CHAPTER IV
FROM LOUIS LEVERETT, IN PARIS, TO HARVARD TREMONT, IN BOSTON.
September 25th.
My dear Harvard--I have carried out my plan, of which I gave you a
hint in my last, and I only regret that I should not have done it
before. It is human nature, after all, that is the most interesting
thing in the world, and it only reveals itself to the truly earnest
seeker. There is a want of earnestness in that life of hotels and
railroad trains, which so many of our countrymen are content to lead
in this strange Old World, and I was distressed to find how far I,
myself; had been led along the dusty, beaten track. I had, however,
constantly wanted to turn aside into more unfrequented ways; to
plunge beneath the surface and see what I should discover. But the
opportunity had always been missing; somehow, I never meet those
opportunities that we hear about and read about--the things that
happen to people in novels and biographies. And yet I am always on
the watch to take advantage of any opening that may present itself; I
am always looking out for experiences, for sensations--I might almost
say for adventures.
The great thing is to LIVE, you know--to feel, to be conscious of
one's possibilities; not to pass through life mechanically and
insensibly, like a letter through the post-office. There are times,
my dear Harvard, when I feel as if I were really capable of
everything--capable de tout, as they say here--of the greatest
excesses as well as the greatest heroism. Oh, to be able to say that
one has lived--qu'on a vecu, as they say here--that idea exercises an
indefinable attraction for me. You will, perhaps, reply, it is easy
to say it; but the thing is to make people believe you! And, then, I
don't want any second-hand, spurious sensations; I want the knowledge
that leaves a trace--that leaves strange scars and stains and
reveries behind it! But I am afraid I shock you, perhaps even
frighten you.
If you repeat my remarks to any of the West Cedar Street circle, be
sure you tone them down as your discretion will suggest. For
yourself; you will know that I have always had an intense desire to
see something of REAL FRENCH LIFE. You are acquainted with my great
sympathy with the French; with my natural tendency to enter into the
French way of looking at life. I sympathise with the artistic
temperament; I remember you used sometimes to hint to me that you
thought my own temperament too artistic. I don't think that in
Boston there is any real sympathy with the artistic temperament; we
tend to make everything a matter of right and wrong. And in Boston
one can't LIVE--on ne peut pas vivre, as they say here. I don't mean
one can't reside--for a great many people manage that; but one can't
live aesthetically--I may almost venture to say, sensuously. This is
why I have always been so much drawn to the French, who are so
aesthetic, so sensuous. I am so sorry that Theophile Gautier has
passed away; I should have liked so much to go and see him, and tell
him all that I owe him. He was living when I was here before; but,
you know, at that time I was travelling with the Johnsons, who are
not aesthetic, and who used to make me feel rather ashamed of my
artistic temperament. If I had gone to see the great apostle of
beauty, I should have had to go clandestinely--en cachette, as they
say here; and that is not my nature; I like to do everything frankly,
freely, naivement, au grand jour. That is the great thing--to be
free, to be frank, to be naif. Doesn't Matthew Arnold say that
somewhere--or is it Swinburne, or Pater?
When I was with the Johnsons everything was superficial; and, as
regards life, everything was brought down to the question of right
and wrong. They were too didactic; art should never be didactic; and
what is life but an art? Pater has said that so well, somewhere.
With the Johnsons I am afraid I lost many opportunities; the tone was
gray and cottony, I might almost say woolly. But now, as I tell you,
I have determined to take right hold for myself; to look right into
European life, and judge it without Johnsonian prejudices. I have
taken up my residence in a French family, in a real Parisian house.
You see I have the courage of my opinions; I don't shrink from
carrying out my theory that the great thing is to LIVE.
You know I have always been intensely interested in Balzac, who never
shrank from the reality, and whose almost LURID pictures of Parisian
life have often haunted me in my wanderings through the old wicked-
looking streets on the other side of the river. I am only sorry that
my new friends--my French family--do not live in the old city--au
coeur du vieux Paris, as they say here. They live only in the
Boulevard Haussman, which is less picturesque; but in spite of this
they have a great deal of the Balzac tone. Madame de Maisonrouge
belongs to one of the oldest and proudest families in France; but she
has had reverses which have compelled her to open an establishment in
which a limited number of travellers, who are weary of the beaten
track, who have the sense of local colour--she explains it herself;
she expresses it so well--in short, to open a sort of boarding-house.
I don't see why I should not, after all, use that expression, for it
is the correlative of the term pension bourgeoise, employed by Balzac
in the Pere Goriot. Do you remember the pension bourgeoise of Madame
Vauquer nee de Conflans? But this establishment is not at all like
that: and indeed it is not at all bourgeois; there is something
distinguished, something aristocratic, about it. The Pension Vauquer
was dark, brown, sordid, graisseuse; but this is in quite a different
tone, with high, clear, lightly-draped windows, tender, subtle,
almost morbid, colours, and furniture in elegant, studied, reed-like
lines. Madame de Maisonrouge reminds me of Madame Hulot--do you
remember "la belle Madame Hulot?"--in Les Barents Pauvres. She has a
great charm; a little artificial, a little fatigued, with a little
suggestion of hidden things in her life; but I have always been
sensitive to the charm of fatigue, of duplicity.
