Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 17

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As the spring progressed, C. continued to make discoveries in French as well as in English literature, but he had nobody with whom he could share them. Pelly was engrossed in art and in the discovery of Norwegian plays and Russian novels, that C. thought unreadable, nor did his friend passionately care for verse, and as for Monsieur Jollivet, he had bounded in his seat when C. told him that he had been reading Zola. It was not the questionable morality nor the indecency of Zola's work that offended him, but the lack of proportion he displayed. Zola's work, he said, was all false; his pretence of realism absurd, his talent one of distortion; he was a painter of exaggerated panoramas, and one of the least French of French authors. C. had also admitted to Monsieur Jollivet that he had read Baudelaire and Verlaine, and here again he had come up against uncompromising opposition. Monsieur Jollivet maintained that C. was beginning at the wrong end; that it was impossible for him to gauge the merits of such authors before he had formed a standard by being thoroughly familiar with the classics. Baudelaire no doubt had written some fine verses, but he was affected and perverse, an exotic. Verlaine had a lyrical gift, but C. should seek the garden and the fields, all of them full of natural flowers, before studying the artificial products of the hothouse; and as for all the symbolists and decadents, they were de simples fumistes, or, what was worse, they often used what might have been a genuine talent to debase and disfigure the French language.

"You can't," he said, "be obscure in French."

"Tout ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas français."

He worked himself up into a fever, and ended by saying the greatest of French poets, and, indeed, the greatest not only of all French writers but of all writers in all the world, and of all times, was La Fontaine. C. confessed to finding the fables tedious.

Monsieur Jollivet sighed.

"When you are forty," he said, "you will agree with me."

To C. this seemed to be impossibly far off.

"Well," said Monsieur Jollivet, "at least if you read the moderns, read the best; read André Chénier, Alfred de Vigny, Musset, Heredia, and in prose read Sainte Beuve, Maupassant and Flaubert; they all write French; but do not waste time on the galimatias of Mallarmé and such people. All that is du chinois."

C., who had been profoundly impressed by the music and the imagery of Baudelaire's poems, and whose heart was captured by the intangible charm and the intolerable poignancy of Verlaine's wayward minstrelsy, felt it was no use discussing these things. And the vision of a small yellow copy of La Fontaine, out of which he used to learn the fables by heart with Mademoiselle Walter, rose up before him, and filled him with nausea. He wondered whether one day he would in reality come to agree with Monsieur Jollivet. Possibly about the old things, he thought, but not about the new. He would always admire Baudelaire and Verlaine.

It was on an afternoon in March--one of those surprisingly balmy days when you feel that winter is dying--after one of his lessons, which generally began with the analysis of a play of Racine or Molière and ended by a discussion on general subjects, during which Monsieur Jollivet always managed to rail at the authors who dared to try and obscure the glorious lucidity and the inviolate logic of the French language, that C. walked to the Park of the Château and sat down on a stone seat and, putting away from him all thoughts of French literature, took out a pocket Keats and began reading Endymion straight through. He was soon engrossed in the poem, which, in spite of its subject and its setting, brought back vividly and poignantly to his mind the sounds and smells of English lanes and English fields, and the colour of English hills and English skies. He was so absorbed in his reading that he did not notice that a man had sat down beside him till he heard a faint grunt. He looked up and saw, sitting at the other end of the long stone seat, rather an untidy man on this side of the middle-age barrier, and not more than thirty-five years old, but having certainly left behind him all his baggage of early dreams, youthful ambitions and illusions. He was large without being fat. His hair was shaggy and rather long. There was a slightly Johnsonian look about him; his clothes dark and untidy, but you did not notice his clothes at all. They seemed all right. What you did notice were his great broad forehead and his eyes, which were penetrating and clear. You seemed to know at once that this man had a good eye for what was good. He, too, was reading in a small book, and every now and then emitting a snort, which might have been pleasure, or which might have been pain. As a matter of fact, he was reading Homer. It was probably the thought of what some people might say about the book rather than anything which he found in it which made him snort.

The stranger suddenly put down his book, looked at C., who smiled and turned a little red.

"Do you think Homer was written by a committee?" the stranger said.

"My tutor at Eton," said C., "used to tell us that it was very difficult to believe that the same man had written the Iliad and the Odyssey."

"Yes, he would say that," said the stranger. "Why do they think they know better than Aristotle? He was probably the wisest man who ever lived, and more than two thousand years nearer to the times of Homer. Are you going to Oxford?"

C. said he was not destined for the University.

"Well, if you do, don't go to Oxford, go to Cambridge. On the whole it will do you less harm. It's getting cold; let's walk."

They got up and walked a little in silence. Then the stranger began to talk of the places they were passing. They were near the Grand Trianon. He pictured the last days that Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette spent at Versailles, and Louis XVI.'s last day's hunting--October 5th, 1789--and Marie Antoinette sitting for the last time in the Trianon during that rainy morning till the King summoned her.

"It was a pity the French monarchy fell. What a tragedy!" the stranger said. "Do you know Greek?"

C. said he had learnt a little, but had forgotten. He had done German instead.

"You can learn Greek now," said the stranger. "You've plenty of time. You're young. You can learn German later, or not at all. It won't do you much good. You probably know enough now to read all that's worth reading: Faust, half a dozen lyrics of Goethe, and Heine. There's nothing else; only it's worth it for that--well worth it. But Greek is endless. I met some of the young Oxford poets and essayists in London the other day. They said that Greek was useless; Homer a superstition; Æschylus unintelligible; Sophocles dry, and Euripides affected. I asked them whom and what they admired. They said Flaubert and Turgenev. But the owls did not understand that the reason they admired these people (if they did, if they had read and understood them, which I greatly doubt), the reason they are at all admirable, is for conforming to the Greek standard of excellence, and to no other. They are admirable as artists, and admirable only in so much and in so far as they attain that standard--set by the Greeks. Turgenev tried to write Greek tragedy. He had the form, but not the power--no estomac. Flaubert had the estomac, but hadn't the restraint. He could paint, but he couldn't really draw. The principles of art, like the principles of strategy, are eternal. It doesn't matter if you fight with bows and arrows, or if you fight with torpedoes and the mitrailleuse. It doesn't matter if you write a sonnet or an epic; if you make a statue of Apollo or paint a picture of the Thames Embankment. The principles are the same, and when you apply them well, the result is good art, or good verse--a victory; and if you apply them badly, the result is bad art, bad verse--defeat.

"But the best verse of all is Greek--Homer. Nothing has ever touched it. Do you remember when Priam goes to Achilles to ransom the body of Hector?" And here he began to quote:--

"But the words so stirred the heart of Achilles that he wept, thinking now of Patroclus, and now of his old father at home, and Priam wept, thinking of his dead Hector."

"That is how Church translates it in Stories from Homer, and, as usual, he does it best, only he leaves out one line:--

"And he touched the old man's hand and gently moved him back."

And the stranger repeated the Greek lines again, and as he did so he looked towards the lowering sunlight which was reflected and shone on the large window panes of Trianon, and at the sky which, for the first time that year, was spring-like. It was lilac and green, and the trees were soft and dewy. In the East, great snowy, cold clouds were piled up one on another, faintly reflecting the light in the West. A black-cap was singing somewhere. The stranger's eyes filled with tears, and there was a new light in them, and of the same quality as that of the evening sky. C. felt they were for the moment on holy ground, and that it was good for him to be there. So do great verse and the words of the mighty poets transfigure the semblance and the manner of ordinary mortals, for nothing could have been more prosaic than the appearance of the stranger. All at once the spell was broken, and the stranger said:--

"I must go. I have got an appointment. My name is Burstall. I live 4, Rue de la Gare. Where do you live?"

C. told him his name and address.

"I am generally in to breakfast at twelve. You must come some day. I'll send you a line."

With these words Burstall left C. and walked away briskly. C. waited a moment longer in the garden and then he, too, walked away in the opposite direction, wondering who the stranger was, and fearing to force himself upon the stranger's society.

A week passed without C. hearing anything from his new acquaintance, and C. had almost forgotten all about the incident when he received a card, written in a diminutive and clear scholarly handwriting, asking him to breakfast on the following Saturday. He accepted and went. He found Burstall occupied three small rooms on the fourth floor of a large building. The rooms were untidy and littered with books and papers. An old woman, immensely hardy and sturdy, a peasant called Suzanne, with grey hair and the makings of a grey moustache, looked after him and cooked for him. After C. had been sitting for a few moments on the only available space that was not covered with books, Suzanne put her head into the room and announced that "Monsieur" was "servi."

Burstall leapt up and shouted, "What about the omelette?" he trusted that was not servi. It was not. There was on the dining-room table, covered with toile cirée, only some hors d'œuvre in the form of radishes, sardines and olives.

"I always make the omelette myself," said Burstall.

He disappeared into the kitchen, whence there issued during the next few moments the echoes of a heated argument.

"Mais non, Monsieur. Ce n'est pas comme cela qu'on fait une omelette."

Presently Burstall came out very red in the face, and said:--

"She never will cook an omelette on a hot enough fire. However, I have let her do it just for this once to pacify her."

This was, as C. found out later, the usual ritual at Burstall's luncheons. He always announced his intention of making the omelette himself. Suzanne let him begin, then made objections. The result was he would argue, shout, and drop an egg, and finally let Suzanne cook the omelette herself, which she did quite admirably.

They sat down in the dining-room, which had no pictures on the grey boiseries, and no ornaments save a glass of narcissi and violets, lilies-of-the-valley and one little alien rose, put there by Suzanne.

Burstall fetched a bottle of burgundy, and they sat down to their breakfast. Burstall talked about Paris; what was going on. He had seen Musset's Fantasio at the Odéon.

"Professional actors spoil Musset," he said. "Children would do it, only, unfortunately, they are not children's plays; or amateurs, if amateurs could only speak and move and not be self-conscious. Delaunay was the only professional actor who could act Musset. His plays are meant for drawing-rooms. So are Racine's, as to that. There has only been one perfect performance of Racine, I expect. At Saint Cyr. I should have liked to have seen it. Actors shout and rant Racine now. That's all wrong. I suppose you were taught at Eton to despise Racine?"

C. said he had been brought up at home to admire Racine, but he confessed the plays bored him. He had never seen one acted.

"I'll take you some day," said Burstall. "Sometimes you get a decent performance, and you want to hear the verse spoken. The dons and the critics in England despise Racine for one simple reason. They don't understand French. They understand sometimes what the words mean, but not always; they are capable even then of the most ludicrous blunders, but they don't feel the values of the language. The French don't feel the values of English--of Shakespeare and Milton; they don't see why

Smooth-sliding Mincius crowned with vocal reeds

is a good line, but they don't go about saying the English can't write verse. They say they can't understand English and don't want to. It's all they can do to compete with their own language, which, as you know, is an exacting one. The English see no difference between Voltaire's plays and Racine's; they don't see why lines like

J'ai voulu devant vous exposant mes remords,

Par un chemin plus lent descendre chez les morts

are the lines of a great poet, that they are as good as they can be. They talk rot about it not being Greek. It isn't; it's French. Phèdre is a practising Catholic Christian, slightly tinged with Jansenism, and she talks the language of Versailles. But she is a living being, and the language she talks is quite perfect.

"Don't believe a word they tell you about anything French. They know nothing about it whatever. Because Matthew Arnold talked nonsense about French verse, which he didn't understand, they think they can do the same thing safely. Some day, if ever they give a matinée of Phèdre, we'll go. You're bored with Racine now. That's because they've spoilt it for you at home or at school, or at both, but once you hear the lines properly spoken you'll understand that it is great verse."

C. told Burstall about his lessons with Monsieur Jollivet, and of the want of appreciation that Professor professed of the modern authors.

"A great deal of what he says is true," said Burstall. "He's quite right about Zola not being French. He's got what they call a 'gros talent'; he can set crowds going, but he can't write French; not French such as Maupassant writes. As to the modern verse, your man is annoyed by the fumistes I suppose. There always are a lot of those about, because literature in Paris is a living thing. People care for it, care for it enough to make jokes about it and in it, and to understand the jokes that are being made about it and in it. But Baudelaire is good, as good as he can be, and of the living poets Verlaine is about the best thing in French lyrics since Villon, and Heredia is first-rate. You've read him?"

C. hadn't.

Burstall quoted some lines from a poem on a Greek subject, a funeral epigram on a shipwrecked mariner.

"That's as good as possible," he said, "only it takes him fourteen lines to say it. A Greek would have said it in four. Heredia would have written a perfect sonnet about those flowers that Suzanne has put on the table. Rufinus did it in six lines; they are his flowers, too. 'I send you Rhodocleia, this garland, the lily, the rose, the moist windflower, the wet narcissus, and the dark-eyed violet. Crowned with these flowers, put pride away, for you shall fade, you as well as the garland.' I'll lend you a Heredia when you go away."

Then they talked of English books and of English verse, and to C.'s delight there was nothing that Burstall did not seem to know. He quoted Webster and Donne; Dryden and Keats; Pope and Byron.

"Of course," he said, "you are at the stage when you think Swinburne is the greatest poet who ever lived. But you won't think that for ever. He is a damned good poet at his best. For the moment at a certain epoch of one's life he's like Wagner's music, he annihilates everything else. Have you ever heard Wagner's music?"

C. shook his head.

"Well, you'll have to some day, I suppose. You must get through it like measles. Don't go to it here; they can't do it. It's poisonous, neurotic stuff, and it's all wrong; but you'll have to experience the disease. Don't think I'm saying you're wrong to like what you like. You're young, that's the great thing, and I'm not, and the young are often right in admiring what they do admire. It's a great thing they should admire anything. When people get older they see nothing in Shelley or Swinburne; the colours seem to have faded out of these things, but they haven't really. The colours are there, only they are too dry and too crusted to see them. Only remember, there are other poets as well, and if they tell you that Pope is not a poet, or that Byron couldn't write verse, don't believe them. There is not a young man now alive writing who would now give both his hands to be able to write one line as good as any line of Pope, or one of Byron's good lines, and they could no more do it than fly. Pay no attention to them, neither to the dons, and still less to the professsional writers. You don't know any? Thank God for it, and don't. I suppose you write yourself?"

C. blushed scarlet.

"Yes," he said, "I have tried to write a little."

"Well, you must show me what you've written. I shall tell you what I think, and I shan't talk nonsense to you. Whatever the stuff is like you are writing now, if you are keen about it, and go on, you will end by writing something good." He paused, and added with a sigh: "It may be something quite different from what you imagine. When I was young I thought I should like to write an epic on King Arthur, and a tragedy about Helen of Troy, and God knows what--a century of sonnets, hymns like Ronsard's. Actually I make my living by writing in journals that nobody reads, and about people like Donne, and Rabelais, and Villon, that nobody cares about except pedants who don't understand them--or anything else. We live in an illiterate age, and in a country that cares nothing for art and literature, and it's becoming--although this wasn't always so, and certainly not in the eighteenth century--a good thing when they don't; because those who do tend to become nauseating. Here, in France, there is a public which does care about those things. I don't say they are better. I don't say they are even more intelligent. In some ways they are not, but they do care about those things; they care for literature, art, and the stage, only they take no interest in our country, or our literature, or in any country except their own. They are like the Chinese, and they have a stiff brick wall round them. But if you do care for such things, for good prose, good verse, good pictures, and good music, you will have a lonely time of it in England, and the more you keep it to yourself, the better."

They had finished breakfast by now, and Suzanne brought in some cups of steaming, fragrant coffee. Burstall offered C. a Bock cigar, and wandered round the untidy room, picking up a book here and a book there, and carrying on a disconnected running comment. He was a book collector. And looking for a quotation from Phèdre he took up from an untidy litter a small volume, and showed it to C., saying:--

"That's a first edition. I picked it up for two francs. These things do happen sometimes. Adventures in book-collecting happen sometimes--even to the adventurous."

He began reading to himself, and he stopped and cried out:--

"My God, how good it is!" and his eyes were wet.