CHAPTER IV.
The weeks glided on. Isaura's manuscript bad passed into print; it came
out in the French fashion of _feuilletons_,--a small detachment at a
time. A previous flourish of trumpets by Savarin and the clique at his
command insured it attention, if not from the general public, at least
from critical and literary coteries. Before the fourth instalment
appeared it had outgrown the patronage of the coteries; it seized hold of
the public. It was not in the last school in fashion; incidents were not
crowded and violent,--they were few and simple, rather appertaining to an
elder school, in which poetry of sentiment and grace of diction
prevailed. That very resemblance to old favourites gave it the
attraction of novelty. In a word, it excited a pleased admiration, and
great curiosity was felt as to the authorship. When it oozed out that it
was by the young lady whose future success in the musical world had been
so sanguinely predicted by all who had heard her sing, the interest
wonderfully increased. Petitions to be introduced to her acquaintance
were showered upon Savarin. Before she scarcely realized her dawning
fame, she was drawn from her quiet home and retired habits; she was
_fetee_ and courted in the literary circle of which Savarin was a chief.
That circle touched, on one side, Bohemia; on the other, that realm of
politer fashion which, in every intellectual metropolis, but especially
in Paris, seeks to gain borrowed light from luminaries in art and
letters. But the very admiration she obtained somewhat depressed,
somewhat troubled her; after all, it did not differ from that which was
at her command as a singer.
On the one hand, she shrank instinctively from the caresses of female
authors and the familiar greetings of male authors, who frankly lived in
philosophical disdain of the conventions respected by sober, decorous
mortals. On the other hand, in the civilities of those who, while they
courted a rising celebrity, still held their habitual existence apart
from the artistic world, there was a certain air of condescension, of
patronage, towards the young stranger with no other protector but Signora
Venosta, the _ci-devant_ public singer, and who had made her _debut_ in a
journal edited by M. Gustave Rameau, which, however disguised by
exaggerated terms of praise, wounded her pride of woman in flattering her
vanity as author. Among this latter set were wealthy, high-born men, who
addressed her as woman--as woman beautiful and young--with words of
gallantry that implied love, but certainly no thought of marriage,--many
of the most ardent were indeed married already. But once launched into
the thick of Parisian hospitalities, it was difficult to draw back. The
Venosta wept at the thought of missing some lively soiree, and Savarin
laughed at her shrinking fastidiousness as that of a child's ignorance of
the world. But still she had her mornings to herself; and in those
mornings, devoted to the continuance of her work (for the commencement
was in print before a third was completed), she forgot the commonplace
world that received her in the evenings. Insensibly to herself the tone
of this work had changed as it proceeded. It had begun seriously indeed,
but in the seriousness there was a certain latent joy. It might be the
joy of having found vent of utterance; it might be rather a joy still
more latent, inspired by the remembrance of Graham's words and looks, and
by the thought that she had renounced all idea of the professional career
which he had evidently disapproved. Life then seemed to her a bright
possession. We have seen that she had begun her _roman_ without planning
how it should end. She had, however, then meant it to end, somehow or
other, happily. Now the lustre had gone from life; the tone of the work
was saddened; it foreboded a tragic close. But for the general reader it
became, with every chapter, still more interesting; the poor child had a
singularly musical gift of style,--a music which lent itself naturally to
pathos. Every very young writer knows how his work, if one of feeling,
will colour itself from the views of some truth in his innermost self;
and in proportion as it does so, how his absorption in the work
increases, till it becomes part and parcel of his own mind and heart.
The presence of a hidden sorrow may change the fate of the beings he has
created, and guide to the grave those whom, in a happier vein, he would
have united at the altar. It is not till a later stage of experience and
art that the writer escapes from the influence of his individual
personality, and lives in existences that take no colourings from his
own. Genius usually must pass through the subjective process before it
gains the objective. Even a Shakspeare represents himself in the Sonnets
before no trace of himself is visible in a Falstaff or a Lear.
