MADAME MARCELLE TINAYRE

WhenMadame Tinayre published herMaison du Péché, we thought in France that we had discovered our George Eliot. We pitched our hopes too high; Madame Tinayre is not even a George Sand. But she is a very interesting and gifted novelist. If that first book was of a new and veritable beauty, superior to any which has as yet followed it—but Madame Tinayre is young—it is because the conception of the story entailed a certain simplicity and order of composition, an art of opposition and construction, a severity of style even—in fact, the qualities in which our novelist is generally lacking. Her talent in her subsequent works is no less rich and imaginative; but there is the difference between a rose-tree covered with flowers trained over an espalier, and the same lovely crimson rambler left without support, and dropping half its fragrant burden in the dust.

Madame Tinayre, like most women writers, is endowed with an exact and attentive faculty of observation; like very few women writers, she has a sort of magic, similar to colour or melody, which often disguises the poverty of her compositions; her art aspires to the condition of music; she, too, might say with Saint Hildegard, ‘Symphonialis est anima.’ She knows how to project, from hermind into ours, a violent, an incomparable sentiment, as the waters in the marble fountains of Versailles overlap and drop from one basin into another. And she has the culture of a man.

These are great gifts, sometimes impaired by a certain warmth and coarseness in the treatment of love,—an offence rare in male writers, however libertine, but which hurts our taste occasionally even in a Mrs Browning (for instance, inAurora Leigh); and sometimes her fault is a lack of measure and order which lets her books meander in a perpetual flux, branching hither and thither, instead of moulding and rounding them into the fore-established harmony of a perfect sphere. In brief, Madame Tinayre is a romantic. But just once, as it were by accident, she consented to the classic discipline. And nothing in literature is so charming, so touching, so delightful, as a romantic who submits to be a classic.

That ‘once’ was, of course, when she wroteLa Maison du Péché. Her art, so often too literal, and, as it were, photographed from reality without arrangement (as in the greater part ofLa Rebelle), at other moments excessive and satiating in its lyrism, found on that occasion the exact middle path between experience and imagination. There is not only passion in the book and beauty, but solidity, balance, meditation, reason; there is not only spontaneity and grace, but a large and firm knowledge of life, a perspicacity, a sincerity beyondpraise. It has the qualities of poetry and the virtues of prose.

In this novel, Madame Tinayre shows us the clash and the conflict, the attraction and the repulsion, which cause a continual contest between the two halves of France, equally important and irreducibly different. Born into one of these spheres, married into the other, Madame Tinayre is at home in either. Her Augustin, so pure and grave and true, so narrow, so weak, so passionate, is the brother of M. Rolland’s Antoinette, is the great-nephew of Pascal. He is a type which has always existed in France, admirable but dangerous, for he is incapable of understanding his contrary. Among French Protestants, Jansenists, strict proverbial Catholics, in certain austere university circles, there are many variations on the type of Augustin. And Fanny, the charming Bohemian, light-hearted Fanny, an artist to the tips of her fingers but only very dimly conscious of being an immortal soul (a pretension which Augustin never abandons for an hour), is not Fanny the very flower of a different, a more frivolous, a lighter, brighter France?

The contact and the conflict of these two natures, their ill-starred, impossible love, is all the story ofLa Maison du Péché: one of the most moving stories of our times. There are readers, there are even critics, who prefer Madame Tinayre’s subsequent novel,La Rebelle. I have some difficulty, I admit, in catching their point of view. I prefernot onlyLa Maison du Péché, but even that exquisite piece of still-life,François Barbazanges, which some have condemned on the ground that, though it was art, it was not life.La Rebelleis much more life than art. The background, a fresco of popular Paris, is vast, living, and exact; indeed it is too vast, too living, too exact, for it distracts our attention from the rather ordinary characters who occupy the foreground.

And yet there is a great charm in the drawing of Josanne Valentin, the brave young woman-worker married to a neurasthenic invalid—that charm of poignant sincerity which sometimes, in a woman’s work, makes the reader’s heart beat quicker, as though he had suddenly stumbled on a private confession. Josanne is so courageous, so tender, so kind, that we forgive her conjugal infidelity, and chiefly regret that her lover should be so obviously unworthy of her.