I am rather disappointed, I confess, in the society I find here; it
is not so local, so characteristic, as I could have desired. Indeed,
to tell the truth, it is not local at all; but, on the other hand, it
is cosmopolitan, and there is a great advantage in that. We are
French, we are English, we are American, we are German; and, I
believe, there are some Russians and Hungarians expected. I am much
interested in the study of national types; in comparing, contrasting,
seizing the strong points, the weak points, the point of view of
each. It is interesting to shift one's point of view--to enter into
strange, exotic ways of looking at life.
The American types here are not, I am sorry to say, so interesting as
they might be, and, excepting myself; are exclusively feminine. We
are THIN, my dear Harvard; we are pale, we are sharp. There is
something meagre about us; our line is wanting in roundness, our
composition in richness. We lack temperament; we don't know how to
live; nous ne savons pas vivre, as they say here. The American
temperament is represented (putting myself aside, and I often think
that my temperament is not at all American) by a young girl and her
mother, and another young girl without her mother--without her mother
or any attendant or appendage whatever. These young girls are rather
curious types; they have a certain interest, they have a certain
grace, but they are disappointing too; they don't go far; they don't
keep all they promise; they don't satisfy the imagination. They are
cold, slim, sexless; the physique is not generous, not abundant; it
is only the drapery, the skirts and furbelows (that is, I mean in the
young lady who has her mother) that are abundant. They are very
different: one of them all elegance, all expensiveness, with an air
of high fashion, from New York; the other a plain, pure, clear-eyed,
straight-waisted, straight-stepping maiden from the heart of New
England. And yet they are very much alike too--more alike than they
would care to think themselves for they eye each other with cold,
mistrustful, deprecating looks. They are both specimens of the
emancipated young American girl--practical, positive, passionless,
subtle, and knowing, as you please, either too much or too little.
And yet, as I say, they have a certain stamp, a certain grace; I like
to talk with them, to study them.
The fair New Yorker is, sometimes, very amusing; she asks me if every
one in Boston talks like me--if every one is as "intellectual" as
your poor correspondent. She is for ever throwing Boston up at me; I
can't get rid of Boston. The other one rubs it into me too; but in a
different way; she seems to feel about it as a good Mahommedan feels
toward Mecca, and regards it as a kind of focus of light for the
whole human race. Poor little Boston, what nonsense is talked in thy
name! But this New England maiden is, in her way, a strange type:
she is travelling all over Europe alone--"to see it," she says, "for
herself." For herself! What can that stiff slim self of hers do
with such sights, such visions! She looks at everything, goes
everywhere, passes her way, with her clear quiet eyes wide open;
skirting the edge of obscene abysses without suspecting them; pushing
through brambles without tearing her robe; exciting, without knowing
it, the most injurious suspicions; and always holding her course,
passionless, stainless, fearless, charmless! It is a little figure
in which, after all, if you can get the right point of view, there is
something rather striking.
By way of contrast, there is a lovely English girl, with eyes as shy
as violets, and a voice as sweet! She has a sweet Gainsborough head,
and a great Gainsborough hat, with a mighty plume in front of it,
which makes a shadow over her quiet English eyes. Then she has a
sage-green robe, "mystic, wonderful," all embroidered with subtle
devices and flowers, and birds of tender tint; very straight and
tight in front, and adorned behind, along the spine, with large,
strange, iridescent buttons. The revival of taste, of the sense of
beauty, in England, interests me deeply; what is there in a simple
row of spinal buttons to make one dream--to donnor a rever, as they
say here? I think that a great aesthetic renascence is at hand, and
that a great light will be kindled in England, for all the world to
see. There are spirits there that I should like to commune with; I
think they would understand me.
This gracious English maiden, with her clinging robes, her amulets
and girdles, with something quaint and angular in her step, her
carriage something mediaeval and Gothic, in the details of her person
and dress, this lovely Evelyn Vane (isn't it a beautiful name?) is
deeply, delightfully picturesque. She is much a woman--elle est bien
femme, as they say here; simpler, softer, rounder, richer than the
young girls I spoke of just now. Not much talk--a great, sweet
silence. Then the violet eye--the very eye itself seems to blush;
the great shadowy hat, making the brow so quiet; the strange,
clinging, clutching, pictured raiment! As I say, it is a very
gracious, tender type. She has her brother with her, who is a
beautiful, fair-haired, gray-eyed young Englishman. He is purely
objective; and he, too, is very plastic.
