Chapter VI: Part 6

Some of these episodes, once read, are fixed in the memory for ever; and of these the finest, I think, is _Le Portique_. Who can forget the death of Poterloo in the explosion of the obus, as he rises from the earth, bolt upright, black, his two arms stretched full length as on a cross, and a flame on his shoulders in place of the shattered head? We cannot banish that terrible image if we would. There are pages of _Le Feu_, which, just glanced at, imprint themselves on our consciousness--like the death of the horse, Trompette, in the mine of _Germinal_, for we are always brought back to our initial comparison of M. Barbusse with Zola. And those who appreciate what I can but call the epic grandeur of _Germinal_ or _L’Assommoir_, will do well to read _Le Feu_; while those who cannot endure the foul images, the filthy realism, the coarse slang, the half-mad enthusiasms and indignations of Zola, will be wise in avoiding any book by Henri Barbusse.

For M. Barbusse, like Zola, is an apostle and writes inspired by the energy of his social revolt. Like Péguy--although he is so different from Péguy--he longs to fly to the rescue. There was a medieval saint and poetess, Mechtild of Magdeburg, who sang in one of her lyric prayers, ‘Ô Christ on the Cross, lend me Thine arms to save a suffering world!’ That is the prayer of M. Barbusse, only he addresses it to Socialism--or rather, if I understand him aright, to Bolshevism. He would save the dumb dwellers in that dark underworld which, in the present state of things, appears to have no issue. ‘And he went down into Hell.’ More than once the line has slid into my mind in reading his unedifying pages, and I understood that here, too, was a sort of Gospel--the most modern of the apocrypha.

One may doubt of the wisdom of a social theory which, seeing the stain on our vesture, would simply turn it wrong side out. The stain may go right through. The world may prove no stronger and no saner if you set it upside down. I am not M. Barbusse’s political convert. But I admire him for his reaction, his revolt against that which most of us so readily accept--the sufferings of the unknown mass. It is well that there should be writers who rouse and reveal, though their trumpet notes be harsh and unmodulated--well there should be those who shake the sleepers from their sloth and bid them save their neighbours and themselves, building anew, lest the pillars of the temple fall and crush us all in their ruin.

In _Clarté_ the ideas of M. Barbusse are explained at full length: abolition of inheritance, universal disarmament, universal equality, universal Republic in the Federation of the World. In this book (which concerns the life of a clerk in the office of a factory, who marries, goes to the war, and returns to look at his wife and society, with not unkindly but disenchanted eyes)--M. Barbusse has lost his coarseness, but also that biting acid which imprinted on our remembrance the scenes of _Le Feu_. In his feminine characters--in the old aunt, in Marie, the wife, in the little blind girl whom every one pities and for whom no one cares--he shows a new quality of tenderness.

What will he give us to-morrow?

GEORGES DUHAMEL

Like Henri Barbusse, M. Georges Duhamel has found his great opportunity in the events of the war. Before 1914 we knew him as a young writer of promise in only too many directions. He had written a play, _À l’Ombre de Statues_, which Antoine produced at the Odéon Theatre, and which was (with Marie Lenéru’s _Affranchis_) the chief success of Antoine’s heroic voyage of discovery in the perilous tracts of unknown youthful genius. M. Duhamel was also just coming into notice as a poet and especially as a critic of poetry in the columns of the _Mercure de France_. We liked his young uncompromising voice and the deliberate way in which he said that he was proud to be born in the century which produced a Paul Claudel. He had as yet published no novel. But the mobilisation revealed his capacity as a doctor, and it was as an army-surgeon that he joined the forces.

His _Vie des Martyrs_ (which Mr Heinemann has published in English as the _New Book of Martyrs_) revealed a considerable writer, with that rare gift of insight, of recognition, which pierces at a glance to the core of things. Tenderness, infinite pity, regret, a sense of the helplessness of science, a sense of the hopelessness of so-called progress which ends in such an explosion of organised disorder--it is these feelings that inspire the good physician as he bends above the murdered youths, the martyrs, whom it is his destiny always to torture and sometimes to cure or to relieve. _La Vie des Martyrs_ is a set of brief sketches of the lives and deaths of wounded soldiers in hospital on the front.

With a brief, sure touch (which comes, I think, from his familiarity with the writing of verse), M. Duhamel indicates the few essential outlines which bring into living relief the poor lads to whom he ministers: the Zouave who thought himself so strong when his spine was touched with paralysis; Léglise, of whom his country claimed the double sacrifice of his two legs and who yet found life worth living; Boucheutore--but why enumerate the cases? It is not the cases that matter, it is the souls that animate these tortured and shattered bodies, which M. Duhamel knows how to make, as it were, transparent to our gaze. There is in these studies (as there was in the eyes of Béal) ‘une lumière, une douceur une tristesse extrêmes.’ We have heard of the religion of human suffering--and here it wells from a deep and loving nature, full of spiritual richness, and yet totally devoid of mysticism or piety.

I like _La Vie des Martyrs_ better than _Civilisation_ which followed it in 1918 and was awarded the Prix Goncourt last December. This latter book inclines to the theories of M. Barbusse: Oh, Civilisation, what crimes are committed in thy name! The setting is the same; the personages are still the wounded soldiers, but also the M.O.’s and great visiting Surgeons, sanitary inspectors, and in these latter sketches M. Duhamel reveals an admirable talent for caricature. There is something of Daumier’s biting wit in his portraits of medical ‘big-wigs.’

Here is a writer with great gifts, a master of tears and laughter. His sketches are admirable. But has he the gift of organic construction? Will he (as the draughtsman Boz became the painter Dickens) go on from strength to strength?

Time will show.