He abandons her—we knew it!—and how pathetic is the scene of their parting—out of doors, in the street, poor Josanne encumbered with thefilet—the net—in which she is carrying home the materials for the family dinner. That parting scene is unlike any other in fiction in its heart-piercing realism! But Josanne is young, and when the morphino-maniac of a husband (tenderly nursed to the last) departs this life; when Josanne falls in with a high-minded radical philanthropist of the most advanced views, we murmur, much relieved: ‘Tout s’arrange.’

For Noël Delysle and Josanne Valentin are alike apostles of a magnanimous democracy: he, a social reformer, author of that notable work,La Travailleuse; she, herself a woman-worker, the feminist reporter of a ladies’ newspaper, in constant contact with the poor in need of help, and the fevered, fussy world of philanthropy. Self-subsisting, ‘generous’ in the wide sense which Descartes gives to the word, Noël Delysle and Josanne Valentin alike reject the tyrannous old dictum of Arnolphe:—

‘Bien qu’on soit deux moitiés de la sociétéCes deux moitiés pourtant n’ont pas d’égalité.’

For them, the woman-worker, self-supporting, independent, has attained a moral and social equality with man, and should be judged by the standard of what Mr Shaw, we believe, has called the New Morality.

They both possess that ‘vraie générosité’ which consists in self-reliance, strength of will, endurance, contempt for opinion, and respect for the liberty of others. Descartes thought nothing more useful than to foster a race of such generous individuals, ‘sachant subsister par soi-même ... pour ce qu’ils n’estiment rien de plus grand que de faire du bien aux autres et de mépriser son propre intérêt.’ And, despite one secret blemish in her past, Josanne feels herself a member of thisélite, a factor of progress. Nor does she attach any great importanceto a back-sliding which is not esteemed too damnable by the men and the women of the New Morality. She makes her confession to Noël Delysle in much the same spirit as Tess of the D’Urbervilles unbosoms herself to Angel Clare.

For reformers are prompt to forget that what was human nature in the past, what may be human nature in the future (should they and others persist in their modern ideal), is not human naturenow. The mind of man has modified all things around him and within. From the seeding-grasses in the hay he has produced the varieties of corn; from the small and acid crab-fruit in the hedge, the rennet and the Ribston pippin; and from the poisonous roots of foreign forests our daily domestic potato. Our morality is another product; we may modify it yet further; such as it is, at present it remains our staff of life. And the staunchest feminist in the world, if he be a man and in love, will expect his wife to be tender, chaste, and faithful, and care little enough whether or no she be self-reliant, generous, and brave.

Noël Delysle is a stronger man than Angel Clare, and proportionately less hard and dour; but he receives the shock of Josanne’s confession with little less dismay. He learns then that the little stepson who will share their home—the child, he imagined naturally, of the unfortunate Valentin—is in reality the son of Josanne’s lover. In treating such a situation, Madame Tinayre is at her best. The central fact of all her novels is thestruggle between nature and nurture, between instinct and convention. Deep, deep below the intellectual superstructure, the primitive man, the primitive woman, stir in her heroes. His virtues and tolerances fall from Noël Delysle, leaving him jealous and passionate; her valour and self-reliance fade in Madame Valentin, and Josanne, the rebel, becomes the merest woman.

La Rebelleis an interesting book, but how much do I prefer (though its faults he thick upon it)L’Ombre de l’Amour![2]The tale rambles on as it pleases, independent of design or composition, poorly constructed enough with its two long parallel lines, as monotonous, if as impressive, as those low, even cliffs which enclose between their grassy walls some Limousin or Gascon valley.

Bis repetita placentis a good motto if we wish to amuse; for (as Bergson has pointed out) there is something comic in reiteration, in a repeated misadventure, and especially in a double fall—every clown knows that! In spite of the rare beauty and sincerity of the character-drawing, this tale of two pure girls stumbling, one after the other, in the same secret slip, does produce an effect of painful ludicrousness.

The defilement of a young girl in her innocence is the most pathetic of themes, but it is its singularity alone that makes it touching. Mephistopheles, in his cleverness, degrades the misery of poor Gretchen when he observes: ‘Sie ist nicht dieErste.’ We must imagine no angel ever tripped before; we must have very present in our sight the state of innocence from which she is thrust out. So the wise Walter Scott places beside his sad Effie the peerless Jeanie Deans. So George Eliot relieves the abasement of Hetty by the pure brilliance of Dinah. But in this novel of Madame Tinayre’s, there are but two young girls, and, by an inconceivable error, she involves them both in the same miserable mystery. Involuntarily we protest. I, for my part, protested, and the novelist replied:—

‘Il me semble que votre principale objection porte sur le double effet d’une double aventure, qui vous paraît un artifice littéraire. Mais, dans ma pensée, il fallait que Fortunade complétât Denise, que la pitié spirituelle pour le maudit aboutit au même échec que la pitié plus physique pour le malade. Fortunade, c’est, en tout petit, Eloa. Je crois que ces ‘doubles’ ne sont pas sans exemples dans les grandes œuvres de la littérature, et que de glorieux précédents auraient pu m’enhardir, si j’avais hésité. Dans la réalité même on voit des âmes de même nature se deviner et se rapprocher.’

The literary doubles of which our author speaks are a charming device when the novelist treats of what is normal, salutary, or pleasant: we love to see Rosalind by the side of Celia, or the Two Gentlemen of Verona; but we should not care to look at two Quilps, or two Deformed Transformed,or two Gretchens, or even two dumb girls of Portici. The abnormal does not suffer repetition.

So I persist in my protestation, and all the more because I love and admire the two sweet girls, so pure, so devoted; ruined and debased, the one by pity for a man’s bodily sufferings, the other by compassion for his moral state. For Madame Tinayre, following the theories of Spinoza and Nietzsche, looks on pity as a debilitating emotion, relaxing the fibres of the soul and predisposing to an ignoble self-surrender.

But how charming is the first half of this novel; the opening scene in the country doctor’s dining-room, with the two girls seated in the red-paved parlour that smells of damp bricks and freshly-washed linen and ripe apples. Denise, the young lady of the house, is the soul of a home:—

‘A perfect woman, nobly plannedTo warn, to comfort, and command——’

a large human type, as easily imagined in England or Scotland as in Central France. But the girl who sews at her side is essentially Limousine, her very name, Fortunade, recalls the pathetic head of the girl-saint of the Corrèze whom she resembles—pensive and slim, with the pursed, plaintive mouth, the suffering grace of her profile, and the something dreamy, sweet, yet almost sullen that makes her appear half a Gothic angel and half a scolded child.

Fortunade Brandou is only a little peasant, the daughter of the village innkeeper, who goes out sewing by the day to the few gentlemen’s houses in the countryside. But all the dreams, all the visions, all the missionary fervours and superstitious fears of a Celtic race are locked beneath the smooth black braids of her roundly projecting brow. Her longing is not to be happy, but to expiate, to redeem, to fly to the rescue of the oppressed. She must up and grapple with sin and sorrow. She cannot let the evil-doer perish before her eyes. Fortunade, with her feeble body full of suffering grace, her doleful smile, her plaintive voice, has the soul of Corneille’s Pauline, destroying the idols of the Temple and braving the Proconsul; has the faith and the fervour of a Joan of Arc, letting slip her shepherd’s crook to grasp an enchanted sword.

And, even as she must suffer and struggle for the moral welfare of her fellow-mortals, so Dr Cayrol must needs overcome and stamp out disease. Each of these personages is a type—complete, rare, and living—animated with an extraordinary racial truth. In describing the peasants and the mountain of Corrèze, Madame Tinayre puts us in contact with her own familiar country. There are few more beautiful in France as scenery; none more noble as a focus of human character.

Those who have studied the deep wave of moral feeling which broke over France between the fall of the First and the rise of the Second Empire—studentsof the Saint-Simonians, historians of ‘48—have always been struck by the great proportion of men from the southern centre—from Auvergne and Corrèze—generous, philanthropic, active sons of Utopia, brusque and kind, avid for justice as the prophets of Israel. These minds, less intellectually or theoretically great than large and magnanimous, form one of the finest categories of the French character.

In no novel have we come across so adequate a presentment of them as in the village doctor—worthyconfrèreof Mrs Gaskell’s country surgeon and of Balzac’smédecin de campagne—the rusticsavant, interested in the scientific and social movement of his times yet homely in his private tastes and standards of life; parsimonious in pence, and liberal with his rare gold pieces; distrustful of all strangers, yet quick to harbour a fresh chimera; prompt to anger; to all appearance just a son of the soil, a hearty meat-fed man, fond of his glass, fond of his pipe, fond of his gun, striding at ease in his strong solid shoes and his old country clothes—but a sage for all that, and nearly a saint; a man, at least, in the best sense of the word, with the root of the matter in him. Such a man, choleric, proud, and kind, is Étienne Cayrol, at once the hero and the father of the heroine inL’Ombre de l’Amour.

We recognise him at once and love him from his very entrance on the twelfth page, when he comes in, out of the mud, and the dark, whistlingthe air of a country reel, and greeting, with kind, quizzical observant eyes, the two young girls mending the linen in his parlour.

‘Il avait un visage de vieux chef gaulois, coloré, couperosé aux pommettes, les cheveux gris, l’œil bleu saillant, le nez aquilin, la mâchoire solide sous une longue moustache dédorée. Comme il inclinait la tête, on voyait l’attache puissante du cou, et cette forme du crâne qui s’unit à la nuque par une ligne droite, caractéristique chez les gens du Plateau central. Les épaules étaient carrées, le torse trapu; les jambes un peu arquées devaient peser lourd sur le sol. Toute la personne—sans finesse mais non pas sans noblesse—d’Étienne Cayrol, révélait l’origine paysanne. Elle exprimait la force, une force stable, lente, réfléchie, sûre d’elle même.’

And yet (an observation admirably in accordance with the history of the type) some secret defect of judgment condemns the dearest schemes of the doctor (so well considered, so unselfish in their working out, so noble and yet practical in their aim), but destined none the less, to miscarry and ‘gang aft agley.’ His unfinished sanatorium scars the hill-top with the mean unsightly ruins of uncompleted work; and the consumptive youth, whom he takes into his own home to nurse back to health, not only dies, but seduces the doctor’s only daughter: the girl who was the pride of hisheart, as the sanatorium was the dream of his mind.

Denise Cayrol is a noble creature, strong, kind, and pure. At twenty-seven years of age she no longer thinks of herself as a young girl; she is not concerned with love and marriage, and it is rather with a half-maternal, half-sisterly devotion that she tends the young consumptive, a few years younger than herself, who is so eager to live, so ardent in loving, and whom her clear, reasonable judgment and pitiful heart see from the first as marked with the signs of his doom. Denise attracts the hapless Jean with all the force and promise of her health. When the doctor suspects the secret engagement that binds his daughter to his patient, he is both jealous and indignant (for he cannot conceive how a woman can love a consumptive), and he sends Jean away into a sanatorium. But Jean falls ill; Denise rushes to his death-bed, and then and there (in a wild pitiful desire to pour out all the best of life, in one moment, while there is time) she yields to his fevered desire; she succumbs.

There were two girls seated in the red-paved parlour, that smelt of damp bricks and freshly-washed linen and ripe apples, when the doctor strode in from the dark night outside, on the winterly evening which opens the novel. The second is Fortunade Brandou, the little village dressmaker, the mystic; an ill-judged pity lures her, too, to her undoing. When Veydrenne, the poacher, theoutlaw, breaks his leg, Fortunade tends the village miscreant in his illness and strives to save his soul:—

‘Ce serait si beau de sauver cette âme!’

Alas, when did the wolf listen to the voice of Little Red Riding Hood? The sweet, the mystical, the charitable Fortunade fell prey to a wild beast, and the deep gorges of the mountain torrent received the soiled, childish body that dared no longer affront the light of the sun.

‘Morte, morte! non par le hasard d’un faux pas, non par un chagrin d’amour, elle n’avait jamais aimé que Dieu, la chaste fille: Dieu et ses pauvres! morte pour être allée vers celui que tous haïssaient; morte pour avoir tenté l’entreprise folle de sauver une âme perdue!... Perdue elle-même sans doute, brutalement outragée, deux fois victime, elle avait payé de sa pudeur et de sa vie l’imprudence sublime de sa pitié.’

These characters are conceived with the sure and intimate reality that comes of kinship; we feel that Madame Tinayre is of their race and their habitation. Here, her foot is on her native heath, and she compels our interest far more powerfully than when she writes of Paris (her Paris is always a little too ‘Rive gauche’); when she pictures her Corrèze, when she evokes the mountain sceneryround Brives or Tulle, I think no French novelist since George Sand has possessed so masterly a touch in peopling a living landscape with living beings. Indeed, remembering the pastoral novels of Our Lady of Nohant, recalling ‘Marie Claire,’ comparing them and this book of Madame Tinayre’s withThe Mill on the FlossandAdam Bede, it seems to me possible that one of the greatest gifts of woman as a novelist may lie in her singular power of rendering country life in all the variety of its personages, its customs, and its natural background.

FOOTNOTES:[2]Translated into English under the title:The Shadow of Love.

FOOTNOTES:

[2]Translated into English under the title:The Shadow of Love.

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