Chapter 8

To read the _Memoires_ is to feel that in writing them the great musician deliberately set himself to win the heart of posterity. He believed in himself, and he believed in his music: he divined that one day or another he would be legendary as well as immortal; and he took an infinite deal of pains to make certain that the ideal which was presently to represent him in men's minds should be an ideal of which he could thoroughly approve. It is fair to note that in this care for the good will and the good word of the future he was not by any means alone. The _romantiques_, indeed, were keen--from Napoleon downwards--to make the very best of themselves. The poet of the _Legende des Siecles_, for example, went early to work to arrange the story of his life and character at least as carefully as he composed the audiences of his _premieres_; and he did it with so light a hand, and with such a sense of the importance of secrecy, that it is even now by no means so well and widely known as it should be that _Victor Hugo raconte par un Temoin de sa Vie_ is the work of the hero's wife, and was not only inspired but may also have been revised and prepared for publication by the hero himself. Again, the dramatist of _Antony_ and the novelist of _Bragelonne_ was never so happy as when he was engaged upon the creation of what he hoped would be the historical Dumas; he made volume after volume of delightful reading out of his own impressions and adventures; he turned himself into copy with a frankness, a grace, a gusto, a persistency of egoism, which are merely enchanting. Berlioz, therefore, had good warrant for his work. It is more to the point, perhaps, that he would have taken it if he had not had it. And I hold that he would have done well; for (in any case) a great man's notion of himself is, _ipso facto_, better and more agreeable and convincing, especially as he presents it, than the idea of his inferiors and admirers, especially as presented by them. Berlioz, it is true, was prodigal in these _Memoires_ of his of wit and fun and devilry, of fine humanity and noble art, of good things said and great things dreamed and done and suffered; but he was prodigal of invention and suppression as well, and the result, while considerably less veracious, is all the more fascinating, therefor. One feels that for one thing he was too complete an artist to be merely literal and exact; that for another he saw and felt things for himself, as Milton did before him--Milton in the mind's eye of Milton the noblest of created things and to Mr. Saintsbury almost as unpleasing a spectacle as the gifted but abject Racine; and for a third that from his own point of view he was right, and there is an end of it.

GEORGE ELIOT

The Ideal.

It was thought that with George Eliot the Novel-with-a-Purpose had really come to be an adequate instrument for the regeneration of humanity. It was understood that Passion only survived to point a moral or provide the materials of an awful tale, while Duty, Kinship, Faith, were so far paramount as to govern Destiny and mould the world. A vague, decided flavour of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was felt to pervade the moral universe, a chill but seemly halo of Golden Age was seen to play soberly about things in general. And it was with confidence anticipated that those perfect days were on the march when men and women would propose--(from the austerest motives)--by the aid of scientific terminology.

The Real.

To the Sceptic--(an apostate, and an undoubted male)--another view was preferable. He held that George Eliot had carried what he called the 'Death's-Head Style' of art a trifle too far. He read her books in much the same spirit and to much the same purpose that he went to the gymnasium and diverted himself with parallel bars. He detested her technology; her sententiousness revolted while it amused him; and when she put away her puppets and talked of them learnedly and with understanding--instead of letting them explain themselves, as several great novelists have been content to do--he recalled how Wisdom crieth out in the street and no man regardeth her, and perceived that in this case the fault was Wisdom's own. He accepted with the humility of ignorance, and something of the learner's gratitude, her woman generally, from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet. But his sense of sex was strong enough to make him deny the possibility in any stage of being of nearly all the governesses in revolt it pleased her to put forward as men; for with very few exceptions he knew they were heroes of the divided skirt. To him Deronda was an incarnation of woman's rights; Tito an 'improper female in breeches'; Silas Marner a good, perplexed old maid, of the kind of whom it is said that they have 'had a disappointment.' And Lydgate alone had aught of the true male principle about him.

Appreciations.

Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a handful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books--('on several occasions')--that 'it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels'; that, 'while less romantic than Euclid's Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving reading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand _plus_ Science and _minus_ Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as 'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and is not unkind.

BORROW

His Vocation.