THE COUNTESS DE NOAILLES

Years and years ago--five-and-twenty years ago--I used sometimes to spend my Thursday afternoons with a Russian friend; more than once on these occasions our pleasure was heightened by the musical talent of her little cousins, the young daughters of the Princess Brancovan. In my mind’s eye I still see the two children seated on the long piano-stool; I contemplate their fervent shoulders, their four thick dark plaits, bobbing from side to side, and the small eager right hand of one, and the left hand of her sister, flying up and down the keyboard as they interpret, four-handed, some difficult page of Beethoven.

My friend died; years passed; I saw no more of the young musicians. They grew up; they married. And then one day, in 1901, a new book of poems burst--yes, literally _burst_--upon the world of letters; and I learnt with pleasure and curiosity that its author, the Countess Mathieu de Noailles, was the Princess Anna de Brancovan. Like all Paris, I read her poems.

Have you ever seen, in Switzerland or in Auvergne (in some mountain country), the spring meadows, at Eastertime, when the young foals, the lambs, and especially the little calves (born in the dusk of the stable in February) make their first irruption into a world of sunshine, of tender and fresh green grass stretching illimitably in all directions? If not, and if you would none the less realise the extreme of joy, of young delight in mere existence, take down from the shelf _Le Cœur Innombrable_, or indeed any of the early poems of Madame de Noailles.

Madame de Noailles resembles no living poet or poetess. There is none among them who gives us so absolutely the sense of inspiration--the poet’s frenzy with its flights and its fervours--and also the flagging, drifting laxness of the verse when suddenly that inspiration fail. Yet, even in that wandering delirium, we feel (as in the diviner poetry of Shelley) no less than the poet’s weakness, the strength and the ardour of the afflatus. On the frontispiece of her second book (_Les Éblouissements_, 1907), Mme de Noailles has inscribed a sentence from Plato’s _Banquet_: ‘My heart beats more tumultuously than the pulse of the priests of Cybele.’ And indeed the dance, the extravagant fury, the κoρυβαντιασμός, of the Phrygian festival are echoed in the strophes of this daughter of Hellas, married into the house of Noailles. But the young Mænad (strayed from Parnassus into France) is never more to my liking than when suddenly she interrupts her corybantic song to idle in her walled fruit-garden, making friends with her pears and apples, praising the brave, bright splashes of red on the ranks of her scarlet-runners, or counting the gathered peaches ranged among straw on the shelves of the fragrant fruitery, while a wasp whizzes out his soul of rage against the dusty window-pane:--

‘Ô peuple parfumé des fruits,
Vous que le chaud été compose
De cieux bleus et de terre rose,
Vous, sève dense, sucre mol,
Nés des jeux de l’air et du sol,
Vous qui vivez dans une crèche,
Petits dieux de la paille fraîche,
Compagnons de l’arrosoir vert.
Des hottes, des bêches, de fer,
Gardez-moi dans la douce ronde
Que forme votre odeur profonde!’

There is in Madame de Noailles something of Pindar--and something of Herrick. I like her best in Herrick’s vein, singing the homely things we know with a penetrating, new, and yet familiar sweetness:--

‘Bien plus que pour Bagdad dont le seul nom étonne,
Que pour Constantinople, ineffable Houri,
Je m’émeus quand je vois dans un matin d’automne
Le clocher de Corbeil ou de Château-Thierry.’

But that other self of hers--the Phrygian pythoness--is no less worthy of our attention. Every page of this volume bears the imprint of her image, ardent, wasted, joyous, excited, full of a mingled asperity and sweetness. Her voice rings out intoxicated with the wonder of the universe, the mystery of life, the terror of death. None of the poets of our generation has expressed so keenly the mortal pang caused by the impact of a beauty which is eternal on a system of nerves which is the cobweb of an hour:--

‘Je n’ai fait résonner que mes nerfs sur ma lyre.’

It is true there is little of deep emotion and little of pure thought in these earlier poems of Madame de Noailles; but all that the sense can receive of the outer world is exquisitely rendered. So alive is the poetess to the magic and glory of the visible world that she is jealous of that inner, personal realm which engrosses us so much. Constantly she regrets those years of childhood, which were objective, calm, free from the tumult of the heart:--

‘Enfants, regardez bien toutes les plaines rondes,
La capucine avec ses abeilles autour,
Regardez bien l’étang, les champs, avant l’amour;--
Car après l’on ne voit plus jamais rien du monde.

‘Après l’on ne voit plus que son cœur devant soi,
On ne voit plus qu’un peu de flamme sur sa route,
On n’entend rien, on ne sait rien, et l’on écoute
Les pieds du triste Amour qui court ou qui s’assoit.’

But passion is not the only power which contends with our faculty for absorbing the imperishable quality of the Cosmos. There is another, yet more terrible, which splits the glass in our hands, even as we raise it to our lips:--

‘Ô beauté de toute la terre,
Visage innombrable des jours,
Voyez avec quel sombre amour
Mon cœur en vous se désaltère.

‘Et pourtant il faudra nous en aller d’ici
Quitter les jours luisants, les jardins où noussommes,
Cesser d’être du sang, des yeux, des mains, des hommes,
Descendre dans la nuit avec un front noirci.

‘Descendre par l’étroite, l’horizontale porte,
Où l’on passe étendu, voilé, silencieux;
Ne plus jamais vous voir, Ô Lumière des cieux!
Hélas! je n’étais pas faite pour être morte.’

These verses, and many others no less beautiful--for one of the characteristics of Madame de Noailles is her abundance--could leave no doubt on my mind of the quality of the poetess, and I remember writing, when her second book appeared:--

‘There are four lyric poets--there are at least four lyric poets--writing to-day in France. If we glance over the land in a sort of bird’s eye view, we see, down by the river, like a faun in the reeds and rushes, M. Francis Jammes piping on his Pan’s pipe a sweet irregular and broken music. His is an elfin spirit, familiar with green things and shy wild animal life; his patrons are St Francis and Ariel. Where the bee sucks, there lurks he; and yet he is not wholly natural. Something quaint, furtive, and precious in his style reminds us of a constant artifice in his simplicity.

