When Eline returns from De Horze to her sister and brother-in-law’s house in The Hague, she finds that her older cousin, Vincent, is in temporary residence. Vincent has led a rackety life, which has taken its toll on him both physically and financially (he endlessly cadges money). Eline’s sister Betsy – practical, conventional, insensitive – loathes him, but on Eline he exerts a curious fascination, particularly as the Gelderland days recede, and the all-too-familiar tedium of her life in The Hague engulfs her anew. Vincent reminds Eline of the father she so loved and revered, a failed artist who could never find the energy to complete one of his ambitious canvases. Indeed, for all his dabbling in doubtful commercial enterprises, Vincent, with his collection of bric-a-brac, could himself be called a failed artist, and this is how he sees himself. A man more unlike Otto van Erlevoort than this seedy, yet somehow magnetic, individual could scarcely be imagined, and in fact we readers know that Otto, unlike the other more impressionable young men in his social circle, actually despises him: ