A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY

A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHYÀ M. Gaston, Parisde l’Institut de France

À M. Gaston, Parisde l’Institut de France

A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHYTHEREwas a break in the soft stream of Rameau’s eloquence when somebody spoke of Krowtosky. The interruption came from Louis Gaston, a brilliant young journalist, whose air of sanctified rake and residence in the Rue du Bac, in front of a well-known shop, earned him the nickname ofLe Petit Saint Thomas.Krowtosky’s name diverted the channel of the murmurous, half-abstracted discourse to which we had lent an attentive ear, physically lulled, and though charmed, not boisterously amused by Rameau’s sly anecdotal humour and complaisant lightness of tone. Rameau always talked delightfully, without any apparent consciousness of the fact; above all, without any apparent effort. He never raised his voice, gesticulated slightly, accentuated no point, and left much to his listener’s discretion; and his calm drollery was all the more delicious becauseof the sedate and equable expression of his handsome face.‘Krowtosky,’ he repeated, as he turned his picturesque grey head in Gaston’s direction; with a deliberate air he removed his glasses, slowly polished them, and interjected, ‘Ah!’‘You must remember that queer Russian who used to hold forth here some years ago,’ Louis Gaston continued, in an explanatory tone; ‘a heavy, unemotional fellow, with desperate views. He began by amusing us, and ended by nearly driving us mad with his eternalNirvana.’‘Oh, yes,’ somebody else cried, suddenly spurred to furnish further reminiscences. ‘His trousers were preternaturally wide, and his coat-sleeves preternaturally short. You always imagined that he carried dynamite in his pockets, and apprehended an explosion if you accidentally threw a lighted match or a half-smoked cigarette in his neighbourhood.’‘He had small eyes, and a big nose, the head of an early Gaul, and a hollow voice,’ I remarked.‘A monster to convince the Tartars themselves of their superior ugliness, if they entertainedany doubt of it,’ half lisped a Frenchman recently crowned by the Academy, and as unconscious of his own ill-looks as only a man, and above all a Frenchman, can be.‘The good-nature of your remarks and your keen remembrance of Krowtosky prove that he must be a personage in his way,’ said Rameau mockingly.‘What became of him?’ asked Le Petit Saint Thomas, between slow puffs of his cigarette.‘Poor fellow! He has fallen upon grief.’‘Naturally; it is the great result of birth. A love affair?’‘Worse.’‘Blasphemy, Professor! ’Tis the sole sorrow of life. The rest are but the trifling ills of humanity.’ Gaston spoke with all the authority of a young man who is perpetually in and out of love, is backed upon the thorny path of literature by rich and devoted relatives, and has never known a day’s illness upon his road.‘It can’t be marriage, for that violent resource would merely drift him into deeper depths of Pessimism, which would be a gratifying confirmation of his theories.’‘It can’t be love either,’ I suggested. ‘Pessimismand love don’t mate. Marriage it might be; for even a pessimist may be conceded the weakness of objecting to a demonstration of the nothingness of marriage in the person of his own wife.’‘It might be debt, if that were not a modified trouble since the inhuman law of imprisonment was abolished.’‘Behold the force of imagination, Professor,’ exclaimed Gaston, pointing to a visionary perspective with his cigarette, in answer to Rameau’s glance of contemplative irony. ‘I see our monster married to an unvirtuousgrisette, or an amiable young laundress, who discovers the superior attractiveness of an optimist poet on the opposite side of the way. She can hardly be blamed for the discovery; for though we may applaud the courage of a woman who marries a monster, it would be both rash and cruel to expect her to add fidelity to her courage. Where women are concerned, it is a wise precaution to count upon a single virtue.’‘Your wit, the outcome of natural perversity, flies beyond the mark,’ said Rameau, shrugging his shoulders. ‘The real sorrows of life arevery simple, and command respect by their simplicity. The others are the complications, the depravities of civilisation at which we cavil and laugh. Krowtosky has not stumbled in double life, but he has just lost a baby girl.’There was dead silence. A perceptible start of emotion found expression in an interjectionary arch of brow, a sigh blown on the puff of a cigarette, and an uneasy shifting of attitudes. A baby girl! What a slight thing in the hurry of life, what a simple thing in its crowding perplexities! The tragic end of men and women whom the years have worn and fretted; the sudden death of happy youth in the midst of its bright promises; the peaceful sadness that accompanies the departure of the old, who have honourably lived their lives and accomplished all natural laws:—but the closed eyes of a little baby girl! What is it more than tumble of a new-born bird from its nest, leaving no empty space? Upon a boy paternal pride might have feasted, and the sting might remain that new avenues to fame and fortune were closed by his sharp withdrawal.Yet despite the insignificance of the loss,none of the faces round Rameau wore a look of indifference or surprise. For a moment each man was serious, touched, and uninclined for wit at poor Krowtosky’s expense. Upon dropped lids I seemed to see the big grotesque head, so full of honesty and strife, bent in grief over an empty cradle; and I was wrung by a smart of anger when Gaston lightly asked, ‘Is there then a legitimate Madame Krowtosky?’‘All that is most legitimate,’ replied Rameau gravely.‘You have followed the story?’‘Since I played the part of confidential friend—why, I know as little as you.’‘And the lady?’‘Ah, the lady! Her I only know on report that cannot exactly be described as impartial.’‘Is it a story worth telling?’‘In its way it is curious enough, especially unfolded in the illumination of Krowtosky’s jumble of crude philosophy and speculative theories, and, above all, told in his queer French. He has honoured me with a correspondence in the form of a journal. It is extremely interesting, and I have preserved it.Some day I will publish it,—when the philosopher is dead, of course.’‘Then begin now, my dear Professor,’ I urged. ‘Try its effecten petit comité.’ We read assent in the Professor’s way of crossing his legs, while he drew one hand slowly round the back of his head. When he had carefully polished and adjusted his glasses, each of us chose a commodious attitude, and looked expectantly at him. After a pause, Rameau began in his soft conversational tone, subdued like the indefinite shade of the lamp-screen that cast its glimmer over heads and profiles, showing vaguely upon a background of dull tapestries.‘Krowtosky looked much older than his age. He was, in fact, very young, Pessimism being one of the most pronounced symptoms of the malady of youth. He is still young, and the malady has yet some years to run. He came here with a letter to me from an old friend in Moscow, and a very big bundle of hopes.‘I hardly know what he expected to make of Paris, but Paris, I imagine, made nothing of him. I did what I could for him, which was not much, and from the first I had no illusions whatever upon the nature of his probablesuccess. I found a lady ambitious to read Turgenieff and Tolstoï in Russian. I sent Krowtosky to her; but after the second lesson she dismissed him on the plea of his unearthly ugliness; his heavy Calmuck face diverted her attention from Turgenieff’s charming women and Tolstoï’s philosophy, and gave her nightmares. I encouraged the poor fellow to come here, which he did, and most of you met him frequently. He was interesting in his way, very, but crude and boundlessly innocent. He had the queerest notions upon all things, and having sounded theDécadents, he professed to find them hollow. I think he suspected those gentlemen of an unreasonable sanity and an underhand enjoyment of life. The French Realists he dismissed as caricaturists; he said they were reading for the devil when he was drunk and in a merry mood. I daresay he meant the Czar.‘He railed at the mock decay of modern civilised life, and imagined that a glimpse of Pessimism beyond the Pyrenees would prove instructive. He was convinced that he would find it there of less noxious quality, exhibiting the sombre melancholy and dignity of a greatrace fallen into poetic decay and unvexed by the wearisome febrile conditions of its development here. “You understand nothing of the spirit of calm fatality,” he would say, apostrophising the nation in my humble person for lack of a more enlightened audience. “You are everlastingly in strife with your own emotions and despairs; and these you decorate, as you idly decorate your persons, with persistent vanity and with wasteful care.” I deprecated the charge upon my own account, and assured him that it took me exactly four minutes to decorate my person each morning. Four minutes, I claimed, cannot be described as an exorbitant charge upon Time for the placing and adjusting of eighteen articles, and as he seemed to doubt the number, I told them off, including my hat andpince-nez. I mentioned a few Frenchmen who I thought accepted the luxury of unemotional despair calmly enough, and were as incapable of strife as a tortoise. He shook his head; he was not easily to be convinced. His Pessimism was so black that our sombre Maupassant was a captivating Optimist beside him. And provided with this meagre intellectual baggage, he set out forhalf-forgotten and ruined lands, beginning with Spain.’‘He fell in for a fortune, I suppose,’ Gaston interrupted.‘He had not a sou, which is the best explanation of an expensive voyage. Remark, my friends, that a man only becomes really extravagant and reckless upon an empty purse. An empty purse and an empty stomach are equally effectual in producing light-headedness, and vest us in the cloak of illusion. Illusion I opine to be one of the things that look best in rags. Krowtosky travelled third class, and was prodigiously uncomfortable, which, after all, is another method of enjoying life upon his theory. He ate Bologna sausages, and refreshed himself with grapes upon the wayside.