Hideous though he was, his powerful brutality had a great effect on the ladies of the circle. They literally hung upon his words. He seized them by the wrists, and slid his black paws up their bare arms. The married women whispered languishingly: "You have a marvellous power over women." The husbands looked on smilingly.
Now when Hello and he and their friends and the ladies began to talk about religious matters and got steam up, it was a veritable witches' Sabbath, and no mistake, every voice being raised in virulent cheap Jack denunciation of freedom, and common sense. Satan himself had dictated Voltaire's works; now Voltaire was burning in everlasting fire. Unbelievers ought to be exterminated; it would serve them right. Renan ought to be hanged on the first tree that would bear him; the Black Doctor even maintained that in Manila he would have been shot long ago. It was always the Doctor who started the subject of the persecution of heretics. Hello himself persecuted heretics with patronising scorn, but was already ready to drop into a hymn of praise to the Madonna.
I had then read two of Hello's books,Le StyleandM. Renan, L'Allemagne et l'Athéisme au 19me Siècle. Such productions are called books, because there is no other name for them. As a matter of fact, idle talk and galimatias of the sort are in no wise literature. Hello never wrote anything but Roman Catholic sermons, full of theological sophistries and abuse of thinking men. In those years his books, with their odour of incense, made the small, flat inhabitants of the sacristy wainscotting venture out of their chinks in the wall in delight; but they obtained no applause elsewhere.
It was only after his death that it could occur to a morbid seeker after originality, with a bitter almond in place of a heart, like Huysmans, to make his half-mad hero, Des Esseintes, who is terrified of the light, find satisfaction in the challenges to common sense that Hello wrote. Hello was a poor wretch who, in the insane conviction that he himself was a genius, filled his writings with assertions concerning the marvellous, incomprehensible nature of genius, and always took up the cudgels on its behalf. During the Empire, his voice was drowned. It was only a score of years later that the new Catholic reaction found it to their advantage to take him at his word and see in him the genius that he had given himself out to be. He was as much a genius as the madman in the asylum is the Emperor.
A few days after my arrival, I called upon Taine and was cordially received. He presented me with one of his books and promised me his great work,De l'Intelligence, which was to come out in a few days, conversed with me for an hour, and invited me to tea the following evening. He had been married since I had last been at his house, and his wife, a young, clear-skinned lady with black plaits, brown eyes and an extremely graceful figure, was as fresh as a rose, and talked with the outspoken freedom of youth, though expressing herself in carefully selected words.
After a few days, Taine, who was generally very formal with strangers, treated me with conspicuous friendliness. He offered at once to introduce me to Renan, and urgently advised me to remain six months in Paris, in order to master the language thoroughly, so that I might enlighten Frenchmen on the state of things in the North, as well as picture the French to my fellow-countrymen. Why should I not make French my auxiliary language, like Turgenieff and Hillebrandt!
Taine knew nothing of German belles lettres. As far as philosophy was concerned, he despised German Aesthetics altogether, and laughed at me for believing in "Aesthetics" at all, even one day introducing me to a stranger as "A young Dane who does not believe in much, but is weak enough to believe in Aesthetics." I was not precisely overburdened by the belief. But a German Aesthetic, according to Taine's definition, was a man absolutely devoid of artistic perception and sense of style, who lived only in definitions. If you took him to the theatre to see a sad piece, he would tear his hair with delight, and exclaim: "Voilà das Tragische!"
Of the more modern German authors, Taine knew only Heine, of whom he was a passionate admirer and whom, by reason of his intensity of feeling, he compared with Dante. A poem like thePilgrimage to Kevlaarroused his enthusiasm. Goethe's shorter poems, on the other hand, he could not appreciate, chiefly no doubt because he did not know German sufficiently well. He was not even acquainted with the very best of Goethe's short things, and one day that I asked him to read one poem aloud, the words in his mouth rang very French.
Lieber dur Laydénn möcht ee mee schlag'e, als so feel Frödenn des Laybengs airtrah'ge, was intended to be--
Lieber durch Leiden,Möcht ich mich schlagenAls so viel FreudenDes Lebens ertragen.
Goethe's prose he did not consider good, but heavy and prolix, and lacking in descriptive power. He would praise Voltaire's prose at his expense. "You perceive the figure and its movements far more clearly," he said. The German romanticists disgusted him; their style, also, was too inartistic for him (ils ne savent pas écrire, cela me dégoûte d'eux).
I frequently met friends at his house, amongst others, Marcelin, who had been his friend from boyhood, and upon whom, many years later, he wrote a melancholy obituary. This man, the proprietor of that supremely worldly paper,La Vie Parisienne, was a powerful, broad- shouldered, ruddy-cheeked man, who looked the incarnation of health and very unlike one's preconception of the editor of the most frivolous and fashionable weekly in Paris. He was a draughtsman and an author, had studied the history of the last few centuries in engravings, and himself owned a collection of no fewer than 300,000. What Taine had most admired in him was the iron will with which, left, at nineteen years of age, penniless, and defectively educated, as head of his family, he had kept his mother and brothers and sisters by his work. Next to that Taine admired his earnestness. Marcelin, who was generally looked upon as belonging to gay Paris, was a solitary-minded man, an imaginative recreator of the peoples of the past, as they were and went about, of their ways and customs. He it was who opened Taine's eyes to the wealth of contributions to history locked up in collections of engravings, more especially perhaps as regarded people's external appearance, and what the exterior revealed. Another friend who came to Taine at all sorts of times was Gleyre, the old painter, who had been born in French Switzerland, but was otherwise a Parisian. And he was not the only deeply idealistic artist with whom Taine was connected in the bonds of friendship. Although a fundamental element of Taine's nature drew him magnetically to the art that was the expression of strength, tragic or carnal strength, a swelling exuberance of life, there was yet room in his soul for sympathy with all artistic endeavour, even the purely emotional. That which drew him to the idealistic painters was, at bottom, the same quality as drew him to Beethoven and Chopin.
Gleyre's best-known picture is the painting in the Louvre, somewhat weak in colouring, but showing much feeling, a Nile subject representing a man sitting on the banks of the river and watching the dreams of his youth, represented as beautiful women, fleeing from him on a decorated dahabeah, which is disappearing. The title isLost Illusions. There is more strength in the painting, much reproduced in engraving, of a Roman army, conquered by Divico the Helvetian, passing under the yoke --a picture which, as an expression of the national pride of the Swiss, has been placed in the Museum at Lausanne.
Still, it was the man himself, rather than his pictures, that Taine thought so much of. Intellectually, Taine was in his inmost heart an admirer of the Italian and the English Renaissance, when most pagan and most unrestrained; his intellectual home was the Venice of the sixteenth century; he would have been in his right place at one of the festivals painted by Veronese, and should have worn the rich and tasteful costume of that period. But socially, and as a citizen, he was quite different, was affectionate and subdued and calm, excessively conventional; temperate in all his judgments, as in his life.
If I succeeded in winning his good-will, it was most emphatically not because I had written a book about him, which, for that matter, he could not understand; he barely glanced through it; he read, at most, the appreciative little review that Gaston Paris did me the honour to write upon it in theRevue Critique. But it appealed to him that I had come to France from pure love of knowledge, that I might become acquainted with men and women and intellectual life, and that I had spent my youth in study.
He grew fond of me, advised me as a father or an elder brother might have done, and smiled at my imprudences--as for instance when I almost killed myself by taking too strong a sleeping draught--(vous êtes imprudent, c'est de votre âge). He sometimes reproached me with not jotting down every day, as he did, whatever had struck me; he talked to me about his work, about the projected Essay on Schiller that came to nothing on account of the war, of hisNotes sur l'Angleterre, which he wrote in a little out-of-the-way summer-house containing nothing save the four bare whitewashed walls, but a little table and a chair. He introduced into the book a few details that I had mentioned to him after my stay in England.
When we walked in the garden at his country-house at Châtenay, he sometimes flung his arm round my neck--an act which roused great astonishment in the Frenchmen present, who could scarcely believe their eyes. They knew how reserved he usually was.
It quite irritated Taine that the Danish Minister did nothing for me, and introduced me nowhere, although he had had to procure me a free pass to the theatre. Again and again he reverted to this, though I had never mentioned either the Minister or the Legation to him. But the revolutionary blood in him was excited at what he regarded as a slight to intellectual aristocracy. "What do you call a man like that? A Junker?" I said no. "Never mind! it is all the same. One feels that in your country you have had no revolution like ours, and know nothing about equality. A fellow like that, who has not made himself known in any way whatever, looks down on you as unworthy to sit at his table and does not move a finger on your behalf, although that is what he is there for. When I am abroad, they come at once from the French Embassy to visit me, and open to me every house to which they have admittance. I am a person of very small importance in comparison with Benedetti, but Benedetti comes to see me as often as I will receive him. We have no lording of it here."
These outbursts startled me, first, because I had never in the least expected or even wished either to be received by the Danish Minister or to be helped by him; secondly, because it revealed to me a wide difference between the point of view in the Romance countries, in France especially, and that in the North. In Denmark, I had never had the entrée to Court or to aristocratic circles, nor have I ever acquired it since, though, for that matter, I have not missed it in the least. But in the Romance countries, where the aristocratic world still occasionally possesses some wit and education, it is taken as a matter of course that talent is a patent of nobility, and, to the man who has won himself a name, all doors are open, indeed, people vie with one another to secure him. That a caste division like that in the North was quite unknown there, I thus learnt for the first time.
Through Taine, I very soon made the acquaintance of Renan, whose personality impressed me very much, grand and free of mind as he was, without a trace of the unctuousness that one occasionally meets in his books, yet superior to the verge of paradox.
He was very inaccessible, and obstinately refused to see people. But if he were expecting you, he would spare you several hours of his valuable time.
His house was furnished with exceeding simplicity. On one wall of his study hung two Chinese water-colours and a photograph of Gérôme'sCleopatra before Caesar; on the opposite wall, a very beautiful photograph of what was doubtless an Italian picture of the Last Day. That was all the ornamentation. On his table, there always lay a Virgil and a Horace in a pocket edition, and for a long time a French translation of Sir Walter Scott.
What surprised me most in Renan's bearing was that there was nothing solemn about it and absolutely nothing sentimental. He impressed one as being exceptionally clever and a man that the opposition he had met with had left as it found him. He enquired about the state of things in the North. When I spoke, without reserve, of the slight prospect that existed of my coming to the front with my opinions, he maintained that victory was sure. (Vous l'emporterez! vous l'emporterez!) Like all foreigners, he marvelled that the three Scandinavian countries did not try to unite, or at any rate to form an indissoluble Union. In the time of Gustavus Adolphus, he said, they had been of some political importance; since then they had retired completely from the historical stage. The reason for it must very probably be sought for in their insane internecine feuds.
Renan used to live, at that time, from the Spring onwards, at his house in the country, at Sèvres. So utterly unaffected was the world-renowned man, then already forty-seven years of age, that he often walked from his house to the station with me, and wandered up and down the platform till the train came.
His wife, who shared his thoughts and worshipped him, had chosen her husband herself, and, being of German family, had not been married after the French manner; still, she did not criticise it, as she thought it was perhaps adapted to the French people, and she had seen among her intimate acquaintances many happy marriages entered into for reasons of convenience. They had two children, a son, Ary, who died in 1900 after having made a name for himself as a painter, and written beautiful poems (which, however, were only published after his death), and a daughter, Noémi (Madame Psichari) who, faithfully preserving the intellectual heritage she has received from her great father, has become one of the centres of highest Paris, a soul of fire, who fights for Justice and Truth and social ideas with burning enthusiasm.
A source of very much pleasure to me was my acquaintance with the old author and Collège de France Professor, Philarète Chasles. Grégoire introduced me to him and I gradually became at home, as it were, in his house, was always a welcome visitor, and was constantly invited there. In his old age he was not a man to be taken very seriously, being diffusive, vague and vain. But there was no one else so communicative, few so entertaining, and for the space of fifty years he had known everybody who had been of any mark in France. He was born in 1798; his father, who was a Jacobin and had been a member of the Convention, did not have him baptised, but brought him up to believe in Truth, (hence the name Philarète,) and apprenticed him to a printer. At the Restoration of the Royal Family, he was imprisoned, together with his father, but released through the influence of Chateaubriand; he then went to England, where he remained for full seven years (1819-1826), working as a typographer, and made a careful study of English literature, then almost unknown in France. After having spent some further time in Germany, he returned to Paris and published a number of historical and critical writings.
Philarète Chasles, as librarian to the Mazarin Library, had his apartments in the building itself, that is, in the very centre of Paris; in the Summer he lived in the country at Meudon, where he had had his veranda decorated with pictures of Pompeian mosaic. He was having a handsome new house with a tower built near by. He needed room, for he had a library of 40,000 volumes.
His niece kept house for him; she was married to a German from Cologne, Schulz by name, who was a painter on glass. The pair lived apart. Madame Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter, the fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was charmed with her, and it was always full of guests, young students from Alsace and Provence, young negroes from Hayti, young ladies from Jerusalem, and poetesses who would have liked to read their poems aloud and would have liked still better to induce Chasles to make them known by an article.
Chasles chatted with everyone, frequently addressing his conversation to me, talking incessantly about the very men and women that I most cared to hear about, of those still living whom I most admired, such as George Sand, and Mérimée, and, in fact, of all the many celebrities he had known. As a young man, he had been taken to the house of Madame Récamier, and had there seen Chateaubriand, an honoured and adored old man, and Sainte-Beuve an eager and attentive listener, somewhat overlooked on account of his ugliness, in whom there was developing that lurking envy of the great, and of those women clustered round, which he ought to have combatted, to produce just criticism.
Chasles had known personally Michelet and Guizot, the elder Dumas and Beyle, Cousin and Villemain, Musset and Balzac; he knew the Comtesse d'Agoult, for so many years the friend of Liszt, and Madame Colet, the mistress, first of Cousin, then of Musset, and finally of Flaubert, of whom my French uncle, who had met her on his travels, had drawn me a very unattractive picture. Chasles was on terms of daily intimacy with Jules Sandeau; even as an old man he could not forget George Sand, who had filched the greater part of his name and made it more illustrious than the whole became. Sandeau loved her still, forty years after she had left him.
Chasles was able, in a few words, to conjure up very vividly the images of the persons he was describing to his listener, and his anecdotes about them were inexhaustible. He took me behind the scenes of literature and I saw the stage from all its sides. The personal history of his contemporaries was, it is quite true, more particularly its chronicle of scandals, but his information completed for me the severe and graceful restraint of all Taine said. And side by side with his inclination for gay and malicious gossip, Chasles had a way of sketching out great synopses of intellectual history, which made one realise, as one reflected,' the progress of development of the literatures with which one was familiar. Those were pleasant evenings, those moonlight Spring evenings in the open veranda out there at Meudon, when the old man with the sharp-pointed beard and the little skull-cap on one side of his head, was spokesman. He had the aptest and most amusing way of putting things. For instance, to my question as to whether Guizot had really been as austere by nature as he was in manner, he replied: "It is hard to say; when one wishes to impress, one cannot behave like a harlequin."
Although I had a keen enough eye for Philarète Chasles' weaknesses, I felt exceedingly happy in his house. There I could obtain without difficulty the information I wished for, and have the feeling of being thoroughly "in Paris." Paris was and still is the only city in the world that is and wishes to be the capital not only of its own country but of Europe; the only one that takes upon itself as a duty, not merely to meet the visitor half-way by opening museums, collections, buildings, to him, but the only one where people habitually, in conversation, initiate the foreigner in search of knowledge into the ancient, deep culture of the nation, so that its position with regard to that of other races and countries is made clear to one.
I had not let a single day elapse before I took my seat again in theThéâtre Français, to which I had free admission for an indefinite period. The first time I arrived, the doorkeeper at the theatre merely called the sub-officials together; they looked at me, noted my appearance, and for the future I might take my seat wherever I liked, when the man at the entrance had called out hisEntrée. They were anything but particular, and in the middle of the Summer, after a visit of a month to London, I found my seat reserved for me as before.
The first evening after my arrival, I sat, quietly enjoyingHernani(the lyric beauty of which always rejoiced my heart), with Mounet-Sully in the leading rôle, Bressant as Charles V, and as Doña Sol, Mlle. Lloyd, a minor actress, who, however, at the conclusion of the piece, rose to the level of the poetry. The audience were so much in sympathy with the spirit of the piece that a voice from the gallery shouted indignantly: "Le roi est un lâche!" Afterwards, during the same evening, I saw, in a transport of delight, Mme. de Girardin's charming little piece,La Joie fait Peur. A certain family believe that their son, who is a young naval officer, fallen in the far East, has been cruelly put to death. He comes back, unannounced, to his broken-hearted mother, his despairing bride, his sister, and an old man- servant. This old, bent, faithful retainer, a stock dramatic part, was played by Régnier with the consummate art that is Nature itself staged. He has hidden the returned son behind a curtain for fear that his mother, seeing him unexpectedly, should die of joy. The sister comes in. Humming, the servant begins to dust, to prevent her going near the curtain; but unconsciously, in his delight, his humming grows louder and louder, until, in a hymn of jubilation, tratara-tratara! he flings the broom up over his head, then stops short suddenly, noticing that the poor child is standing there, mute with astonishment, not knowing what to think. Capital, too, was the acting of a now forgotten actress, Mlle. Dubois, who played the young girl. Her exclamation, as she suddenly sees her brother, "Je n'ai pas peur, va!" was uttered so lightly and gaily, that all the people round me, and I myself, too, burst into tears.
I was much impressed by Edmond Thierry, then director of theThéâtre Français. I thought him the most refined man I had so far met, possessed of all the old French courtesy, which seemed to have died out in Paris. A conversation with him was a regular course in Dramaturgy, and although a young foreigner like myself must necessarily have been troublesome to him, he let nothing of this be perceptible. I was so charmed by him that nearly two years later I introduced a few unimportant words of his about Molière'sMisanthropeinto my lectures on the first part ofMain Currents in European Literature, simply for the pleasure of mentioning his name.
It was, moreover, a very pleasant thing to pay him a visit, even when he was interrupted. For actors streamed in and out of his house. One day, for instance, the lovely Agar burst into the room to tell her tale of woe, being dissatisfied with the dress that she was to wear in a new part. I saw her frequently again when war had been declared, for she it was who, every evening, with overpowering force and art, sang theMarseillaisefrom before the footlights.
The theatrical performances were a delight to me. I had been charmed as much only by Michael Wiehe and Johanne Luise Heiberg in my salad days when they played together in Hertz'sNinon. But my artistic enjoyment went deeper here, for the character portrayal was very much more true to life. The best impressions I had brought with me of Danish art were supremely romantic, Michael Wiehe as Henrik inThe Fairies, as the Chevalier inNinon, as Mortimer in Schiller'sMary Stuart. But this was the real, living thing.
One evening I sawRistoriplay the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth with thrilling earnestness and supreme virtuosity. You felt horror to the very marrow of your bones, and your eyes filled with tears of emotion and anxiety. Masterly was the regular breathing that indicated slumber, and the stiff fingers when she washed her hands and smelt them to see if there were blood upon them. But Mme. Favart, who with artistic self-restraint co-ordinated herself into the whole, without any virtuosity at all, produced no less an effect upon me. As the leading character in Feuillet'sJulie, she was perfection itself; when I saw her, it seemed to me as though no one at home in Denmark had any idea of what feminine characterisation was. What had been taken for such (Heiberg's art, for instance,) only seemed like a graceful and brilliant convention, that fell to pieces by the side of this.
The performances at theThéâtre Françaislasted longer than they do now. In one evening you could see Gozlan'sTempête dans un verre d'Eau, Augier'sGabrielle, and Banville'sGringoire. When I had seen Mme. Favart and Régnier inGabrielle, Lafontaine as Louis XI, his wife as Loyse, Mlle. Ponsin as Nicole, and Coquelin, at that time still young and fresh, as Gringoire, I felt that I had enjoyed one of the greatest and most elevating pleasures the world had to offer. I went home, enraptured and enthusiastic, as much edified as the believer returning from his church. I could seeGringoirea dozen times in succession and find only one expression for what I felt: "This is holy."
The piece appealed to me so much, no doubt, because it was more in agreement than the rest with what in Denmark was considered true poetry. But during the three years since I had last seen him, Coquelin had made immense strides in this rôle. He rendered it now with an individuality, a heartfelt sincerity and charm, that he had not previously attained; in contrast to harsh King Louis and unfeeling Loyse, was so poor, and hungry, and ill and merry and tender and such a hero and such a genius-- that I said to myself: "Who, ever has seen this, has lived."
