“With all my will, but much against my heart,We two now part,My very dear,Our solace is the sad road lies so clear;Go thou to East,I West.”
“With all my will, but much against my heart,We two now part,My very dear,Our solace is the sad road lies so clear;Go thou to East,I West.”
“With all my will, but much against my heart,We two now part,My very dear,Our solace is the sad road lies so clear;Go thou to East,I West.”
“With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part,
My very dear,
Our solace is the sad road lies so clear;
Go thou to East,
I West.”
Coventry Patmore’s Ode sums up the whole tragedy. The sentiments the characters express are what any characters would have said in such a situation now or a thousand years ago, and would be just as appropriate and true if the protagonists of the drama belonged to Belgravia or to the Mile End Road. The verse is exquisite.
Antiochus, who loved Bérénice in vain, says to her as he leaves her:
“Que vous dirai-je enfin? je fuis des yeux distraits,Qui me voyant toujours ne me voyaient jamais.”
“Que vous dirai-je enfin? je fuis des yeux distraits,Qui me voyant toujours ne me voyaient jamais.”
“Que vous dirai-je enfin? je fuis des yeux distraits,Qui me voyant toujours ne me voyaient jamais.”
“Que vous dirai-je enfin? je fuis des yeux distraits,
Qui me voyant toujours ne me voyaient jamais.”
The tragedy is full of musical lines, sad and suggestive and softly reverberating, with muted endings such as:
“Dans l’Orient désert quel devint mon ennui?Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée,Lieux charmants, où mon cœur vous avait adorée,”
“Dans l’Orient désert quel devint mon ennui?Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée,Lieux charmants, où mon cœur vous avait adorée,”
“Dans l’Orient désert quel devint mon ennui?Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée,Lieux charmants, où mon cœur vous avait adorée,”
“Dans l’Orient désert quel devint mon ennui?
Je demeurai longtemps errant dans Césarée,
Lieux charmants, où mon cœur vous avait adorée,”
and some of the most poignant words of farewell ever uttered:
“Pour jamais! Ah Seigneur! songez-vous en vous-mêmeCombien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime?Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons nous,Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous?Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice.”
“Pour jamais! Ah Seigneur! songez-vous en vous-mêmeCombien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime?Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons nous,Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous?Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice.”
“Pour jamais! Ah Seigneur! songez-vous en vous-mêmeCombien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime?Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons nous,Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous?Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice.”
“Pour jamais! Ah Seigneur! songez-vous en vous-même
Combien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime?
Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons nous,
Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous?
Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,
Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice.”
The Prince of Wales passed through Paris and stayed there a night that winter and dined at the Embassy, and we had to wear special coats and be careful they had the right number of buttons on them.
I got to know a good many French people, and some of those who had been famous in the days of the Second Empire: Madame de Galliffet and Madame de Pourtalès. Madame de Pourtalès had grey hair, but time, which had taken away much from herand stamped her with his pitiless seal, had not taken, and was destined never to take, away the undefinable authority that alone great beauty possesses, and never loses, nor her radiant smile, which would suddenly make her look young.
Once at a party at Paris many years after this, at the Jaucourts’ house, I again saw Madame de Pourtalès. It was not long before she died. Her hair was, or seemed to be, quite white, and that evening the room was rather dim and lit from the ceiling; her face was powdered and she appeared quite transfigured; the whiteness of her hair and the effect of the light made her face look quite young. You were conscious only of dazzling shoulders, a peerless skin, soft shining eyes, and a magical smile. She put out everyone else in a room. She looked like the photographs of herself taken when she was a young woman. One saw what she must have been, and everybody who was there agreed that here was an instance of the undefinable, undying persistence of great beauty that just when you think it is dead, suddenly blooms afresh and gives you a glimpse of its own past.
Reggie Lister told me that he had once asked Madame de Pourtalès what was the greatest compliment that had ever been paid her. She said it was this. Once in summer she had been going out to dinner in Paris. It was rather late in the summer, and a breathless evening, she was sitting in her open carriage, dressed for dinner, waiting for someone in the clear daylight. It was so hot she had only a tulle veil round her shoulders. While she was waiting a workman passed the carriage, and when he saw her he stood and gaped in silence; at last he said: “Christi! que tu es belle!”
I had already written some short parodies of four French authors which I wished to get published. A friend of mine sent them to Henri de Régnier and asked his advice. His opinion was extremely favourable. He said, and I quote his words, so that he may bear the responsibility for my publishing such a thing in Paris: “J’ai lu les amusants pastiches de M. Baring. Bourget, Renan, Loti ou France pourraient avoir écrit chacun des pages qui soient moins eux.” “Il faut pour avoir fait cela une science bien délicate de la langue française. Conseillez donc à Monsieur Baring de faire imprimer une petite plaquette. Elle representerait à elle seule de gros livres, ce qui sera délicieux.” I sent the parodies to Lemerre and he acceptedthem, and they were published in Paris by his firm. The pamphlet was calledHildesheim, and the small edition was soon sold out. The little book was well received by the French, and I got a good deal of fun out of it.
Another literary adventure I had at this time was a correspondence I started in theSaturday Review. Max Beerbohm, in an article on a French translation ofHamlet, said something about the French language being lacking in suggestiveness and mystery. I wrote a letter saying that the French language was as suggestive to a Frenchman as the English language was to an Englishman, upon which a professor wrote to say that the French language was only a bastard language, and that when a Frenchman wrote of a girl as beingbeaucoup bellehe was talking pidgin-Latin. Many people then wrote to point out that the professor was talking pidgin-French, and a certain H. B. joined in the fray, quoting the “Chanson de Roland,” and saying that an Englishman who used the phrasebeaucoup bellein France would be treated with the courtesy due to strangers, but a Frenchman would be preparing for himself an unhappy manhood and a friendless old age. It was a terrible comment, he added, on the modern system of primary education. The controversy then, as nearly always happens, wandered into the channel of a side-issue, where it went on merrily bubbling for several weeks.