No news of the Englishman,--not a word. Isaura could not but feel that
in his words, his looks, that day in her own garden, and those yet
happier days at Enghien, there had been more than friendship; there had
been love,--love enough to justify her own pride in whispering to
herself, "And I love too." But then that last parting! how changed he
was! how cold! She conjectured that jealousy of Rameau might, in some
degree, account for the coldness when he first entered the room, but
surely not when he left; surely not when she had overpassed the reserve
of her sex, and implied by signs rarely misconstrued by those who love
that he had no cause for jealousy of another. Yet he had gone,--parted
with her pointedly as a friend, a mere friend. How foolish she had been
to think this rich ambitious foreigner could ever have meant to be more!
In the occupation of her work she thought to banish his image; but in
that work the image was never absent; there were passages in which she
pleadingly addressed it, and then would cease abruptly, stifled by
passionate tears. Still she fancied that the work would reunite them;
that in its pages he would hear her voice and comprehend her heart. And
thus all praise of the work became very, very dear to her.
At last, after many weeks, Savarin heard from Graham. The letter was
dated Aix-la-Chapelle, at which the Englishman said he might yet be some
time detained. In the letter Graham spoke chiefly of the new journal:
in polite compliment of Savarin's own effusions; in mixed praise and
condemnation of the political and social articles signed Pierre Firmin,--
praise of their intellectual power, condemnation of their moral cynicism.
"The writer," he said, "reminds me of a passage in which Montesquieu
compares the heathen philosophers to those plants which the earth
produces in places that have never seen the heavens. The soil of
his experience does not grow a single belief; and as no community
can exist without a belief of some kind, so a politician without
belief can but help to destroy; he cannot reconstruct. Such writers
corrupt a society; they do not reform a system."
He closed his letter with a reference to Isaura:
"Do, in your reply, my dear Savarin, tell me something about your
friends Signora Venosta and the Signorina, whose work, so far as yet
published, I have read with admiring astonishment at the power of a
female writer so young to rival the veteran practitioners of fiction
in the creation of interest in imaginary characters, and in
sentiments which, if they appear somewhat over-romantic and
exaggerated, still touch very fine chords in human nature not
awakened in our trite every-day existence. I presume that the
beauty of the _roman_ has been duly appreciated by a public so
refined as the Parisian, and that the name of the author is
generally known. No doubt she is now much the rage of the literary
circles, and her career as a writer may be considered fixed. Pray
present my congratulations to the Signorina when you see her."
Savarin had been in receipt of this letter some days before he called on
Isaura, and carelessly showed it to her. She took it to the window to
read, in order to conceal the trembling of her hands. In a few minutes
she returned it silently.
"Those Englishmen," said Savarin, "have not the heart of compliment.
I am by no means flattered by what he says of my trifles, and I dare say
you are still less pleased with this chilly praise of your charming tale;
but the man means to be civil."
"Certainly," said Isaura, smiling faintly.
"Only think of Rameau!" resumed Savarin. "On the strength of his salary
in the 'Sens Commun,' and on the _chateaux en Espagne_ which he
constructs thereon, he has already furnished an apartment in the Chaussee
d'Antin, and talks of setting up a coupe in order to maintain the dignity
of letters when he goes to dine with the duchesses who are some day or
other to invite him. Yet I admire his self-confidence, though I laugh at
it. A man gets on by a spring in his own mechanism, and he should always
keep it wound up. Rameau will make a figure. I used to pity him;
I begin to respect. Nothing succeeds like success. But I see I am
spoiling your morning. Au revoir, mon enfant."
Left alone, Isaura brooded in a sort of mournful wonderment over the
words referring to herself in Graham's letter. Read though but once, she
knew them by heart. What! did he consider those characters she had
represented as wholly imaginary? In one--the most prominent, the most
attractive--could he detect no likeness to himself? What! did he
consider so "over-romantic and exaggerated" sentiments which couched
appeals from her heart to his? Alas! in matters of sentiment it is the
misfortune of us men that even the most refined of us often grate upon
some sentiment in a woman, though she may not be romantic,--not romantic
at all, as people go,--some sentiment which she thought must be so
obvious if we cared a straw about her, and which, though we prize her
above the Indies, is by our dim, horn-eyed, masculine vision
undiscernible. It may be something in itself the airiest of trifles: the
anniversary of a day in which the first kiss was interchanged, nay, of a
violet gathered, a misunderstanding cleared up; and of that anniversary
we remember no more than we do of our bells and coral. But she--she
remembers it; it is no bells and coral to her. Of course, much is to be
said in excuse of man, brute though he be. Consider the multiplicity of
his occupations, the practical nature of his cares. But granting the
validity of all such excuse, there is in man an original obtuseness of
fibre as regards sentiment in comparison with the delicacy of woman's.
It comes, perhaps, from the same hardness of constitution which forbids
us the luxury of ready tears. Thus it is very difficult for the wisest
man to understand thoroughly a woman. Goethe says somewhere that the
highest genius in man must have much of the woman in it. If this be
true, the highest genius alone in man can comprehend and explain the
nature of woman, because it is not remote from him, but an integral part
of his masculine self. I am not sure, however, that it necessitates the
highest genius, but rather a special idiosyncrasy in genius which the
highest may or may not have. I think Sophocles a higher genius than
Euripides; but Euripides has that idiosyncrasy, and Sophocles not. I
doubt whether women would accept Goethe as their interpreter with the
same readiness with which they would accept Schiller. Shakspeare, no
doubt, excels all poets in the comprehension of women, in his sympathy
with them in the woman-part of his nature which Goethe ascribes to the
highest genius; but, putting aside that "monster," I do not remember any
English poet whom we should consider conspicuously eminent in that lore,
unless it be the prose poet, nowadays generally underrated and little
read, who wrote the letters of Clarissa Harlowe. I say all this in
vindication of Graham Vane, if, though a very clever man in his way, and
by no means uninstructed in human nature, he had utterly failed in
comprehending the mysteries which to this poor woman-child seemed to need
no key for one who really loved her. But we have said somewhere before
in this book that music speaks in a language which cannot explain itself
except in music. So speaks, in the human heart, much which is akin to
music. Fiction (that is, poetry, whether in form of rhyme or prose)
speaks thus pretty often. A reader must be more commonplace than, I
trust, my gentle readers are, if he suppose that when Isaura symbolized
the real hero of her thoughts in the fabled hero of her romance, she
depicted him as one of whom the world could say, "That is Graham Vane."
I doubt if even a male poet would so vulgarize any woman whom he
thoroughly reverenced and loved. She is too sacred to him to be thus
unveiled to the public stare; as the sweetest of all ancient love-poets
says well--
"Qui sapit in tacito gaudeat ille sinu."
But a girl, a girl in her first untold timid love, to let the world know,
"that is the man I love and would die for!"--if such a girl be, she has
no touch of the true woman-genius, and certainly she and Isaura have
nothing in common. Well, then, in Isaura's invented hero, though she saw
the archetypal form of Graham Vane,--saw him as in her young, vague,
romantic dreams idealized, beautified, transfigured,--he would have been
the vainest of men if he had seen therein the reflection of himself. On
the contrary he said, in the spirit of that jealousy to which he was too
prone, "Alas! this, then, is some ideal, already seen perhaps, compared
to which how commonplace am I!" and thus persuading himself, no wonder
that the sentiments surrounding this unrecognized archetype appeared to
him over-romantic. His taste acknowledged the beauty of form which
clothed them; his heart envied the ideal that inspired them. But they
seemed so remote from him; they put the dreamland of the writer farther
and farther from his workday real life.
In this frame of mind, then, he had written to Savarin, and the answer he
received hardened it still more. Savarin had replied, as was his
laudable wont in correspondence, the very day he received Graham's
letter, and therefore before he had even seen Isaura. In his reply, he
spoke much of the success her work had obtained; of the invitations
showered upon her, and the sensation she caused in the salons; of her
future career, with hope that she might even rival Madame de Grantmesnil
some day, when her ideas became emboldened by maturer experience, and
a closer study of that model of eloquent style,--saying that the young
editor was evidently becoming enamoured of his fair contributor; and that
Madame Savarin had ventured the prediction that the Signorina's _roman_
would end in the death of the heroine, and the marriage of the writer.