‘Let us now lift our gaze towards the busier haunts of men; there, in an inspired attitude, stands M. Fernand Gregh, his hand lifted towards the visionary lyre of Victor Hugo, which, like the dagger of Macbeth, hovers before him, just out of reach; yet, though he never wholly grasps it, sometimes the poet snatches a fine strain of music from the strings. A little higher, among the ruins of antiquity, meditates in music M. Henri de Régnier. But who is this who rushes past (her eye in a fine frenzy rolling), singing in an incoherent passion of delight, like the wild shepherdess--_La Ravie de l’Amour de Dieu_--in the Queen of Navarre’s delightful pastoral, soaring sunwards in a corybantic ecstasy--who is this lyric muse, half siren and half bird?

“And all a wonder and a wild desire.”’

(In those days I had not read the odes of M. Paul Claudel. And, after all, can one call a poet ‘lyric,’ if he choose to write his rhapsodies in prose?)

A year or two later, our poetess gave us, one after the other, three books in prose--a strange beautiful Oriental prose, charged with colour as the draperies of a Russian ballet, full of a crude barbarian charm. First she produced (I think her best prose book) _La Nouvelle Espérance_.

The novels of Madame de Noailles all tell more or less the same story. They show us a woman of passionate and eager temperament, a soul of suffering ardour, fevered with a sort of avid languor, of fierce tenderness whose cold fit is a sudden revolt of indifference or pride: a woman who reminds us sometimes of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and sometimes of Phædra! Need we say that this self-centred and sensual being is unhappy? Yet she is full of poetry, of passion, of charm, half a spoiled child, half an inspired Muse. But she seeks in sentiment and in sensation an Absolute which does not exist on earth. Thus, imprisoned in the tyrannous circle of her own personality, she turns round upon herself, like a squirrel in its cage. So at least we see her in this first novel and in the last: _La Domination_.

Between the two the poetess has placed a sort of pastel, a sort of fairy-tale, exquisite in its refinement and impossible grace, _Le Visage Emerveillé_, where, if the features are the same, the colour and the lighting are so softened that we greet with a smile what, in the other volumes seemed, in all cruel sincerity, the terrible image of hysterical passion.

And then, in the summer of 1913, she produced, after so long a silence of the Muse, her finest poems. Ah! here she is her real self--she whom Melchior de Voguë used to call, briefly, emphatically, ‘le grand poète,’ distinguishing her thus among her contemporaries. The Countess de Noailles is really a great poet--the greatest that the Twentieth Century has as yet produced in France, perhaps in Europe. In her the romantic Nineteenth Century has its last echo: her ardent magnificence, her sense of the wild beauty of natural things, her lyric cries, her vast horizons magically evoked, her summits and her tempests, and then her sudden bursts of simple, friendly homeliness, recall the genius of Victor Hugo.

_Photo: Dormac_ _To face p. 184_

But in this new volume the Bacchante, the Undine, of her earlier poems comes back to us in tears. Like Prince Gautama when he left his palace, she has encountered love and sickness and death. She has learned that to live is to suffer; she has discovered that man (and especially woman) has a heart to feel, as well as eyes to see with; that our destiny is always mysterious and generally sad. This is no longer the vine-crowned Bacchante, irresponsible as a young and graceful tiger-cub, whose sole desire was to satisfy her instinct. This is not she who, in her tamer moments, tuned her flute in the sunny kitchen-garden under the warm south wall, hung with espaliers, smiling as she sang: ‘Yon ripe pear is my heart!’

People will read those earlier poems as long as they love gardens and the frisky joy of flocks, and the swift upsoaring flight of the eagle above the mountain-tops, and all the innumerable many-twinkling smile of Nature. For so I should have called her first volume: not the _Innumerable Heart_ (she had not yet grown a heart) but the _Innumerable Smile_, ‘ανἠριθμoν γελασμα. That something mad, and fierce, and glad, and living, can never come again, nor that heroic impatience of mortality--and morality. Our Muse is no longer twenty. Like Thekla she has ‘geliebt und gelebet’; she has discovered that inner universe which has no common measure with the material world; she has loved and parted; she has loved and lost; she has looked on the icy face of Death and trembled; she has stood on the pale verge of the unknown abyss.

As we read these lyrics for their splendid music we gradually perceive the motives of the symphony. There is more here than beauty. There is a secret story intricately involved, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets or Elizabeth Browning’s. The first poems confess the end of a passion, still deep, and quick, but full of quarrels and combats; we feel the inevitable rupture close at hand, and the disenchantment which notes the death of a sentiment that our muse had believed immortal:--

‘Te souviens-tu du temps où, les regards tendus
Vers l’espace, ma main entre tes mains gisante,
J’exigeai de régner sur la mer de Lépante,
Dans quelque baie heureuse, aux parfums suspendus,
Où l’orgueil et l’amour halcettent confundus?

‘À présent, épuisée, immobile ou errante,
J’abdique sans effort le destin qui m’est dû.
Quel faste comblerait une âme indifferente?

‘Je n’ai besoin de rien puisque je t’ai perdu.’

The lovers separate. The meeting had seemed a prodigy. But the Muse, in a cloud of poetry, has declared to her votaress her jealousy of a mortal lover:--

‘On n’est pas à la fois enivrée et heureuse,
L’univers dans vos bras n’aura pas de rival.’

and the great poet (who has also the misfortune to be a young and beautiful woman) bids her lover farewell, much as the immortal Diana may have dismissed Endymion:--

‘Allez vers votre simple et calme destinée;
Et, comme la lueur d’un phare diligent
Suit longtemps sur la mer les barques étonnées.
Je verserai sur vous ma lumière d’argent.’