Three hundred years since Borrow would have been a gentleman adventurer: he would have dropped quietly down the river, and steered for the Spanish Main, bent upon making carbonadoes of your Don. But he came too late for that, and falling upon no sword and buckler age but one that was interested in Randal and Spring, he accepted that he found, and did his best to turn its conditions, into literature. As he had that admirable instinct of making the best of things which marks the true adventurer, he was on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing for Javan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of everything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent at the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze hard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring to the romantic mind than any Mingo or Comanch that ever traded a scalp. While as for your tricks of fence--your immortal _passado_, your _punto reverso_--if that be no longer the right use for a gentleman, have not Spring and Langan fought their great battle on Worcester racecourse? and has not Cribb of Gloucestershire--that renowned, heroic, irresistible Thomas--beaten Molyneux the negro artist in the presence of twenty thousand roaring Britons? and shall the practice of an art which has rejoiced in such a master as the illustrious Game Chicken, Hannibal of the Ring, be held degrading by an Englishman of sufficient inches who, albeit a Tory and a High Churchman, is at bottom as thoroughgoing a Republican as ever took the word of command from Colonel Cromwell? And if all this fail, if he get nobody to put on the gloves with him, if the tents of the Romany prove barren of interest, if the king's highway be vacant of adventure as Mayfair, he has still philology to fall back upon, he can still console himself with the study of strange tongues, he can still exult in a peculiar superiority by quoting the great Ab Gwylim where the baser sort of persons is content with Shakespeare. So that what with these and some kindred diversions--a little horse-whispering and ale-drinking, the damnation of Popery, the study of the Bible--he can manage not merely to live but to live so fully and richly as to be the envy of some and the amazement of all. That, as life goes and as the world wags, is given to few. Add to it the credit of having written as good a book about Spain as ever was written in any language, the happiness of having dreamed and partly lived that book ere it was written, the perfect joy of being roundly abused by everybody, and the consciousness of being different from everybody and of giving at least as good as ever you got at several things the world is silly enough to hold in worship--as the Toryism of Sir Walter, or the niceness of Popery, or the pleasures of Society: and is it not plain that Borrow was a man uncommon fortunate, and that he enjoyed life as greatly as most men not savages who have possessed the fruition of this terrestrial sphere?

Ideals and Achievements.

He prepared his effects as studiously and almost as dexterously as Dumas himself. His instinct of the picturesque was rarely indeed at fault; he marshalled his personages and arranged his scene with something of that passion for effect which entered so largely into the theory of M. le Comte de Monte-Cristo. However closely disguised, himself is always the heroic figure, and he is ever busy in arranging discovery and triumph. To his chance-mates he is but an eccentric person, an amateur tinker, a slack-baked gipsy, an unlettered hack; to his audience he is his own, strong, indifferent self: presently the rest will recognise him and he will be disdainfully content. And recognise him they do. He throws off his disguise; there is a gape, a stare, a general conviction that Lavengro is the greatest man in the world; and then--as the manner of Lesage commands--the adventure ends, the stars resume their wonted courses, and the self-conscious Tinker-Quixote takes the road once more and passes on to other achievements: a mad preacher to succour, a priest to baffle, some tramp to pound into a jelly of humility, an applewoman to mystify, a horse-chaunter to swindle, a pugilist to study and help and portray. But whatever it be, Lavengro emerges from the ordeal modestly, unobtrusively, quietly, most consciously magnificent. Circumstantial as Defoe, rich in combinations as Lesage, and with such an instinct of the picturesque, both personal and local, as none of these possessed, this strange wild man holds on his strange wild way, and leads you captive to the end. His dialogue is copious and appropriate: you feel that like Ben Jonson he is dictating rather than reporting, that he is less faithful and exact than imaginative and determined; but you are none the less pleased with it, and suspicious though you be that the voice is Lavengro's and the hands are the hands of some one else, you are glad to surrender to the illusion, and you regret when it is dispelled. Moreover, that all of it should be set down in racy, nervous, idiomatic English, with a kind of eloquence at once primitive and scholarly, precious but homely--the speech of an artist in sods and turfs--if at first it surprise and charm yet ends by seeming so natural and just that you go on to forget all about it and accept the whole thing as the genuine outcome of a man's experience which it purports to be. Add that it is all entirely unsexual; that there is none with so poor an intelligence of the heart as woman moves it; that the book does not exist in which the relations between boy and girl are more miserably misrepresented than in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_; that that picaresque ideal of romance which, finding utterance in Hurtado de Mendoza, was presently to appeal to such artists as Cervantes, Quevedo, Lesage, Smollett, the Dickens of _Pickwick_, finds such expression in _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ as nowhere else; and the tale of Borrow is complete enough.

Himself.

Despite or because of a habit of mystification which obliged him to jumble together the homely Real and a not less homely Ideal, Lavengro will always, I think, be found worthy of companionship, if only as the one exemplary artist-tramp the race has yet achieved. The artist-tramp, the tinker who can write, the horse-coper with a twang of Hamlet and a habit of Monte-Cristo--that is George Borrow. For them that love these differences there is none in whom they are so cunningly and quaintly blended as George Borrow; and they that love them not may keep the other side of the road and fare in peace elsewhither.

BALZAC

Under which King?

To Goethe it seemed that every one of Balzac's novels had been dug out of a suffering woman's heart: but Goethe spoke not always wisely, and in this exacting world there be some that not only have found fault with Balzac's method and results but have dared to declare his theory of society the dream of a mind diseased. To these critics Balzac was less observer than creator: his views were false, his vision was distorted, and though he had 'incomparable power' he had not power enough to make them accept his work. This theory is English, and in France they find Balzac possible enough. There is something of him in Pierre Dupont; he made room for the work of Flaubert, Feydeau, the younger Dumas, Augier and Zola and the brothers Goncourt; and to him Charles Baudelaire is as some fat strange fungus to the wine-cask in whose leakings it springs. Sainte-Beuve refused to accept him, but his 'Pigault-Lebrun des duchesses' is only malicious: he resented the man's exuberant and inordinate personality, and made haste to apply to it some drops of that sugared vitriol of which he had the secret. Taine is a fitter critic of the _Comedie humaine_ than Sainte-Beuve; and Taine has come to other conclusions. Acute, coarse, methodical, exhaustive, he has recognised the greatness of one still more exhaustive, methodical, coarse, and acute than himself. English critics fall foul of Balzac's women; but Taine falls foul of English critics, and with the authority of a Parisian by profession declares that the _Parisiennes_ of the _Comedie_ are everything they ought to be--the true daughters of their 'bon gros libertin de pere.' And while Taine, exulting in his Marneffe and his Coralie, does solemnly and brilliantly show that he is right and everybody else is wrong, a later writer--English of course--can find no better parallel of Balzac than Browning, and knows nothing in art so like the Pauline of _la Peau de Chagrin_ as the Sistine Madonna. It is curious, this clash of opinions; and it is plain that one or other party must be wrong. Which is it? 'Qui trompe-t-on ici?' Is Taine a better judge than Mr. Leslie Stephen or Mr. Henry James? Or are Messrs. James and Stephen better qualified to speak with authority than Taine? It may be that none but a Frenchman can thoroughly and intimately apprehend in its inmost a thing so essentially French as the _Comedie_; it is a fact that Frenchmen of all sorts and sizes have accepted the _Comedie_ in its totality; and that is reason good enough for any commonplace Englishman who is lacking in the vanity of originality to accept it also.

The Fact.

Balzac's ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. His Hulot was to remain the Antony of modern romance, losing the world for the love of woman, and content to lose it; his Marneffe, in whom is incarnated the instinct and the science of sexual corruption, is Hulot's Cleopatra, and only dies because 'elle va faire le bon Dieu'--as who should say 'to mash the Old Man'; Frenhoeffer, Philippe Bridau, Vautrin, Marsay, Rastignac, Grandet, Balthazar Claes, Beatrix, Sarrazine, Lousteau, Esther, Lucien Chardon--the list is, I believe, some thousands strong! Also the argument is proved in advance: there is the _Comedie_ itself--'the new edition fifty volumes long.' Bad or good, foul or fair, impossible or actual, a monstrous debauch of mind or a triumph of realisation, there is the _Comedie_. It is forty years since Balzac squared and laid the last stones of it; and it exists--if a little the worse for wear: the bulk is enormous--if the materials be in some sort worm-eaten and crumbling. Truly, he had 'incomparable power.' He was the least capable and the most self-conscious of artists; his observation was that of an inspired and very careful auctioneer; he was a visionary and a fanatic; he was gross, ignorant, morbid of mind, cruel in heart, vexed with a strain of Sadism that makes him on the whole corrupting and ignoble in effect. But he divined and invented prodigiously if he observed and recorded tediously, and his achievement remains a phantasmagoria of desperate suggestions and strange, affecting situations and potent and inordinate effects. He may be impossible; but there is French literature and French society to show that he passed that way, and had 'incomparable power.' The phrase is Mr. Henry James's, and it is hard to talk of Balzac and refrain from it.

LABICHE

Teniers or Daumier?

