George Moore, Confessions of A Young Man (1888)

Chapter V
A last hour of vivid blue and gold glare; but now the twilight sheds softly upon the darting jays, and only the little oval frames catch the fleeting beams. I go to the miniatures. Amid the parliamentary faces, all strictly garrotted with many-folded handkerchiefs, there is a metal frame enchased with rubies and a few emeralds. And this chef d’oeuvre of antique workmanship surrounds a sharp, shrewdish, modern face, withal pretty. Fair she is and thin.
She is a woman of thirty, — no, — she is the woman of thirty. Balzac has written some admirable pages on this subject; my memory of them is vague and uncertain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that marvellous story, or rather study, has been blunted in my knowledge of this tiny face with the fine masses of hair drawn up from the neck and arranged elaborately on the crown. There is no fear of plagiary; he cannot have said all; he cannot have said what I want to say.
Looking at this face so mundane, so intellectually mundane, I see why a young man of refined mind — a bachelor who spends at least a pound a day on his pleasures, and in whose library are found some few volumes of modern poetry — seeks his ideal in a woman of thirty.
It is clear that, by the very essence of her being, the young girl may evoke no ideal but that of home; and home is in his eyes the antithesis of freedom, desire, aspiration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and he is tempted with a foolish little illusion — white dresses, water colour drawings, and popular music. He dreams of Pleasure, and he is offered Duty; for do not think that that sylph-like waist does not suggest to him a yard of apron string, cries of children, and that most odious word, “Papa.” A young man of refined mind can look through the glass of the years.
He has sat in the stalls, opera-glass in hand; he has met women of thirty at balls, and has sat with them beneath shadowy curtains; he knows that the world is full of beautiful women, all waiting to be loved and amused, the circles of his immediate years are filled with feminine faces, they cluster like flowers on this side and that, and they fade into garden-like spaces of colour. How many may love him? The loveliest may one day smile upon his knee! and shall he renounce all for that little creature who has just finished singing, and is handing round cups of tea? Every bachelor contemplating marriage says, “I shall have to give up all for one, one.”
The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very essence of the young girl’s being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin. Nor is there in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in a thousand any doubt that the hand, that spends at least a pound a day in restaurants and cabs, will succeed in gathering the muslin flower if he so wills it, and by doing so he will delight every one. Where, then, is the struggle? where, then, is the triumph? Therefore, I say that if a young man’s heart is not set on children, and tiresome dinner parties, the young girl presents to him no possible ideal. But the woman of thirty presents from the outset all that is necessary to ensnare the heart of a young man. I see her sitting in her beautiful drawing-room, all composed by, and all belonging to her. Her chair is placed beneath an evergreen plant, and the long leaves lean out as if to touch her neck. The great white and red roses of the d’aubusson carpet are spread enigmatically about her feline feet; a grand piano leans its melodious mouth to her; and there she sits when her visitors have left her, playing Beethoven’s sonatas in the dreamy firelight. The spring-tide shows but a bloom of unvarying freshness; August has languished and loved in the strength of the sun. She is stately, she is tall. What sins, what disappointments, what aspirations lie in those grey eyes, mysteriously still, and mysteriously revealed. These a young man longs to know of, they are his life. He imagines himself sitting by her, when the others have gone, holding her hand, calling on her name; sometimes she moves away and plays the moonlight sonata. Letting her hands droop upon the keys she talks sadly, maybe affectionately; she speaks of the tedium of life, of its disenchantments. He knows well what she means, he has suffered as she has; but could he tell her, could she understand, that in his love reality would dissolve into a dream, all limitations would open into boundless infinity.
The husband he rarely sees. Sometimes a latchkey is heard about half-past six. The man is thick, strong, common; his jaws are heavy; his eyes are expressionless; there is about him the loud swagger of the caserne; and he suggests the inevitable question, Why did she marry him? — a question that every young man of refined mind asks a thousand times by day and ten thousand times by night, asks till he is five-and-thirty, and sees that his generation has passed into middle age.
Why did she marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer; riddle that no Oedipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the seagulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she has forgotten.
The young man shakes hands with the husband; he strives not to look embarrassed, and he talks of indifferent things — of how well he (the husband) is looking, of his amusements, his projects; and then he (the young man of refined mind) tastes of that keen and highly-seasoned delight — happiness in crime. He knows not the details of her home life, the husband is merely a dark cloud that fills one side of the picture, sometimes obliterating the sunlight; a shadowy shape that in certain moments solidifies and assumes the likeness of a rock-sculptured, imminent monster; but the shadow and the shape and the threat are magnetic, and in a sense of danger the fascination is sealed. ...
See the young man of refined mind in a ball room! He is leaning against the woodwork in a distant doorway, he scarcely knows what to do with himself; and he is now striving to interest himself in the conversation of a group of men twice his age. I will not say he is shunned; but neither the matrons nor the young girls make any advances towards him. The young girls looking so sweet — in the oneness of their fresh hair, flowers, dresses, and glances — are being introduced, are getting up to dance, and the hostess is looking round for partners. She sees the young man in the doorway; but she hesitates and goes to some one else; and if you asked her why, she could not tell you why she avoided him. Presently the woman of thirty enters. She is in white satin and diamonds. She looks for him, — a circular glance, — and calm with possession she passes to a seat. She dances the eighth, twelfth, and fifteenth waltz with him.
Will he induce her to visit his rooms? Will they be like mine — strange debauches of colour and Turkish lamps, Marshall’s taste, an old cabinet, a faded pastel which embalms the memory of a pastoral century, my taste; or will it be a library, — two leather library chairs, a large escritoire, etc.? Be this as it may, whether the apartments be the ruthless extravagance of artistic impulse, or the subdued taste of the student, she, the woman of thirty, shall be there by night and day: her statue is there, and even when she is sleeping safe in her husband’s arms with fevered brow, he, the young man of refined mind, alone and lonely shall kneel and adore her.
And should she not visit his rooms? If the complex and various accidents of existence should have ruled out her life virtuously; if the many inflections of sentiment have decided against this last consummation, then she will wax to the complete, the unfathomable temptress — the Lilith of old — she will never set him free, and in the end will be found about his heart “one single golden hair.” She shall haunt his wife’s face and words (should he seek to rid himself of her by marriage), a bitter sweet, a half-welcome enchantment; she shall consume and destroy the strength and spirit of his life, leaving it desolation, a barren landscape, burnt and faintly scented with the sea. Fame and wealth shall slip like sand from him. She may be set aside for the cadence of a rhyme, for the flowing line of a limb, but when the passion of art has raged itself out, she shall return to blight the peace of the worker.
A terrible malady is she, a malady the ancients knew of and called nympholepsy — a beautiful name evocative and symbolic of its ideal aspect, “the breast of the nymph in the brake.” And the disease is not extinct in these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men shall yearn for the unattainable; and the prosy bachelors who trail their ill-fated lives from their chambers to their clubs know of, and they call their malady — the woman of thirty.

