydénn möcht ee mee schlag'e, als so feel Frödenn des Laybengs airtrah'ge_, was intended to be--

Lieber durch Leiden, Möcht ich mich schlagen Als so viel Freuden Des Lebens ertragen.

Goethe's prose he did not consider good, but heavy and prolix, and lacking in descriptive power. He would praise Voltaire's prose at his expense. "You perceive the figure and its movements far more clearly," he said. The German romanticists disgusted him; their style, also, was too inartistic for him (_ils ne savent pas écrire, cela me dégoûte d'eux_).

I frequently met friends at his house, amongst others, Marcelin, who had been his friend from boyhood, and upon whom, many years later, he wrote a melancholy obituary. This man, the proprietor of that supremely worldly paper, _La Vie Parisienne_, was a powerful, broad-shouldered, ruddy-cheeked man, who looked the incarnation of health and very unlike one's preconception of the editor of the most frivolous and fashionable weekly in Paris. He was a draughtsman and an author, had studied the history of the last few centuries in engravings, and himself owned a collection of no fewer than 300,000. What Taine had most admired in him was the iron will with which, left, at nineteen years of age, penniless, and defectively educated, as head of his family, he had kept his mother and brothers and sisters by his work. Next to that Taine admired his earnestness. Marcelin, who was generally looked upon as belonging to gay Paris, was a solitary-minded man, an imaginative recreator of the peoples of the past, as they were and went about, of their ways and customs. He it was who opened Taine's eyes to the wealth of contributions to history locked up in collections of engravings, more especially perhaps as regarded people's external appearance, and what the exterior revealed. Another friend who came to Taine at all sorts of times was Gleyre, the old painter, who had been born in French Switzerland, but was otherwise a Parisian. And he was not the only deeply idealistic artist with whom Taine was connected in the bonds of friendship. Although a fundamental element of Taine's nature drew him magnetically to the art that was the expression of strength, tragic or carnal strength, a swelling exuberance of life, there was yet room in his soul for sympathy with all artistic endeavour, even the purely emotional. That which drew him to the idealistic painters was, at bottom, the same quality as drew him to Beethoven and Chopin.

Gleyre's best-known picture is the painting in the Louvre, somewhat weak in colouring, but showing much feeling, a Nile subject representing a man sitting on the banks of the river and watching the dreams of his youth, represented as beautiful women, fleeing from him on a decorated dahabeah, which is disappearing. The title is _Lost Illusions_. There is more strength in the painting, much reproduced in engraving, of a Roman army, conquered by Divico the Helvetian, passing under the yoke--a picture which, as an expression of the national pride of the Swiss, has been placed in the Museum at Lausanne.

Still, it was the man himself, rather than his pictures, that Taine thought so much of. Intellectually, Taine was in his inmost heart an admirer of the Italian and the English Renaissance, when most pagan and most unrestrained; his intellectual home was the Venice of the sixteenth century; he would have been in his right place at one of the festivals painted by Veronese, and should have worn the rich and tasteful costume of that period. But socially, and as a citizen, he was quite different, was affectionate and subdued and calm, excessively conventional; temperate in all his judgments, as in his life.

If I succeeded in winning his good-will, it was most emphatically not because I had written a book about him, which, for that matter, he could not understand; he barely glanced through it; he read, at most, the appreciative little review that Gaston Paris did me the honour to write upon it in the _Revue Critique_. But it appealed to him that I had come to France from pure love of knowledge, that I might become acquainted with men and women and intellectual life, and that I had spent my youth in study.

He grew fond of me, advised me as a father or an elder brother might have done, and smiled at my imprudences--as for instance when I almost killed myself by taking too strong a sleeping draught--(_vous êtes imprudent, c'est de votre âge_). He sometimes reproached me with not jotting down every day, as he did, whatever had struck me; he talked to me about his work, about the projected Essay on Schiller that came to nothing on account of the war, of his _Notes sur l'Angleterre_, which he wrote in a little out-of-the-way summer-house containing nothing save the four bare whitewashed walls, but a little table and a chair. He introduced into the book a few details that I had mentioned to him after my stay in England.