In vain he protests and begs her to consider how void and out of shape her days will hang, bereft of the substance of so rare an affection. A dreary isolation, a self-centred ambition, are surely less propitious to poetry than a sympathy communicated, not only between two hearts, but between two minds? (The man’s part of the dialogue we must more or less supply.) The fact is, she is tired of him, or rather of the storm and stress of passion, and she replies with an absent look:--

‘Je n’avais plus besoin de vous pour vous aimer....’

‘Mon amour, je ne puis t’aimer! Le jour éclate
Comme un blanc incendie, au mont des aromates!
Le gazon, telle une eau, fraîchit au fond des bois;
Un délire sacré m’entraîne loin de toi.’

She is relentless, and all the more relentless that she forgets nothing of their old delights. Since Sappho has any woman uttered such a burst of passion as she pours out in shameless reminiscence in the marvellous lyric entitled ‘T’aimer. Et quand le jour timide ...?’ (the day may enjoy as much timidity as it pleases; the poetess leaves all her share untouched). Here are the accents of desire, the voice of nature naked and unashamed; but it is the evocation of a love consumed and finished. The remembered flame is now a handful of ashes:--

‘Ô cher pâtre, inquiet et désormais terni,
J’ai vécu pour cela, qui est déjà fini!

Is there any happiness to equal our anticipation of happiness? Only in listening to music can the wearied beauty still believe: ‘Qu’il existe un bonheur qui ressemble au désir,’ and then the melody of Schumann seems to ring with a reproach, a warning, a presentiment, a final certainty:--

‘Je vois, là-bas, dans l’ombre dépouillée
Du jardin où le vent d’automne vient gémir,
Les trahisons, les pleurs, les âmes tenaillées,
Le vieillesse, la mort, la terre entre-bâillée.’

At this point we lose the clue, and wander a while in the Pindaric labyrinth of lyrics. A new love, fresh, kind, and young, appears (we think) on the horizon. Mindful of her ancient rigours, our muse hesitates:--

‘Je porte un vague amour, plus grave et plus ancien,
Qui t’avait précédé et ne peut pas te suivre.’

Yet she does follow her mortal lover. And again she feels that Nature rejects her, thrusts her, with a flaming sword, forth from her Paradise into a disordered world of souls and bodies:--

‘Tu n’es plus cette enfant, libre comme la flamme,
Qui montait comme un jet de bourgeons et d’odeurs.’

This new love is of a different sort, turned towards eternity, and sometimes, as in the song called _Un Abondant Amour_ and also _Je ne puis pas comprendre, encore que tu sois né_, we feel that it is perhaps the love for a child. In any case, her passion is for some creature still innocent and tender. And this new feeling--the point of departure for the eternal life--does really estrange the poetess from her frenzied pantheism.

‘Je ne regarde plus
Avec la même ardeur un monde qui m’a plu.
Mon esprit tient captifs des oiseaux éternels....
Je songe au noble éclat des nuits platoniciennes.’

But Fate intervenes to separate the two lovers. A lyrical intermezzo drags the pageant of a broken heart through all the miracles of Italy. The universe has avenged itself upon the woman; she is no longer the child of the sun, the sister of the winds, but an unhappy mortal everywhere estranged. And in this desolation, this fast in the desert, there dawns upon her the mystic apprehension of the spiritual world. A series of poems, entitled _Les Élévations_, enshrines, this experience of our eternity:--

‘Mon Dieu, je ne sais rien, mais je sais que je souffre
Au delà de l’appui et du secours humain,
Et puisque tous les ponts sont rompus sur le gouffre,
Je vous nommerai Dieu, et je vous tends la main....

‘Les lumineux climats d’où sont venus mes pères
Ne me préparaient pas à m’approcher de vous,
Mais on est votre enfant dès que l’on désespère
Et quand l’intelligence à plier se résout....

‘Comme vous accablez vos préférés, Seigneur
Il semble que votre ample et salubre courage
Veuille assainir en nous quelque obscur marécage,
Tant vous nous arrachez, par des sueurs de sang,
L’âcre ferment vivant, orgueilleux et puissant.
On pense qu’on mourra du mal que vous nous faites,
Et puis, c’est tout à coup la fin de la tempête.’

But once again a flaming sword waves before her eyes and drives her forth from the common experience of humanity; even as Nature and genius banished her from love, so the cold hand of death shuts her out from religion. Her beloved dies; and she has looked on his waxen face, and seen the leaden coffin go down into the grave.

This terrible moment--which has driven many in a panic of anguish from the despair of this world to the desperate hope of a Beyond, as a stag harried and hunted to the extreme edge of a cliff will spring into the sea--this ‘sombre accident quotidien de la mort’ immures our poetess in the prison of a stoical grief, where sometimes (but very rarely) rustle the wings of that angel who led Peter out of his captivity. In that austere infrangible house of mourning she remains, aloof from life and Nature, choosing this living death rather than the treason of a life renewed and fruitful, though bereaved. There she sits still, forgetting the spring and the summer, and looks in a white agony upon the face of Truth. And in verse as firm and full as that of Emily Brontë, she recites the sterile lesson she has learned:--

‘Je m’emplis d’une vaste et rude connaissance,
Que j’acquiers d’heure en heure, ainsi qu’un noir trésor,
Qui me dispense une âpre et totale science;
Je sais que tu es mort.’

MADAME COLETTE

Imagine a young girl in the country, very young, very fresh, sensitive to the finest degree, upright, credulous, and doubtless dainty as a daisy; imagine her in the flower of her youth married and carried off to Paris--to the decadent Paris of the nineties--by a man of the world, who is also a man of letters and a man of science, intelligent, corrupt, and cynical as Mephistopheles himself. No, I am not telling you over again the story of ‘Madeleine Jeune femme’; I am telling the history of Madame Colette, and it ends differently.