English people used to stream through Paris all the year round. One was constantly asked out to dinner, both by them and by the French. One night I dined with Admiral Maxse, and the other guest was M. Clemenceau. M. Clemenceau was in those days conducting a violent campaign for Dreyfus in the Press, and was a thorn in the flesh of the Government. I was severely reproved for dining with him the next day. I knew a few Frenchmen of letters: M. Henri de Régnier, Melchior de Vogüé, André Chevrillon, Edouard Rod, Madame Darmesteter.
I remember at one of Anatole France’s receptions (I only attended very few, as in those days a foreigner felt uncomfortable in circles where the Dreyfus case was being discussed—it was too much of a family affair) Anatole France talked of Æschylus. He said the texts we possess of Æschylus are shortened, abbreviated forms of the plays, almost, speaking with exaggeration, like the libretto of an opera founded on a well-known drama, almost as if we only possessed an operaticlibretto ofHamletorFaust, but he added: “Pourtant ceux qui ont admiré Aschyle ne sont point des imbéciles.”
But literature was rarely discussed anywhere in those days, asL’affairedominated everything and excluded all other topics.
In August came the Rennes trial, and the excitement reached its climax. Galliffet was minister of war, and I heard him make his first speech in the Chamber. “Assassin!” shouted the left. “C’est moi, Messieurs,” said Galliffet, and waited till they had finished. During the month of August, he used to dine every night at the “Cercle de l’Union.” The club was quite deserted. I used often to sit at his table.
He told me that many people in the Club would probably not speak to him when they returned, for his having accepted the portfolio at such a time. “They will turn their backs on me probably,” he said. “Mais,” he added, with a chuckle, “ils ne se permetteront pas une impertinence.” He used to tell me many interesting things. He said the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life was Georgiana, Lady Dudley, at one of the early Paris Exhibitions, and after her, Madame de Castiglione. I never knew whether he had believed in the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, but I knew he was determined the case should end somehow and by a verdict which should bring about anapaisement.
The General was a picturesque and striking figure, not tall nor imposing, but carved, as it were, in some enduring granite-like substance, with steely eyes, a quick, rather hoarse, jerky utterance, and a very direct manner, a little alarming to a newcomer, owing to its abrupt frankness, and his way of saying what he thought in the most pointed, Gallic manner. His illustrations, too, and his confessions were sometimes startling.
In conversation he leapt over all conventions, with the same gaiety and gallantry that had made him say at Sedan: “Tant que vous voudrez, Mon Général.” In the early days of the case he had been strongly in favour of revision.
When the verdict of the Court of Rennes was announced, and Dreyfus subsequently pardoned, a curious thing happened. Although the topic had been raging daily for years to the exclusion of everything else, exciting everywhere the fiercest passions, and dividing every family in France, estranging friendships, and breaking careers, the very moment the decisionwas made known, the topic dropped from the minds of men instantly and finally, as though it had never existed.
My own point of view, which I sometimes found was shared by others, was that I believed Dreyfus to be innocent, but I loathed the Dreyfusards. Commenting on this, Andrew Lang wrote to me: “People like us, who hate vivisection and anti-vivisectionists, who believe Dreyfus was innocent and loathe Dreyfusards (though anti-Dreyfusards were really worse), have no business on this foolish planet.”
I often went to the play, and the chief enjoyment I derived was from what Sarah Bernhardt did in those days, about most of which I shall deal with separately. She must have a chapter to herself. Of the rest I remember but little except a revival ofLa Belle Hélènewith its enchanting tunes, and some funny songs at Montmartre; Réjane inZazaandLa Robe Rouge, and a terrifying play at the Théâtre Antoine calledEn Paix, about a man who is shut up in a lunatic asylum, when he is sane, and who ends by going mad. This play was said not only to have been founded on fact, but to have been written by a man whose brother had been shut up in a private lunatic asylum by some conspiring greedy relations.
The man whose brother was thus treated went to Law, but without avail, so as a last resource he wrote a play in which he exposed the facts, which were briefly these: A greedy family wish to get one of their members out of the way. They say he is mad and get him sequestered in a mad-house. He has a just brother who tries to get him released, but the brother finds himself faced with the obstinacy of professionalism when he declares the sequestered man is not mad; the lunatic experts say he does not understand the intricacies of the disease, and when he loses his temper, the doctors say: “You, too, are showing signs of the family madness.” The man who is shut up is quick tempered; a sojourn with lunatics sharpens his temper, and the play ends by his being dragged out by sinister-looking warders, crying out: “A la douche!” I could not sleep after seeing this spectacle, which lost nothing in the realistic interpretation of actors such as Antoine and Gémier.
In September, I went for a short time on leave, and stayed at Lynton, North Devon, with the Cornishes in a delightful little house called the Chough’s Nest. It was a warm, softwindy Devonshire September. Hubert and I bathed in the great breakers. We had wonderful teas in the valley, and followed the staghounds on Exmoor. We talked of all the books under the sun, and I wrote a poem in blank verse which was afterwards published in theAnglo-Saxon Review.
Later in the autumn, I stayed a few days at a château near Fontainebleau, and saw the forest in all the glory of its autumn foliage, with the tall trees ablaze, like funeral torches for the dying year; and the gardens of the château, and the splendid rooms seemed more melancholy than ever, as though the ghosts of the kings and queens of France were there unseen; and, looking at the gorgeous raiment of the fading forest, I thought of Mary Stuart putting on her most splendid robes on the morning of her execution, and mounting the scaffold in flaming satin.