Chapter VI
A Japanese dressing gown, the ideality of whose tissue delights me, some fresh honey and milk set by this couch hung with royal fringes; and having partaken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack my great python that is crawling about after a two months’ fast. I tie up a guineapig to the tabouret, pure Louis XV., the little beast struggles and squeaks, the snake, his black, bead-like eyes are fixed, how superb are the oscillations ... now he strikes, and slowly and with what exquisite gourmandise he lubricates and swallows.
Marshall is at the organ in the hall, he is playing a Gregorian chant, that beautiful hymn, the “Vexilla Regis,” by Saint Fortunatus, the great poet of the Middle Ages. And, having turned over the leaves of “Les Fêtes Gallantes,” I sit down to write.
My original intention was to write some thirty or forty stories varying from thirty to three hundred lines in length. The nature of these stories is easy to imagine: there was the youth who wandered by night into a witches’ sabbath, and was disputed for by the witches, young and old. There was the light o’ love who went into the desert to tempt the holy man; but he died as he yielded, and the arms stiffening by some miracle to iron-like rigidity, she was unable to free herself, and died of starvation, as her bondage loosened in decay. And I had increased my difficulties by adopting as part of my task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in many cases extravagantly composed metres, and I had begun to feel that I was working in sand, I could make no progress, the house I was raising crumbled and fell away on every side. These stories had one merit: they were all, so far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. For the art of telling a story clearly and dramatically, selon les procédés de M. Scribe, I had thoroughly learnt from old M. Duval, the author of a hundred and sixty plays, written in collaboration with more than a hundred of the best writers of his day, including the master himself, Gautier. I frequently met M. Duval at breakfast at a neighbouring café, and our conversation turned on l’exposition de la pièce, préparer la situation, nous aurons des larmes, etc. One day, as I sat waiting for him, I took up the Voltaire. It contained an article by M. Zola. Naturalisme, la vérité, la science, were repeated some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able to believe my eyes, I read that you should write, with as little imagination as possible, that plot in a novel or in a play was illiterate and puerile, and that the art of M. Scribe was an art of strings and wires, etc. I rose up from breakfast, ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little dizzy, like one who has received a violent blow on the head.
Echo-augury! Words heard in an unexpected quarter, but applying marvellously well to the besetting difficulty of the moment. The reader who has followed me so far will remember the instant effect the word “Shelley” had upon me in childhood, and how it called into existence a train of feeling that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many years, until it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the reader will also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of the word “France” awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the creation of a mental existence.
And now for a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, “the new art,” impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my “Roses of Midnight” were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any semblance of life, passionless in all their passion.
I had read a few chapters of the “Assommoir,” as it appeared in La République des Lettres; I had cried, “ridiculous, abominable,” only because it is characteristic of me to instantly form an opinion and assume at once a violent attitude. But now I bought up the back numbers of the Voltaire, and I looked forward to the weekly exposition of the new faith with febrile eagerness. The great zeal with which the new master continued his propaganda, and the marvellous way in which subjects the most diverse, passing events, political, social, religious, were caught up and turned into arguments for, or proof of the truth of naturalism astonished me wholly. The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilisation, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition. In my fevered fancy I saw a new race of writers that would arise, and with the aid of the novel would continue to a more glorious and legitimate conclusion the work that the prophets had begun; and at each development of the theory of the new art and its universal applicability, my wonder increased and my admiration choked me. If any one should be tempted to turn to the books themselves to seek an explanation of this wild ecstasy, they would find nothing — as well drink the dregs of yesterday’s champagne. One is lying before me now, and as I glance through the pages listlessly I say, “Only the simple crude statements of a man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision.”
Still, although eager and anxious for the fray, I did not see how I was to participate in it. I was not a novelist, not yet a dramatic author, and the possibility of a naturalistic poet seemed to me not a little doubtful. I had clearly understood that the lyrical quality was to be for ever banished; there were to be no harps and lutes in our heaven, only drums; and the preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen, did, I could not help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), sound not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had declared that the Republic would fall if it did not become instantly naturalistic; he would not, he could not pass over in silence so important a branch of literature as poetry, no matter how contemptible he might think it. If he could find nothing to praise, he must at least condemn. At last the expected article came. It was all that could be desired by one in my fever of mind. Hugo’s claims had been previously disproven, but now Banville and Gautier were declared to be warmed up dishes of the ancient world; Baudelaire was a naturalist, but he had been spoilt by the romantic influence of his generation. Cependant there were indications of the naturalistic movement even in poetry. I trembled with excitement, I could not read fast enough. Coppée had striven to simplify language; he had versified the street cries, Achetez la France, le Soir, le Rappel; he had sought to give utterance to humble sentiments as in “Le Petit Epicier de Montrouge,” the little grocer qui cassait le sucre avec mélancolie; Richepin had boldly and frankly adopted the language of the people in all its superb crudity. All this was, however, preparatory and tentative. We are waiting for our poet, he who will sing to us fearlessly of the rude industry of dustmen and the comestible glories of the marketplaces. The subjects are to hand, the formula alone is wanting.
The prospect was a dazzling one; I tried to calm myself. Had I the stuff in me to win and to wear these bays, this stupendous laurel crown? — bays, laurel crown, a distinct souvenir of Parnassus, but there is no modern equivalent, I must strive to invent a new one, in the meantime let me think. True it is that Swinburne was before me with the “Romantiques.” The hymn to Proserpine and Dolores are wonderful lyrical versions of Mdlle. de Maupin. In form the Leper is old English, the colouring is Baudelaire, but the rude industry of the dustmen and the comestible glories of the market-place shall be mine. A bas “Les Roses de Minuit” !
I felt the “naturalisation” of the “Roses of Midnight” would prove a difficult task. I soon found it an impossible one, and I laid the poems aside and commenced a volume redolent of the delights of Bougival and Ville d’Avray. This book was to be entitled “Poems of ’Flesh and Blood.’”
” Elle mit son plus beau chapeau, son chapeau bleu” ... and then? Why, then picking up her skirt she threads her way through the crowded streets, reads the advertisements on the walls, hails the omnibus, inquires at the concierge’s loge, murmurs as she goes upstairs, “Que c’est haut le cinqième,” and then? Why, the door opens, and she cries, “Je t’aime.”
But it was the idea of the new æstheticism — the new art corresponding to modern, as ancient art corresponded to ancient life — that captivated me, that led me away, and not a substantial knowledge of the work done by the naturalists. I had read the “Assommoir,” and had been much impressed by its pyramid size, strength, height, and decorative grandeur, and also by the immense harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal treatment of the different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new — the washhouse, for example: the fight motive is indicated, then follows the development of side issues, then comes the fight motive explained; it is broken off short, it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the fight motive is again taken up, and now it is worked out in all its fulness; it is worked up to crescendo, another side issue is introduced, and again the theme is given forth. And I marvelled greatly at the lordly, river-like roll of the narrative, sometimes widening out into lakes and shallowing meres, but never stagnating in fen or marshlands. The language, too, which I did not then recognise as the weak point, being little more than a boiling down of Chateaubriand and Flaubert, spiced with Goncourt, delighted me with its novelty, its richness, its force. Nor did I then even roughly suspect that the very qualities which set my admiration in a blaze wilder than wildfire, being precisely those that had won the victory for the romantic school forty years before, were very antagonistic to those claimed for the new art; I was deceived, as was all my generation, by a certain externality, an outer skin, a nearness, un approchement; in a word, by a substitution of Paris for the distant and exotic backgrounds so beloved of the romantic school. I did not know then, as I do now, that art is eternal, that it is only the artist that changes, and that the two great divisions — the only possible divisions — -are: those who have talent, and those who have no talent. But I do not regret my errors, my follies; it is not well to know at once of the limitations of life and things. I should be less than nothing had it not been for my enthusiasms; they were the saving clause in my life.
But although I am apt to love too dearly the art of my day, and at the cost of that of other days, I did not fall into the fatal mistake of placing the realistic writers of 1877 side by side with and on the same plane of intellectual vision as the great Balzac; I felt that that vast immemorial mind rose above them all, like a mountain above the highest tower.
And, strange to say, it was Gautier that introduced me to Balzac; for mention is made in the wonderful preface to “Les Fleurs du Mal” of Seraphita: Seraphita, Seraphitus; which is it? — woman or man? Should Wilfred or Mona be the possessor? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal lily and aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water flowing up and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff’s side; the straight white feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is torn, and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhortations. Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and manifestation, the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven; the closing of the stupendous allegory when Seraphita lies dead in the rays of the first sun of the nineteenth century.
I, therefore, had begun, as it were, to read Balzac backwards; instead of beginning with the plain, simple, earthly tragedy of the Père Goriot, I first knelt in a beautiful but distant coigne of the great world of his genius — Seraphita. Certain nuances of soul are characteristic of certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led him to Norway in quest of this fervent soul? The instincts of genius are unfathomable; but he who has known the white northern women with their pure spiritual eyes, will aver that instinct led him aright. I have known one, one whom I used to call Seraphita; Coppée knew her too, and that exquisite volume, “L’Exilé,” so Seraphita-like in the keen blond passion of its verse, was written to her, and each poem was sent to her as it was written. Where is she now, that flower of northern snow, once seen for a season in Paris? Has she returned to her native northern solitudes, great gulfs of sea water, mountain rock, and pine?
Balzac’s genius is in his titles as heaven is in its stars: “Melmoth Reconcilié,” “Jésus-Christ en Flandres,” “Le Revers d’un Grand Homme,” “La Cousine Bette.” I read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was the greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pascal. Of Pascal’s claim to be a great thinker I confess I cannot judge. No man is greater than the age he lives in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the legitimate children of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the existence of God strikes us in just the same light as the logical proof of the existence of Jupiter Ammon. “Les Pensées” could appear to me only as infinitely childish; the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and sterile to one of such modern and exotic taste as myself. Still, I accept thankfully, in its sense of two hundred years, the compliment paid to Balzac; but I would add that personally he seems to me to have shown greater wings of mind than any artist that ever lived. I am aware that this last statement will make many cry “fool” and hiss “Shakespeare!” But I am not putting forward these criticisms axiomatically, but only as the expressions of an individual taste, and interesting so far as they reveal to the reader the different developments and the progress of my mind. It might prove a little tiresome, but it would no doubt “look well,” in the sense that going to church “looks well,” if I were to write in here ten pages of praise of our national bard. I must, however, resist the temptation to “look well;” a confession is interesting in proportion to the amount of truth it contains, and I will, therefore, state frankly I never derived any profit whatsoever, and very little pleasure from the reading of the great plays. The beauty of the verse! Yes; he who loved Shelley so well as I could not fail to hear the melody of —
“Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.”
Is not such music as this enough? Of course but I am a sensualist in literature. I may see perfectly well that this or that book is a work of genius, but if it doesn’t “fetch me,” it doesn’t concern me, and I forget its very existence. What leaves me cold to-day will madden me to-morrow. With me literature is a question of sense, intellectual sense if you will, but sense all the same, and ruled by the same caprices — those of the flesh? Now we enter on very subtle distinctions. No doubt that there is the brain-judgment and the sense-judgment of a work of art. And it will be noticed that these two forces of discrimination exist sometimes almost independently of each other, in rare and radiant instances confounded and blended in one immense and unique love. Who has not been, unless perhaps some dusty old pedant, thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action of a book that penetrates to and speaks to you of your most present and most intimate emotions. This is of course pure sensualism; but to take a less marked stage. Why should Marlowe enchant me? why should he delight and awake enthusiasm in me, while Shakespeare leaves me cold? The mind that can understand one can understand the other, but there are affinities in literature corresponding to, and very analogous to, sexual affinities — the same unreasoned attractions, the same pleasures, the same lassitudes. Those we have loved most we are most indifferent to. Shelley, Gautier, Zola, Flaubert, Goncourt! how I have loved you all; and now I could not, would not, read you again. How womanly, how capricious; but even a capricious woman is constant, if not faithful to her amant de coeur. And so with me; of those I have loved deeply there is but one that still may thrill me with the old passion, with the first ecstacy — it is Balzac. Upon that rock I built my church, and his great and valid talent saved me often from destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new aestheticisms, the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and sickly surf of the symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit and not the flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and sublimity of Balzac’s thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest heights, and his range is limitless; there is no passion he has not touched, and what is more marvellous, he has given to each in art a place equivalent to the place it occupies in nature; his intense and penetrating sympathy for human life and all that concerns it enabled him to surround the humblest subjects with awe and crown them with the light of tragedy. There are some, particularly those who are capable of understanding neither and can read but one, who will object to any comparison being drawn between the Dramatist and the Novelist; but I confess that I — if the inherent superiority of verse over prose, which I admit unhesitatingly, be waived — that I fail, utterly fail to see in what Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the poet’s thought is of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be greater than the novelist’s. On these points we will cry quits, and come at once to the vital question — the creation. Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet? Is Eugénie Grandet inferior to Desdemona? Is her father inferior to Shylock? Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin? Can it be said that the apothecary in the “Cousine Bette,” or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine Bette herself is inferior to anything the brain of man has ever conceived? And it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three hundred years and the advantage of stage representation to impress his characters on the sluggish mind of the world; and as mental impressions are governed by the same laws of gravitation as atoms, our realisation of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than any character in contemporary literature, although it were equally great. And so far as epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I speak with absolute sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist seems to me richer than that of the dramatist. Who shall forget those terrible words of the poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house? Speaking of Vautrin she says, “His look frightens me as if he put his hand on my dress;” and another epigram from the same book, “Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.” Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes more incisively to the truth of things. One more; here I can give the exact words: “La gloire est le soleil des morts.” It would be easy to compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all “Maximes” and “Pensées,” even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and shallow.
Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the “Comédie Humaine.” I no doubt fluttered through some scores of other books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but he alone left any important or lasting impression upon my mind. The rest was like walnuts and wine, an agreeable aftertaste.
But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship of any kind; for save life I could never learn anything correctly. I am a student only of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude, — study as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the composition of my unfortunate “Roses of Midnight.”
Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces! conversation, oh the magic of it! It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can carry. Two old ladies discussing the peerage? Much may be learned, it is gold; poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into jewels, and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the diamond and the glow of the ruby.
I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to the “Nouvelle Athènes.” What is the “Nouvelle Athènes"? He who would know anything of my life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. Not the official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the café. The “Nouvelle Athènes” is a café on the Place Pigale. Ah! the morning idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer illusion, the grey moonlights on the Place where we used to stand on the pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to separate, thinking of what we had left said, and how much better we might have enforced our arguments. Dead and scattered are all those who used to assemble there, and those years and our home, for it was our home, live only in a few pictures and a few pages of prose. The same old story, the vanquished only are victorious; and though unacknowledged, though unknown, the influence of the “Nouvelle Athènes” is inveterate in the artistic thought of the nineteenth century.
How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth. With what strange, almost unnatural clearness do I see and hear, — see the white face of that café, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of those two streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass-door of the café grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o’clock the fragrant odour of absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer. A partition, rising a few feet or more over the hats, separates the glass front from the main body of the café. The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticised till two o’clock in the morning. But who is that man? he whose prominent eyes flash with excitement. That is Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The last or the supposed last of the great family. He is telling that girl a story — that fair girl with heavy eyelids, stupid and sensual. She is, however, genuinely astonished and interested, and he is striving to play upon her ignorance. Listen to him. “Spain — the night is fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the orange trees, you know — a midnight of stars and dreams. Now and then the silence is broken by the sentries challenging — that is all. But not in Spanish but in French are the challenges given; the town is in the hands of the French; it is under martial law. But now an officer passes down a certain garden, a Spaniard disguised as a French officer; from the balcony the family — one of the most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a thousand years, long before the conquest of the Moors — watches him. Well then" — Villiers sweeps with a white feminine hand the long hair that is falling over his face — he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in the opening of the story, and he is striving in English to “scamp,” in French to escamoter. “The family are watching, death if he is caught, if he fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague sound attracts the sentry, he turns; all is lost. The Spaniard is seized. Martial law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French general is a man of iron.” (Villiers laughs, a short hesitating laugh that is characteristic of him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain way), “man of iron; not only he declares that the spy must be beheaded, but also the entire family — a man of iron that, ha, ha; and then, no you cannot, it is impossible for you to understand the enormity of the calamity — a thousand years before the conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard alone could — there is no one here, ha, ha, I was forgetting — the utter extinction of a great family of the name, the oldest and noblest of all the families in Spain, it is not easy to understand that, no, not easy here in the ’Nouvelle Athènes’ — ha, ha, one must belong to a great family to understand, ha, ha.