To the maker of Poirier and Fabrice, of Seraphine and Giboyer, of Olympe and the Marquis d'Auberive, there were analogies between the genius of Labiche and the genius of Teniers. 'C'est au premier abord,' says he, 'le meme aspect de caricature; c'est, en y regardant de plus pres, la meme finesse de tons, la meme justesse d'expression, la meme vivacite de mouvement.' For myself, I like to think of Labiche as in some sort akin to Honore Daumier. Earnestness and accomplishment apart, he has much in common with that king of caricaturists. The lusty frankness, the jovial ingenuity, the keen sense of the ridiculous, the insatiable instinct of observation, of the draughtsman are a great part of the equipment of the playwright. Augier notes that truth is everywhere in Labiche's work, and Augier is right. He is before everything a dramatist: an artist, that is, whose function is to tell a story in action and by the mouths of its personages; and whimsical and absurd as he loves to be, he is never either the one or the other at the expense of nature. He is often careless and futile: he will squander--(as in _Vingt-neuf Degres a l'Ombre_ and _l'Avare en Gants_ _Jaunes_)--an idea that rightly belongs to the domain of pure comedy on the presentation of a most uproarious farce. But he is never any falser to his vocation than this. Now and then, as in _Moi_ and _le Voyage de M. Perrichon_, he is an excellent comic poet, dealing with comedy seriously as comedy should be dealt with, and incarnating a vice or an affectation in a certain character with impeccable justness and assurance. Now and then, as in _les Petits Oiseaux_ and _les Vivacites du Capitaine Tic_, he is content to tell a charming story as pleasantly as possible. Sometimes, as in _Celimare le Bien-Aime_ (held by M. Sarcey to be the high-water mark of the modern _vaudeville_), _le Plus Heureux des Trois_, and _le Prix Martin_, he fights again from a humouristic point of view that triangular duel between the wife, the husband, and the lover which fills so large a place in the literature of France; and then he shows the reverse of the medal of adultery--with the husband at his ease, the seducer haunted by the ghosts of old sins, the erring wife the slave of her unsuspecting lord. Or again, he takes to turning the world upside down, and--as in the _Cagnotte_, the _Chapeau de Paille_, and the _Trente Millions_--to producing a scheme of morals and society that seems to have been dictated from an Olympus demoralised by champagne and lobster. But at his wildest he never forgets that men and women are themselves. His dialogue is always right and appropriate, however extravagant it be. His vivid and varied knowledge of life and character supplies him with touches enough of nature and truth to make the fortune of a dozen ordinary dramatists; and withal you feel as you read that he is writing, as Augier says of him, to amuse himself merely, and that he could an if he would be solemn and didactic with all the impressiveness that a perfect acquaintance with men and things and an admirable dramatic aptitude can bestow. The fact that he is always in a good temper has done him some wrong in that it has led him to be to all appearances amusing only, where he might well have posed as a severe and serious artist. But he is none the less true for having elected to be funny, and there is certainly more genuine human nature and human feeling in such drolleries as the _Chapeau de Paille_ and _le Plus Heureux des Trois_ than in all the serious dramas of Ponsard (say) and Hugo put together.

Labiche.

Perhaps the most characteristic and individual part of his work is that in which he has given his invention full swing, and allowed his humour to play its maddest pranks at will. _Moi_ is an admirable comedy, and De la Porcheraie is almost hideously egoistic; the _Voyage de M. Perrichon_ is delightful reading, and Perrichon is as pompous an ass as I know; but the _Chapeau de Paille_, the _Cagnotte_, the _Trente Millions_, the _Sensitive_, the _Deux Merles Blancs_, the _Doit-On le Dire_, and their compeers--with them it is other-guess work altogether. In these whimsical phantasmagorias men and women move and speak as at the bidding of destinies drunk with laughing-gas. Time and chance have gone demented, fate has turned comic poet, society has become its own parody, everybody is the irrepressible caricature of himself. You are in a topsy- turvy world, enveloped in an atmosphere instinct with gaiety and folly, where burlesque is natural and only the extravagant is normal; where your Chimaera has grown frolic, your Nightmare is first Cousin to the Cheshire Cat, and your Sphinxes are all upon the spree; and where you have as little concern for what is real as you have in that hemisphere of the great globe of Moliere--that has Scapin and Sganarelle for its breed-bates, and Pourceaugnac for its butt, and Pancrace and Marphurius for its scientific men, and Lelie and Agnes for its incarnations of love and beauty. That the creator of such a world as this should have aspired to the Academy's spare arm-chair--that one above all others but just vacated by the respectable M. de Sacy--was a fact that roused the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ even to satire. But if the arm-chair brought honour with it, then no man better deserved the privilege than Eugene Labiche, for he had amused and kept awake the public for nearly forty years--for almost as long, that is, as the _Revue_ had been sending it to sleep. There are times and seasons when a good laugh makes more for edification than whole folios of good counsel. 'I regarded him not,' quoth Sir John of one that would have moved him to sapience, 'and yet he talked wisely.' Now Sir John, whatever his opinion of the _Revue_, would never have said all that--the second part of it he might--of anything signed 'Eugene Labiche,' nor--so I love to believe--would his august creator either. For is not his work so full of quick, fiery, and delectable shapes as to be perpetual sherris? And when time and season fit, what more can the heart of man desire?

CHAMPFLEURY

The Man.