There is, it seems, an amusement in elaborating the sentimental education of a young bride, in complicating it with excursions into vice and into art; brief, the gifted and immoral author who chooses to be known as ‘Willy’ was pleased to make over his wife in his own image. She was an artist to the ends of her finger-tips, and they wrote books together--the famous series of _Claudine_--hailed with delight by all that is least strait-laced in Paris (and, in those days especially, there was very little screwing about the moral waist of one sort of Paris!). For Colette Willy realised a personage, always charming to the man about town in its candid perversity, that of the innocent wanton, or (to quote the title of one of her stories) _L’Ingénue Libertine_.

One day I bought one of these Claudine books; it was called _Claudine en Ménage_. I opened it and thought it delightful. What an admirable style, firm and free, full of nature, full of grace, and the character of the girl, at once shrewd and naïve, pleased me immensely ... and then I began to wonder.... And then I did not know what to do with the book! I would not place it on my shelf, I could not leave it lying on the table. Finally, remembering a certain lyric of Robert Browning’s, I took it out into the forest and dropped it deep in the hollow trunk of a tree. There, among the pale wood-lice, and the centipedes, and the fungus, Claudine in her seclusion, finds audience fit though few.

One day it must have dawned on Madame Colette Willy that all men were not made on the same pattern--that there was fresh air somewhere in the world even for a married woman--that a man might be a support, and a comfort, and an example--or perhaps, more simply, that one might do without one altogether. Anyhow, Madame Colette Willy became Madame Colette; she divorced her collaborator and began her ascent out of Avernus. She was, in these new conditions, obliged to earn her living, and, mindful of the prices paid for even a successful book, she complicated her profession as woman of letters with the career of a Variety Artist.

That is to say, she went on the music hall stage and was immensely applauded; and I am sure she is a splendid variety artist--just as I am sure that Marguerite Audoux must have had a lovely ‘cut’--just as I know (and as any one who goes to the Place des Vosges can see) that a great cabinet-maker was spoiled in Victor Hugo.... The music hall feeds its flock. After a few years Madame Colette returned to literature--returned, I mean, to the exclusive practice of literature, which she had never really abandoned--henceforth independent.

A Paris music hall may appear a strange place of purification, but it all depends on what one is used to. The courage, the indefatigable industry, the gentleness, the charity and kindliness of her new companions impressed Madame Colette; and she admired the relative pureness of their lives. We see her, in our fancy (like Roumanille when he contemplated the lambs frisking in the meadows), gazing on the clowns, and the quick-change artists, and the circus-riders, and the dancers, and the leaders of performing dogs, as she murmurs:--

‘Coume fan ben tout ço que fan!
Et l’innoucénço, coum es bello!’

And gradually her novels showed the influence of a healthier environment. It is true that at first she wrote _Les Vrilles de la Vigne_. But her last three volumes possess (with rare literary beauty) a freedom of soul and a sensitiveness which at least, to my thinking, go far to compensate a little colour-blindness as to morality. Experience has rendered her wise and sad, indulgent and serene; it has shown her how to organise her impressions, so that her art--simple as it is and apparently facile--has some of the qualities of a philosophy. In the terms of a metaphor dear to Mr Henry James, her novels henceforth are, not a slice of life, but an extract, an elixir.

Not that her last three volumes--_La Vagabonde_, _L’Envers du Music Hall_, and _L’Entrave_--are to be recommended without precaution. They are very free; they describe a world beyond the precincts of conventional morality, and they are also very Pagan. There is mighty little inner life in the world of Colette Willy! But those who read Mr Compton Mackenzie or Mr Maxwell will, after all, find nothing more alarming in _La Vagabonde_, or even in _L’Entrave_. And they will admire a natural and yet exquisite faculty of expression--it is difficult to write with a more delicate exactness than Madame Colette--and also a psychology, and a sort of disenchanted mansuetude, that go hand in hand with a love of youth, a sense of youth, quite extraordinary. For my part, I find the lady very taking; but I do not recommend her to the more serious admirers of Paul Claudel.

In _La Vagabonde_, we see her as a music hall star, dropped from the sphere of the woman of the world, and all the happier in her new orbit, although aware she is a stranger there. Men, of course, pay her court, and one of them, Maxime Dufferein-Chautel (whose tender, bourgeois, authoritative nature is admirably depicted) comes very near to being her lover, and proposes to make her his wife. But Max, good, solid, faithful, is the least subtle of lovers--a great, affectionate Newfoundland dog of a man. And Renée Néré, the vagabond, who has borne so resentfully the yoke of her first husband’s heart, fears to suffer as much from the narrowness of a second husband’s brain. She cannot resign her liberty to an inferior, and, on the eve of their marriage, she sends him a cruel little letter:--

‘Max, mon chéri, je m’en vais,’

and is off with her troupe on a tour to the New World.

On the first page of _L’Entrave_, she has met again with this old lover, or rather, herself unrecognised, she has seen him pass, one day at Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais, he, his young wife, and his little child. He has not mourned her long! And Renée feels oddly dispossessed: no one, nothing, belongs to her; she has no place in the world for she is no longer a star of the stage. A convenient inheritance has given her the means of liberty--that liberty she coveted of old--and she strays from hotel to hotel on the Riviera mixing with theatrical visitors, frequenting the better sort (which, I suppose, means the wealthier sort?) of demi-monde, yet oddly out of place among these amiable barbarians who have neither an idea nor an ideal.