“The father beseeches; he begs that one member may be spared to continue the name — the youngest son — that is all; if he could be saved, the rest what matter; death is nothing to a Spaniard; the family, the name, a thousand years of name is everything. The general is, you know, a ’man of iron.’ ’Yes, one member of your family shall be respited, but on one condition.’ To the agonised family conditions are as nothing. But they don’t know the man of iron is determined to make a terrible example, and they cry, ’Any conditions.’ ’He who is respited must serve as executioner to the others.’ Great is the doom; you understand; but after all the name must be saved. Then in the family council the father goes to his youngest son and says, ’I have been a good father to you, my son; I have always been a kind father, have I not? answer me; I have never refused you anything. Now you will not fail us, you will prove yourself worthy of the great name you bear. Remember your great ancestor who defeated the Moors, remember.’” (Villiers strives to get in a little local colour, but his knowledge of Spanish names and history is limited, and he in a certain sense fails.) “Then the mother comes to her son and says, ’My son, I have been a good mother, I have always loved you; say you will not desert us in this hour of our great need.’ Then the little sister comes, and the whole family kneels down and appeals to the horror-stricken boy. ...
“’He will not prove himself unworthy of our name,’ cries the father. ’Now, my son, courage, take the axe firmly, do what I ask you, courage, strike straight.’ The father’s head falls into the sawdust, the blood all over the white beard; then comes the elder brother, and then another brother; and then, oh, the little sister was almost more than he could bear, and the mother had to whisper, ’Remember your promise to your father, to your dead father.’ The mother laid her head on the block, but he could not strike. ’Be not the first coward of our name, strike; remember your promise to us all,’ and her head was struck off.”
“And the son,” the girl asks, “what became of him?”
“He never was seen, save at night, walking, a solitary man, beneath the walls of his castle in Granada.”
“And whom did he marry?”
“He never married.”
Then after a long silence some one said, —
“Whose story is that?”
“Balzac’s.”
At that moment the glass door of the café grated upon the sanded floor, and Manet entered. Although by birth and by art essentially Parisian, there was something in his appearance and manner of speaking that often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it was his dress — his clean-cut clothes and figure. That figure! those square shoulders that swaggered as he went across a room and the thin waist; and that face, the beard and nose, satyr-like shall I say? No, for I would evoke an idea of beauty of line united to that of intellectual expression — frank words, frank passion in his convictions, loyal and simple phrases, clear as well-water, sometimes a little hard, sometimes, as they flowed away, bitter, but at the fountain head sweet and full of light. He sits next to Degas, that round-shouldered man in suit of pepper and salt. There is nothing very trenchantly French about him either, except the large necktie; his eyes are small and his words are sharp, ironical, cynical. These two men are the leaders of the impressionist school. Their friendship has been jarred by inevitable rivalry. “Degas was painting ’Semiramis’ when I was painting ’Modern Paris,’” says Manet. “Manet is in despair because he cannot paint atrocious pictures like Durant, and be fêted and decorated; he is an artist, not by inclination, but by force. He is as a galley slave chained to the oar,” says Degas. Different too are their methods of work. Manet paints his whole picture from nature, trusting his instinct to lead him aright through the devious labyrinth of selection. Nor does his instinct ever fail him, there is a vision in his eyes which he calls nature, and which he paints unconsciously as he digests his food, thinking and declaring vehemently that the artist should not seek a synthesis, but should paint merely what he sees. This extraordinary oneness of nature and artistic vision does not exist in Degas, and even his portraits are composed from drawings and notes. About midnight Catulle Mendès will drop in, when he has corrected his proofs. He will come with his fine paradoxes and his strained eloquence. He will lean towards you, he will take you by the arm, and his presence is a nervous pleasure. And when the café is closed, when the last bock has been drunk, we shall walk about the great moonlight of the Place Pigale, and through the dark shadows of the streets, talking of the last book published, he hanging on to my arm, speaking in that high febrile voice of his, every phrase luminous, aerial, even as the soaring moon and the fitful clouds. Duranty, an unknown Stendal, will come in for an hour or so; he will talk little and go away quietly; he knows, and his whole manner shows that he knows that he is a defeated man; and if you ask him why he does not write another novel, he will say, “What’s the good, it would not be read; no one read the others, and I mightn’t do even as well if I tried again.” Paul Alexis, Léon Diex, Pissarro, Cabaner, are also frequently seen in the “Nouvelle Athènes.”
Cabaner! the world knows not the names of those who scorn the world: somewhere in one of the great populous churchyards of Paris there is a forgotten grave, and there lies Cabaner. Cabaner! since the beginning there have been, till the end of time there shall be Cabaners; and they shall live miserably and they shall die miserable, and shall be forgotten; and there shall never arise a novelist great enough to make live in art that eternal spirit of devotion, disinterestedness, and aspiration, which in each generation incarnates itself in one heroic soul. Better than those who stepped to opulence and fame upon thee fallen thou wert; better, loftier-minded, purer; thy destiny was to fall that others might rise upon thee, thou wert one of the noble legion of the conquered; let praise be given to the conquered, for the brunt of victory lies with the conquered. Child of the pavement, of strange sonnets and stranger music, I remember thee; I remember the silk shirts, the four sous of Italian cheese, the roll of bread, and the glass of milk; — the streets were thy dining-room. And the five-mile walk daily to the suburban music hall where five francs were earned by playing the accompaniments of comic songs. And the wonderful room on the fifth floor, which was furnished when that celebrated heritage of two thousand francs was paid. I remember the fountain that was bought for a wardrobe, and the American organ with all the instruments of the orchestra, and the plaster casts under which the homeless ones that were never denied a refuge and a crust by thee slept. I remember all, and the buying of the life-size “Venus de Milo.” Something extraordinary would be done with it, I knew, but the result exceeded my wildest expectation. The head must needs be struck off, so that the rapture of thy admiration should be secure from all jarring reminiscence of the streets.
Then the wonderful story of the tenor, the pork butcher, who was heard giving out such a volume of sound that the sausages were set in motion above him; he was fed, clothed, and educated on the five francs a day earned in the music hall in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet; and when he made his début at the Théâtre Lyrique, thou wert in the last stage of consumption and too ill to go to hear thy pupil’s success. He was immediately engaged by Mapleson and taken to America.
I remember thy face, Cabaner; I can see it now — that long sallow face ending in a brown beard, and the hollow eyes, the meagre arms covered with a silk shirt, contrasting strangely with the rest of the dress. In all thy privation and poverty, thou didst never forego thy silk shirt. I remember the paradoxes and the aphorisms, if not the exact words, the glamour and the sentiment of a humour that was all thy own. Never didst thou laugh; no, not even when in discussing how silence might be rendered in music, thou didst say, with thy extraordinary Pyrenean accent, “Pour rendre le silence en music il me faudrait trois orchestres militaires.” And when I did show thee some poor verses of mine, French verses, for at this time I hated and had partly forgotten my native language —
“My dear Dayne, you always write about love, the subject is nauseating.”
“So it is, so it is; but after all Baudelaire wrote about love and lovers; his best poem. ...”
” C’est vrai, mais il s’agissait d’une charogne et cela relève beaucoup la chose.”
I remember, too, a few stray snatches of thy extraordinary music, “music that might be considered by Wagner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not fail to understand;” also thy settings of sonnets where the melody was continued uninterruptedly from the first line to the last; and that still more marvellous feat, thy setting, likewise with unbroken melody, of Villon’s ballade “Les Dames du Temps Jadis;” and that Out-Cabanering of Cabaner, the putting to music of Cros’s “Hareng Saur.”
And why didst thou remain ever poor and unknown? Because of something too much, or something too little? Because of something too much! so I think, at least; thy heart was too full of too pure an ideal, too far removed from all possible contagion with the base crowd.
But, Cabaner, thou didst not labour in vain; thy destiny, though obscure, was a valiant and fruitful one; and, as in life, thou didst live for others so now in death thou dost live in others. Thou wert in an hour of wonder and strange splendour when the last tints and lovelinesses of romance lingered in the deepening west; when out of the clear east rose with a mighty effulgence of colour and lawless light Realism; when showing aloft in the dead pallor of the zenith, like a white flag fluttering faintly, Symbolists and Decadents appeared. Never before was there so sudden a flux and conflux of artistic desire, such aspiration in the soul of man, such rage of passion, such fainting fever, such cerebral erethism. The roar and dust of the daily battle of the Realists was continued under the flush of the sunset, the arms of the Romantics glittered, the pale spiritual Symbolists watched and waited, none knowing yet of their presence. In such an hour of artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wert, and thou wert a magnificent rallying point for all comers; it was thou who didst theorise our confused aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from all base commercialism, from all hateful prostitution; thou wert ever our high priest, and from thy high altar turned to us the white host, the ideal, the true and living God of all men.
Cabaner, I see you now entering the “Nouvelle Athènes;” you are a little tired after your long weary walk, but you lament not and you never cry out against the public that will accept neither your music nor your poetry. But though you are tired and footsore, you are ready to aestheticise till the café closes; for you the homeless ones are waiting: there they are, some three or four, and you will take them to your strange room, furnished with the American organ, the fountain, and the decapitated Venus, and you give them a crust each and cover them with what clothes you have; and, when clothes are lacking, with plaster casts, and though you will take but a glass of milk yourself, you will find a few sous to give them lager to cool their thirsty throats. So you have ever lived — a blameless life is yours, no base thought has ever entered there, not even a woman’s love; art and friends, that is all.
Reader, do you know of anything more angelic? If you do you are more fortunate than I have been.