“And all in red as of a funeral flame,And clothed as if with sunset.”
“And all in red as of a funeral flame,And clothed as if with sunset.”
“And all in red as of a funeral flame,And clothed as if with sunset.”
“And all in red as of a funeral flame,
And clothed as if with sunset.”
There are no sadder places in the world than Versailles, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne; those empty, deserted shells where there was once so much glory and so much gaiety, so much bustle and so much drama, and which are now hollow museums laid bare to the scrutiny of every profane sight-seer.
During the autumn of 1899, in Paris, I received a visit from Reggie Balfour, whom I had known at Cambridge, although he went to Cambridge after I had left. He was a brilliant scholar and had done great things at Cambridge. He had been staying at Angers to study French. We talked of books, of the Dreyfus case, and he suddenly said that he felt a strong desire to become a Catholic. I was extremely surprised and disconcerted. Up till that moment I had only known two people who had become Catholics: one was a relation, who had married a Catholic, and the other was an undergraduate, who had never discussed the matter except to say he must have all or nothing. When Reggie Balfour told me this I was amazed. I remember saying to him that the Christian religion was not so very old, and so small a strip in the illimitable series of the creeds of mankind; but that if he believed in the Christian revelation, and in the Sacraments of the Anglican Church, he would find it difficult to turn round and say those Sacraments had been an illusion. I begged him to wait. I said there was nothing to prevent his worshipping in Catholic churches without committinghimself intellectually to a step that must cramp his freedom. I advised him to live in the porch without entering the building. I said finally: “My trouble is I cannot believe in the first proposition, the source of all dogma. If I could do that, if I could tell the first lie, I quite see that all the rest would follow.”
He took me one morning to Low Mass at Notre Dame des Victoires. I had never attended a Low Mass before in my life. It impressed me greatly. I had imagined Catholic services were always long, complicated, and overlaid with ritual. A Low Mass, I found, was short, extremely simple, and somehow or other made me think of the catacombs and the meetings of the Early Christians. One felt one was looking on at something extremely ancient. The behaviour of the congregation, and the expression on their faces impressed me too. To them it was evidently real.
We worked together at some poems I had written, and Reggie arranged to have a small pamphlet of them privately printed for me, at the Cambridge University Press, which was done that Christmas.
When we got back to London, he sent me this epitaph, which is translated from the Latin, and is to be found at Rome in the Church of St. John Lateran, the date being about 1600:
“Ci-gît Robert Pechom, anglais, catholique, qui après la rupture de l’Angleterre avec l’église, a quitté l’Angleterre ne pouvant y vivre sans la foi et qui, venu à Rome y est mort ne pouvant y vivre sans patrie.”
The next year saw the opening of the Exhibition. On the 17th of March, I went with Reggie Lister to the first night ofL’Aiglon. It was a momentous first night. All the most notable people in the literary and social world of Paris were there: Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, Halévy, Sardou, Robert de Montesquiou, Albert Vandal, Henry Houssaye, Paul Hervieu, Coquelin, Madame Greffuhle. The excitement was tense. Sarah had a tremendous reception. When she spoke the line, which occurs in the first scene, “Je n’aime pas beaucoup que la France soit neutre,” there was a roar of applause, but this, one felt, was political rather than artistic enthusiasm. The first quiet dialogue between the Duke and the courtiers held the audience, and we felt that Sarah’s calm and biting irony portended great reserves held in store, and when the scene of thehistory lesson followed, which Sarah played with an increasing accelerando and crescendo, and when she came to the lines:
“Il suit l’ennemi; sent qu’il l’a dans la main;Un soir il dit au camp: ‘Demain!’ Le lendemain,Il dit en galopant sur le front de bandière:‘Soldats, il faut finir par un coup de tonnerre!’Il va, tachant de gris l’état-major vermeil;L’armée est une mer; il attend le soleil;Il le voit se lever du haut d’un promontoire;Et, d’un sourire, il met ce soleil dans l’histoire!”[8]
“Il suit l’ennemi; sent qu’il l’a dans la main;Un soir il dit au camp: ‘Demain!’ Le lendemain,Il dit en galopant sur le front de bandière:‘Soldats, il faut finir par un coup de tonnerre!’Il va, tachant de gris l’état-major vermeil;L’armée est une mer; il attend le soleil;Il le voit se lever du haut d’un promontoire;Et, d’un sourire, il met ce soleil dans l’histoire!”[8]
“Il suit l’ennemi; sent qu’il l’a dans la main;Un soir il dit au camp: ‘Demain!’ Le lendemain,Il dit en galopant sur le front de bandière:‘Soldats, il faut finir par un coup de tonnerre!’Il va, tachant de gris l’état-major vermeil;L’armée est une mer; il attend le soleil;Il le voit se lever du haut d’un promontoire;Et, d’un sourire, il met ce soleil dans l’histoire!”[8]
“Il suit l’ennemi; sent qu’il l’a dans la main;
Un soir il dit au camp: ‘Demain!’ Le lendemain,
Il dit en galopant sur le front de bandière:
‘Soldats, il faut finir par un coup de tonnerre!’
Il va, tachant de gris l’état-major vermeil;
L’armée est une mer; il attend le soleil;
Il le voit se lever du haut d’un promontoire;
Et, d’un sourire, il met ce soleil dans l’histoire!”[8]
she carried them off with a pace and an intensity that went through the large theatre like an electric shock. People were crying everywhere in the audience, and I remember Reggie Lister saying to me in theentr’actethat what moved him at a play or in a book was hardly ever the pathetic, but when people did or said splendid things.
The rest of the play, from that moment until the end, was a triumphant progression of cunningly administered electric thrills which were deliriously received by a quivering audience.