The most barbarian of all is little May, a young hetaira _à la mode_, fresh, fair, and five-and-twenty. Renée is a dozen years older and ought to know better; but she steals poor May’s lover away from her; and she shackles herself with this uncultivated young man for life, because she loves him; and it is the first time that she has loved. Ah, she no longer asks herself: is he her equal?... Madame Colette, like her heroine, has consented to the hobble, to the shackle, to _L’Entrave_. She, too, has married, has found for herself again a place in organised society, has seen open out before her unsuspected interior horizons, and murmurs perhaps, like Renée Néré:--

‘Se peut-il, Beauté, que je te préfère l’âme qui t’habite?’

And I await her next novel with almost a tremulous expectation.

MADAME MARCELLE TINAYRE

When Madame Tinayre published her _Maison du Péché_, we thought in France that we had discovered our George Eliot. We pitched our hopes too high; Madame Tinayre is not even a George Sand. But she is a very interesting and gifted novelist. If that first book was of a new and veritable beauty, superior to any which has as yet followed it--but Madame Tinayre is young--it is because the conception of the story entailed a certain simplicity and order of composition, an art of opposition and construction, a severity of style even--in fact, the qualities in which our novelist is generally lacking. Her talent in her subsequent works is no less rich and imaginative; but there is the difference between a rose-tree covered with flowers trained over an espalier, and the same lovely crimson rambler left without support, and dropping half its fragrant burden in the dust.

Madame Tinayre, like most women writers, is endowed with an exact and attentive faculty of observation; like very few women writers, she has a sort of magic, similar to colour or melody, which often disguises the poverty of her compositions; her art aspires to the condition of music; she, too, might say with Saint Hildegard, ‘Symphonialis est anima.’ She knows how to project, from her mind into ours, a violent, an incomparable sentiment, as the waters in the marble fountains of Versailles overlap and drop from one basin into another. And she has the culture of a man.

These are great gifts, sometimes impaired by a certain warmth and coarseness in the treatment of love,--an offence rare in male writers, however libertine, but which hurts our taste occasionally even in a Mrs Browning (for instance, in _Aurora Leigh_); and sometimes her fault is a lack of measure and order which lets her books meander in a perpetual flux, branching hither and thither, instead of moulding and rounding them into the fore-established harmony of a perfect sphere. In brief, Madame Tinayre is a romantic. But just once, as it were by accident, she consented to the classic discipline. And nothing in literature is so charming, so touching, so delightful, as a romantic who submits to be a classic.

That ‘once’ was, of course, when she wrote _La Maison du Péché_. Her art, so often too literal, and, as it were, photographed from reality without arrangement (as in the greater part of _La Rebelle_), at other moments excessive and satiating in its lyrism, found on that occasion the exact middle path between experience and imagination. There is not only passion in the book and beauty, but solidity, balance, meditation, reason; there is not only spontaneity and grace, but a large and firm knowledge of life, a perspicacity, a sincerity beyond praise. It has the qualities of poetry and the virtues of prose.

In this novel, Madame Tinayre shows us the clash and the conflict, the attraction and the repulsion, which cause a continual contest between the two halves of France, equally important and irreducibly different. Born into one of these spheres, married into the other, Madame Tinayre is at home in either. Her Augustin, so pure and grave and true, so narrow, so weak, so passionate, is the brother of M. Rolland’s Antoinette, is the great-nephew of Pascal. He is a type which has always existed in France, admirable but dangerous, for he is incapable of understanding his contrary. Among French Protestants, Jansenists, strict proverbial Catholics, in certain austere university circles, there are many variations on the type of Augustin. And Fanny, the charming Bohemian, light-hearted Fanny, an artist to the tips of her fingers but only very dimly conscious of being an immortal soul (a pretension which Augustin never abandons for an hour), is not Fanny the very flower of a different, a more frivolous, a lighter, brighter France?

The contact and the conflict of these two natures, their ill-starred, impossible love, is all the story of _La Maison du Péché_: one of the most moving stories of our times. There are readers, there are even critics, who prefer Madame Tinayre’s subsequent novel, _La Rebelle_. I have some difficulty, I admit, in catching their point of view. I prefer not only _La Maison du Péché_, but even that exquisite piece of still-life, _François Barbazanges_, which some have condemned on the ground that, though it was art, it was not life. _La Rebelle_ is much more life than art. The background, a fresco of popular Paris, is vast, living, and exact; indeed it is too vast, too living, too exact, for it distracts our attention from the rather ordinary characters who occupy the foreground.

And yet there is a great charm in the drawing of Josanne Valentin, the brave young woman-worker married to a neurasthenic invalid--that charm of poignant sincerity which sometimes, in a woman’s work, makes the reader’s heart beat quicker, as though he had suddenly stumbled on a private confession. Josanne is so courageous, so tender, so kind, that we forgive her conjugal infidelity, and chiefly regret that her lover should be so obviously unworthy of her.

He abandons her--we knew it!--and how pathetic is the scene of their parting--out of doors, in the street, poor Josanne encumbered with the _filet_--the net--in which she is carrying home the materials for the family dinner. That parting scene is unlike any other in fiction in its heart-piercing realism! But Josanne is young, and when the morphino-maniac of a husband (tenderly nursed to the last) departs this life; when Josanne falls in with a high-minded radical philanthropist of the most advanced views, we murmur, much relieved: ‘Tout s’arrange.’

For Noël Delysle and Josanne Valentin are alike apostles of a magnanimous democracy: he, a social reformer, author of that notable work, _La Travailleuse_; she, herself a woman-worker, the feminist reporter of a ladies’ newspaper, in constant contact with the poor in need of help, and the fevered, fussy world of philanthropy. Self-subsisting, ‘generous’ in the wide sense which Descartes gives to the word, Noël Delysle and Josanne Valentin alike reject the tyrannous old dictum of Arnolphe:--

‘Bien qu’on soit deux moitiés de la société
Ces deux moitiés pourtant n’ont pas d’égalité.’