Quite a short while after my arrival--April 12, 1870--I saw for the first time Sarah Bernhardt, who had just begun to make a name at the Odéon. She was playing in George Sand's beautiful and mutinous dramaL'autre, from which the great-grandmother in Björnson'sLeonardais derived. The piece is a plea for the freedom of love, or rather, for indulgence with regard to what are branded by society as the sins of love. Sarah Bernhardt was the young girl who, in her innocence, judges all moral irregularities with the utmost severity, until her eyes are opened to what the world really is. She is, without knowing it, the child of unlawful love, and the father's curse is that of not daring to be anything to his child--whom he has educated and over whom he watches--not daring to claim his right to her affection, as he would otherwise stain her mother's memory. In his presence, the young girl utters all the hard words that society has for those who break her laws; she calls her unknown father false and forsworn. George Sand has collected all the justified protests and every prejudice for this young girl to utter, because in her they inspire most respect, and are to their best advantage.--So far her father has not revealed himself. Then at last it dawns upon her that it is he, her benefactor, who is theother onewhom she has just condemned, and as the curtain falls she flings herself, melted, into his arms.
Sarah played the part with great modesty, with what one might assume to be the natural melancholy of the orphan, and the enthusiasm of the young virgin for strict justice, and yet in such wise that, through all the coldness, through the expressive uncertainty of her words, and especially through the lovely, rich ring of her voice, one suspected tenderness and mildness long held back.
I tried, while I was in Paris, to understand something of the development of French literature since the beginning of the century, to arrange it in stages, and note the order of their succession; I wanted, at the same time, to form for myself a similar general view of Danish literature, and institute parallels between the two, being convinced beforehand that the spirit of the age must be approximately the same in two European countries that were, so to speak, intellectually allied. This was my first naïve attempt to trace The Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.
The French poetry of the nineteenth century seemed to me to fall into three groups: Romanticism, the School of Common Sense, the Realistic Art. I defined them as follows:
I. What the French callRomanticismhas many distinguishing marks. It is, firstly, abreak with Graeco-Roman antiquity. It therefore harks back to the Gallic, and to the Middle Ages. It is a resurrection of the poets of the sixteenth century. But the attempt is a failure, for Ronsard and the Pleiad [Footnote: The poets who formed the first and greater Pleiad were, besides Ronsard, Dubellay, Remi, Belleau, Jodelle, Dorat, Baif and Pontus de Thiard.] are also Greek-taught, are Anacreontics. If we except theChanson de Roland, there is no original mediaeval literature that can be compared with the Icelandic. For that reason the choice of subjects is extended from the Middle Ages in France to the Middle Ages in other countries, for instance, Germany, whence Victor Hugo derives his dramaLes Burgraves. The poets select foreign matter, Alfred de Vigny treats Chatterton and Musset Italian and Spanish themes. Mérimée harks back to the French Middle Ages (The Peasant Rising), but as he there finds too little originality, he flees, as a poet, to less civilised nationalities, Spaniards, South Americans, Corsicans, Russians, etc. Romanticism becomes ethnographical.
Its second distinguishing mark istempestuous violence. It is connected with the 1830 revolution. It attacks society and the conditions of property (Saint Simon, Fourier, Proudhon), attacks marriage and the official verdict upon sexual relations (Dumas) Antony Rousseau's old doctrine that Nature is good, the natural state the right one, and that society alone has spoilt everything. George Sand in particular worships Rousseau, and writes in essential agreement with him.
In the later French literature the influence of Voltaire and that of Rousseau are alternately supreme. Voltaire rules until 1820, Rousseau again until 1850, then Voltaire takes the reins once more with About, Taine, and Sarcey. In Renan Voltaire is merged with Rousseau, and now, later still, Diderot has taken the place of both.
II. TheSchool of Common Sense(l'école de bon sens) follows upon Romanticism. As the latter worshipped passion, so the School of Common Sense pays homage to sound human intelligence. In certain individuals it is possible to trace the transition--Musset'sUn Capricein contrast with the wanton works of his youth. George Sand's village novels, in contrast with her novels on Marriage. The popular tone and the landscape drawing here, which, for that matter, are all derived from Rousseau, lead on into a tranquil idyl. Works like Ponsard'sLucrèceand Augier'sGabrielleshow the reaction from Romanticism. In the tragedy it is Lucrèce, in the modern play, Gabrielle, upon whom the action hinges. In Ponsard and Augier common sense, strict justice, and a conventional feeling of honour, are acclaimed. Marriage is glorified in all of Ponsard, Augier and Octave Feuillet's dramas. Literature has no doubt been influenced in some degree by the ruling orders of the monarchy of July. Louis Philippe was the bourgeois King. An author like Scribe, who dominates the stages of Europe, is animated by the all-powerful bourgeois spirit, educated and circumscribed as it was. Cousin, in his first manner, revolutionary Schellingism, corresponded to romanticism; his eclecticism as a moralising philosopher corresponds to the School of Common Sense. The distinctive feature which they have in common becomes a so-called Idealism. Ponsard revives the classical traditions of the seventeenth century. In criticism this endeavour in the direction of the sensible and the classical, is represented by Nisard, Planche, and Sainte-Beuve in his second manner.
III. The third tendency of the century IsRealistic Art, with physiological characteristics. It finds its support in positivist philosophy; Herbart in Germany, Bentham and Mill in England, Comte and Littré in France. In criticism, Sainte-Beuve's third manner. On the stage, the younger Dumas. In novels, the brothers Goncourt, and Flaubert. In Art, a certain brutality in the choice of subject,Gérôme and Régnault. In politics, the accomplished fact (le fait accompli), the Empire, the brutal pressure from above and general levelling by universal suffrage from below. In lyric poetry, the strictly technical artists of form of theParnasse, Coppée, who describes unvarnished reality, and the master workmen (les maîtres de la facture), Leconte Delisle, Gautier and his pupils, who write better verse than Lamartine and Hugo, but have no new thoughts or feelings--the poetic language materialists.
In conclusion, a great many indistinct beginnings, of which it is as yet impossible to say whither they are tending.
This, my first attempt to formulate for myself a general survey of one of the great literatures of the nineteenth century, contained much that was true enough, but revealed very plainly the beginner's lack of ability to estimate the importance of phenomena, an inclination to over- estimate purely evanescent apparitions, and a tendency to include that which was merely externally similar, under one heading. The insignificant School of Common Sense could not by any means be regarded as marking an epoch. Neither, with any justice, could men like Augier and Dumas be placed in different groups. The attempt to point out realism in the lyric art was likewise exceedingly audacious.
However, this division and grouping seemed to me at that time to be a great discovery, and great was my disappointment when one day I consulted Chasles on the subject and he thought it too forced, and another day submitted it to Renan, who restricted himself to the reply:
"No! no! Things do not proceed so systematically!"
As this survey of the literature of France was also intended to guide me with regard to the Danish, I groped my way forward in the following manner:
I.Romanticism. Oehlenschläger's attitude towards the past corresponds exactly to Victor Hugo's; only that the resurrection of the Middle Ages in poetry is much more successful (Earl Hakon, The Gods of the North), by reason of the fresh originality in Snorre and theEdda. Grundtvig'sScenes from the Lives of the Warriors of the Northlikewise owes all its value to the Edda and the Sagas. Oehlenschläger'sAladdinis the Northern pendant to Hugo'sLes Orientales. Gautier, as a poet, Delacroix as a painter, affect the East, as Oehlenschläger does inAli and Gulhyndi. Steffens and Sibbern, as influenced by Schelling, correspond to Cousin. Hauch not infrequently seeks his poetic themes in Germany, as do Nodier and Gérard de Nerval. Ingemann's weak historical novels correspond to the French imitations of Sir Walter Scott (Alfred de Vigny'sCinq-Mars, Dumas'Musketeers). Oehlenschläger's tragedies correspond to the dramas of Victor Hugo. With the Danes, as with the French, hatred of intelligence, as cold; only that the Danes glorify imagination and enthusiasm, the French, passion. Romanticism lasts in Denmark (without Revolutions and Restorations) until about 1848, as in France.