When it was all over and people talked of it the next and the following days in drawing-rooms and in the press, the enthusiasm began to cool down.
The following extracts from an article which I wrote in theSpeakerabout it, immediately after the performance, give an idea of the impression the play made at the time:
“Monsieur Rostand, thanks to his rapid and brilliant career, and the colossal success ofCyrano de Bergerac, is certainly the French author of the present day who attracts the greatest amount of public attention in France, whose talent is the most keenly debated, whose claims are supported and disputed with the greatest vehemence. His popularity in France is as great as that of Mr. Kipling in England; and in France, as is the case with Mr. Kipling in England, there are not wanting many and determined advocates of the devil. Some deny to M. Rostand the title of poet, while admitting that he is a clever playwright; some say that he has no poetical talent whatsoever. In the case of poetical plays the public is probably in the long run the only judge. Never in the world’s history has it been seen that the really magnificent poetical play has proved a lasting failure,or a really bad poetical play a perennial success. Of course there have been plays which, like other works that have come before their season, the public have taken years to appreciate; while, on the other hand, the public have patronised plays of surprising mediocrity and vulgarity; these works, however, have never resisted the hand of time. But in the main the public has been right, and those who take the opposite view generally belong to a class alluded to by Pope:
‘So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throngBy chance go right, they purposely go wrong.’
‘So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throngBy chance go right, they purposely go wrong.’
‘So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throngBy chance go right, they purposely go wrong.’
‘So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng
By chance go right, they purposely go wrong.’
Certainly in M. Rostand’s case, whatever may be the exact ‘place’ of his plays in the evolution of the world’s poetical drama, one thing is quite certain: his plays are triumphantly successful. This for a play is a merit in itself. After the triumph ofCyranoit was difficult to believe thatL’Aiglonwould attain the same level of merit and success, and never was a success more discounted beforehand. For weeksL’Aiglonwas the main topic of conversation in Paris, and provided endless copy for the newspapers. Another thing is certain: however the æsthetic value ofL’Aiglonmay be rated in the future, it constitutes for the present another gigantic success. Never did a play come at a more opportune moment. At a time when the French are thinking that their country has for a long time been playing too insignificant a part in European politics, when the country is still convalescent and suffering from the vague discomfort subsequent on a feverish crisis, fretting and chafing under the colourless mediocrity of a régime that falls short of their flamboyant ideal, M. Rostand comes skilfully leading a martial orchestra, and sets their pulses throbbing, their ears tingling, and their hearts beating to the inspiring tunes of Imperial France.
“M. Rostand’s play is certainly a forward step in his poetical career. It has the same colour and vitality asCyrano; the same incomparable instinct for stage effect, the same skill and dexterity in the manipulation of words which amounts to jugglery, the same fertility in poetical images and felicitous couplets that we find in his earlier works; but, besides this, it has something that they have not—a graver atmosphere, a larger outlook, a deeper note; the fabric, though the builder’s skill is the same, is less perfect as a whole, more irregular, butin it we hear mysterious echoes, and the footfall of the Epic Muse, which compensates for the unevenness of the carpentry.
“InL’Aiglonwe breathe the atmosphere of the epic of Napoleon. Although the scenes which M. Rostand presents to us deal only with the sunset of that period, the glories and vicissitudes of that epoch are suggested to us; we do not see the things themselves, but we are conscious of their spirit, their poetic existence and essence. M. Rostand evokes them, not by means of palpable shapes, but, like a wizard, in the images of his phrases and the sound of his verse, and thus we see them more clearly than if they had been presented to us in the form of elaborate tableaux or spectacular battle-pieces.
“The existence of NapoleonII.was in itself a tragic fact. Yet more tragic if, as Metternich is reported to have said of him, he had ‘a head of iron and a body of glass.’ And a degree more tragic still is M. Rostand’s creation of a prince whose frail tenement of clay is consumed by ambition and aspiration, and who is conscious, at times, of the vanity of his aspiration and the hopelessness of his ambition. Thus tossed to and fro, from ecstasy to despair, he is another Hamlet, born, not to avenge a crime against his father, but to atone for his father’s crimes. Perhaps the most poetical moment of the play is when the prince realises, on the plain of Wagram, that he himself is the atonement; that he is the white wafer of sacrifice offered as an expiation for so many oceans of blood. M. Rostand has chosen this theme, pregnant with pathos, as his principalmotif. It is needless to relate the play… The close of the Fifth Act is perhaps the finest thing in conception of the whole; in it we see Napoleon, after the failure of an attempted escape to France, alone on the battlefield of Wagram, pale in his white uniform on the great green moonlit plain, with the body of the faithful soldier of the Old Guard, who killed himself rather than be taken by the Austrians, lying before him. Gradually in the sighing winds Napoleon imagines he hears the moans of the soldiers who once strewed the plain, until the fancy grows into hallucination, until he sees himself surrounded by regiments of ghosts, and hears the groans, the call, and the clamour of phantom armies growing louder and louder till they culminate in the cry of ‘Vive l’empereur.’ He hears the tramping of men, the champing and neighing of chargers, and the music of the band; he thinks the ‘Grande Armée’ has come to life, andrushes joyfully to meet it; the vision is then dispelled, and the irony of the reality is made plain, for it is the white uniforms of the Austrian regiment (of which he is Colonel) that appear in the plain. The scene is almost Shakespearean in its effect of beauty and terror.
“Finally, in the last Act, we see theRoi de Romedying in his gilded cage while he listens to the account of his baptism in Paris, which is read out to him as he dies. He who as a child ‘eut pour hochet la couronne de Rome’ is now an obscure and insignificant Hapsburg princeling, dying forgotten by the world, without a friend, and under the eye of his imperturbable enemy.