When we walked in the garden at his country-house at Châtenay, he sometimes flung his arm round my neck--an act which roused great astonishment in the Frenchmen present, who could scarcely believe their eyes. They knew how reserved he usually was.

It quite irritated Taine that the Danish Minister did nothing for me, and introduced me nowhere, although he had had to procure me a free pass to the theatre. Again and again he reverted to this, though I had never mentioned either the Minister or the Legation to him. But the revolutionary blood in him was excited at what he regarded as a slight to intellectual aristocracy. "What do you call a man like that? A Junker?" I said no. "Never mind! it is all the same. One feels that in your country you have had no revolution like ours, and know nothing about equality. A fellow like that, who has not made himself known in any way whatever, looks down on you as unworthy to sit at his table and does not move a finger on your behalf, although that is what he is there for. When I am abroad, they come at once from the French Embassy to visit me, and open to me every house to which they have admittance. I am a person of very small importance in comparison with Benedetti, but Benedetti comes to see me as often as I will receive him. We have no lording of it here."

These outbursts startled me, first, because I had never in the least expected or even wished either to be received by the Danish Minister or to be helped by him; secondly, because it revealed to me a wide difference between the point of view in the Romance countries, in France especially, and that in the North. In Denmark, I had never had the entrée to Court or to aristocratic circles, nor have I ever acquired it since, though, for that matter, I have not missed it in the least. But in the Romance countries, where the aristocratic world still occasionally possesses some wit and education, it is taken as a matter of course that talent is a patent of nobility, and, to the man who has won himself a name, all doors are open, indeed, people vie with one another to secure him. That a caste division like that in the North was quite unknown there, I thus learnt for the first time.

IV.

Through Taine, I very soon made the acquaintance of Renan, whose personality impressed me very much, grand and free of mind as he was, without a trace of the unctuousness that one occasionally meets in his books, yet superior to the verge of paradox.

He was very inaccessible, and obstinately refused to see people. But if he were expecting you, he would spare you several hours of his valuable time.

His house was furnished with exceeding simplicity. On one wall of his study hung two Chinese water-colours and a photograph of Gérôme's _Cleopatra before Caesar_; on the opposite wall, a very beautiful photograph of what was doubtless an Italian picture of the Last Day. That was all the ornamentation. On his table, there always lay a Virgil and a Horace in a pocket edition, and for a long time a French translation of Sir Walter Scott.

What surprised me most in Renan's bearing was that there was nothing solemn about it and absolutely nothing sentimental. He impressed one as being exceptionally clever and a man that the opposition he had met with had left as it found him. He enquired about the state of things in the North. When I spoke, without reserve, of the slight prospect that existed of my coming to the front with my opinions, he maintained that victory was sure. (_Vous l'emporterez! vous l'emporterez_!) Like all foreigners, he marvelled that the three Scandinavian countries did not try to unite, or at any rate to form an indissoluble Union. In the time of Gustavus Adolphus, he said, they had been of some political importance; since then they had retired completely from the historical stage. The reason for it must very probably be sought for in their insane internecine feuds.

Renan used to live, at that time, from the Spring onwards, at his house in the country, at Sèvres. So utterly unaffected was the world-renowned man, then already forty-seven years of age, that he often walked from his house to the station with me, and wandered up and down the platform till the train came.

His wife, who shared his thoughts and worshipped him, had chosen her husband herself, and, being of German family, had not been married after the French manner; still, she did not criticise it, as she thought it was perhaps adapted to the French people, and she had seen among her intimate acquaintances many happy marriages entered into for reasons of convenience. They had two children, a son, Ary, who died in 1900 after having made a name for himself as a painter, and written beautiful poems (which, however, were only published after his death), and a daughter, Noémi (Madame Psichari) who, faithfully preserving the intellectual heritage she has received from her great father, has become one of the centres of highest Paris, a soul of fire, who fights for Justice and Truth and social ideas with burning enthusiasm.

V.