For them, the woman-worker, self-supporting, independent, has attained a moral and social equality with man, and should be judged by the standard of what Mr Shaw, we believe, has called the New Morality.

They both possess that ‘vraie générosité’ which consists in self-reliance, strength of will, endurance, contempt for opinion, and respect for the liberty of others. Descartes thought nothing more useful than to foster a race of such generous individuals, ‘sachant subsister par soi-même ... pour ce qu’ils n’estiment rien de plus grand que de faire du bien aux autres et de mépriser son propre intérêt.’ And, despite one secret blemish in her past, Josanne feels herself a member of this _élite_, a factor of progress. Nor does she attach any great importance to a back-sliding which is not esteemed too damnable by the men and the women of the New Morality. She makes her confession to Noël Delysle in much the same spirit as Tess of the D’Urbervilles unbosoms herself to Angel Clare.

For reformers are prompt to forget that what was human nature in the past, what may be human nature in the future (should they and others persist in their modern ideal), is not human nature _now_. The mind of man has modified all things around him and within. From the seeding-grasses in the hay he has produced the varieties of corn; from the small and acid crab-fruit in the hedge, the rennet and the Ribston pippin; and from the poisonous roots of foreign forests our daily domestic potato. Our morality is another product; we may modify it yet further; such as it is, at present it remains our staff of life. And the staunchest feminist in the world, if he be a man and in love, will expect his wife to be tender, chaste, and faithful, and care little enough whether or no she be self-reliant, generous, and brave.

Noël Delysle is a stronger man than Angel Clare, and proportionately less hard and dour; but he receives the shock of Josanne’s confession with little less dismay. He learns then that the little stepson who will share their home--the child, he imagined naturally, of the unfortunate Valentin--is in reality the son of Josanne’s lover. In treating such a situation, Madame Tinayre is at her best. The central fact of all her novels is the struggle between nature and nurture, between instinct and convention. Deep, deep below the intellectual superstructure, the primitive man, the primitive woman, stir in her heroes. His virtues and tolerances fall from Noël Delysle, leaving him jealous and passionate; her valour and self-reliance fade in Madame Valentin, and Josanne, the rebel, becomes the merest woman.

_La Rebelle_ is an interesting book, but how much do I prefer (though its faults he thick upon it) _L’Ombre de l’Amour_![2] The tale rambles on as it pleases, independent of design or composition, poorly constructed enough with its two long parallel lines, as monotonous, if as impressive, as those low, even cliffs which enclose between their grassy walls some Limousin or Gascon valley.

_Bis repetita placent_ is a good motto if we wish to amuse; for (as Bergson has pointed out) there is something comic in reiteration, in a repeated misadventure, and especially in a double fall--every clown knows that! In spite of the rare beauty and sincerity of the character-drawing, this tale of two pure girls stumbling, one after the other, in the same secret slip, does produce an effect of painful ludicrousness.

The defilement of a young girl in her innocence is the most pathetic of themes, but it is its singularity alone that makes it touching. Mephistopheles, in his cleverness, degrades the misery of poor Gretchen when he observes: ‘Sie ist nicht die Erste.’ We must imagine no angel ever tripped before; we must have very present in our sight the state of innocence from which she is thrust out. So the wise Walter Scott places beside his sad Effie the peerless Jeanie Deans. So George Eliot relieves the abasement of Hetty by the pure brilliance of Dinah. But in this novel of Madame Tinayre’s, there are but two young girls, and, by an inconceivable error, she involves them both in the same miserable mystery. Involuntarily we protest. I, for my part, protested, and the novelist replied:--

‘Il me semble que votre principale objection porte sur le
double effet d’une double aventure, qui vous paraît un artifice
littéraire. Mais, dans ma pensée, il fallait que Fortunade
complétât Denise, que la pitié spirituelle pour le maudit aboutit
au même échec que la pitié plus physique pour le malade. Fortunade,
c’est, en tout petit, Eloa. Je crois que ces ‘doubles’ ne sont pas
sans exemples dans les grandes œuvres de la littérature, et que de
glorieux précédents auraient pu m’enhardir, si j’avais hésité. Dans
la réalité même on voit des âmes de même nature se deviner et se
rapprocher.’

The literary doubles of which our author speaks are a charming device when the novelist treats of what is normal, salutary, or pleasant: we love to see Rosalind by the side of Celia, or the Two Gentlemen of Verona; but we should not care to look at two Quilps, or two Deformed Transformed, or two Gretchens, or even two dumb girls of Portici. The abnormal does not suffer repetition.

So I persist in my protestation, and all the more because I love and admire the two sweet girls, so pure, so devoted; ruined and debased, the one by pity for a man’s bodily sufferings, the other by compassion for his moral state. For Madame Tinayre, following the theories of Spinoza and Nietzsche, looks on pity as a debilitating emotion, relaxing the fibres of the soul and predisposing to an ignoble self-surrender.

But how charming is the first half of this novel; the opening scene in the country doctor’s dining-room, with the two girls seated in the red-paved parlour that smells of damp bricks and freshly-washed linen and ripe apples. Denise, the young lady of the house, is the soul of a home:--

‘A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command----’

a large human type, as easily imagined in England or Scotland as in Central France. But the girl who sews at her side is essentially Limousine, her very name, Fortunade, recalls the pathetic head of the girl-saint of the Corrèze whom she resembles--pensive and slim, with the pursed, plaintive mouth, the suffering grace of her profile, and the something dreamy, sweet, yet almost sullen that makes her appear half a Gothic angel and half a scolded child.