“The play has already been accused of incoherence, lengthiness, and inequality; of too rapid transitions, of a clash in style between preciosity and brutality. It has been compared unfavourably withCyrano… Fault is found now, as it was before, with the form of M. Rostand’s verses; they are no doubt better heard on the stage than read in the study, and this surely shows that they fulfil their conditions. His verses are not those of Racine, of Alfred de Vigny, or of Lecomte de Lisle … but they have a poetic quality and a value of their own; and while their clarion music is still ringing in my ears I should think it foolish to quarrel with them and to criticise them in a captious spirit; possibly on readingL’Aiglonthe impression may be different. For the present, still under the spell of the enthusiasm and shouts of applause which his couplets inspired on the memorable first night of the play, I can but thank the author who brought before my eyes, with the skilful and clamorous music of his harps and horns, his trumpets and fifes and drums, the vision of an heroic epoch and the shadows of Homeric battles—the red sun and the cannon balls shivering the ice at Austerlitz, the Pope crowning another Cæsar at Notre Dame, Moscow in flames and the Great Army scattered on the plains of Russia, and the lapping of the tideless sea round St. Helena.”
Many of those who had been most enthusiastic at the first night ofL’Aiglonlost no time in saying they had been mistaken, and that it was after all but a poor affair. Someone said that Rostand’s verse was madeen caoutchouc. I heard someone ask Robert de Montesquieu his opinion soon after the play was produced. He said he thought the verse was in the bestVictor Hugo tradition; some of it, Metternich’s monologue on Napoleon’s hat, very fine. Somebody mentioned the more sentimental verses onLa Petite Source: “Cela doit être,” said Montesquiou, “de Madame Rostand.”
Arthur Strong, after he saw the play, told me it had carried him away, and the fact of Sarah Bernhardt being a woman, and not a young woman, had mattered to him no more than the footlights or the painted scenery; he had accepted it, he had been made to accept it gladly, by the fire of the play and the power of the interpretation.
The Paris Exhibition of 1900 was opened on the 14th of April, and the whole of the Embassy staff attended that ceremony in uniform. I remember little of it. The features of the Exhibition were thetrottoir roulant, a moving platform, that took visitors all round the Exhibition without their having to stir a foot; the pictures in the Grand Palais; the little city on the left bank of the Seine, where every nation was represented by a house, and where, in the English house, there was a room copied from Broughton Castle, full of Gainsboroughs; the Petit Palais, a gem in itself; and, besides these, there were the usual features of all exhibitions—side-shows, bales of chocolate, and galleries full of machinery and implements.
Towards the end of April I was taken by M. Castillon de Saint Victor for an expedition in a free balloon. I had been up twice in a captive balloon in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and had not enjoyed the experience, especially once on a windy day. I was not at all sure I was not going to dislike the free balloon, and I felt a pang of fear whenever I thought of it beforehand; but when the moment of starting came, and the balloon was released, and rose as gently and as imperceptibly as a puff of smoke from Saint Denis, and soared higher and higher into the dazzling sky without noise, without our experiencing any effect of motion or breeze, I felt intoxicated with pleasure. We went up to three thousand feet. It was like reaching another planet, an Olympic region of serenity and light, and one had no desire to leave it or to descend again to the earth.
We ate luncheon from a basket and drank a little rum, which was said to be the best beverage in a balloon, and we took photographs from the air. I little thought that I should one day have something to do with aircraft, air photographs, and all the many details of air navigation. We floated onacross Paris in a south-easterly direction. We came down low over a château belonging to the Rothschilds’ and over the forest of Creçy; later in the afternoon, we dropped a guide rope and floated over the country at a height of about two hundred feet, and as the evening came on, the balloon came down still lower and sailed along just over the tree-tops. Finally we landed. The balloon hopped like a football, the basket car was overturned, and the gas was let out. We landed in a deserted piece of flat country, but no sooner was the balloon on the ground than, as always happens, a crowd sprang from nowhere and helped us. The balloon was put in a cart, and we walked to the town of Provins, which was not far off, and there we took the train to Paris. The next time I visited Provins it was the General Headquarters of the French Army during the latter part of the European War.
I spent a week of that spring at Fontainebleau and Chantilly. There were a great many English people in Paris. One night, at the opera, in a box, an English lady was sitting, a large emerald poised high on her hair; the audience looked at nothing else, and an old Frenchman, who had been an ornament of the Second Empire, came up to me in the entr’acte and said: “Il est impossible d’être plus jolie que cette femme.” Shortly after this I travelled up to Paris from Fontainebleau with this same lady. The train was crowded, and we just managed to find room in the barest of provincial railway carriages. There were some private soldiers in the carriage, and some substantial women in sabots with large baskets. They gazed at her with childish delight, unmixed admiration, and surprised wonder, as she sat, making the boards of the third-class carriage look like a throne, in cool, diaphanous, lilac and white muslins and a large bunch of flowers, a vision of radiance and grace; it reminded me of the large masses of lilies of the valley and roses you suddenly meet with in a dark, narrow street corner on the first fine day of spring in Florence.
We went to a shop in Paris where she wanted to buy a pair of gloves. When she asked how much they were, the lady who was serving her said: “Pour vous rien, Madame, vous êtes trop jolie!”