II. TheSchool of Common Senseis in Denmark partly a worship of the sound sense of the people, partly a moralising tendency. Grundtvig, with his popular manner, his appreciation of the unsophisticated peasant nature, had points of contact with the pupils of Rousseau. Moralising works are Heiberg'sA Soul after Death, Paludan-Müller'sAdam Homo, and Kierkegaard'sEither-Or. The funny thing about the defence of marriage contained in this last book is that it defends what no one in Denmark attacks. It can only be understood from the contemporary movement in the intellectual life of Europe, which is now asserting the universal validity of morality, as it formerly did the right of passion. Its defence of Protestantism corresponds to Octave Feuillet's defence of Catholicism, only that Feuillet is conciliatory, Kierkegaard vehement. Björnson's peasant novels, which are a continuation of Grundtvig and Blicher, are, by their harmony and their peaceable relations to all that is, an outcome of love of common sense; they have the same anti-Byronic stamp as the School of Common Sense. The movement comes to us ten years later. But Björnson has simultaneously something of Romanticism and something of Realism. We have not men to place separately in the various frames.
III.Realistic Art. There is so far only an attempt at a realistic art.
Thus, in Björnson'sArneandSigurd Slembe. Note also an attempt in Bergsöe's clumsy use of realistic features, and in his seeking after effect. Richardt corresponds in our lyric art as an artist in language to the poets of theParnasse, while Heiberg's philosophy and most of his poetry may be included in the School of Common Sense. Bröchner'sIdeal Realismforms the transitional stage to the philosophy of Reality. Ibsen's attack upon the existing state of things corresponds to realism in the French drama. He is Dumas on Northern soil. In theLove Comedy, as a scoffer he is inharmonious. InPeer Gynt, he continues in the moralising tendency with an inclination to coarse and brutal realistic effects (relations with Anitra).
In Germany we find ourselves at the second stage still, sinking deeper and deeper into dialect and popular subjects (from Auerbach to Claus Groth and Fritz Reuter).
It is unnecessary to point out to readers of the present day how incomplete and arbitrary this attempt at a dissection of Danish literature was. I started from the conviction that modern intellectual life in Europe, in different countries, must necessarily in all essentials traverse the same stages, and as I was able to find various unimportant points of similarity in support of this view, I quite overlooked the fact that the counterbalancing weight of dissimilarities rendered the whole comparison futile.
As, during my first stay in Paris, I had frequently visited Madame Victorine, the widow of my deceased uncle, and her children, very cordial relations had since existed between us, especially after my uncle's faithless friend had been compelled to disgorge the sums sent from Denmark for her support, which he had so high-handedly kept back. There were only faint traces left of the great beauty that had once been hers; life had dealt hardly with her. She was good and tender-hearted, an affectionate mother, but without other education than was usual in the Parisian small bourgeois class to which she belonged. All her opinions, her ideas of honour, of propriety, of comfort and happiness, were typical of her class.
Partly from economy, partly from a desire not to waste the precious time, I often, in those days, restricted my midday meal. I would buy myself, at a provision dealer's, a large veal or ham pie and eat it in my room, instead of going out to a restaurant. One day Victorine surprised me at a meal of this sort, and exclaimed horrified:"Comment? vous vous nourrissez si mal!"To her, it was about the same as if I had not had any dinner at all. To sit at home without a cloth on the table, and cut a pie in pieces with a paper knife, was to sink one's dignity and drop to poor man's fare.
Her thoughts, like those of most poor people in France and elsewhere, centred mostly on money and money anxieties, on getting on well in the world, or meeting with adversity, and on how much this man or the other could earn, or not earn, in the year. Her eldest son was in St. Petersburg, and he was doing right well; he was good and kind and sent his mother help when he had a little to spare. He had promised, too, to take charge of his next brother. But she had much anxiety about the little ones. One of them was not turning out all that he should be, and there were the two youngest to educate.
There was a charming celebration in the poor home when little Emma went to her first communion, dressed all in white, from head to foot, with a long white veil and white shoes, and several other little girls and boys came just as smartly dressed, and presents were given and good wishes offered. Little Henri looked more innocent than any of the little girls.
Victorine had a friend whom she deemed most happy; this was Jules Clarétie's mother, for, young though her son was, he wrote in the papers, wrote books, too, and earned money, so that he was able to maintain his mother altogether. He was a young man who ought to be held in high estimation, an author who was all that he should be. There was another author whom she detested, and that was P.L. Möller, the Dane:
"Jacques, as you know, was always a faithful friend of Monsieur Möller; he copied out a whole book for him, [Footnote:The Modern Drama in France and Denmark, which won the University Gold Medal for Möller.] when he himself was very busy. But then when Jacques died--pauvre homme!--he came and paid visits much too often and always at more and more extraordinary times, so that I was obliged to forbid him the house."
In a students' hotel near the Odéon, where a few Scandinavians lived, I became acquainted with two or three young lawyers and more young abbés and priests. If you went in when the company were at table in the dining room, the place rang again with their noisy altercations. The advocates discussed politics, literature and religion with such ardour that the air positively crackled. They were apparently practising to speak one day at the Bar or in the Chamber. It was from surroundings such as these that Gambetta emerged.
The young abbés and priests were very good fellows, earnest believers, but so simple that conversations with them were only interesting because of their ignorance and lack of understanding. Scandinavians in Paris who knew only Roman Catholic priests fromTartufeat the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet. Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one of these three types. But my ecclesiastical acquaintances were as free from hypocrisy as from fanaticism. They were good, honest children of the commonalty, with, not the cunning, but the stupidity, of peasants.
Many a day I spent exploring the surroundings of Paris in their company. We went to St. Cloud and Sèvres, to Versailles and St. Germain, to Saint Denis, to Montmorency and Enghien, or to Monthléry, a village with an old tower from the thirteenth century, and then breakfasted at Longjumeau, celebrated for its postillion. There Abbé Leboulleux declared himself opposed to cremation, for the reason that it rendered the resurrection impossible, since God himself could not collect the bones again when the body had been burnt. It was all so amiable that one did not like to contradict him. At the same meal another was giving a sketch of the youth of Martin Luther; he left the church--on se demande encore pourquoi. In the innocence of his heart this abbé regarded the rebellion of Luther less as an unpermissible than as an inexplicable act.