‘His first letter was dated from Bayonne. It was a long and a curious letter, and so interested me that I resolved to follow up the correspondence with vigorous encouragement, for it was not an occasion to be missed by a student of mankind. I will read you some extracts from these letters, which I have here in a drawer of my writing-table.’The packet of letters found, Rameau went onreading, with the perfect and polished irony and charm of enunciation that could cast an intellectual glamour over an auctioneer’s inventory. ‘“I have chosen you as the recipient of the impressions and incidents of my voyage,—why, I hardly know; I am not inspired by any strong sympathy for you. My esteem and my liking are very moderate indeed; you have a face that rather repels than invites confidence, and I ought to be discouraged by the fact that I have no faith in your sympathy for me, and have every conviction that you are the last person likely to understand me. The friend who would understand me, and for whom I should enjoy writing these impressions and the adventures that may lie ahead, is at present voyaging in far-off waters; I think he is somewhere about the Black Sea, but I don’t know his address, or when or where communication might chance to reach him. So, having cast about me for a confidant, choice alighted upon you; but you need not read my letters if they bore you. They are written rather for my own gratification than for yours. If I possessed literary talent, the public would be my natural victim....”‘This was a flattering beginning, you will admit, but it sharpened my curiosity. After that I began to look forward to Krowtosky’s post-day, as some people look forward to thefeuilletonof the morning paper. His queer minute handwriting never found me indifferent or unexpectant of diversion.‘At Toulouse he wrote again: “A young girl got into the carriage with me. We were alone, and she soon gave me a visible demonstration of the strange eccentricities oddly explained by the single wordlove. Whylove? It is simply a malady more or less innocuous and only sometimes deadly; but love, no! I was not flattered; I am above that weakness, because nothing pleases me. I was interested, however, and investigated the case with scientific calm. So might any physician have diagnosed a disease. It struck me for the first time as a form of mild insanity. I asked myself why the poets and romancers amuse themselves in writing of it rather than of the other fevers and bodily illnesses that overcome us. For everything about this young girl convinced me that love is but a sickness. I studied her gestures, her expression, her tones of voice and her attitudes;all served to prove my theory. One minute I offered to open the window, and the next I suggested that perhaps it would be better to close it. She assented. Though curious, it was rather monotonous, but she assented to everything I proposed. If I looked at her, she looked at me; if I looked away, she continued to look at me. After a couple of hours’ study, I felt that I quite understood love and all its phases. I found it in the main a silly game, and an excitement only fit for brainless boys and girls in their first youth. But the most remarkable feature of humanity is its crass stupidity; it is a monstrously shabby and feeble institution, male and female. This young girl, now; I daresay you and others would call her pretty. Bah! I can see but the ugliness of women. Behind their forehead thought does not work; their eyes only express the meanest and most personal sentiments. Big black empty eyes and sensual red lips; a round lazy figure and nerveless hands! I protest there is more intelligence and matter for study in a dog than in these insipid creatures, all curves and no muscles. Men, say they, don’t understand them. Are dolls worth understanding? Theyare actuated solely by impulse and personal claims. What is there in this worth understanding? I escaped from my conquest, now grown irksome, upon the frontier, and I am resolved never to give evidence of a similar weakness. It is degrading folly. What, for instance, can women see in us to inspire this most infelicitously-called tender passion, and, in the name of all that is eternal, what are we supposed to see in them to justify it?...”’‘A sympathetic dog, to go snarling in that cantankerous way through life because the Almighty has seen fit to cast a flower or two across his path,’ growled the indignant Petit Saint Thomas, to whom love was the main object of existence.‘Scenery does not interest him much,’ Rameau went on, with an acquiescent nod; ‘but he has a good deal to say upon his impressions of the Spanish race in particular, and of all other races in general. The subject is not a new one, and Krowtosky is only really entertaining when he is talking of himself, or of his next-door neighbour in connection with himself.‘“I am on the whole much disappointed in Madrid,” he continues further on, “not becauseit is a duller town than I had imagined, but because local colour and national individuality are almost extinct. It proves the disastrous tendencies of all races to amalgamation and imitation. Yet, after all, Rameau, what is the real value of local colour? It is more often than not a mere matter of imagination, and one of the illusions we fancy we enjoy. Any one with a lively imagination can invent a more vivid local colour for all the countries he has never visited than he is likely to find in any of them. Witness Merimée and his band. They duped their public like the vulgarest literary conjurors, and showed us that a trick will serve us instead of what we are pleased to call Nature. And the deception was but the result of our stupid hunger for the unusual. As if anything under the monotonous stars of an unchanging heaven can be unusual; and as if everything in this old and ugly world is not hideously familiar! The more varied our travels the more similar our experience. For, Rameau, our real ills are monotony and stupidity. Man resembles man, as rats resemble rats, only he is a good deal less interesting and more noxious. You have a finehead, and I have a misshapen one. Well, the same perplexities, needs, instincts, appetites, passions, and impulses agitate us, and explain our different actions, which,au fond, have no variety in them whatever. We change the symbols of our faiths, while these remain fundamentally the same, and we give our countries different names to represent the unchangeable miseries of humanity....”‘Here you have the malady of youth in its crisis. Adécadentpoet could not chant more lugubriously, though perhaps less intelligibly. The sick youth laments in the same irritable tone the vulgarity of themadrileñas, the exaggerated prowess of the gentlemen of the arena, exalts the patient and noble bulls, rails at the puny byplay of the picadors and at the silly enthusiasm of the spectators. He rushes distractedly from an inexpensive inn, where a band of merry rascals joined him and over wine sang the praises of the Fair. Praise of the eternal feminine he cannot stand. Poor wretch! Had he been Adam in the Garden of Paradise, Eden would have ceased to be Eden upon the impertinent introduction of Eve. We find him complaining that he shouldhave left a score of maundering youths in Paris doing dismal homage to the Sex, to drop upon a sillier band in Madrid hymning the everlasting subject. He protests the Spanish women, for all their eyes and arched feet, are untempting and insipid, like the rest. They are not the dolls of the North; they are the animals of the South. He confines his curiosity to Spanish literature, and is in pursuit of its apostle of Pessimism. “I am taking lessons in Spanish,” he writes from another inn. “I teach Russian to as poor a devil as myself, in exchange for his help in his own tongue. Between us we are making creditable progress. He is writing an article on the Russian novelists for a review that will pay him something like twopence a page. Yet he preserves his faith in literature! Mighty indeed is man’s capacity for cherishing illusions. I advised him to break stones for a lucrative change, but he seems to doubt the value of the advice since I do not follow it myself. This is one of the things that prove man a rational being. We read Castrès together. You have doubtless heard of Castrès, the poet of Spain, and said to be sufficiently sedative asregards the happy hopes of youth. Such is my Spaniard’s description in reply to a question of mine upon his tendencies. I have inserted the phrase as a concession to the perverse taste for local colouring. The phrase paints the man; he lives upon onions and bread into the bargain, and dreams with a cigarette between his lips. This morning I went to see Castrès.... I found the great man writing and smoking at the same time in a big sparsely furnished bedroom. He is low-sized and heavily built, with soft black eyes and a forest of hair round and about his sallow face. He looks as if he dined well and liked women. There is always something unctuous and fatuous about a man who likes women, which becomes intolerably accentuated if women should happen to like him too. The expression suggests a mixture of oil and sugar. We discussed theDécadentsunder their new name, and hardly appreciated the advantage of exchange, symbolism being no whit less empty and vapid; another demonstration of the worthlessness of novelty, since, however much we vary things, we end where we start, at the Unchangeable. Castrès agrees with me that Naturalism is dead; but what thedevil, he asked, is going to take its place? Naturalism under a new name, I replied, which is only romance upside down. Whether we invent animals or angels, it matters little. It is romancing all the same, and only proves that one man likeseau sucréeand another likesabsinthe. It is a concoction either way, and about as useful in one form as in the other.... Of Castrès the man I thought as indifferently as I did of Castrès the poet. I asked him how Pessimism stood in Spain, and who were its representatives. He shrugged, spat, and surveyed me dismissingly, and with his big soft eyes.... ‘Caramba!I can’t say I know much about it. But I believe it will never flourish here. We have too much sun, and life is, on the whole, easy