I used to see a great deal of Monsieur and Madame de Jaucourt, whom I could remember ever since the early days of my childhood. Monsieur de Jaucourt had the most delightfulway of expressing things. One day when Madame de Jaucourt was pressing myself and another of the secretaries to stay with them in the country, he said: “Ma chère, les jeunes gens ont beaucoup mieux à faire que d’aller passer des heures à la campagne!” He was passionately fond of Paris. “On me gâte mon cher Paris,” he used to say. After luncheon, he would interview the cook and discuss every detail of last night’s dinner, praising this and criticising that, with extraordinary nicety and precision; and when he gave a dance in his house for boys and girls, on the afternoon preceding it, he would have different samples of lemonade and orangeade sent up to taste and choose from, to see if they were sweet enough but not too sweet. The lemonade was for the juvenile buffet. Women’s bets used to amuse him, and when they talked about racing, he would say: “Les paris des femmes sont à crever de rire.” He was a connoisseur of artistic things, and enjoyed a fine house, and beautifulobjets d’art. He insisted on my going to see the château of Vaux, which he said was the finest house he knew. He said what distinguished it from other houses was that it was not crammed with valuable things for the sake of ostentation, show, or ornament, but where a piece of furniture was wanted, there it would be, and it would be a good one.
Monsieur de Jaucourt had a house not far from Paris in the country, and I remember playing croquet one day there. His daughter, Françoise, aimed carefully at the ball and missed the hoop, upon which M. de Jaucourt said, with a sigh: “Ma pauvre fille, tu as joué sans réfléchir.” I often used to dine at the “Cercle de l’Union.” There were about four or five old men who used to dine there every night; a few, a very few, younger men, but no quite young Frenchmen.
One night someone arrived and asked for some cold soup. There was none. In a fury of passion this member asked for the book of complaints. When it was brought, he wrote in it: “N’ayant pas pu trouver un consommé froid j’ai dû diner hors du Club.”
One night the new house, built by Count Boni de Castellane in the Bois de Boulogne, was being discussed. Someone said it was like Trianon, and that it would be difficult to keep up. Someone else who was there said: “Mais Boni est beaucoup plus riche que LouisXIV.” M. Du Lau and General Galliffet used often to dine there to discuss the days of their youth and talkover the beauties and even the wines of the past; General Galliffet told us one night how he won sums of money by playing with a piece of rope taken from a gibbet in his pocket, and that the best wine he had ever drunk in his life was in the Rhine country. Now they are all dead, and I suppose their place is taken by those who were the older young men in those days, but I have no doubt that they sit round in the same chairs and sometimes complain if there is noconsommé froidto be had.
In the summer of 1900, I went on leave to London for a few weeks and attempted to pass an examination in International Law after a few weeks’ preparation. I went up for the examination, and I don’t think I was able to answer a single question; my crammer told me I had not the legal mind. At the end of the summer, I was told that the Foreign Office wanted me to go to Copenhagen, and at the beginning of August I started for Denmark as Third Secretary to Her Majesty’s Legation.
I arrived at Copenhagen in August. I went there direct from Paris and crossed whatever intervening seas lie between Denmark and GermanyviaHamburg and Kiel. I had been given an ointment made of tar by a French hair specialist to check my rapidly increasing baldness, and I applied it before I went to bed in my cabin, which contained three other berths. When the other passengers, who had intended to share my cabin, put their heads into it, they were appalled by the smell of tar, and thought that they had been given berths in the sail-room by the steward. They complained loudly, and refused to sleep there, so I had the cabin to myself.
I stayed at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and on the morning of my arrival presented myself to the Minister, Sir Edward Goschen. He was alone at the Legation. I took rooms in a street not far from the Legation, and settled down to the quiet routine of Legation life in a small capital.
Copenhagen in August seemed unusually quiet. The sentries outside the Amalienborg Palace looked like big wooden dolls in their blue uniforms, white trousers, white belts, and bearskins.
I immediately began to have Danish lessons from the British Vice-Consul, who was a Dane, and we soon began to read Hans Andersen in Danish. The diplomatic world in Copenhagen was a little world by itself. It consisted of the Russian Minister, Count Benckendorff, who, when I arrived, was there by himself; the Austrian Minister, Count Wildenbruch, who lived at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, and never went out and rarely saw anybody; the French Minister, M. Jusserand, one of the most erudite of English scholars besides being one of the most charming of Frenchmen; and the German Minister, M. Schön,who had a passion for dressing up in fancy dress; the Norwegian Minister, M. de Knagenhjelm; and the Italian Minister.
The diplomatic world mixed little with the Danes. I once heard a Dane say to another Dane: “Do you receive diplomats?” in the same tone of surprise as would have been appropriate had the question been: “Do you receive police-spies?”
I think the theatres were shut when I arrived, and the only amusements were to go out sailing which I used to do often with Sir Edward, who had a yacht, and in the evenings to have dinner at the Tivoli music-hall, which was an out-of-door park full of side-shows and was pleasantly illuminated.
The staff of the British Legation consisted of a First Secretary, Sir Alan Johnstone, and a Chancery servant: a Dane called Ole, who was a charming, simple person like a character in Hans Andersen, vaguely intoxicated sometimes, paternal, easily upset, and endlessly obliging.
Sir Alan Johnstone had a little house in the country, and there I often used to spend Sunday, and there I made the acquaintance of Count Benckendorff. The first time I met him we had a violent argument about the Dreyfus case. He was a firm believer in Dreyfus’ innocence and so was I, but that did not prevent us arguing as though we held diametrically opposite opinions.
In the middle of August, Edmund Gosse paid a visit to Denmark and I went to him meet at Munkebjerg, which entailed a long cross-country journey over many canals and in trains that were borne on steamers. Munkebjerg was a lovely place on the top of a high hill with little woods reaching down to the water. There, for the first time, I experienced the long, green, luminous twilights of the north. Edmund Gosse was inspired by the surroundings to write a book calledHypolympia, which he afterwards dedicated to me. He imagined that the gods of Greece arrived at Munkebjerg immediately after their exile, and on that theme he wove a fantasy.