The society of the Italian friends of my first visit gave me much pleasure. My first call at the Pagellas' was a blank; at the next, I was received like a son of the house and heaped with reproaches for not having left my address; they had tried to find me at my former hotel, and endeavoured in vain to learn where I was staying from Scandinavians whom they knew by name; now I was to spend all the time I could with them, as I used to do in the old days. They were delighted to see me again, and when I wished to leave, drove me home in their carriage. I resumed my former habit of spending the greater part of my spare time with Southerners; once more I was transported to Southern Europe and South America. The very first day I dined at their house I met a jovial old Spaniard, a young Italian, who was settled in Egypt, and a very coquettish young Brazilian girl. The Spaniard, who had been born in Venezuela, was an engineer who had studied conditions in Panama for eleven years, and had a plan for the cutting of the isthmus. He talked a great deal about the project, which Lesseps took up many years afterwards.
Pagella, too, was busy with practical plans, setting himself technical problems, and solving them. Thus he had discovered a new method of constructing railway carriages on springs, with a mechanism to prevent collisions. He christened this theVirginie-ressort, after his wife, and had had offers for it from the Russian government.
An Italian engineer, named Casellini, who had carried out the construction for him, was one of the many bold adventurers that one met with among the Southerners in Paris. He had been sent to Spain the year before by Napoleon III to direct the counter-revolution there. Being an engineer, he knew the whole country, and had been in constant communication with Queen Isabella and the Spanish Court in Paris. He gave illuminating accounts of Spanish corruptibility. He had bribed the telegraph officials in the South of Spain, where he was, and saw all political telegrams before the Governor of the place. In Malaga, where he was leading the movement against the Government, he very narrowly escaped being shot; he had been arrested, his despatches intercepted and 1,500 rifles seized, but he bribed the officials to allow him to make selection from the despatches and destroy those that committed him. In Madrid he had had an audience of Serrano, after this latter had forbidden the transmission from the town of any telegrams that were not government telegrams; he had taken with him a telegram drawn up by the French party, which sounded like an ordinary business letter, and secured its being sent off together with the government despatches. Casellini had wished to pay for the telegram, but Serrano had dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand, rung a bell and given the telegram to a servant. It was just as in Scribe'sQueen Marguerite's Novels, the commission was executed by the enemy himself.
Such romantic adventures did not seem to be rare in Spain. Prim himself had told the Pagellas how at the time of the failure of the first insurrection he had always, in his flight, (in spite of his defective education, he was more magnanimous and noble-minded than any king), provided for the soldiers who were sent out after him, ordered food and drink for them in every inn he vacated, and paid for everything beforehand, whereas the Government let their poor soldiers starve as soon as they were eight or ten miles from Madrid.
I often met a very queer, distinguished looking old Spaniard named Don José Guell y Rente, who had been married to a sister of King Francis, the husband of King Isabella, but had been separated from her after, as he declared, she had tried to cut his throat. As witness to his connubial difficulties, he showed a large scar across his throat. He was well-read and, amongst other things, enthusiastically admired Scandinavian literature because it had produced the world's greatest poet, Ossian, with whom he had become acquainted in Cesarotti's Italian translation. It was useless to attempt to explain to him the difference between Scandinavia and Scotland. They are both in the North, he would reply.
A young American named Olcott, who visited Chasles and occasionally looked me up, brought with him a breath from the universities of the great North American Republic. A young German, Dr. Goldschmidt, a distinguished Sanscrit scholar, a man of more means than I, who had a pretty flat with a view over the Place du Châtelet, and dined at good restaurants, came, as it were, athwart the many impressions I had received of Romance nature and Romance intellectual life, with his violent German national feeling and his thorough knowledge. As early as the Spring, he believed there would be war between Germany and France and wished in that event to be a soldier, as all other German students, so he declared, passionately wished. He was a powerfully built, energetic, well-informed man of the world, with something of the rich man's habit of command. He seemed destined to long life and quite able to stand fatigue. Nevertheless, his life was short. He went through the whole of the war in France without a scratch, after the conclusion of peace was appointed professor of Sanscrit at the University of conquered Strasburg, but died of illness shortly afterwards.
A striking contrast to his reticent nature was afforded by the young Frenchmen of the same age whom I often met. A very rich and very enthusiastic young man, Marc de Rossiény, was a kind of leader to them; he had 200,000 francs a year, and with this money had founded a weekly publication called "L'Impartial," as a common organ for the students of Brussels and Paris. The paper's name,L'Impartial, must be understood in the sense that it admitted the expression of every opinion with the exception of defence of so-called revealed religion. The editorial staff was positivist, Michelet and Chasles were patrons of the paper, and behind the whole stood Victor Hugo as a kind of honorary director. The weekly preached hatred of the Empire and of theology, and seemed firmly established, yet was only one of the hundred ephemeral papers that are born and die every day in the Latin quarter. When it had been in existence a month, the war broke out and swept it away, like so many other and greater things.
Of course I witnessed all that was accessible to me of Parisian public life. I fairly often found my way, as I had done in 1866, to the Palais de Justice to hear the great advocates plead. The man I enjoyed listening to most was Jules Favre, whose name was soon to be on every one's lips. The younger generation admired in him the high-principled and steadfast opponent of the Empire in the Chamber, and he was regarded as well-nigh the most eloquent man in France. As an advocate, he was incomparable. His unusual handsomeness,--his beautiful face under a helmet of grey hair, and his upright carriage,--were great points in his favour. His eloquence was real, penetrating, convincing, inasmuch as he piled up fact upon fact, and was at the same time, as the French manner is, dramatic, with large gesticulations that made his gown flutter restlessly about him like the wings of a bat. It was a depressing fact that afterwards, as the Minister opposed to Bismarck, he was so unequal to his position.
I was present at theThéâtre Françaison the occasion of the unveiling of Ponsard's bust. To the Romanticists, Ponsard was nothing less than the ass's jawbone with which the Philistines attempted to slay Hugo. But Émile Chasles, a son of my old friend, gave a lecture upon him, and afterwardsLe lion amoureuxwas played, a very tolerable little piece from the Revolutionary period, in which, for one thing, Napoleon appears as a young man. There are some very fine revolutionary tirades in it, of which Princess Mathilde, after its first representation, said that they made herRepublicanheart palpitate. The ceremony in honor of this little anti-pope to Victor Hugo was quite a pretty one.
Once, too, I received a ticket for a reception at the French Academy. The poet Auguste Barbier was being inaugurated and Silvestre de Sacy welcomed him, in academic fashion, in a fairly indiscreet speech. Barbier'sJamberwas one of the books of poems that I had loved for years, and I knew many of the strophes by heart, for instance, the celebrated ones on Freedom and on Napoleon; I had also noticed how Barbier's vigour had subsided in subsequent collections of poems; in reality, he was still living on his reputation from the year 1831, and without a doubt most people believed him to be dead. And now there he stood, a shrivelled old man in his Palm uniform, his speech revealing neither satiric power nor lofty intellect. It was undoubtedly owing to his detestation of Napoleon (videhis poemL'Idole) that the Academy, who were always agitating against the Empire, had now, so late in the day, cast their eyes upon him. Bald little Silvestre de Sacy, the tiny son of an important father, reproached him for his verses on Freedom, as the bold woman of the people who was not afraid to shed blood.
"That is not Freedom as I understand it," piped the little man,--and one believed him,--but could not refrain from murmuring with the poet:
C'est que la Liberté n'est pas une comtesseDu noble Faubourg St. Germain,Une femme qu'un cri fait tomber en faiblesse,Qui met du blanc et du carmin;C'est une forte femme.