enough for us. An hour of sunshine, a crust of bread, and a bunch of grapes, or the taste of an onion and a lifted wine-skin upon the roadside, and there you have a Spaniard built and ready for love-making. What more does he want? And in a land where women are fair and facile, wherefore should he whine, and see black where God made blue? I have here a volume of poems just published by a young girl—Señorita Pilar Villafrancay Nuño. I have glanced through the volume, and I don’t think you can ask for anything finer in the way of Pessimism. It is enough to make a sane man cut his throat, if he had not the good sense to pause beforehand, in distrust of the sincerity of the writer who could survive the proof-reading of such dismal stuff. It reminds me of what I have heard of Schopenhauer, who, after wrecking all our altars, could sit down and enjoy a heavy dinner. He despised none of the pleasures of life in practice, while decrying them all in theory. You’ll probably find that this young woman dines heartily, and employs her evenings over her wedding outfit, if she is not already married and nursing her first baby. I took the book away and read it with my poor devil that evening. You will not be surprised to learn that I found it very much superior to anything of Castrès’ I have read. He might well sneer at her in self-preservation, that being the weapon the strong have ever preferred to use against the weak. It is bad enough to find real talent in a young woman, but absolute unbelief, the doctrine of complete negation! To find in this landof To-morrow, a feminine apostle of theNirvana....”’‘Ah,’ interrupted Gaston, ‘I was wondering what had become of the word.’‘“A feminine apostle of theNirvana,”’ continued Rameau, with an expressive smile. ‘“Judge if masculine opinion in Spain would be indulgent. Even my poor devil, though no less struck than I with the poetry, found it much too strong for a woman. ‘But she is doubtless old, and then it matters less. The discontents and disappointments of old maidenhood have drifted her into deep learning and irreligion,’ he added, by way of consolation. ‘Old or young,’ I exclaimed, ‘it is all one to me. For me she is a thinker, not a woman. And I am going straight off to her publisher, from whom I’ll wrest her address, if need be, by reason of a thick stick.’‘“The services of a stick were not required. My request was immediately complied with. I carried the lady’s book in my hand, and was no doubt mistaken for a recent purchaser. My poet lives on the fourth floor in a very shabby house, in a very shabby street at the other end of Madrid. I deemed it wise to defer my visituntil after dinner. It was half-past eight when I climbed the four flights, and stood on the landing, anxiously asking myself if I had made up my mind to ring. Had it not the air of an invasion? While I was yet debating the door opened, and an untidy-looking maid shot out into the passage. I captured her before the twilight of the stairs had swallowed her, and demanded to see the Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I understood that it would not serve me in her eyes to give evidence of uncertainty or bashfulness. ‘She is inside; knock at the middle door and you’ll find her,’ screamed the untidy maid, and in another moment she was whirling down the stairs, and I was left to shut the hall door and announce myself.‘“The house was tidier than the maid. I crossed a scrupulously clean hall and knocked at the middle door, as I had been directed. A low, deep voice shouted,Come in!While turning the handle gingerly, I thought to myself, the poor devil was right; only a woman of massive proportions and very advanced years could bellow that order. The scene that met my eyes was prettier than absolute conformity to my ideas demanded. In a neat little sitting-room,lit by a shaded lamp, were seated three persons; a stout Spanish woman engaged with a basket of stockings, a pale, thin young girl with melancholy eyes of an unusual intensity of gaze, and a small lad sitting at her feet, and reading aloud from a book they held together. The child had the girl’s eyes, but while curiosity, belonging to his years, brightened their sombreness with the promise of surprise and laughter, hers held an expression of permanent sadness and soft untroubled gloom. It was superfluous information on the mother’s part, in response to my mention of the poet’s name, to indicate her daughter majestically, as if she wished it to be understood that she herself had no part in the production of matter so suspicious in a woman as poetry. I was on the brink of assuring her that nobody would ever deem her capable of such folly, and begging her to return to her stockings as occupation more appropriate than the entertainment of an admirer of the Muse she despised, when Pilar quietly said, ‘Be seated, sir.’ From that moment I took no further heed of the Señora Villafranca than if she had been the accommodatingdueñaof Spanish comedy and I the unvirtuous, or noble but thwarted,lover who had bribed her. In ten minutes Pilar and I were talking as freely as if we had known one another from infancy; far more freely, possibly, for in the latter case we should long ago have talked ourselves to silence. How do these young girls manage to get hold of books, Rameau, when all the forces of domestic law are exercised to keep them apart? There is not a living Spanish or French writer with whom this child, barely out of her teens, is not acquainted. Her judgment may often be at fault,—whose is not, if backed by anything like originality? But to hear her discuss Naturalism! Castrès, puffing his eternal cigarette, walks you throughles lieux communs, but this girl takes flights that fairly dazzle you. And then her Pessimism! The queer thing is that she has found it for herself, and Schopenhauer has nothing to do with it. For that matter, nobody living or dead seems to have had anything to do with the forming of her. She is essentiallyprimesautière. You French do manage to hit upon excellent words;primesautièreperfectly describes this Spanish maid. She is all herself, first of the mould, fresh, though so burdened with the century’s malady. So young,and she believes in nothing—but nothing, Rameau! She hopes for nothing, for nothing! She plays with no emotions, feigns no poetic despairs, utters no paradoxes, and is simplicity itself in her gestures, expressions, and ideas. She calmly rejects all the pretty illusions of her sex, without a pang or regret, because, for her, truth is above personal happiness.‘“We talked, we talked—talked till far into the night, while the fat mother slumbered noisily in her chair, and the little boy slept curled up at his sister’s feet. Can you guess what first put it into my head to go? The smell of the lamp as the wick flickeringly lowered. ‘Dios mio!’ cried Pilar, ‘it is close on two o’clock, and we have been chattering while my mother sleeps comfortlessly in her chair, and my little brother is dreaming on the carpet instead of in his bed. Good-night, sir; I must leave you and carry my baby to bed.’ She stooped and lifted the sleeping boy with her arms. Such bodily strength in one so frail much astonished me. I would have offered her help, but the little lad had already found a comfortable spot in the hollow of her neck, and with a cordial nod to me she disappearedinto the inner room. I had not expected this evidence of womanly tenderness from her, and the picture haunted me on my way down the dark staircase and through the dim starlit streets.”‘The extracts from the next letters are singularly characteristic,’ said Rameau, well pleased by our profound attention. ‘Krowtosky, upon his return to Paris, has taken a third-class ticket from Madrid to Bayonne. To the poet he has said his last farewell, and probably wears upon his heart her precious autograph. Not that Krowtosky is ostensibly sentimental. He rejects the notion of such folly, and if by chance he dropped into pretty fooling, be sure he would find a philosophical way out of the disgrace deservedly attached to such weakness. “I am travelling to Bayonne,” he writes, “and I will reach it to-morrow afternoon, but I am convinced that once there I shall straightway take the train back to Madrid. Odd, is it not? Yet I feel that I shall be compelled to return to that young girl. And this is not love, mark you, Rameau; not in the least. I know all about that. Did I not study it in the case of that young girl I met at Toulouse? Well, nothing I feel forPilar in any way resembles the foolish sentiment her gestures and looks expressed. I am quite master of myself, and do not hang on any one’s lips or glances; but I must see Pilar again. Do you know why I hesitated outside her door that first evening I called upon her? I had a presentiment, as I climbed up those stairs, that I should marry her. We may reject a faith in presentiments, but they shake us nevertheless. How slowly this train goes! The landscape, across which we speed in the leisurely movement of Spanish steam, is flat and ugly, an interminable view of cornfields. There is a wide-hatted priest in front of me with an open breviary in his hand. Perhaps I shall find myself craving service of one of his brothers some day. What an odd fellow I am, to be sure! I intend, oh certainly I intend to take the Paris train to-morrow night from Bayonne, and as certainly I know I shall find myself on my way back to Madrid! And it cannot be for the pleasure of passing a couple of days and nights in a beastly third-class carriage, which is nothing better here than a cattle-pen....”‘Of his reception by the poet, of his sentiments and wooing, he writes very sparingly. Hisgreat terror is that I should detect the lover where he insists there is only a philosopher. Philosophy took him from Madrid, and Philosophy brought him back within forty-eight hours. Philosophy sued, wooed, and won the Muse, and led him to his wedding-morn. While engaged in its service, he writes in this jocose strain the very evening of his marriage: “This morning in a dark little church, in a dark little street of Madrid, we were married. Though neither of us believes in anything, we agreed to make the usual concession to conventional feeling and social law, and were married in the most legal and Christianlike fashion. Nothing was lacking,—neither rings nor signatures, nor church-bells nor church-fees, nor yet the excellent and venerable fat priest, a degree uglier than myself, who obligingly made us one. While this ceremony was being performed, I could not forget the inconvenient fact that neither of us brought the other much in the shape of promise of future subsistence, not even hope, of which there is not a spark between us. This preoccupation distracted me while the priest mumbled and sermonised, and a wicked little French couplet kept running through my head:Un et un font deux, nombre heureux en galanterie,Mais quand un et un font trois,—c’est diablerie!Meanwhile the fat priest discoursed to my wife, most excellently, upon the duties and virtues of the true Christian spouse, to which discourse my wife lent an inattentive ear. Perhaps she also was thinking of the future,—somewhat tardily. My dear Rameau, have you ever reflected upon the amazing one-sidedness of religion on these occasions? Wives are eloquently exhorted to practise all the virtues, and not a word is flung at the husbands. It is something of course for us to learn, by the aid of the Church, that all the duty is on the other side, and that we have nothing to do but command, be worshipped, and fall foul of infidelity. The beautiful logic of man, and the profound Pessimism of woman! She never rebels, but accepts all without hope of remedy. The real Pessimists are women. They admit the fact that everything is unalterable, evil without amelioration; everything is, and everything will remain to the end. Man occasionally rises up, and takes his oppressor by the throat, but woman never. There is a point at which his patience vanishes, but hers is inexhaustible. She is the soul andspirit and body of the malady only diagnosed this century. Conviction that suffering is her only heritage is hers before birth, and she placidly bends to the law of fate often without a murmur, always without the faintest instinct of revolt. Is she an idiot or an angel? The latter rebelled in paradise; then she must be an idiot. Man is activity, she is inertia; that is why she yields so readily to his ruling. These are thoughts suitable to the marriage of two Pessimists. There will be on neither side revolt or stupid demands upon destiny. I am simply interested in the development of this strange union of the barbarous North and the barbarous South, and watch this unfamiliar person, my wife, placed in an enervating proximity by a queer social institution. I wonder if she will eventually prove explosive; meantime it is my privilege to kiss her. I have not mentioned it, but she has very sweet lips.”‘After this there is a long lapse of silence. I fear the delights of poor Krowtosky’s honeymoon were soon enough disturbed by the grim question of ways and means. As I was only a fair-weather friend in default of the sympathetic confidant voyaging in distant waters, I imagineat this period the traveller must have returned, and received the rest of the journal so wantonly intrusted to me, or Krowtosky must have confided his troubles to his wife. When next I hear from him, it is many months later, and he has just obtained a professorship in a dreary snow-bound place called Thorpfeld. From his description, it is evidently the very last place God Almighty bethought himself of making, and by that time all the materials of comfort, pleasure, and beauty had been exhausted. “As Thorpfeld is not my birthplace,” writes Krowtosky, “I may befoul it to my liking. It contains about seven thousand inhabitants, one poorer and more ignorant than another. What they can want with professors and what the authorities are pleased to call a college, the wicked government under which we sweat and suffer and groan alone can tell. Six out of a hundred cannot read, and three of these can barely write. The less reason have they for a vestige of belief in man, the more fervent is their faith in their Creator. Nothing but anticipation of the long-delayed joys of paradise can keep them from cutting their own and their neighbours’ throats. They ought to begin withthe professors and the rascally magistrates. As if snow and broken weather were not enough to harass these poor wretches in pursuit of a precarious livelihood, what little money the magistrates or the professors leave them is wrung from them by the popes. Even Pilar is demoralised by her surroundings. She has left off writing pessimistic poetry, and has betaken herself to Christian charity. ’Tisn’t much we can do, for we have barely enough to live upon ourselves, but that little she manages to do somehow or other. These hearts of foolish women will ever make them traitor to their heads. I naturally growl when I find our sack of corn diminished in favour of a neighbour’s hungry children, or return frost-bitten from the college to find no fire, and learn that my wife has carried a basket of fuel to a peasant dying up among snow-hills. She does not understand these people, and they do not understand her, but they divine her wish to share their wretchedness, her own being hardly less; and then she is a pretty young woman! Timon himself could hardly have spurned her. But where’s her Pessimism? Has it vanished with the sun and vines of her own bright land, or has it founda grave in the half-frozen breast of a strange Sister of Charity unknown to me and born of the sight of snow-clad misery such as in Spain is never dreamed of? You see, I am on the road to poetry instead of my poor changed young wife.‘“Last evening when I came home from a farmer’s house, where I had stopped to warm myself with a couple of glasses ofvodka, I found her shivering over the remaining sparks of a miserable fire. She looked so white and unhappy and alone, so completely the image of a stranger in a foreign land, to whom I, too, her husband, am a foreigner, that I asked myself, in serious apprehension, if I might not be destined to lose her in the coming crisis. ‘Pilar,’ I cried, ‘what ails thee?’ And when she turned her head I saw that she was crying silently. ‘I want my own land; I want the sun and vines of Spain, where at least the peasants have wine and sunshine in abundance whatever else they may lack!’ I should think so, I grimly muttered, remembering that over there the mortar that built up the walls of a town was wet with wine instead of water, and that fields are sometimes moistened with last year’s winewhen the new is ready. Pilar is right, my friend. There is no poverty so sordid and awful as that of the cold North. But what could I do? I could not offer her the prospect of change. She was sobbing bitterly now, and I had no words of comfort for her. If only she had not forsaken her principles and her poetry! But the baby may rouse her when it comes. She has not smiled since we left Spain, poor girl. We must wait meanwhile; but Rameau, it is very cold.”’‘Poor little woman!’ murmured Gaston. ‘I hardly know which is the worst fortune for her, her transplantation or her marriage with that maundering owl Krowtosky. Krowtosky married to a pretty Spanish poet! Ye gods, it is a cruel jest! There would have been some appropriateness in the laundress or thegrisette, but a Spanish girl with arched feet and melancholy eyes! I vow the jade Destiny ought to have her neck wrung for it. Is there a Perseus among us to free this modern unhappy Andromeda?’‘Poor Krowtosky! he deserves a word too,’ I modestly ventured to suggest, touched by that little stroke,It is very cold, and his fear oflosing his wife. ‘He is more human than he himself is aware, and we may be sorry for him too.’‘Ah, yes,’ assented Rameau, and he dropped an easy sigh. ‘If he is a bear, he is an honest bear. His next letter was just a note to announce the birth of a little girl and the well-being of the mother, which was followed by a more philosophical communication later, as soon as the gracious content of motherhood had fallen upon the young Spaniard. Relieved of his fears, he plunges once again into high speculation, and throws out queer suggestions as to the result of such conflicting elements in parentage as those contributed by Spain and Russia. He has found an occupation of vivid interest,—that of watching the development of his child, which he is convinced will turn out something very curious. Pilar, he adds, has so far recovered her old self as to have written a delicious little poem, which has just appeared in theRevista. It is over there, if any of you can read Spanish.’‘And the baby is now dead,’ said Gaston.‘Dead, yes, poor mite! It had not time to show what the mingling of Spanish and Russian blood might mean. Krowtosky’s letter wasmost pitiful. That I will not read to you; it affected me too deeply. It was the father there who wrote. Unconsciously the little creature had forced a way into his heart, and discovered it a very big and human heart despite his Pessimism and Philosophy. What hurt him most was the cruel hammering of nails into the baby’s coffin, and the sound keeps haunting him through the long wakeful nights. Of the bereaved mother he says little. His mind is fixed on the empty cradle and the small fresh mound in the churchyard, whither he goes every day. I believe myself that it is the first time his heart has ever been stirred by passionate love, and now he speaks of never leaving Thorpfeld,—a place he has been moving heaven and earth to get away from the past six years.’‘I promise you, Professor, that I’ll never laugh at him again,’ said Gaston, very gravely. ‘There can be nothing absurd about a man who mourns a little child like that. Give me his address, and I’ll write to him at once.’‘It may be a distraction for him, and at any rate it will serve to show him that he is remembered in Paris,’ said Rameau, eager to comply with the request. We thanked the Professorfor his story, with some surprise at the lateness of the hour. The door-bell rang, and the appearance of the servant with the evening letters arrested our departure. With a hand extended to the sobered St. Thomas, Rameau took the letters and glanced as he spoke at the top envelope, deeply edged with black. ‘Tiens!a letter from poor Krowtosky,’ he exclaimed. He broke the seal and read aloud: ‘My dear friend, I thank you for your kind words in my bereavement. But I am past consolation; I am alone now; my wife is dead, and my heart is broken.’

THEREwas a break in the soft stream of Rameau’s eloquence when somebody spoke of Krowtosky. The interruption came from Louis Gaston, a brilliant young journalist, whose air of sanctified rake and residence in the Rue du Bac, in front of a well-known shop, earned him the nickname ofLe Petit Saint Thomas.

Krowtosky’s name diverted the channel of the murmurous, half-abstracted discourse to which we had lent an attentive ear, physically lulled, and though charmed, not boisterously amused by Rameau’s sly anecdotal humour and complaisant lightness of tone. Rameau always talked delightfully, without any apparent consciousness of the fact; above all, without any apparent effort. He never raised his voice, gesticulated slightly, accentuated no point, and left much to his listener’s discretion; and his calm drollery was all the more delicious becauseof the sedate and equable expression of his handsome face.

‘Krowtosky,’ he repeated, as he turned his picturesque grey head in Gaston’s direction; with a deliberate air he removed his glasses, slowly polished them, and interjected, ‘Ah!’

‘You must remember that queer Russian who used to hold forth here some years ago,’ Louis Gaston continued, in an explanatory tone; ‘a heavy, unemotional fellow, with desperate views. He began by amusing us, and ended by nearly driving us mad with his eternalNirvana.’

‘Oh, yes,’ somebody else cried, suddenly spurred to furnish further reminiscences. ‘His trousers were preternaturally wide, and his coat-sleeves preternaturally short. You always imagined that he carried dynamite in his pockets, and apprehended an explosion if you accidentally threw a lighted match or a half-smoked cigarette in his neighbourhood.’

‘He had small eyes, and a big nose, the head of an early Gaul, and a hollow voice,’ I remarked.

‘A monster to convince the Tartars themselves of their superior ugliness, if they entertainedany doubt of it,’ half lisped a Frenchman recently crowned by the Academy, and as unconscious of his own ill-looks as only a man, and above all a Frenchman, can be.

‘The good-nature of your remarks and your keen remembrance of Krowtosky prove that he must be a personage in his way,’ said Rameau mockingly.

‘What became of him?’ asked Le Petit Saint Thomas, between slow puffs of his cigarette.

‘Poor fellow! He has fallen upon grief.’

‘Naturally; it is the great result of birth. A love affair?’

‘Worse.’

‘Blasphemy, Professor! ’Tis the sole sorrow of life. The rest are but the trifling ills of humanity.’ Gaston spoke with all the authority of a young man who is perpetually in and out of love, is backed upon the thorny path of literature by rich and devoted relatives, and has never known a day’s illness upon his road.

‘It can’t be marriage, for that violent resource would merely drift him into deeper depths of Pessimism, which would be a gratifying confirmation of his theories.’

‘It can’t be love either,’ I suggested. ‘Pessimismand love don’t mate. Marriage it might be; for even a pessimist may be conceded the weakness of objecting to a demonstration of the nothingness of marriage in the person of his own wife.’

‘It might be debt, if that were not a modified trouble since the inhuman law of imprisonment was abolished.’

‘Behold the force of imagination, Professor,’ exclaimed Gaston, pointing to a visionary perspective with his cigarette, in answer to Rameau’s glance of contemplative irony. ‘I see our monster married to an unvirtuousgrisette, or an amiable young laundress, who discovers the superior attractiveness of an optimist poet on the opposite side of the way. She can hardly be blamed for the discovery; for though we may applaud the courage of a woman who marries a monster, it would be both rash and cruel to expect her to add fidelity to her courage. Where women are concerned, it is a wise precaution to count upon a single virtue.’

‘Your wit, the outcome of natural perversity, flies beyond the mark,’ said Rameau, shrugging his shoulders. ‘The real sorrows of life arevery simple, and command respect by their simplicity. The others are the complications, the depravities of civilisation at which we cavil and laugh. Krowtosky has not stumbled in double life, but he has just lost a baby girl.’

There was dead silence. A perceptible start of emotion found expression in an interjectionary arch of brow, a sigh blown on the puff of a cigarette, and an uneasy shifting of attitudes. A baby girl! What a slight thing in the hurry of life, what a simple thing in its crowding perplexities! The tragic end of men and women whom the years have worn and fretted; the sudden death of happy youth in the midst of its bright promises; the peaceful sadness that accompanies the departure of the old, who have honourably lived their lives and accomplished all natural laws:—but the closed eyes of a little baby girl! What is it more than tumble of a new-born bird from its nest, leaving no empty space? Upon a boy paternal pride might have feasted, and the sting might remain that new avenues to fame and fortune were closed by his sharp withdrawal.

Yet despite the insignificance of the loss,none of the faces round Rameau wore a look of indifference or surprise. For a moment each man was serious, touched, and uninclined for wit at poor Krowtosky’s expense. Upon dropped lids I seemed to see the big grotesque head, so full of honesty and strife, bent in grief over an empty cradle; and I was wrung by a smart of anger when Gaston lightly asked, ‘Is there then a legitimate Madame Krowtosky?’

‘All that is most legitimate,’ replied Rameau gravely.

‘You have followed the story?’

‘Since I played the part of confidential friend—why, I know as little as you.’

‘And the lady?’

‘Ah, the lady! Her I only know on report that cannot exactly be described as impartial.’

‘Is it a story worth telling?’

‘In its way it is curious enough, especially unfolded in the illumination of Krowtosky’s jumble of crude philosophy and speculative theories, and, above all, told in his queer French. He has honoured me with a correspondence in the form of a journal. It is extremely interesting, and I have preserved it.Some day I will publish it,—when the philosopher is dead, of course.’

‘Then begin now, my dear Professor,’ I urged. ‘Try its effecten petit comité.’ We read assent in the Professor’s way of crossing his legs, while he drew one hand slowly round the back of his head. When he had carefully polished and adjusted his glasses, each of us chose a commodious attitude, and looked expectantly at him. After a pause, Rameau began in his soft conversational tone, subdued like the indefinite shade of the lamp-screen that cast its glimmer over heads and profiles, showing vaguely upon a background of dull tapestries.

‘Krowtosky looked much older than his age. He was, in fact, very young, Pessimism being one of the most pronounced symptoms of the malady of youth. He is still young, and the malady has yet some years to run. He came here with a letter to me from an old friend in Moscow, and a very big bundle of hopes.

‘I hardly know what he expected to make of Paris, but Paris, I imagine, made nothing of him. I did what I could for him, which was not much, and from the first I had no illusions whatever upon the nature of his probablesuccess. I found a lady ambitious to read Turgenieff and Tolstoï in Russian. I sent Krowtosky to her; but after the second lesson she dismissed him on the plea of his unearthly ugliness; his heavy Calmuck face diverted her attention from Turgenieff’s charming women and Tolstoï’s philosophy, and gave her nightmares. I encouraged the poor fellow to come here, which he did, and most of you met him frequently. He was interesting in his way, very, but crude and boundlessly innocent. He had the queerest notions upon all things, and having sounded theDécadents, he professed to find them hollow. I think he suspected those gentlemen of an unreasonable sanity and an underhand enjoyment of life. The French Realists he dismissed as caricaturists; he said they were reading for the devil when he was drunk and in a merry mood. I daresay he meant the Czar.

‘He railed at the mock decay of modern civilised life, and imagined that a glimpse of Pessimism beyond the Pyrenees would prove instructive. He was convinced that he would find it there of less noxious quality, exhibiting the sombre melancholy and dignity of a greatrace fallen into poetic decay and unvexed by the wearisome febrile conditions of its development here. “You understand nothing of the spirit of calm fatality,” he would say, apostrophising the nation in my humble person for lack of a more enlightened audience. “You are everlastingly in strife with your own emotions and despairs; and these you decorate, as you idly decorate your persons, with persistent vanity and with wasteful care.” I deprecated the charge upon my own account, and assured him that it took me exactly four minutes to decorate my person each morning. Four minutes, I claimed, cannot be described as an exorbitant charge upon Time for the placing and adjusting of eighteen articles, and as he seemed to doubt the number, I told them off, including my hat andpince-nez. I mentioned a few Frenchmen who I thought accepted the luxury of unemotional despair calmly enough, and were as incapable of strife as a tortoise. He shook his head; he was not easily to be convinced. His Pessimism was so black that our sombre Maupassant was a captivating Optimist beside him. And provided with this meagre intellectual baggage, he set out forhalf-forgotten and ruined lands, beginning with Spain.’

‘He fell in for a fortune, I suppose,’ Gaston interrupted.

