by Frank Harris
I remember meeting Rostand in Paris in 1898. He was then at the height of his vogue. Cyrano de Bergerac had been brought out by Madame Bernhardt in 1897, when he was just 27 years of age. There have been few such triumphs: the play ran 400 nights in Paris and nearly as long in Berlin in Fulda's translation. Petersburg and Madrid, Belgrade even, went crazy over it, and dozens of companies played it all over the United States.
Rostand met me like a prince might meet a small unknown boy. I have never seen any Frenchman put on such airs. He was a little over average height and dressed with a touch of eccentricity all in black; a big black satin stock, showing only a narrow white edge of collar, seemed to hold up his head, and he held it very high. His face was pale; his features regular; his dark eyes rather large and long-a handsome face with an air of haughty disdain- the French word morgue exactly expressed it. Though Marcel Schwob (who introduced me) spoke of me as a master and mentioned that my stories had appeared in La Revue des Deux Mondes, Rostand contented himself with a slight bow, while his eyebrows lifted with an air of patient inattention. I had prepared a compliment, but I kept it to myself and turned aside abruptly. I didn't think much of Cyrano, and Rostand's other work seemed to me negligible, while the airs he gave himself were inexcusable in so young a man. No great man ever plays grand seigneur without some extraordinary good reason.
Nothing was talked about but his plays; he was asked about his method of work. He gave ordinary facts with the air of a God letting new truths drop from Sinai. It seemed that like most of us the period of gestation in him was long, the parturition hurried. "I read and think a great deal," he said, "till it's all clear and then write incessantly." A well bred murmur of admiration greeted the oracle. It was quite certain that no really great man could have won such popularity so early. I went away as soon as I decently could.
Rostand was born rich; success came at twenty with his first book Les Musardies, and his wealth enabled him to screen himself off from anything harsh or true, spoiled in fact a great theatrical talent.
Once later I was destined to meet him. I had taken Oscar Wilde to dine at Maire's restaurant, intending to go afterwards to Antoine's theatre close by.
Rostand was already at table when we entered. I hardly knew whether to bow to him or not. To my surprise he rose and bowed more than politely — cordially.
Thus encouraged, I went over to him and shot off the compliment I had prepared months before. He laughed delightedly, and when I introduced Oscar, he showed a kindly human side I had scarcely expected. During the dinner he kept up an intermittent conversation from table to table, and was really charming, attributing the success of his play mainly to the incomparable acting.
Oscar took the ball on the hop, and told of seeing Coquelin at a dress rehearsal. The great actor, it appeared, was doubtful whether he should add to his already prominent nose; "It is mine and Cyrano's," he exclaimed, "why alter it?"
"They may say," interjected Oscar with an air of deep meditation, "that you play the part so well because it is your own story; I think I'd increase the nose."
"You're right," replied Coquelin gravely. "I must remain the artist, the artist always, above my creation."
Oscar told the story superbly, mimicking air and manner and throwing into high relief the actor's vanity: "My creation."
Rostand enjoyed the tale ingenuously, and the talk turning on noses, I could not help reciting the witty remark made about Baron Hirsch. Some one said:
"You'd hardly believe he was a Jew were it not for his nose." "True," replied the listener, "God forgives and the world forgets, but the nose remains."
Suddenly we found it was time to go if we would not lose part of the play, and then Rostand told us that he also wanted to see Foil de Carotte (Carrots!), I think it was, with Madame Nau in the title part, so we turned down the boulevard together and went to our seats like old friends.
On reflection, Rostand seemed to me a richly endowed romantic nature, dwarfed by wealth and wanting the spur of desperate incentive. But he came at the psychological moment. The second generation since the great defeat was growing up and full of the old Gallic vanity and the courage which was resolved to act and not to talk. The French youths all took up athletics, went in for boxing, even; left realism for romance and began to affirm, instead of denying. The romance of daring was in the air and Rostand gave it a voice. In almost everything he was a herald of the new time; his family life was very happy; in fine, in spite of surface faults, he was a good representative of the new France. It is almost symbolical to me that he should have been born in 1870, in the year of disaster, and died in 1919, in the assurance of victory.
I have written a good deal about Meredith and tried to give a true picture of him as one of the greatest writers of the time and a charming personality.
Shortly after I took over the Saturday Review, he came up to London to undergo an operation, and I met him again and was of course as cordial as I could be, but I could never forgive him for having refused his name to the petition in favor of Oscar Wilde. Up to that time, I used to go down to Boxhill to spend some hours with him nearly every week. Afterwards I only met him on rare occasion by chance. His operation seemed to have weakened him a good deal, for afterwards he took to riding about in a little carriage which he drove himself, and almost ceased to walk. I excused myself for not seeing him more often by telling him that I spent fully six months of every year in the south of France, whereas he preferred Boxhill and the Sussex Downs.
It was on one of these visits to Nice that I got to know Maeterlinck and Georgette Le Blanc whom I regarded as his wife. Maeterlinck was an interesting personality, but I never got much out of him beyond what any one could get from his books. He never seemed able to reveal new sides of himself in talk.