Chapter VII
THE SYNTHESIS OF THE NOUVELLE ATHÈNES
Two dominant notes in my character — an original hatred of my native country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in. All the aspects of my native country are violently disagreeable to me, and I cannot think of the place I was born in without a sensation akin to nausea. These feelings are inherent and inveterate in me. I am instinctively averse to my own countrymen; they are at once remote and repulsive; but with Frenchmen I am conscious of a sense of nearness; I am one with them in their ideas and aspirations, and when I am with them, I am alive with a keen and penetrating sense of intimacy. Shall I explain this by atavism? Was there a French man or woman in my family some half dozen generations ago? I have not inquired. The English I love, and with a love that is foolish — mad, limitless; I love them better than the French, but I am not so near to them. Dear, sweet Protestant England, the red tiles of the farmhouse, the elms, the great hedgerows, and all the rich fields adorned with spreading trees, and the weald and the wold, the very words are passionately beautiful ... southern England, not the north — there is something Celtic in the north, — southern England, with its quiet, steadfast faces; — a smock frock is to me one of the most delightful things in the world; it is so absolutely English. The villages clustered round the greens, the spires of the churches pointing between the elm trees. ... This is congenial to me; and this is Protestantism. England is Protestantism, Protestantism is England. Protestantism is strong, clean, and westernly, Catholicism is eunuch-like, dirty, and Oriental. ... Yes, Oriental; there is something even Chinese about it. What made England great was Protestantism, and when she ceases to be Protestant she will fall. ... Look at the nations that have clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incense silence of the Vatican. Let us be Protestant, and revere Cromwell.