‘He had not a sou, which is the best explanation of an expensive voyage. Remark, my friends, that a man only becomes really extravagant and reckless upon an empty purse. An empty purse and an empty stomach are equally effectual in producing light-headedness, and vest us in the cloak of illusion. Illusion I opine to be one of the things that look best in rags. Krowtosky travelled third class, and was prodigiously uncomfortable, which, after all, is another method of enjoying life upon his theory. He ate Bologna sausages, and refreshed himself with grapes upon the wayside.

‘His first letter was dated from Bayonne. It was a long and a curious letter, and so interested me that I resolved to follow up the correspondence with vigorous encouragement, for it was not an occasion to be missed by a student of mankind. I will read you some extracts from these letters, which I have here in a drawer of my writing-table.’

The packet of letters found, Rameau went onreading, with the perfect and polished irony and charm of enunciation that could cast an intellectual glamour over an auctioneer’s inventory. ‘“I have chosen you as the recipient of the impressions and incidents of my voyage,—why, I hardly know; I am not inspired by any strong sympathy for you. My esteem and my liking are very moderate indeed; you have a face that rather repels than invites confidence, and I ought to be discouraged by the fact that I have no faith in your sympathy for me, and have every conviction that you are the last person likely to understand me. The friend who would understand me, and for whom I should enjoy writing these impressions and the adventures that may lie ahead, is at present voyaging in far-off waters; I think he is somewhere about the Black Sea, but I don’t know his address, or when or where communication might chance to reach him. So, having cast about me for a confidant, choice alighted upon you; but you need not read my letters if they bore you. They are written rather for my own gratification than for yours. If I possessed literary talent, the public would be my natural victim....”

‘This was a flattering beginning, you will admit, but it sharpened my curiosity. After that I began to look forward to Krowtosky’s post-day, as some people look forward to thefeuilletonof the morning paper. His queer minute handwriting never found me indifferent or unexpectant of diversion.

‘At Toulouse he wrote again: “A young girl got into the carriage with me. We were alone, and she soon gave me a visible demonstration of the strange eccentricities oddly explained by the single wordlove. Whylove? It is simply a malady more or less innocuous and only sometimes deadly; but love, no! I was not flattered; I am above that weakness, because nothing pleases me. I was interested, however, and investigated the case with scientific calm. So might any physician have diagnosed a disease. It struck me for the first time as a form of mild insanity. I asked myself why the poets and romancers amuse themselves in writing of it rather than of the other fevers and bodily illnesses that overcome us. For everything about this young girl convinced me that love is but a sickness. I studied her gestures, her expression, her tones of voice and her attitudes;all served to prove my theory. One minute I offered to open the window, and the next I suggested that perhaps it would be better to close it. She assented. Though curious, it was rather monotonous, but she assented to everything I proposed. If I looked at her, she looked at me; if I looked away, she continued to look at me. After a couple of hours’ study, I felt that I quite understood love and all its phases. I found it in the main a silly game, and an excitement only fit for brainless boys and girls in their first youth. But the most remarkable feature of humanity is its crass stupidity; it is a monstrously shabby and feeble institution, male and female. This young girl, now; I daresay you and others would call her pretty. Bah! I can see but the ugliness of women. Behind their forehead thought does not work; their eyes only express the meanest and most personal sentiments. Big black empty eyes and sensual red lips; a round lazy figure and nerveless hands! I protest there is more intelligence and matter for study in a dog than in these insipid creatures, all curves and no muscles. Men, say they, don’t understand them. Are dolls worth understanding? Theyare actuated solely by impulse and personal claims. What is there in this worth understanding? I escaped from my conquest, now grown irksome, upon the frontier, and I am resolved never to give evidence of a similar weakness. It is degrading folly. What, for instance, can women see in us to inspire this most infelicitously-called tender passion, and, in the name of all that is eternal, what are we supposed to see in them to justify it?...”’

‘A sympathetic dog, to go snarling in that cantankerous way through life because the Almighty has seen fit to cast a flower or two across his path,’ growled the indignant Petit Saint Thomas, to whom love was the main object of existence.

‘Scenery does not interest him much,’ Rameau went on, with an acquiescent nod; ‘but he has a good deal to say upon his impressions of the Spanish race in particular, and of all other races in general. The subject is not a new one, and Krowtosky is only really entertaining when he is talking of himself, or of his next-door neighbour in connection with himself.

‘“I am on the whole much disappointed in Madrid,” he continues further on, “not becauseit is a duller town than I had imagined, but because local colour and national individuality are almost extinct. It proves the disastrous tendencies of all races to amalgamation and imitation. Yet, after all, Rameau, what is the real value of local colour? It is more often than not a mere matter of imagination, and one of the illusions we fancy we enjoy. Any one with a lively imagination can invent a more vivid local colour for all the countries he has never visited than he is likely to find in any of them. Witness Merimée and his band. They duped their public like the vulgarest literary conjurors, and showed us that a trick will serve us instead of what we are pleased to call Nature. And the deception was but the result of our stupid hunger for the unusual. As if anything under the monotonous stars of an unchanging heaven can be unusual; and as if everything in this old and ugly world is not hideously familiar! The more varied our travels the more similar our experience. For, Rameau, our real ills are monotony and stupidity. Man resembles man, as rats resemble rats, only he is a good deal less interesting and more noxious. You have a finehead, and I have a misshapen one. Well, the same perplexities, needs, instincts, appetites, passions, and impulses agitate us, and explain our different actions, which,au fond, have no variety in them whatever. We change the symbols of our faiths, while these remain fundamentally the same, and we give our countries different names to represent the unchangeable miseries of humanity....”

‘Here you have the malady of youth in its crisis. Adécadentpoet could not chant more lugubriously, though perhaps less intelligibly. The sick youth laments in the same irritable tone the vulgarity of themadrileñas, the exaggerated prowess of the gentlemen of the arena, exalts the patient and noble bulls, rails at the puny byplay of the picadors and at the silly enthusiasm of the spectators. He rushes distractedly from an inexpensive inn, where a band of merry rascals joined him and over wine sang the praises of the Fair. Praise of the eternal feminine he cannot stand. Poor wretch! Had he been Adam in the Garden of Paradise, Eden would have ceased to be Eden upon the impertinent introduction of Eve. We find him complaining that he shouldhave left a score of maundering youths in Paris doing dismal homage to the Sex, to drop upon a sillier band in Madrid hymning the everlasting subject. He protests the Spanish women, for all their eyes and arched feet, are untempting and insipid, like the rest. They are not the dolls of the North; they are the animals of the South. He confines his curiosity to Spanish literature, and is in pursuit of its apostle of Pessimism. “I am taking lessons in Spanish,” he writes from another inn. “I teach Russian to as poor a devil as myself, in exchange for his help in his own tongue. Between us we are making creditable progress. He is writing an article on the Russian novelists for a review that will pay him something like twopence a page. Yet he preserves his faith in literature! Mighty indeed is man’s capacity for cherishing illusions. I advised him to break stones for a lucrative change, but he seems to doubt the value of the advice since I do not follow it myself. This is one of the things that prove man a rational being. We read Castrès together. You have doubtless heard of Castrès, the poet of Spain, and said to be sufficiently sedative asregards the happy hopes of youth. Such is my Spaniard’s description in reply to a question of mine upon his tendencies. I have inserted the phrase as a concession to the perverse taste for local colouring. The phrase paints the man; he lives upon onions and bread into the bargain, and dreams with a cigarette between his lips. This morning I went to see Castrès.... I found the great man writing and smoking at the same time in a big sparsely furnished bedroom. He is low-sized and heavily built, with soft black eyes and a forest of hair round and about his sallow face. He looks as if he dined well and liked women. There is always something unctuous and fatuous about a man who likes women, which becomes intolerably accentuated if women should happen to like him too. The expression suggests a mixture of oil and sugar. We discussed theDécadentsunder their new name, and hardly appreciated the advantage of exchange, symbolism being no whit less empty and vapid; another demonstration of the worthlessness of novelty, since, however much we vary things, we end where we start, at the Unchangeable. Castrès agrees with me that Naturalism is dead; but what thedevil, he asked, is going to take its place? Naturalism under a new name, I replied, which is only romance upside down. Whether we invent animals or angels, it matters little. It is romancing all the same, and only proves that one man likeseau sucréeand another likesabsinthe. It is a concoction either way, and about as useful in one form as in the other.... Of Castrès the man I thought as indifferently as I did of Castrès the poet. I asked him how Pessimism stood in Spain, and who were its representatives. He shrugged, spat, and surveyed me dismissingly, and with his big soft eyes.... ‘Caramba!I can’t say I know much about it. But I believe it will never flourish here. We have too much sun, and life is, on the whole, easy enough for us. An hour of sunshine, a crust of bread, and a bunch of grapes, or the taste of an onion and a lifted wine-skin upon the roadside, and there you have a Spaniard built and ready for love-making. What more does he want? And in a land where women are fair and facile, wherefore should he whine, and see black where God made blue? I have here a volume of poems just published by a young girl—Señorita Pilar Villafrancay Nuño. I have glanced through the volume, and I don’t think you can ask for anything finer in the way of Pessimism. It is enough to make a sane man cut his throat, if he had not the good sense to pause beforehand, in distrust of the sincerity of the writer who could survive the proof-reading of such dismal stuff. It reminds me of what I have heard of Schopenhauer, who, after wrecking all our altars, could sit down and enjoy a heavy dinner. He despised none of the pleasures of life in practice, while decrying them all in theory. You’ll probably find that this young woman dines heartily, and employs her evenings over her wedding outfit, if she is not already married and nursing her first baby. I took the book away and read it with my poor devil that evening. You will not be surprised to learn that I found it very much superior to anything of Castrès’ I have read. He might well sneer at her in self-preservation, that being the weapon the strong have ever preferred to use against the weak. It is bad enough to find real talent in a young woman, but absolute unbelief, the doctrine of complete negation! To find in this landof To-morrow, a feminine apostle of theNirvana....”’