I remember he asked me once why I didn't review his translation of the Macbeth, which he had sent to me. I told him I would if he liked, but I didn't think his knowledge of English was sufficient; however, I promised to do my best. Later, in London, remembering the promise, I picked up his translation; I looked at one line in it: "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well," and I found Maeterlinck had translated it: "Apres les convulsions fievreuses de la vie il dort bien." I saw at once that he had taken "fitful" to mean full of fits, as "painful" is full of pain, and had no conception that it simply meant intermittent. Therefore I sent a friend to the British Museum, who brought me back the information that of the one hundred translations of Macbeth in French, about eighty-five had followed Francois Victor Hugo in this misrendering of "fitful"; and the other had left it out altogether: "Apres le fievre de la vie il dort bien."
I sent this to Maeterlinck, thinking he would laugh over the matter, but when I met him again in Nice the next year, he and Georgette came and lunched with us and he broached the subject at once by saying that the translations of Shakespeare were quite impossible. I tried to agree with him by saying that of course it took an equal poet to try to translate from one language into the other adequately.
But he would have it that Shakespeare was quite impossible, and he gave an example from Hamlet where Ophelia says:
Here's rosemary-that's for remembrance;
Here are pansies-that's for thoughts…
"The first sentence can be translated," he said, "but the second can't, because in French the word for pansies is almost the same as the word for thoughts; you cannot say, 'Voila des pensees-c'est pour penser.'"
"Oh," I retorted, "I think it quite possible. Picture the scene to yourself:
Ophelia is speaking before the King and Queen and she knows, with a woman's divination, that the Queen is the real culprit, so she says, 'Voila des pensees,' and then, looking at the Queen, adds, stuttering, 'c'est pour penser.'"
Francis Carco, who was also at the lunch, applauded me for the thought, but Maeterlinck pretended not to understand. Really, whenever Frenchmen translate from English, they are apt to come to grief. The other day I saw that one of them had translated "Love's last shift" in
to "La derniere chemise de l'amour."
I knew Albert, Prince of Monaco, fairly well for more than a quarter of a century. The New York Times gave a column article to him while he was visiting America shortly before his death; it said that "he belonged to the Grimaldis of Genoa… one of the most ancient houses of Europe"; described him as "a wise old man of the world, honorably distinguished as a savant; an enlightened ruler… sagacious and experienced," and God knows what besides. Now, Albert of Monaco was not a Grimaldi at all, but a Matignon of little Breton squire stock, and his "wisdom and enlightenment" were low cunning.
One incident will give a better picture of this Princelet than pages of word painting. When I first knew him he was always talking of his dislike of "the gambling house" of Monte Carlo, which gave him his princely revenue and paid besides all the expenses of his three miles long and half a mile wide kingdom. Every one staying in the palace was requested not to visit or even enter "the gambling house," and the Prince was continually complaining that his father had given M. Blanc a lease of the place till 1907, or else "I'd shut it up tomorrow. I hate the corruptions of it. It is really wrong for a father so to bind and fetter a son; I loathe the place," so he used to preach.
It seemed to me that the Prince protested too much; in any case, surely he need not have accepted "the wages of sin," had he had not been so inclined.
But bit by bit his protests affected me; I came to believe in his honesty.
For there was a side to the Prince which pleased me. He was a sportsman. He had a great country house at Marchais on the borders of Lorraine; it had at one time belonged to the Dues de Guise and was set, a great house, in the midst of marshes.
There was most excellent shooting to be had in the swamps of Marchais; wild geese and ducks by the myriad flocked there from the north in cold weather, and wild swans, too, and the woods were well stocked with pheasants and rabbits and hares.
But there were other amenities at Marchais. So long as the Princess Alice ruled there, the food was excellent and there used to be wonderful music in the evenings.
One met at Marchais all the literary geniuses and the leaders of French thought: Bourget and Loti, Saint-Saens and Sarah Bernhardt. In Marchais, more than in any other French house, one touched life at many points.
Naturally, I was delighted to go to Marchais and spend long days with the Prince shooting. I have been awakened at four o'clock in the morning with the news that wild swans had just come in and in ten minutes I was up and dressed. Before we started out I had a cup or two of delicious hot coffee and such eggs and bacon, preserves and bread as one seldom finds. Then down in the cold night to ride six or seven miles to the ground, and when there to crawl for perhaps another mile on one's stomach between straw fences to the huts, out of which one could watch the great swans sailing the water and shoot them, if one wanted to. Then as day dawned we would take this wood for pheasants, and that stubbled plain for red-legged partridge, and so fleet the day in healthy exercise. Then home to a hot bath and a superb dinner with super-excellent French wine and coffee, and a great evening with good music by Tosti or De Lara, or a talk in a quiet room with a member of the Institute or the Academy.
Who could resist the seduction! One evening the Prince assured me that he meant to shut up the "tripot" or "den," as he called it, at Monte Carlo as soon as he had the right, and begged me to preach this in the British press, so as not to surprise people when it took place.
"I want to avoid complaints," he said, "and the leaders of English life are powerful in France."
Naturally, I did my best for his high purpose.
I knew the "gambling house" at Monte Carlo extremely well: I had spent a good many winters at the Principality, and it was apparent to me that the way to give tone and importance to the whole place was by founding a special Sporting Club which should have all the best visitors as members, especially the best English and French and Americans. One day I outlined this scheme to the Prince of Monaco, saying that if he decided that he had to leave the "gambling house" as it was, the way to improve it would be by establishing a high class Sporting Club in close connection with it.
He asked me to make out the whole scheme. I told him it would cost some time and labor: and he wanted to know how he should reward me. "Very simple," I said, "you can make me a permanent secretary at a decent salary."
"Certainly," he exclaimed enthusiastically. "You help me: make out the whole constitution and articles of the club, print them and let me have them, and you shall be permanent secretary at a salary, say, of a thousand pounds a year, and of course lodgings in the club." I said that would suit me excellently;
I made out the whole thing-constitution, articles and all- and submitted it to him. He told me it was exactly what he wanted.
A little later it was rumored that the Prince of Monaco had concluded a treaty with Monsieur Camille Blanc, the chief shareholder in the "gambling house," and had given him fresh extension of his lease, on condition of receiving some millions of francs.
One night in London I mentioned the matter to one of the kings of finance; he laughed outright.
"So you're the culprit," he cried; "that's a jolly good one on you."
"Why?" I asked. "What are you laughing at?"
"I'm laughing," he said, "because that wily fox, the Prince of Monaco, got you for nothing to frighten M. Blanc so that he has concluded a new contract for fifty years to come on most favorable terms."
I knew intuitively that I had been done by the fox. But I had been cheated, I found, more completely than I had even imagined. The Prince of Monaco sold the whole idea of the Sporting Club, as constituted by me, to Camille Blanc, and got another large sum for it, taking care not to encumber the deal with a permanent secretary, and so cheated me.
There were two sides to Prince Albert, as to most men: he really loved science and prosecuted his deep sea fishing in the interests of science; at the same time he married an immensely rich heiress, and he sold the future of Monte Carlo to Camille Blanc, after getting the highest possible from the financier by publishing his resolve to shut the "tripot" as soon as the lease was out.
Verily, The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of Light!
CHAPTER XI
Jesus, the Christ
OPINION IS SLOWLY coming to the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth is the greatest spirit in recorded time. Very early they proclaimed him divine, and now for nearly two thousand years all sorts and conditions of men have studied him and talked of him. But very few, so far as I know, have even tried to see him as he was. He was so sweet and so great that even after twenty centuries the jury of his peers has not yet been formed, nor the final verdict pronounced. As I have loved him without adoring him, I contribute here my voice to the final decision, and describe besides how I came to my belief, and the effect it had upon my conduct.
In my portrait of Renan, I have told how, towards the end of the century, Sir Charles Dilke had given me an introduction to him, and Dilke was one of the few Englishmen who spoke French as well as he spoke English: his commendation therefore had some weight. At first, Renan received me with great kindness and almost immediately began to ask me how his Life of Jesus was appreciated in England. I said that it was regarded as the best life- much better than Strauss's: but again and again he came back to the matter with a desire of praise which seemed almost childish to me, and an invincible disdain of any criticism, however well founded, which sometimes provoked me.
Every time I came to Paris for some years, I went to see him, and after a couple of visits he began to treat me with a sort of condescension, which was really due to the fact that I had never told him fully what was in my mind about his work. At length I resolved to do this.
One day, I have forgotten how, he provoked me and I said to him: "Master, what was the ordinary language that Jesus spoke?" "Aramaic," he replied,
"the common Jewish dialect of Hebrew." "I have always hoped," I said, "that he spoke Greek or
dinarily, though of course it may have been Latin."
"Oh no," said Renan, "he only spoke one language; he was quite uneducated, so far as we know."
"What does it mean," I said, "when on the cross he cries, 'Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?' That's Aramaic, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Renan, "surely."
"Then they go on to say in the Bible, 'which being interpreted means, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" ' It is surely plain from this that he usually spoke another language, which did not need to be interpreted, and that here on the Cross in his mortal anguish, he fell into the language of his childhood, and they therefore translated it."
"I see your inference," cried Renan; "strange that I had never thought of that before; where did you get the idea?"
I smiled, but it almost made me tell him that I had gotten hardly anything from his Life of Jesus, often as I had looked into it.
There are many little touches in the Bible which seem to make the Master plain to me. If I had another life to live, I would learn Aramaic and Hebrew and try to do what Renan failed to do: give a real portrait of the greatest man who ever wore flesh.
When his mother and father left him as a boy, and finding that he was not with them, returned to Jerusalem and discovered that he bad been in the synagogue, he said to them: "Wist thou not that I must be about my Father's business?" This and the remark afterwards that his mother kept all such sayings in her heart seemed to reveal him to me as extraordinary, even in boyhood.