Fortunade Brandou is only a little peasant, the daughter of the village innkeeper, who goes out sewing by the day to the few gentlemen’s houses in the countryside. But all the dreams, all the visions, all the missionary fervours and superstitious fears of a Celtic race are locked beneath the smooth black braids of her roundly projecting brow. Her longing is not to be happy, but to expiate, to redeem, to fly to the rescue of the oppressed. She must up and grapple with sin and sorrow. She cannot let the evil-doer perish before her eyes. Fortunade, with her feeble body full of suffering grace, her doleful smile, her plaintive voice, has the soul of Corneille’s Pauline, destroying the idols of the Temple and braving the Proconsul; has the faith and the fervour of a Joan of Arc, letting slip her shepherd’s crook to grasp an enchanted sword.

And, even as she must suffer and struggle for the moral welfare of her fellow-mortals, so Dr Cayrol must needs overcome and stamp out disease. Each of these personages is a type--complete, rare, and living--animated with an extraordinary racial truth. In describing the peasants and the mountain of Corrèze, Madame Tinayre puts us in contact with her own familiar country. There are few more beautiful in France as scenery; none more noble as a focus of human character.

Those who have studied the deep wave of moral feeling which broke over France between the fall of the First and the rise of the Second Empire--students of the Saint-Simonians, historians of ‘48--have always been struck by the great proportion of men from the southern centre--from Auvergne and Corrèze--generous, philanthropic, active sons of Utopia, brusque and kind, avid for justice as the prophets of Israel. These minds, less intellectually or theoretically great than large and magnanimous, form one of the finest categories of the French character.

In no novel have we come across so adequate a presentment of them as in the village doctor--worthy _confrère_ of Mrs Gaskell’s country surgeon and of Balzac’s _médecin de campagne_--the rustic _savant_, interested in the scientific and social movement of his times yet homely in his private tastes and standards of life; parsimonious in pence, and liberal with his rare gold pieces; distrustful of all strangers, yet quick to harbour a fresh chimera; prompt to anger; to all appearance just a son of the soil, a hearty meat-fed man, fond of his glass, fond of his pipe, fond of his gun, striding at ease in his strong solid shoes and his old country clothes--but a sage for all that, and nearly a saint; a man, at least, in the best sense of the word, with the root of the matter in him. Such a man, choleric, proud, and kind, is Étienne Cayrol, at once the hero and the father of the heroine in _L’Ombre de l’Amour_.

We recognise him at once and love him from his very entrance on the twelfth page, when he comes in, out of the mud, and the dark, whistling the air of a country reel, and greeting, with kind, quizzical observant eyes, the two young girls mending the linen in his parlour.

‘Il avait un visage de vieux chef gaulois, coloré, couperosé aux
pommettes, les cheveux gris, l’œil bleu saillant, le nez aquilin,
la mâchoire solide sous une longue moustache dédorée. Comme il
inclinait la tête, on voyait l’attache puissante du cou, et
cette forme du crâne qui s’unit à la nuque par une ligne droite,
caractéristique chez les gens du Plateau central. Les épaules
étaient carrées, le torse trapu; les jambes un peu arquées devaient
peser lourd sur le sol. Toute la personne--sans finesse mais non
pas sans noblesse--d’Étienne Cayrol, révélait l’origine paysanne.
Elle exprimait la force, une force stable, lente, réfléchie, sûre
d’elle même.’

And yet (an observation admirably in accordance with the history of the type) some secret defect of judgment condemns the dearest schemes of the doctor (so well considered, so unselfish in their working out, so noble and yet practical in their aim), but destined none the less, to miscarry and ‘gang aft agley.’ His unfinished sanatorium scars the hill-top with the mean unsightly ruins of uncompleted work; and the consumptive youth, whom he takes into his own home to nurse back to health, not only dies, but seduces the doctor’s only daughter: the girl who was the pride of his heart, as the sanatorium was the dream of his mind.

Denise Cayrol is a noble creature, strong, kind, and pure. At twenty-seven years of age she no longer thinks of herself as a young girl; she is not concerned with love and marriage, and it is rather with a half-maternal, half-sisterly devotion that she tends the young consumptive, a few years younger than herself, who is so eager to live, so ardent in loving, and whom her clear, reasonable judgment and pitiful heart see from the first as marked with the signs of his doom. Denise attracts the hapless Jean with all the force and promise of her health. When the doctor suspects the secret engagement that binds his daughter to his patient, he is both jealous and indignant (for he cannot conceive how a woman can love a consumptive), and he sends Jean away into a sanatorium. But Jean falls ill; Denise rushes to his death-bed, and then and there (in a wild pitiful desire to pour out all the best of life, in one moment, while there is time) she yields to his fevered desire; she succumbs.

There were two girls seated in the red-paved parlour, that smelt of damp bricks and freshly-washed linen and ripe apples, when the doctor strode in from the dark night outside, on the winterly evening which opens the novel. The second is Fortunade Brandou, the little village dressmaker, the mystic; an ill-judged pity lures her, too, to her undoing. When Veydrenne, the poacher, the outlaw, breaks his leg, Fortunade tends the village miscreant in his illness and strives to save his soul:--

‘Ce serait si beau de sauver cette âme!’

Alas, when did the wolf listen to the voice of Little Red Riding Hood? The sweet, the mystical, the charitable Fortunade fell prey to a wild beast, and the deep gorges of the mountain torrent received the soiled, childish body that dared no longer affront the light of the sun.

‘Morte, morte! non par le hasard d’un faux pas, non par un chagrin
d’amour, elle n’avait jamais aimé que Dieu, la chaste fille:
Dieu et ses pauvres! morte pour être allée vers celui que tous
haïssaient; morte pour avoir tenté l’entreprise folle de sauver une
âme perdue!... Perdue elle-même sans doute, brutalement outragée,
deux fois victime, elle avait payé de sa pudeur et de sa vie
l’imprudence sublime de sa pitié.’