‘Ah,’ interrupted Gaston, ‘I was wondering what had become of the word.’

‘“A feminine apostle of theNirvana,”’ continued Rameau, with an expressive smile. ‘“Judge if masculine opinion in Spain would be indulgent. Even my poor devil, though no less struck than I with the poetry, found it much too strong for a woman. ‘But she is doubtless old, and then it matters less. The discontents and disappointments of old maidenhood have drifted her into deep learning and irreligion,’ he added, by way of consolation. ‘Old or young,’ I exclaimed, ‘it is all one to me. For me she is a thinker, not a woman. And I am going straight off to her publisher, from whom I’ll wrest her address, if need be, by reason of a thick stick.’

‘“The services of a stick were not required. My request was immediately complied with. I carried the lady’s book in my hand, and was no doubt mistaken for a recent purchaser. My poet lives on the fourth floor in a very shabby house, in a very shabby street at the other end of Madrid. I deemed it wise to defer my visituntil after dinner. It was half-past eight when I climbed the four flights, and stood on the landing, anxiously asking myself if I had made up my mind to ring. Had it not the air of an invasion? While I was yet debating the door opened, and an untidy-looking maid shot out into the passage. I captured her before the twilight of the stairs had swallowed her, and demanded to see the Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I understood that it would not serve me in her eyes to give evidence of uncertainty or bashfulness. ‘She is inside; knock at the middle door and you’ll find her,’ screamed the untidy maid, and in another moment she was whirling down the stairs, and I was left to shut the hall door and announce myself.

‘“The house was tidier than the maid. I crossed a scrupulously clean hall and knocked at the middle door, as I had been directed. A low, deep voice shouted,Come in!While turning the handle gingerly, I thought to myself, the poor devil was right; only a woman of massive proportions and very advanced years could bellow that order. The scene that met my eyes was prettier than absolute conformity to my ideas demanded. In a neat little sitting-room,lit by a shaded lamp, were seated three persons; a stout Spanish woman engaged with a basket of stockings, a pale, thin young girl with melancholy eyes of an unusual intensity of gaze, and a small lad sitting at her feet, and reading aloud from a book they held together. The child had the girl’s eyes, but while curiosity, belonging to his years, brightened their sombreness with the promise of surprise and laughter, hers held an expression of permanent sadness and soft untroubled gloom. It was superfluous information on the mother’s part, in response to my mention of the poet’s name, to indicate her daughter majestically, as if she wished it to be understood that she herself had no part in the production of matter so suspicious in a woman as poetry. I was on the brink of assuring her that nobody would ever deem her capable of such folly, and begging her to return to her stockings as occupation more appropriate than the entertainment of an admirer of the Muse she despised, when Pilar quietly said, ‘Be seated, sir.’ From that moment I took no further heed of the Señora Villafranca than if she had been the accommodatingdueñaof Spanish comedy and I the unvirtuous, or noble but thwarted,lover who had bribed her. In ten minutes Pilar and I were talking as freely as if we had known one another from infancy; far more freely, possibly, for in the latter case we should long ago have talked ourselves to silence. How do these young girls manage to get hold of books, Rameau, when all the forces of domestic law are exercised to keep them apart? There is not a living Spanish or French writer with whom this child, barely out of her teens, is not acquainted. Her judgment may often be at fault,—whose is not, if backed by anything like originality? But to hear her discuss Naturalism! Castrès, puffing his eternal cigarette, walks you throughles lieux communs, but this girl takes flights that fairly dazzle you. And then her Pessimism! The queer thing is that she has found it for herself, and Schopenhauer has nothing to do with it. For that matter, nobody living or dead seems to have had anything to do with the forming of her. She is essentiallyprimesautière. You French do manage to hit upon excellent words;primesautièreperfectly describes this Spanish maid. She is all herself, first of the mould, fresh, though so burdened with the century’s malady. So young,and she believes in nothing—but nothing, Rameau! She hopes for nothing, for nothing! She plays with no emotions, feigns no poetic despairs, utters no paradoxes, and is simplicity itself in her gestures, expressions, and ideas. She calmly rejects all the pretty illusions of her sex, without a pang or regret, because, for her, truth is above personal happiness.

‘“We talked, we talked—talked till far into the night, while the fat mother slumbered noisily in her chair, and the little boy slept curled up at his sister’s feet. Can you guess what first put it into my head to go? The smell of the lamp as the wick flickeringly lowered. ‘Dios mio!’ cried Pilar, ‘it is close on two o’clock, and we have been chattering while my mother sleeps comfortlessly in her chair, and my little brother is dreaming on the carpet instead of in his bed. Good-night, sir; I must leave you and carry my baby to bed.’ She stooped and lifted the sleeping boy with her arms. Such bodily strength in one so frail much astonished me. I would have offered her help, but the little lad had already found a comfortable spot in the hollow of her neck, and with a cordial nod to me she disappearedinto the inner room. I had not expected this evidence of womanly tenderness from her, and the picture haunted me on my way down the dark staircase and through the dim starlit streets.”

‘The extracts from the next letters are singularly characteristic,’ said Rameau, well pleased by our profound attention. ‘Krowtosky, upon his return to Paris, has taken a third-class ticket from Madrid to Bayonne. To the poet he has said his last farewell, and probably wears upon his heart her precious autograph. Not that Krowtosky is ostensibly sentimental. He rejects the notion of such folly, and if by chance he dropped into pretty fooling, be sure he would find a philosophical way out of the disgrace deservedly attached to such weakness. “I am travelling to Bayonne,” he writes, “and I will reach it to-morrow afternoon, but I am convinced that once there I shall straightway take the train back to Madrid. Odd, is it not? Yet I feel that I shall be compelled to return to that young girl. And this is not love, mark you, Rameau; not in the least. I know all about that. Did I not study it in the case of that young girl I met at Toulouse? Well, nothing I feel forPilar in any way resembles the foolish sentiment her gestures and looks expressed. I am quite master of myself, and do not hang on any one’s lips or glances; but I must see Pilar again. Do you know why I hesitated outside her door that first evening I called upon her? I had a presentiment, as I climbed up those stairs, that I should marry her. We may reject a faith in presentiments, but they shake us nevertheless. How slowly this train goes! The landscape, across which we speed in the leisurely movement of Spanish steam, is flat and ugly, an interminable view of cornfields. There is a wide-hatted priest in front of me with an open breviary in his hand. Perhaps I shall find myself craving service of one of his brothers some day. What an odd fellow I am, to be sure! I intend, oh certainly I intend to take the Paris train to-morrow night from Bayonne, and as certainly I know I shall find myself on my way back to Madrid! And it cannot be for the pleasure of passing a couple of days and nights in a beastly third-class carriage, which is nothing better here than a cattle-pen....”

‘Of his reception by the poet, of his sentiments and wooing, he writes very sparingly. Hisgreat terror is that I should detect the lover where he insists there is only a philosopher. Philosophy took him from Madrid, and Philosophy brought him back within forty-eight hours. Philosophy sued, wooed, and won the Muse, and led him to his wedding-morn. While engaged in its service, he writes in this jocose strain the very evening of his marriage: “This morning in a dark little church, in a dark little street of Madrid, we were married. Though neither of us believes in anything, we agreed to make the usual concession to conventional feeling and social law, and were married in the most legal and Christianlike fashion. Nothing was lacking,—neither rings nor signatures, nor church-bells nor church-fees, nor yet the excellent and venerable fat priest, a degree uglier than myself, who obligingly made us one. While this ceremony was being performed, I could not forget the inconvenient fact that neither of us brought the other much in the shape of promise of future subsistence, not even hope, of which there is not a spark between us. This preoccupation distracted me while the priest mumbled and sermonised, and a wicked little French couplet kept running through my head:

Un et un font deux, nombre heureux en galanterie,Mais quand un et un font trois,—c’est diablerie!