One of the most important duties at Copenhagen was to go to the railway station to meet the various royalties who used to visit the King of Denmark, and another one was to receive English Royalties at the door of the English church when they attended divine service on Sundays. We used often to see the King of Denmark out riding, and although I think he wasthen eighty years old, he looked on horseback, so extraordinarily young was his figure, like a man of thirty.
I learnt Danish fairly quickly and soon I could follow the plays at the Kongelige Theatre and at other theatres. The Kongelige Theatre was a State-supported institution with an ancient tradition and an excellent troupe of actors and dancers. They performed opera: Gluck, Mozart, and Wagner; ballets; the classic Danish comedies of Holberg; Molière; Shakespeare; modern comedies and the dramas of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Holger Drachman. The Shakespeare productions were particularly interesting and far more remarkable than any I ever saw in Berlin. They made use of the Apron Stage; on a small back-cloth at the back of the stage changed with the changing scene; the back-cloth was framed in a Gothic arch, which was supported by pillars raised on low steps. A curtain could be lowered across this arch, and the actors could proceed with the play in front of this curtain, without necessitating the lowering of the larger curtain. This small scene was extremely effective. It was just enough to give the eye the keynote of the play; and in the historical plays of Shakespeare, inRichard III.for instance, it was ideal. I sawRichard III.,King Lear, andA Midsummer Night’s Dream; the latter was a beautiful and gay production; the actor who played Bottom had a rich vein of humour and a large exuberant personality, and the fairy dances were beautifully organised and executed. Of the modern drama I saw Tolstoy’sPowers of Darkness, which made a shattering effect, Ibsen’sDoll’s HouseandHedda Gabler, and Holger Drachman’sGurre, and some comedies by Otto Benzon.
The performance of theDoll’s Housewith Fru Hennings’ Nora was unforgettable. I have seen many Noras; Eleonora Duse and Réjane and Agnes Sorma in Berlin; but Fru Hennings played the part as if it had been written for her; shewasNora; she made the whole play more than natural, she made it inevitable. “Quelle navrante ironie! quel désenchantement à fond!” said Jules Lemaître, writing about Duse’s performance of Magda. In Fru Hennings’ interpretation of Nora, the irony was indeed harrowing, and the disenchantment complete; but irony, disillusion, weariness, disgust were all merged into a wonderful harmony, as the realities of life gradually dawned on the little singing-bird, and the doll changed into a woman. She made the transformation, which whenever I hadseen the play before seemed so difficult to believe in, of the Nora of the first act into the Nora of the last act seem the most natural thing in the world. Then Fru Hennings had the advantage of being a Dane and of speaking the words of the play in the language in which they had been written. She had a musical rippling voice and a plaintive grace of gesture. Holger Drachman’s dramaGurrewas a terrible and intensely dramatic poetic drama, with a love duet of impassioned lyricism and melody, and an almost unbearable scene, in which the Queen has her rival scalded to death in a steam-bath.Hedda GablerI confess to not being able to endure when I saw it; it was beautifully acted; too well acted; there seemed to be no difference between what was going on on the stage and in the audience. I had a sudden uprush of satiety with Norwegian drama: with Ibsen, with problem plays, with Denmark, with the North; and I remember going out of the theatre after the second act, in revolt and disgust, and not being able to stand any more of it. But that was an accidental impression arising from a surfeit of such things, and from an overdose of Scandinavian gloom and Norwegian complexity; a short course of musical comedies would have soon enabled one to appreciate the drama of Ibsen once more; as it was, I heard it after a year and a half’s stay at Copenhagen, and at that moment I had had just a drop too much of that kind of thing.
I also sawWhen we dead awakenwhen it was first produced, and this again had no effect on me, save one of vague and teasing perplexity.
The music at Copenhagen was as interesting as the drama. Mozart’s operas were admirably given at the Kongelige Theatre. I remember a fine performance ofDon Giovanni, theNozze di Figaro, and Gluck’sOrpheo, concerts where Beethoven’s Symphonies were played, and a recital of Paderewski where he played Liszt’s arrangement of theErlkönig. When he came to the end of it, the impression was that he himself had experienced that ride in the night; that he had battled with the Erl King for the life of the child, and that it was he and not the child who was dead.
As soon as I could speak Danish, I made several friends among the Danes. I sometimes spent the evening at Dr. George Brandes’ house, and more often at that of Otto Benzon, the playwright, who was extremely kind to me. Theintelligentsiaof Copenhagen were highly cultivated; they were well-to-do and had fine collections of modern pictures. The meals were long and were often followed by a still longer supper. The days were short in winter at Copenhagen; the sun appeared to set at two; the wind blew in every direction at once down the Bred Gade. Copenhagen in winter had depressing elements.
I had, in the meantime, made great friends with the Benckendorffs at the Russian Legation.
Just as in the art of writing, and in fact in all arts, the best style is that where there is no style, or rather where we no longer notice the style, so appropriate and so inevitable, so easy the thing said, sung, or done is made to appear, so in diplomacy the most delightful diplomats were those about whom there was no diplomatic style, nothing which made you think of diplomacy. Michael Herbert was one of these, and so pre-eminently was Count Benckendorff. When he was Ambassador in London he took root easily in English life, and made friends instantly and without effort in many different worlds, so his personality and his services are well known to Englishmen. I doubt, however, whether they know how great the services were which he rendered at times both to our country as well as to his own.
All through the war, till a few days before his death, he was giving his whole heart and soul to his work, and every nerve of his being was strained to the utmost. The war killed him as certainly as if he had fought in the trenches. He was astonishingly far-sighted and clear-sighted. In 1903 he told me there would be a revolution in Russia directly there was a war. At the time of the Agadir crisis, he told me that the future of Europe entirely depended on the policy of the German Government: on whether the German Emperor and his Government decided or not to embark on a LouisXIV.policy of ambition and aggression, and try to make Germany the only European power.