Garçon, un bock! I write to please myself, just as I order my dinner; if my books sell I cannot help it — it is an accident.
But you live by writing.
Yes, but life is only an accident — art is eternal.

What I reproach Zola with is that he has no style; there is nothing you won’t find in Zola from Chateaubriand to the reporting in the Figaro.
He seeks immortality in an exact description of a linendraper’s shop; if the shop conferred immortality it should be upon the linendraper who created the shop, and not on the novelist who described it.
And his last novel “l’Oeuvre,” how terribly spun out, and for a franc a line in the “Gil Blas.” Not a single new or even exact observation. And that terrible phrase repeated over and over again — "La Conquête de Paris.” What does it mean? I never knew any one who thought of conquering Paris; — no one ever spoke of conquering Paris except, perhaps, two or three provincials.

You must have rules in poetry, if it is only for the pleasure of breaking them, just as you must have women dressed, if it is only for the pleasure of imagining them as Venuses.

Fancy, a banquet was given to Julien by his pupils! He made a speech in favour of Lefevre, and hoped that every one there would vote for Lefevre. Julien was very eloquent. He spoke of Le grand art, le nu, and Lefevre’s unswerving fidelity to le nu ... elegance, refinement, an echo of ancient Greece: and then, — what do you think? when he had exhausted all the reasons why the medal of honour should be accorded to Lefevre, he said, “I ask you to remember, gentlemen, that he has a wife and eight children.” Is it not monstrous?

But it is you who are monstrous, you who expect to fashion the whole world in conformity with your aestheticisms ... a vain dream, and if realised it would result in an impossible world. A wife and children are the basis of existence, and it is folly to cry out because an appeal to such interests as these meet with response ... it will be so till the end of time.

And these great interests that are to continue to the end of time began two years ago, when your pictures were not praised in the Figaro as much as you thought they should be.

Marriage — what an abomination! Love — yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood — transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife — you know all about her — who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au delà? There is none. I say in marriage an au delà is impossible ... the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomises the ennui and the prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there — only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal. ... Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an au delà.

Good heavens! and the world still believes in education, in teaching people the “grammar of art.” Education is fatal to any one with a spark of artistic feeling. Education should be confined to clerks, and even them it drives to drink. Will the world learn that we never learn anything that we did not know before? The artist, the poet, painter, musician, and novelist go straight to the food they want, guided by an unerring and ineffable instinct; to teach them is to destroy the nerve of the artistic instinct, it is fatal. But above all in painting ... “correct drawing,” “solid painting.” Is it impossible to teach people, to force it into their heads that there is no such thing as correct drawing, and that if drawing were correct it would be wrong? Solid painting; good heavens! Do they suppose that there is one sort of painting that is better than all others, and that there is a receipt for making it as for making chocolate! Art is not mathematics, it is individuality. It does not matter how badly you paint, so long as you don’t paint badly like other people. Education destroys individuality. That great studio of Julien’s is a sphinx, and all the poor folk that go there for artistic education are devoured. After two years they all paint and draw alike, every one; that vile execution, — they call it execution, — la pâet, la peinture au premier coup. I was over in England last year, and I saw some portraits by a man called Richmond. They were horrible, but I liked them because they weren’t like painting. Stott and Sargent are clever fellows enough; I like Stott the best. If they had remained at home and hadn’t been taught, they might have developed a personal art, but the trail of the serpent is over all they do — that vile French painting, le morceau, etc. Stott is getting over it by degrees. He exhibited a nymph this year. I know what he meant; it was an interesting intention. I liked his little landscapes better ... simplified into nothing, into a couple of primitive tints, wonderful clearness, light. But I doubt if he will find a public to understand all that.

Democratic art! Art is the direct antithesis to democracy. ... Athens! a few thousand citizens who owned many thousand slaves, call that democracy! No! what I am speaking of is modern democracy — the mass. The mass can only appreciate simple and naïve emotions, puerile prettiness, above all conventionalities. See the Americans that come over here; what do they admire? Is it Degas or Manet they admire? No, Bouguereau and Lefevre. What was most admired at the International Exhibition? — The Dirty Boy. And if the medal of honour had been decided by a plébiscite, the dirty boy would have had an overwhelming majority. What is the literature of the people? The idiotic stories of the Petit Journal. Don’t talk of Shakespeare, Molière, and the masters; they are accepted on the authority of the centuries. If the people could understand Hamlet, the people would not read the Petit Journal; if the people could understand Michel Angelo, they would not look at our Bouguereau or your Bouguereau, Sir F. Leighton. For the last hundred years we have been going rapidly towards democracy, and what is the result? The destruction of the handicrafts. That there are still good pictures painted and good poems written proves nothing, there will always be found men to sacrifice their lives for a picture or a poem. But the decorative arts which are executed in collaboration, and depend for support on the general taste of a large number, have ceased to exist. Explain that if you can. I’ll give you five thousand, ten thousand francs to buy a beautiful clock that is not a copy and is not ancient, and you can’t do it. Such a thing does not exist. Look here; I was going up the staircase of the Louvre the other day. They were putting up a mosaic; it was horrible; every one knows it is horrible. Well, I asked who had given the order for this mosaic, and I could not find out; no one knew. An order is passed from bureau to bureau, and no one is responsible; and it will be always so in a republic, and the more republican you are the worse it will be.

The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilisation; man will have to rise against it sooner or later. ... Capital, unpaid labour, wage-slaves, and all the rest — stuff. ... Look at these plates; they were painted by machinery; they are abominable. Look at them. In old times plates were painted by the hand, and the supply was necessarily limited to the demand, and a china in which there was always something more or less pretty, was turned out; but now thousands, millions of plates are made more than we want, and there is a commercial crisis; the thing is inevitable. I say the great and the reasonable revolution will be when mankind rises in revolt, and smashes the machinery and restores the handicrafts.

Goncourt is not an artist, notwithstanding all his affectation and outcries; he is not an artist. Il me fait l’effet of an old woman shrieking after immortality and striving to beat down some fragment of it with a broom. Once it was a duet, now it is a solo. They wrote novels, history, plays, they collected bric-à-brac — they wrote about their bric-à-brac; they painted in water-colours, they etched — they wrote about their water-colours and etchings; they have made a will settling that the bric-à-brac is to be sold at their death, and the proceeds applied to founding a prize for the best essay or novel, I forget which it is. They wrote about the prize they are going to found; they kept a diary, they wrote down everything they heard, felt, or saw, radotage de vieille femme; nothing must escape, not the slightest word; it might be that very word that might confer on them immortality; everything they heard, or said, must be of value, of inestimable value. A real artist does not trouble himself about immortality, about everything he hears, feels, and says; he treats ideas and sensations as so much clay wherewith to create.
And then the famous collaboration; how it was talked about, written about, prayed about; and when Jules died, what a subject for talk for articles; it all went into pot. Hugo’s vanity was Titanic, Goncourt’s is puerile.
And Daudet?
Oh, Daudet, c’est de la bouillabaisse.

Whistler, of all artists, is the least impressionist; the idea people have of his being an impressionist only proves once again the absolute inability of the public to understand the merits or the demerits of artistic work. Whistler’s art is absolutely classical; he thinks of nature, but he does not see nature; he is guided by his mind, and not by his eyes; and the best of it is he says so. Oh, he knows it well enough! Any one who knows him must have heard him say, “Painting is absolutely scientific; it is an exact science.” And his work is in accord with his theory; he risks nothing, all is brought down, arranged, balanced, and made one, — a well-determined mental conception, I admire his work; I am merely showing how he is misunderstood, even by those who think they understand. Does he ever seek a pose that is characteristic of the model, a pose that the model repeats oftener than any other? — Never. He advances the foot, puts the hand on the hip, etc., with a view to rendering his idea. Take his portrait of Duret. Did he ever see Duret in dress clothes? Probably not. Did he ever see Duret with a lady’s opera cloak? — I am sure he never did. Is Duret in the habit of going to the theatre with ladies? No; he is a littérateur who is always in men’s society, rarely in ladies’. But these facts mattered nothing to Whistler as they matter to Degas, or to Manet. Whistler took Duret out of his environment, dressed him up, thought out a scheme — in a word, painted his idea without concerning himself in the least with the model. Mark you, I deny that I am urging any fault or flaw; I am merely contending that Whistler’s art is not modern art, but classic art — yes, and severely classical, far more classical than Titian’s or Velasquez; — from an opposite pole as classical as Ingres. No Greek dramatist ever sought the synthesis of things more uncompromisingly than Whistler. And he is right. Art is not nature. Art is nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement. Zola and Goncourt cannot, or will not understand that the artistic stomach must be allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion. If a man is really an artist he will remember what is necessary, forget what is useless; but if he takes notes he will interrupt his artistic digestion, and the result will be a lot of little touches, inchoate and wanting in the elegant rhythm of the synthesis.

I am sick of synthetical art; we want observation direct and unreasoned. What I reproach Millet with is that it is always the same thing, the same peasant, the same sabot, the same sentiment. You must admit that it is somewhat stereotyped.

What does that matter; what is more stereotyped than Japanese art? But that does not prevent it from being always beautiful.

People talk of Manet’s originality; that is just what I can’t see. What he has got, and what you can’t take away from him, is a magnificent execution. A piece of still life by Manet is the most wonderful thing in the world; vividness of colour, breadth, simplicity, and directness of touch — marvellous!

French translation is the only translation; in England you still continue to translate poetry into poetry, instead of into prose. We used to do the same, but we have long ago renounced such follies. Either of two things — if the translator is a good poet, he substitutes his verse for that of the original; — I don’t want his verse, I want the original; — if he is a bad poet, he gives us bad verse, which is intolerable. Where the original poet put an effect of caesura, the translator puts an effect of rhyme; where the original poet puts an effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of caesura. Take Longfellow’s “Dante.” Does it give as good an idea of the original as our prose translation? Is it as interesting reading? Take Bayard Taylor’s translation of “Goethe.” Is it readable? Not to any one with an ear for verse. Will any one say that Taylor’s would be read if the original did not exist. The fragment translated by Shelley is beautiful, but then it is Shelley. Look at Swinburne’s translations of Villon. They are beautiful poems by Swinburne, that is all; he makes Villon speak of a “splendid kissing mouth.” Villon could not have done this unless he had read Swinburne. “Heine,” translated by James Thomson, is not different from Thomson’s original poems; “Heine,” translated by Sir Theodore Martin, is doggerel.

But in English blank verse you can translate quite as literally as you could into prose?

I doubt it, but even so, the rhythm of the blank line would carry your mind away from that of the original.

But if you don’t know the original?
The rhythm of the original can be suggested in prose judiciously used; even if it isn’t, your mind is at least free, whereas the English rhythm must destroy the sensation of something foreign. There is no translation except a word-for-word translation. Baudelaire’s translation of Poe, and Hugo’s translation of Shakespeare, are marvellous in this respect; a pun or joke that is untranslatable is explained in a note.

No; ’tis just what they don’t do; they think they are translating word for word, but they aren’t. All the proper names, no matter how unpronounceable, must be rigidly adhered to; you must never transpose versts into kilometres, or roubles into francs; — I don’t know what a verst is or what a rouble is, but when I see the words I am in Russia. Every proverb must be rendered literally, even if it doesn’t make very good sense; if it doesn’t make sense at all, it must be explained in a note. For example, there is a proverb in German: “Quand le cheval est sellé il faut le monter;” in French there is a proverb: “Quand le vin est tiré il faut le boire.” Well, a translator who would translate quand le cheval, etc., by quand le vin, etc., is an ass, and does not know his business. In translation, only a strictly classical language should be used; no word of slang, or even word of modern origin should be employed; the translator’s aim should be never to dissipate the illusion of an exotic. If I were translating the “Assommoir” into English, I should strive after a strong, flexible, but colourless language, something — what shall I say? — a sort of a modern Addison.

What, don’t you know the story about Mendés? — when Chose wanted to marry his sister? Chose’s mother, it appears, went to live with a priest. The poor fellow was dreadfully cut up; he was brokenhearted; and he went to Mendés, his heart swollen with grief, determined to make a clean breast of it, let the worst come to the worst. After a great deal of beating about the bush, and apologising, he got it out. You know Mendés, you can see him smiling a little; and looking at Chose with that white cameo face of his he said, “Avec quel meilleur homme voulez-vous que votre mère se fit? vous n’avez donc, jeune homme, aucun sentiment religieux.”

Victor Hugo, he is a painter on porcelain; his verse is mere decoration, long tendrils and flowers; and the same thing over and over again.

How to be happy! — not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the Nouvelle Athènes, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the bourgeois over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense consciousness of life, — to live in a sleepy country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence. We must have the azaleas out to-morrow and thoroughly cleansed, they are devoured by insects; the tame rook has flown away; mother lost her prayer-book coming from church, she thinks it was stolen. A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy; — and to think there are people who would educate, who would draw these people out of the calm satisfaction of their instincts, and give them passions! The philanthropist is the Nero of modern times.

Chapter VIII
EXTRACT FROM A LETTER
Why did you not send a letter? We have all been writing to you for the last six months, but no answer — none. Had you written one word I would have saved all. The poor concierge was in despair; she said the propriétaire would wait if you had only said when you were coming back, or if you only had let us know what you wished to be done. Three quarters rent was due, and no news could be obtained of you, so an auction had to be called. It nearly broke my heart to see those horrid men tramping over the delicate carpets, their coarse faces set against the sweet colour of that beautiful English cretonne. ... And all the while the pastel by Manet, the great hat set like an aureole about the face — ’the eyes deep set in crimson shadow,’ ’the fan widespread across the bosom’ (you see I am quoting your own words), looking down, the mistress of that little paradise of tapestry. She seemed to resent the intrusion. I looked once or twice half expecting those eyes ’deep set in crimson shadow’ to fill with tears. But nothing altered her great dignity; she seemed to see all, but as a Buddha she remained impenetrable. ...

How like her that letter is; — egotistical, vain, foolish; no, not foolish — narrow, limited, but not foolish; worldly, oh, how worldly! and yet not repulsively so, for there always was in her a certain intensity of feeling that saved her from the commonplace, and gave her an inexpressible charm. Yes, she is a woman who can feel, and she has lived her life and felt it very acutely, very sincerely — sincerely?... like a moth caught in a gauze curtain! Well, would that preclude sincerity? Sincerity seems to convey an idea of depth, and she was not very deep, that is quite certain. I never could understand her; — a little brain that span rapidly and hummed a pretty humming tune. But no, there was something more in her than that. She often said things that I thought clever, things that I did not forget, things, that I should like to put into books. But it was not brain power; it was only intensity of feeling — nervous feeling. I don’t know ... perhaps. ... She has lived her life ... yes, within certain limits she has lived her life. None of us do more than that. True. I remember the first time I saw her. Sharp, little, and merry — a changeable little sprite. I thought she had ugly hands; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her hands before I had known her a month. It is now seven years ago. How time passes! I was very young then. What battles we have had, what quarrels! Still we had good times together. She never lost sight of me, but no intrusion; far too clever for that. I never got the better of her but once ... once I did, enfin! She soon made up for lost ground. I wonder what the charm was. I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever; that I know. ... I never knew if she cared for me, never. There were moments when. ... Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely subtle, subtle in everything, in her sensations subtle; I suppose that was her charm, subtleness. I never knew if she cared for me, I never knew if she hated her husband, — one never knew her, — I never knew how she would receive me. The last time I saw her ... that stupid American would take her downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding behind one of the pillars in the Rue de Rivoli, my hand on the cab door. However, she could not blame me that time — and all the stories she used to invent of my indiscretions; I believe she used to get them up for the sake of the excitement. She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got her into a certain line; that marriage, that title, and she used to think of it night and day. I shall never forget when she went into mourning for the Count de Chambord. And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois they were! That salon; the flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard St. Germain, the cabinets, brass work, the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of comfort; a little grotesque no doubt; — the mechanical admiration for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere, the Figaro, that is to say Albert Wolf, l’homme le plus spirituel de Paris, c’est-à-dire, dans le monde, the success of Georges Ohnet and the talent of Gustave Doré. But with all this vulgarity of taste certain appreciations, certain ebullitions of sentiment, within the radius of sentiment certain elevations and depravities, — depravities in the legitimate sense of the word, that is to say, a revolt against the commonplace. ...

Ha, ha, ha! how I have been dreaming. I wish I had not been awoke from my reverie, it was pleasant.
The letter just read indicates, if it does not clearly tell, the changes that have taken place in my life; and it is only necessary to say that one morning, a few months ago, when my servant brought me some summer honey and a glass of milk to my bedside, she handed me an unpleasant letter. My agent’s handwriting, even when I knew the envelope contained a cheque, has never quite failed to produce a sensation of repugnance in me; — so hateful is any sort of account, that I avoid as much as possible even knowing how I stand at my banker’s. Therefore the odour of honey and milk, so evocative of fresh flowers and fields, was spoilt that morning for me; and it was some time before I slipped on that beautiful Japanese dressing-gown, which I shall never see again, and read the odious epistle.
That some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to starve, that I may not be deprived of my demi-tasse at Tortoni’s; that I may not be forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my cat and my python — monstrous. And these wretched creatures will find moral support in England; they will find pity!
Pity, that most vile of all vile virtues, has never been known to me. The great pagan world I love knew it not. Now the world proposes to interrupt the terrible austere laws of nature which ordain that the weak shall be trampled upon, shall be ground into death and dust, that the strong shall be really strong, — that the strong shall be glorious, sublime. A little bourgeois comfort, a little bourgeois sense of right, cry the moderns.
Hither the world has been drifting since the coming of the pale socialist of Galilee; and this is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity. His divinity is falling, it is evanescent in sight of the goal He dreamed; again He is denied by His disciples. Poor fallen God! I, who hold nought else pitiful, pity Thee, Thy bleeding face and hands and feet, Thy hanging body; Thou at least art picturesque, and in a way beautiful in the midst of the sombre mediocrity, towards which Thou hast drifted for two thousand years, a flag; and in which Thou shalt find Thy doom as I mine, I, who will not adore Thee and cannot curse Thee now. For verily Thy life and Thy fate has been greater, stranger and more Divine than any man’s has been. The chosen people, the garden, the betrayal, the crucifixion, and the beautiful story, not of Mary, but of Magdalen. The God descending to the harlot! Even the great pagan world of marble and pomp and lust and cruelty, that my soul goes out to and hails as the grandest, has not so sublime a contrast to show us as this.
Come to me, ye who are weak. The Word went forth, the terrible disastrous Word, and before it fell the ancient gods, and the vices that they represent, and which I revere, are outcast now in the world of men; the Word went forth, and the world interpreted the Word, blindly, ignorantly, savagely, for two thousand years, but nevertheless nearing every day the end — the end that Thou in Thy divine intelligence foresaw, that finds its voice to-day (enormous though the antithesis may be, I will say it) in the Pall Mall Gazette. What fate has been like Thine? Betrayed by Judas in the garden, denied by Peter before the cock crew, crucified between thieves, and mourned for by a harlot, and then sent bound and bare, nothing changed, nothing altered, in Thy ignominious plight, forthward in the world’s van the glory and symbol of a man’s new idea — Pity. Thy day is closing in, but the heavens are now wider aflame with Thy light than ever before — Thy light, which I, a pagan, standing on the last verge of the old world, declare to be darkness, the coming night of pity and justice which is imminent, which is the twentieth century. The bearers have relinquished Thy cross, they leave Thee in the hour of Thy universal triumph, Thy crown of thorns is falling, Thy face is buffeted with blows, and not even a reed is placed in Thy hand for sceptre; only I and mine are by Thee, we who shall perish with Thee, in the ruin Thou hast created.
Injustice we worship; all that lifts us out of the miseries of life is the sublime fruit of injustice. Every immortal deed was an act of fearful injustice; the world of grandeur, of triumph, of courage, of lofty aspiration, was built up on injustice. Man would not be man but for injustice. Hail, therefore, to the thrice glorious virtue injustice! What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh’s lash or Egypt’s sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died? What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maiden was the price paid for Ingres’ La Source? That the model died of drink and disease in the hospital, is nothing when compared with the essential that I should have La Source, that exquisite dream of innocence, to think of till my soul is sick with delight of the painter’s holy vision. Nay more, the knowledge that a wrong was done — that millions of Israelites died in torments, that a girl, or a thousand girls, died in the hospital for that one virginal thing, is an added pleasure which I could not afford to spare. Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies; to see the great gladiators pass, to hear them cry the famous “Ave Caesar,” to hold the thumb down, to see the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the agonies of poisoned slaves! Oh, for excess, for crime! I would give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire; for the hymn, “A la très-chère, à la très-belle, qui remplit mon coeur de clarté,” let the first-born in every house in Europe be slain; and in all sincerity I profess my readiness to decapitate all the Japanese in Japan and elsewhere, to save from destruction one drawing by Hokee. Again I say that all we deem sublime in the world’s history are acts, of injustice; and it is certain that if mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism. England was great and glorious, because England was unjust, and England’s greatest son was the personification of injustice — Cromwell.
But the old world of heroes is over now. The skies above us are dark with sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are running with streaming canvas upon ruin; all ideals have gone; nothing remains to us for worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Mass; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and rushes about us — we, the great ship that has floated up from the antique world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain passion, its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plaintive blast, and the forest where the whiteness of the nymph was seen escaping! We are weary of pity, we are weary of being good; we are weary of tears and effusion, and our refuge — the British Museum — is the wide sea shore and the wind of the ocean. There, there is real joy in the flesh; our statues are naked, but we are ashamed, and our nakedness is indecency: a fair, frank soul is mirrored in those fauns and nymphs; and how strangely enigmatic is the soul of the antique world, the bare, barbarous soul of beauty and of might!