A very instructive resort, even for a layman, was the Record Office, for there one could run through the whole history of France in the most entertaining manner with the help of the manuscripts placed on view, from the most ancient papyrus rolls to the days of parchment and paper. You saw the documents of the Feudal Lords' and Priests' Conspiracies under the Merovingians and the Capets, the decree of divorce between Philip Augustus and Ingeborg, and letters from the most notable personages of the Middle Ages and the autocracy. The period of the Revolution and the First Empire came before one with especial vividness. There was Charlemagne's monogram stencilled in tin, and that of Robert of Paris, reproduced in the same manner, those of Louis XIV. and Molière, of Francis the Catholic and Mary Stuart. There were letters from Robespierre and Danton, requests for money and death-warrants from the Reign of Terror, Charlotte Corday's last letters from prison and the original letters of Napoleon from St. Helena.
In June I saw the annual races at Longchamps for the first time. Great was the splendour. From two o'clock in the afternoon to six there was an uninterrupted stream of carriages, five or six abreast, along the Champs Elysées; there were thousands oflorettes(as they were called at that time) in light silk gowns, covered with diamonds and precious stones, in carriages decorated with flowers. Coachmen and footmen wore powdered wigs, white or grey, silk stockings and knee-breeches and a flower in the buttonhole matching the colour of their livery and the flowers which hung about the horses' ears. Some of the carriages had no coachman's box or driver, but were harnessed to four horses ridden by postillions in green satin or scarlet velvet, with white feathers in their caps.
The only greatdemi-mondaineof whom I had hitherto caught a glimpse was the renowned Madame de Païva, who had a little palace by the side of the house in which Frölich the painter lived, in the Champs Elysées. Her connection with Count Henckel v. Donnersmark permitted her to surround herself with regal magnificence, and, to the indignation of Princess Mathilde, men like Gautier and Renan, Sainte-Beuve and Goncourt, Saint-Victor and Taine, sat at her table. The ladies here were younger and prettier, but socially of lower rank. The gentlemen went about among the carriages, saidtuwithout any preamble to the women, and squeezed their hands, while their men-servants sat stolid, like wood, seeming neither to hear nor see.
This race-day was the last under the Empire. It is the one described in Zola'sNana. The prize for the third race was 100,000 francs. After English horses had been victorious for several years in succession, the prize was carried off in 1870--as inNana--by a native-born horse, and the jubilation was great; it was a serious satisfaction to national vanity.
At that time, the Tuileries were still standing, and I was fond of walking about the gardens near closing time, when the guard beat the drums to turn the people out. It was pleasant to hear the rolling of the drums, which were beaten by two of the Grenadier Guard drummers and a Turco. Goldschmidt had already written his clever and linguistically very fine piece of prose about this rolling of the drums and what it possibly presaged: Napoleon's own expulsion from the Tuileries and the humiliation of French grandeur before the Prussians, who might one day come and drum this grandeur out. But Goldschmidt had disfigured the pretty little piece somewhat by relating that one day when, for an experiment, he had tried to make his way into the gardens after the signal for closing had sounded, the Zouave had carelessly levelled his bayonet at him with the words:"Ne faites pas des bêtises!"This levelling of the bayonet on such trivial provocation was too tremendous, so I made up my mind one evening to try myself. The soldier on guard merely remarked politely: "Fermé, monsieur, on va sortir."
I little dreamed that only a few months later the Empress would steal secretly out of the palace, having lost her crown, and still less that only six months afterwards, during the civil war, the Tuileries would be reduced to ashes, never to rise again.
At that time the eyes of the Danes were fixed upon France in hope and expectation that their national resuscitation would come from that quarter, and they made no distinction between France and the Empire. Although the shortest visit to Paris was sufficient to convince a foreigner not only that the personal popularity of the Emperor was long since at an end, but that the whole government was despised, in Denmark people did not, and would not, know it. In the Danish paper with the widest circulation, the Daily Paper, foreign affairs were dealt with by a man of the name of Prahl, a wildly enthusiastic admirer of the Empire, a pleasant man and a brainy, but who, on this vital point, seemed to have blinkers on. From all his numerous foreign papers, he deduced only the opinions that he held before, and his opinions were solely influenced by his wishes. He had never had any opportunity of procuring information at first hand. He said to me one day:
"I am accused of allowing my views to be influenced by the foreign diplomatists here, I, who have never spoken to one of them. I can honestly boast of being unacquainted with even the youngest attaché of the Portuguese Ministry." His remarks, which sufficiently revealed this fact, unfortunately struck the keynote of the talk of the political wiseacres in Denmark.
Though the Danes were so full of the French, it would be a pity to say that the latter returned the compliment. It struck me then, as it must have struck many others, how difficult it was to make people in France understand that Danes and Norsemen were not Germans. From the roughest to the most highly educated, they all looked upon it as an understood thing, and you could not persuade them of anything else. As soon as they had heard Northerners exchange a few words with each other and had picked up the frequently recurringJa, they were sufficiently edified. Even many years after, I caught the most highly cultured Frenchmen (such as Edmond de Concourt), believing that, at any rate on the stage, people spoke German in Copenhagen.
One day in June I began chatting on an omnibus with a corporal of Grenadiers. When he heard that I was Danish, he remarked: "German, then." I said: "No." He persisted in his assertion, and asked, cunningly, whatouiwas in Danish. When I told him he merely replied, philosophically, "Ah! then German is the mother tongue." It is true that when Danes, Norwegians and Swedes met abroad they felt each other to be compatriots; but this did not prevent them all being classed together as Germans; that they were not Englishmen, you saw at a glance. Even when there were several of them together, they had difficulty in asserting themselves as different and independent; they were a Germanic race all the same, and people often added, "of second-class importance," since the race had other more pronounced representatives.
The only strong expression of political opinion that was engineered in France then was the so-called plebiscite of May, 1870; the government challenged the verdict of the entire male population of France upon the policy of Napoleon III. during the past eighteen years, and did so with the intention, strangely enough not perceived by Prime Minister Ollivier, of re-converting the so-called constitutional Empire which had been in existence since January 1, 1870, into an autocracy. Sensible people saw that the plebiscite was only an objectionable comedy; a favourable reply would be obtained all over the country by means of pressure on the voters and falsification of votes; the oppositionist papers showed this up boldly in articles that were sheer gems of wit. Disturbances were expected in Paris on the 9th of May, and here and there troops were collected. But the Parisians, who saw through the farce, remained perfectly indifferent.
The decision turned out as had been expected; the huge majority in Paris wasagainst, the provincial population votedfor, the Emperor.
On July 5th I saw John Stuart Mill for the first time. He had arrived in Paris the night before, passing through from Avignon, and paid a visit to me, unannounced, in my room in the Rue Mazarine; he stayed two hours and won my affections completely. I was a little ashamed to receive so great a man in so poor a place, but more proud of his thinking it worth his while to make my acquaintance. None of the French savants had ever had an opportunity of conversing with him; a few days before, Renan had lamented to me that he had never seen him. As Mill had no personal acquaintances in Paris, I was the only person he called upon.
To talk to him was a new experience. The first characteristic that struck me was that whereas the French writers were all assertive, he listened attentively to counter-arguments; it was only when his attitude in the woman question was broached that he would not brook contradiction and overwhelmed his adversaries with contempt.
At that time Mill was without any doubt, among Europe's distinguished men, the greatest admirer of French history and French intellectual life to be found outside of France; but he was of quite a different type from the French, even from those I esteemed most highly. The latter were comprehensive-minded men, bold and weighty, like Taine, or cold and agile like Renan, but they were men of intellect and thought, only having no connection with the practical side of life. They were not adapted to personal action, felt no inclination to direct interference.
Mill was different. Although he was more of a thinker than any of them, his boldness was not of the merely theoretic kind. He wished to interfere and re-model. None of those Frenchmen lacked firmness; if, from any consideration, they modified their utterances somewhat, their fundamental views, at any rate, were formed independently; but their firmness lay in defence, not in attack; they wished neither to rebuke nor to instigate; their place was the lecturer's platform, rather than the tribune. Mill's firmness was of another kind, hard as steel; both in character and expression he was relentless, and he went to work aggressively. He was armed, not with a cuirass, but a glaive.
Thus in him I met, for the first time in my life, a figure who was the incarnation of the ideal I had drawn for myself of the great man. This ideal had two sides; talent and character: great capacities and inflexibility. The men of great reputation whom I had met hitherto, artists and scientists, were certainly men richly endowed with talents; but I had never hitherto encountered a personality combining talents with gifts of character. Shortly before leaving home, I had concluded the preface to a collection of criticisms with these words: "My watchword has been: As flexible as possible, when it is a question of understanding, as inflexible as possible, when it is a question of speaking," and I had regarded this watchword as more than the motto of a little literary criticism. Now I had met a grand inflexibility of ideas in human form, and was impressed for my whole life long.
Unadapted though I was by nature to practical politics, or in fact to any activity save that of ideas, I was far from regarding myself as mere material for a scholar, an entertaining author, a literary historian, or the like. I thought myself naturally fitted to be a man of action. But the men of action I had hitherto met had repelled me by their lack of a leading principle. The so-called practical men at home, lawyers and parliamentarians, were not men who had made themselves masters of any fund of new thoughts that they wished to reduce to practical effect; they were dexterous people, well-informed of conditions at their elbow, not thinkers, and they only placed an immediate goal in front of themselves. In Mill I learnt at last to know a man in whom the power of action, disturbance, and accomplishment were devoted to the service of modern sociological thought.
He was then sixty-four years old, but his skin was as fresh and clear as a child's, his deep blue eyes young. He stammered a little, and nervous twitches frequently shot over his face; but there was a sublime nobility about him.
To prolong the conversation, I offered to accompany him to the Windsor Hotel, where he was staying, and we walked the distance. As I really had intended to go over to England at about that time, Mill proposed my crossing with him. I refused, being afraid of abusing his kindness, but was invited to visit him frequently when I was in England, which I did not fail to do. A few days afterwards I was in London.
My French acquaintances all said the same thing, when I told them I wanted to go over to England: "What on earth do you want there?" Though only a few hours' journey from England, they had never felt the least curiosity to see the country. "And London! It was said to be a very dull city; it was certainly not worth putting one's self out to go there." Or else it was: "If you are going to London, be careful! London is full of thieves and rascals; look well to your pockets!"
Only a few days later, the Parisians were shaken out of their calm, without, however, being shaken out of their self-satisfaction. The Duc de Grammont's speech on the 6th of July, which amounted to the statement that France was not going to stand any Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain, made the people fancy themselves deeply offended by the King of Prussia, and a current of martial exasperation ran through the irritable and misled people, who for four years had felt themselves humiliated by Prussia's strong position. All said and believed that in a week there would be war, and on both sides everything was so ordered that there might be. There was still hope that common sense might get the better of warlike madness in the French Government; but this much was clear, there was going to be a sudden downfall of everything.
Between Dover and Calais the waves beat over the ship. From Dover, the train went at a speed of sixty miles an hour, and made one think him a great man who invented the locomotive, as great as Aristotle and Plato together. It seemed to me that John Stuart Mill was that kind of man. He opened, not roads, but railroads; his books were like iron rails, unadorned, but useful, leading to their goal. And what will there was in the English locomotive that drew our train,--like the driving instinct of England's character!
Two things struck me on my journey across, a type of mechanical Protestant religiosity which was new to me, and the knowledge of the two languages along the coasts. A pleasant English doctor with whom I got into conversation sat reading steadily in a little Gospel of St. John that he carried with him, yawning as he read. The seamen on the ship and the coast dwellers both in England and France spoke English and French with about equal ease. It is probably the same in all border countries, but it occurred to me that what came about here quite naturally will in time be a possibility all over the world, namely, the mastery of a second and common language, in addition to a people's own.
I drove into London through a sea of houses. When I had engaged a room, changed my clothes, and written a letter that I wanted to send off at once, the eighteen-year-old girl who waited on me informed me that no letters were accepted on Sundays. As I had some little difficulty in making out what she said, I supposed she had misunderstood my question and thought I wanted to speak to the post-official. For I could not help laughing at the idea that even the letterboxes had to enjoy their Sabbath rest. But I found she was right. At the post-office, even the letter-box was shut, as it was Sunday; I was obliged to put my letter in a pillar-box in the street.
In Paris the Summer heat had been oppressive. In London, to my surprise, the weather was fresh and cool, the air as light as it is in Denmark in Autumn. My first visit was to the Greek and Assyrian collections in the British Museum. In the Kensington Museum and the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, I added to my knowledge of Michael Angelo, to whom I felt drawn by a mighty affection. The admiration for his art which was to endure undiminished all my life was even then profound. I early felt that although Michael Angelo had his human weaknesses and limitations, intellectually and as an artist he is one of the five or six elect the world has produced, and scarcely any other great man has made such an impression on my inner life as he.
In the British Museum I was accosted by a young Dane with whom I had sometimes ridden out in the days of my riding lessons; this was Carl Bech, now a landed proprietor, and in his company I saw many of the sights of London and its environs. He knew more English than I, and could find his way anywhere. That the English are rigid in their conventions, he learnt one day to his discomfort; he had put on a pair of white trousers, and as this was opposed to the usual precedent and displeased, we were stared at by every man, woman and child we met, as if the young man had gone out in his underclothing. I had a similar experience one day as I was walking about the National Gallery with a young German lady whose acquaintance I had made. An Englishwoman stopped her in one of the rooms to ask:
"Was it you who gave up a check parasol downstairs?" and receiving an answer in the affirmative, she burst out laughing in her face and went off.
On July 16th came the great daily-expected news. War was declared, and in face of this astounding fact and all the possibilities it presented, people were struck dumb. The effect it had upon me personally was that I made up my mind to return as soon as possible to France, to watch the movement there. In London, where Napoleon III. was hated, and in a measure despised, France was included in the aversion felt for him. Everywhere, when I was asked on which side my sympathies were, they broke in at once: "We are all for Prussia."