When the Emperor of Russia issued the manifesto of 17th October, and the Russians were bedecking their cities with flags, because they thought they had received a constitution, he made it excruciatingly clear that it was nothing of the kind; and he predicted no less clearly what would be the results of so ambiguous an act, and so dangerously elastic a charter.
His public career belongs to history. I had the privilegeof knowing him as a private person and of finding in him the kindest and the wisest of friends.
I think his most striking quality was his keenness. The way he would throw himself into the discussion, the topic, or the occupation of the moment, whether it was a book, a play, a picture, a piece of music, a political question, a wolf-hunt, a speech, a problem, even an acrostic to be guessed, or the dredging of a pond.
Whenever I wrote anything new he always made me read it aloud to him, and he was in himself an extraordinarily exhilarating and encouraging public.
He was all for one’s doing more and more, for finding out what one could not do and then doing it.
He once tried to persuade me to go into Parliament. When I objected that I had no power of dealing with political questions, and no understanding of many affairs that a member of Parliament is supposed to understand, he said: “Rubbish! You could do all that part, just as you wrote a parody of Anatole France; people would think you knew.”
He hated pessimism. He hated the Oriental, passive view of life, especially if it was preached by Occidentals. The looking forward to a Nirvana and a closed door. He hated everything negative. Suicide to him was the one unpardonable sin. He hated affectation, especially cosmopolitan affectation, what he used to call “le faux esprit Parisien.” “Je préfère,” he used to say, “le bon sens anglais.” He was extremely argumentative and would put his whole soul into an argument on the most trivial point; and he was as unblushingly unscrupulous as Dr. Johnson in his use of the weapons of contradiction, although, unlike Dr. Johnson, however heated the argument, he was never rude, even for a second; he didn’t know how to be rude. He spoke the most beautiful natural French, the French of a more elegant epoch than ours, with a slightly classical tinge in it. He spoke it not only as well as a Frenchman, but better; that is to say, he spoke without any frills or unnecessary ornament, either of phrase or accent, with complete ease and naturalness.
He spoke English just as naturally. I remember on one occasion, shortly after he arrived in London, his being taken for an Englishman throughout a whole dinner-party by his host. But he used to say that this was sheer bluff and thathis command of the language was limited. His beautiful manners, and the perfection of his courtesy came from the same absence of style I have already alluded to. He was natural and unaffected with everyone, because he waschez soi partout; and his distinction, one felt, was based on a native integrity, a fundamental horror of anything common, or mean, or unkind, the incapacity of striking a wrong note in word or deed: the impossibility of hurting anyone’s feelings. A member of the Russianintelligentsia, writing in a provincial newspaper in Russia, about one of the many European crises that threatened Europe before the outbreak of the Great War, said: “We should have been dragged into a war, had we not had at the time, as our Ambassador in London, the first gentleman in Europe.” That is, I think, his best and most fitting epitaph.
I shall never have the benefit of his criticism any more, his keenness, his almost boyish interest, his decided, argumentative disagreement leaping into a blaze over a trifling point, and never again enjoy that glow of satisfaction—worth a whole world of praise—which I used to feel when he said about something, whether a poem, a newspaper article, a story, or a letter, or the most foolish of rhymes: “C’est très joli.”
I moved from my rooms in the town to the Legation and had most of my meals with the Goschens. Sir Edward’s inimitable humour, his minute observation of detail, and his keen eye for the ludicrous, the quaint and all the absurd incidents of daily life—and especially of diplomatic life—made all the official side of things, the dinner-parties, the interviews with ministers, the ceremonies at the station, the pompousness of the diplomats, extraordinarily amusing. Besides this, he was childishly fond of every kind of game, such as battledore and shuttlecock, and cup and ball.
Sir Edward went on leave in the autumn of 1900, and for a fortnight, from 10th October to 22nd October, I had the glory of being in charge, of being acting Chargé d’Affaires of the Legation, so that when the Foreign Office wrote to me they signed dispatches, “Yours with great truth.” The first thing which had to be done was to leave cards on all theCorps Diplomatique. This duty was always carried out by Ole, the Chancery servant. I gave him a sheaf of my cards to leave; he left some of them, but I think he considered that I was altogether too young to be taken seriously as a Chargé d’Affaires,so he left no cards on the minor diplomats, who lived out of the immediate radius of the British Legation. About three days after I had been in charge, Count Benckendorff told me that the minor diplomats who had received no cards from me had held a meeting of indignation; I was to lose no time in smoothing down their ruffled sensibilities, so I left the cards myself. The only diplomatic interview I remember having was with the future King of Greece, who came to see me in my room and talked about something I didn’t understand. My brief era of sole responsibility was put an end to after a fortnight by the arrival of a new First Secretary in place of Alan Johnson. His name was Herbert. Shortly after his arrival Ethel Smyth paid a visit to Copenhagen on her way back to England from Berlin, where she had been negotiating for the performance of her opera,Der Wald. She wanted to make the acquaintance of the Benckendorffs, and she sang her opera to us, her Mass, and many songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, besides many English and Scotch ballads. Count Benckendorff, who was musical, was enchanted with her singing, with her interpretation of the songs she sang, “la richesse de son exécution,” her vitality, her good humour, her keenness, her passionate interest in everything. She played golf in the daytime and made music in the evening.
At Christmas, Sir Edward’s sons arrived and we had a Christmas-tree in the house, and a treat for the church choir, and endless games of battledore and shuttlecock in the Legation ballroom. Then, suddenly, came the unbelievable news that Queen Victoria was dead. A telegram arrived on the 22nd January, worded thus: