by Walter Pater
That sense of the complex interdependence on each other of all historical conditions is one of the guiding lights of the modern historical method, and Mr. Symonds abundantly shows how thoroughly he has mastered this idea. And yet on the same background, out of the same general conditions, products emerge, the unlikeness of which is the chief thing to be noticed. The spirit of the Renaissance proper, of the Renaissance as a humanistic movement, on which it may be said this volume does not profess to touch, is as unlike the spirit of Alexander VI. as it is unlike that of Savonarola. Alexander VI. has more in common with Ezzelino da Romano, that fanatical hater of human life in the middle age, than with Tasso or Lionardo. The Renaissance is an assertion of liberty indeed, but of liberty to see and feel those things the seeing and feeling of which generate not the “barbarous ferocity of temper, the savage and coarse tastes” of the Renaissance Popes, but a sympathy with life everywhere, even in its weakest and most frail manifestations. Sympathy, appreciation, a sense of latent claims in things which even ordinary good men pass rudely by — these on the whole are the characteristic traits of its artists, though it may be still true that “aesthetic propriety, rather than strict conceptions of duty, ruled the conduct even of the best;” and at least they never “destroyed pity in their souls. “Such softer touches Mr. Symonds gives us in the “good duke Frederic of Urbino,” his real courtesy and height of character, though under many difficulties; in his admirable criticisms on the Cortegiano of Castiglione; and again in his account of Agnolo Pandolfini’s Treatise on the Family, the charm of which has by no means evaporated in Mr. Symonds’s analysis; above all, in the beautiful description, in the seventh chapter, of the last days of Pietro Boscoli the tyrannicide, a striking instance of “the combination of deeply-rooted and almost infantine piety with antique heroism,” coming near as it happened, in his friend Luca della Robbia the younger, to an artist who could understand the aesthetic value of the incidents he has related.
I quote a very different episode as a specimen of Mr. Symonds’s style: —
“There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular felicity. On April 18,1485, a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription, ‘Julia, daughter of Claudius,’ and inside the coffin lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time. The bloom of youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open, her long hair floated round her shoulders. She was instantly removed, so goes the legend, to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old Pagan world. In the eyes of those enthusiastic worshippers her beauty was beyond imagination or description; she was far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII. feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried, secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl’s hair was yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic world.”
The book then presents a brilliant picture of its subject, of the movements of these energetic personalities, the magnificent restlessness and changefulness of their lives, their immense cynicism. As is the writer’s subject so is his style — energetic, flexible, eloquent, full of various illustration, keeping the attention of the reader always on the alert. Yet perhaps the best chapter in the book, the best because the most sympathetic, is one of the quieter ones, that on “The Florentine Historians;” their great studies, their anticipations of the historical spirit of modern times, their noble style, their pious humour of discipleship towards Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, not without a certain pedantry becoming enough in the historians of those republics which were after all “products of constructive skill” rather than of a true political evolution — all this is drawn with a clear hand and a high degree of reflectiveness. The chapter on “The Prince” corrects some common mistakes concerning Machiavelli, who is perhaps less of a puzzle than has sometimes been supposed, a patriot devising a desperate means of establishing permanent rule in Florence, designing, in the spirit of a political idealism not more ruthless than that of Plato’s Republic, to cure a real evil, a fault not unlike that of ancient Athens itself, the constant exaggerated appetite for change in public institutions, bringing with it an incorrigible tendency of all the parts of human life to fly from the centre, a fault, as it happened in both cases, at last become incurable. The chapter on Savonarola is a bold and complete portrait, with an interesting pendant on “Religious Revivals in Mediæval Italy;” and the last chapter on “Charles the Eighth in Italy” has some real light in it, making things lie more intelligibly apart and together in that tangle of events. The imagination in historical composition works most legitimately when it approaches dramatic effects. In this volume there is a high degree of dramatic imagination; here all is objective, and the writer is hardly seen behind his work.
I have noted in the foregoing paragraphs the things which have chiefly impressed and pleased me in reading this book, things which are sure to impress and please hundreds of readers and make it very popular. But there is one thing more which I cannot help noticing before I close. Notwithstanding Mr. Symonds’s many good gifts, there is one quality which I think in this book is singularly absent, the quality of reserve, a quality by no means merely negative, and so indispensable to the full effect of all artistic means, whether in art itself, or poetry, or the finer sorts of literature, that in one who possesses gifts for those things its cultivation or acquisition is neither more nor less than loyalty to his subject and his work. I note the absence of this reserve in many turns of expression, in the choice sometimes of detail and metaphor, in the very bulk of the present volume, which yet needs only this one quality, in addition to the writer’s other admirable qualities of conception and execution, to make this first part of his work wholly worthy of his design.
M. LEMAÎTRE’S “SERENUS, AND OTHER TALES”
MACMILLAN’S MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER, 1887
A VOLUME of fiction which, while it possesses something of the power and charm of Gustave Flaubert, takes us through no scenes of cruelty or coarseness, but relies for its interest on the blameless pathos of life, touched in the spirit of a true realism, is worth pointing out to English readers. The volume takes its name from the singular story of Serenus, a Christian martyr, to which are added certain briefer Stories Of The Past And Of To-day. With two slight exceptions, two pieces of peculiarly Parisian humour, which make a harsh contrast with the rest of the book, these stories are as pure and solemn as the pictures of Alphonse Legros. The narrative of Serenus, the patrician martyr, has about it something which reminds one of those sumptuous Roman basilicas put together out of the marble fragments of older Pagan temples or palaces; and in the shorter pieces the busy French journalist seems to have gone for a sort of mental holiday to quiet convent parlours and whitewashed village churches — places of subdued colour and personages congruous therewith, pleasant, doubtless, to fatigued Parisian eyes. M. Jules Lemaître is before all things an artist, showing in these pieces, the longest of which attains no more than sixty pages, that self-possession and sustained sense of design which anticipates the end in the commencement, and never loses sight of it — that gift of literary structure which lends so monumental an air to even the shortest of Flaubert’s pieces. Then, he has Flaubert’s sense of compassion and his peculiar interest in certain phases or aspects of religious life; and his art (again like Flaubert’s) is a learned
art. There is the fruit of much and varied reading and thought in this volume, short as it is, though without a shade of pedantry; and its union of realism, of the force of style which is allied to a genuine realism, with an entire freedom from the dubious interests of almost all French fiction, gives it a charming freshness of effect.
We propose to say a few words on those shorter pieces first, giving some specimens of M. Lemaitre’s manner. The hero of La Mère Sainte-Agathe, a very intellectual young Parisian, has formed a somewhat artificial marriage engagement with a guileless orphan-girl at the convent school over which Mother Sainte-Agathe presides. Mother Sainte-Agathe was still young — thirty years, perhaps thirty-five. But years, in the case of “the religious,” when they are pretty and live really holy lives, rather embalm them than add to their age. When the young man visits the girl, the Mother presides over their interviews, looking at them with an air of kindness and serenity, with an expression she wore always, in which one seemed to detect the presence of a thought, unique, eternal in its character, ever mingled with the thought of the present hour. One day the girl leads her lover into the convent garden.
“It was a large one, and so neat and prim! — neat and prim as a convent-chapel. An avenue of limes, as exact in line as a row of tapers, led to a terrace projecting on the Loire, with a pleasing view over the landscape of Touraine. Between its gentle banks, amid scattered groups of rustling poplars, the river spread out like a lake, with little pale-coloured islands tufted with misty beds of osiers, and against the horizon a long, long bridge of delicate arches, silver-grey — all very sweet, with melting outlines in water-colour tints, under a lightsome sky of soft blue.”
But the childish lover is shrewd enough to notice that in these visits the real business of conversation (very superior conversation, on M. Renan, for instance) is wholly between the Mother and the clever young man. She writes one day at the end of one of her letters: “Mother Sainte-Agathe tells me that I don’t put warmth enough into my letters. Oh! my friend, I have enough of it in my heart nevertheless; only perhaps I am still too little to know how to tell it.” The young man does not marry the orphan, and, of course, not the reverend Mother. He thought it well to discontinue his visits to the convent “Almost without note of the fact, “he says, “I was treating Lydia like a child. Whenever I said anything at all serious it was to Mother Sainte-Agathe I addressed myself.
“They were exquisite, those conversations with the Mother — all the more exquisite because I was then finishing a volume of criticism and fantasy combined, in which I put the utmost amount of Renanism, Impressionism, and Parisian raillery, in turn or altogether. And it was often after the reading of some perverse book that I took myself to those white interviews. One day at parting, when I kissed Lydia, I saw tears in her eyes. ‘You are crying, Lydia: have I hurt you in any way?’ She gave me a long, serious look, and the look was no longer that of a mere child. ‘Are you quite sure,’ she said to me in a low voice, ‘that it is still for my sake that you come here?’
“It haunted me through the evening, through the whole night, little Lydia’s question. In spite of myself she had revealed to me what was at the bottom of my heart. In effect, I perceived with much distress that for some time past it was for Mother Sainte-Agathe I had come, that that charm of innocence in my betrothed was exhausted. Yes, it was over — well over!
“I did not venture to the convent next day, nor the day after that. Did she look out for me? I never returned there again.”
A still more melancholy note is struck in L’Ainée, the story of a beautiful girl, the eldest of eight sisters, who sees them all cheerfully married to the suitors who had begun by paying court to herself. It pained her to see her nephews and nieces, although she loved them much, and spent her days in work for them. And what added to her unhappiness was that every one, in these matters, took her for a confidante and adviser, regarding her as a person of extraordinary prudence, superior to human passions. To her the prize never comes. Her languors, her dejected resumptions of life, are told with great feeling and tact, till death comes just in time to save her from the dishonour to which the ennui of her days had at last tempted her.
Les Deux Saints presents a curious picture from religious life in a French country village, the not ill-natured irony of which by no means destroys an agreeable sense of calm remoteness from the world in reading it.
“The little village of Champignot-les-Raisins had an aged Curé, an old church, and in the church an ancient image. The image was the image of St. Vincent, patron of vine-dressers. It was of wood, and seemed to have been shaped by the strokes of a hatchet. It had a great belly, a big face frankly painted with vermillion, breathing of gaiety and goodnature — the physiognomy of a vine-dresser at the time of vintage. Pretty it was not. But the Curé and his flock were used to it. The image of the good saint enjoyed the greatest consideration in the parish, and deserved it, for it worked miracles.”
The old Curé dies. His youthful successor forces a smart new image on his flock. The parish is divided between the votaries of the old and the new; and the tiny provincial controversy seems by a certain touch of irony to give the true measure of many greater, perhaps less ingenuous controversies; and for half an hour one has a perfect calm at Champignot-les-Raisins.
M. Lemaître writes for the most part as a pure artist. He writes to please the literary sense: to call into pleasurable exercise a delicately-formed intelligence. In one instance, however, it is to be feared he is writing for a practical purpose. En Nourrice describes the fate of a little child put out to nurse in the country. “He is a beautiful infant,” cries the mother at his birth: “he shall be named George. I hope he may be very happy!” Alas! all goes the other way. His foster-brother, the strenuous Fred, wears out the frail stranger’s dainty frocks — la belle robe de Georges. — When the parents make their visits it is Fred who receives the mother’s embraces instead of the pining George, sent out of sight for the occasion. In short: for a few months and then die, having understood nothing in it all. One night he had refused to sleep. He had refused the feeding-bottle, and even the breast of Rosalie, the treat allowed him when it was too late. His eyes rolled convulsively: the cheeks were of the colour of earth: the infant was dying. Towards morning, instead of crying, little groanings had escaped him, almost like the complaints of a grown person. At last he had grown quite still and moved no more. His mother was glad to have escaped the sight of that.
“It rained in torrents when she and M. Loisil arrived at the village. The young mother, who had been in tears all the way from Paris, could weep no more, rocking herself in her damp gown, her red eyes under her crape. Early in the morning Rosalie had sent Fred to his grandmother’s. She, too, was weeping, — sincerely! if you please.
“Then the mother looked at the little corpse in its cradle of basket-work. George was wearing for the first time his fine frock, dirtied by Fred. He was terribly thin, with cheeks like old wax, the nose dwindled, the eyelids blue, his tiny mouth, pale and partly open, with a little foam at the back, had a touch of violet round the lips.
“‘Poor little babe! how he is changed!’ said the mother, sobbing. M. Loisil looked at the dead child attentively, but said nothing. A horrible doubt had come to him.
“‘Come,’ said Rosalie, ‘don’t look any more. It is too painful.’ Then on a sudden enters Totor, holding Fred in his arms, like a great bundle. Rosalie grew pale. Totor explained that grandmother was sick and would not keep them.
“And Fred, with one of George’s caps on his head and one of George’s sashes round his waist, in George’s white shoes, bursting with health, good-tempered, and moving skittishly in the arms of Totor, began smiling at the lady and gentleman, “The carpenter came, then the Curé, with a choirboy spattered with mud, carrying an old tarnished cross which tottered on its pole.
“They are sickening, those funerals of Parisian nurslings one sees sometimes crossing an empty village-street, leading, behind a coffin of the sise o
f a violin-case, a lady and gentleman in mourning, who pass by, dabbing their eyes, while the labourers regard them curiously from the barn-doors (it happened in La Beauce) on the way to leave a bit of their own hearts in some corner of a forgotten cemetery. As the first shovel of earth fell, Madame Loisil, who had forgotten in her illness that one first kiss she had given to George, cried out, ‘Oh! my poor babe, you will never have a kiss from me alive!’”
Of the Tales Of Other Days, two — Boun and Les Funérailles de Firdousi — are Oriental pieces, apologues, full of that mellow and tranquil wisdom which becomes the East. We profess to be no great lovers of an Oriental setting. A world from which mediæval and modern experience must, from the nature of the case, be excluded, makes on our minds an impression too vague for really artistic effect. The intimacies, the minute and concrete expression of the pathos of life, are apt to be wanting in compositions after the manner of Rasselas. But it is just that element — the refinement of wisdom, the refinement of justice, an exquisite compassion and mercy in the taking of life — which the reader may look for in the charming story of Boun.