Un et un font deux, nombre heureux en galanterie,

Mais quand un et un font trois,—c’est diablerie!

Meanwhile the fat priest discoursed to my wife, most excellently, upon the duties and virtues of the true Christian spouse, to which discourse my wife lent an inattentive ear. Perhaps she also was thinking of the future,—somewhat tardily. My dear Rameau, have you ever reflected upon the amazing one-sidedness of religion on these occasions? Wives are eloquently exhorted to practise all the virtues, and not a word is flung at the husbands. It is something of course for us to learn, by the aid of the Church, that all the duty is on the other side, and that we have nothing to do but command, be worshipped, and fall foul of infidelity. The beautiful logic of man, and the profound Pessimism of woman! She never rebels, but accepts all without hope of remedy. The real Pessimists are women. They admit the fact that everything is unalterable, evil without amelioration; everything is, and everything will remain to the end. Man occasionally rises up, and takes his oppressor by the throat, but woman never. There is a point at which his patience vanishes, but hers is inexhaustible. She is the soul andspirit and body of the malady only diagnosed this century. Conviction that suffering is her only heritage is hers before birth, and she placidly bends to the law of fate often without a murmur, always without the faintest instinct of revolt. Is she an idiot or an angel? The latter rebelled in paradise; then she must be an idiot. Man is activity, she is inertia; that is why she yields so readily to his ruling. These are thoughts suitable to the marriage of two Pessimists. There will be on neither side revolt or stupid demands upon destiny. I am simply interested in the development of this strange union of the barbarous North and the barbarous South, and watch this unfamiliar person, my wife, placed in an enervating proximity by a queer social institution. I wonder if she will eventually prove explosive; meantime it is my privilege to kiss her. I have not mentioned it, but she has very sweet lips.”

‘After this there is a long lapse of silence. I fear the delights of poor Krowtosky’s honeymoon were soon enough disturbed by the grim question of ways and means. As I was only a fair-weather friend in default of the sympathetic confidant voyaging in distant waters, I imagineat this period the traveller must have returned, and received the rest of the journal so wantonly intrusted to me, or Krowtosky must have confided his troubles to his wife. When next I hear from him, it is many months later, and he has just obtained a professorship in a dreary snow-bound place called Thorpfeld. From his description, it is evidently the very last place God Almighty bethought himself of making, and by that time all the materials of comfort, pleasure, and beauty had been exhausted. “As Thorpfeld is not my birthplace,” writes Krowtosky, “I may befoul it to my liking. It contains about seven thousand inhabitants, one poorer and more ignorant than another. What they can want with professors and what the authorities are pleased to call a college, the wicked government under which we sweat and suffer and groan alone can tell. Six out of a hundred cannot read, and three of these can barely write. The less reason have they for a vestige of belief in man, the more fervent is their faith in their Creator. Nothing but anticipation of the long-delayed joys of paradise can keep them from cutting their own and their neighbours’ throats. They ought to begin withthe professors and the rascally magistrates. As if snow and broken weather were not enough to harass these poor wretches in pursuit of a precarious livelihood, what little money the magistrates or the professors leave them is wrung from them by the popes. Even Pilar is demoralised by her surroundings. She has left off writing pessimistic poetry, and has betaken herself to Christian charity. ’Tisn’t much we can do, for we have barely enough to live upon ourselves, but that little she manages to do somehow or other. These hearts of foolish women will ever make them traitor to their heads. I naturally growl when I find our sack of corn diminished in favour of a neighbour’s hungry children, or return frost-bitten from the college to find no fire, and learn that my wife has carried a basket of fuel to a peasant dying up among snow-hills. She does not understand these people, and they do not understand her, but they divine her wish to share their wretchedness, her own being hardly less; and then she is a pretty young woman! Timon himself could hardly have spurned her. But where’s her Pessimism? Has it vanished with the sun and vines of her own bright land, or has it founda grave in the half-frozen breast of a strange Sister of Charity unknown to me and born of the sight of snow-clad misery such as in Spain is never dreamed of? You see, I am on the road to poetry instead of my poor changed young wife.

‘“Last evening when I came home from a farmer’s house, where I had stopped to warm myself with a couple of glasses ofvodka, I found her shivering over the remaining sparks of a miserable fire. She looked so white and unhappy and alone, so completely the image of a stranger in a foreign land, to whom I, too, her husband, am a foreigner, that I asked myself, in serious apprehension, if I might not be destined to lose her in the coming crisis. ‘Pilar,’ I cried, ‘what ails thee?’ And when she turned her head I saw that she was crying silently. ‘I want my own land; I want the sun and vines of Spain, where at least the peasants have wine and sunshine in abundance whatever else they may lack!’ I should think so, I grimly muttered, remembering that over there the mortar that built up the walls of a town was wet with wine instead of water, and that fields are sometimes moistened with last year’s winewhen the new is ready. Pilar is right, my friend. There is no poverty so sordid and awful as that of the cold North. But what could I do? I could not offer her the prospect of change. She was sobbing bitterly now, and I had no words of comfort for her. If only she had not forsaken her principles and her poetry! But the baby may rouse her when it comes. She has not smiled since we left Spain, poor girl. We must wait meanwhile; but Rameau, it is very cold.”’

‘Poor little woman!’ murmured Gaston. ‘I hardly know which is the worst fortune for her, her transplantation or her marriage with that maundering owl Krowtosky. Krowtosky married to a pretty Spanish poet! Ye gods, it is a cruel jest! There would have been some appropriateness in the laundress or thegrisette, but a Spanish girl with arched feet and melancholy eyes! I vow the jade Destiny ought to have her neck wrung for it. Is there a Perseus among us to free this modern unhappy Andromeda?’

‘Poor Krowtosky! he deserves a word too,’ I modestly ventured to suggest, touched by that little stroke,It is very cold, and his fear oflosing his wife. ‘He is more human than he himself is aware, and we may be sorry for him too.’

‘Ah, yes,’ assented Rameau, and he dropped an easy sigh. ‘If he is a bear, he is an honest bear. His next letter was just a note to announce the birth of a little girl and the well-being of the mother, which was followed by a more philosophical communication later, as soon as the gracious content of motherhood had fallen upon the young Spaniard. Relieved of his fears, he plunges once again into high speculation, and throws out queer suggestions as to the result of such conflicting elements in parentage as those contributed by Spain and Russia. He has found an occupation of vivid interest,—that of watching the development of his child, which he is convinced will turn out something very curious. Pilar, he adds, has so far recovered her old self as to have written a delicious little poem, which has just appeared in theRevista. It is over there, if any of you can read Spanish.’

‘And the baby is now dead,’ said Gaston.

‘Dead, yes, poor mite! It had not time to show what the mingling of Spanish and Russian blood might mean. Krowtosky’s letter wasmost pitiful. That I will not read to you; it affected me too deeply. It was the father there who wrote. Unconsciously the little creature had forced a way into his heart, and discovered it a very big and human heart despite his Pessimism and Philosophy. What hurt him most was the cruel hammering of nails into the baby’s coffin, and the sound keeps haunting him through the long wakeful nights. Of the bereaved mother he says little. His mind is fixed on the empty cradle and the small fresh mound in the churchyard, whither he goes every day. I believe myself that it is the first time his heart has ever been stirred by passionate love, and now he speaks of never leaving Thorpfeld,—a place he has been moving heaven and earth to get away from the past six years.’

‘I promise you, Professor, that I’ll never laugh at him again,’ said Gaston, very gravely. ‘There can be nothing absurd about a man who mourns a little child like that. Give me his address, and I’ll write to him at once.’

‘It may be a distraction for him, and at any rate it will serve to show him that he is remembered in Paris,’ said Rameau, eager to comply with the request. We thanked the Professorfor his story, with some surprise at the lateness of the hour. The door-bell rang, and the appearance of the servant with the evening letters arrested our departure. With a hand extended to the sobered St. Thomas, Rameau took the letters and glanced as he spoke at the top envelope, deeply edged with black. ‘Tiens!a letter from poor Krowtosky,’ he exclaimed. He broke the seal and read aloud: ‘My dear friend, I thank you for your kind words in my bereavement. But I am past consolation; I am alone now; my wife is dead, and my heart is broken.’

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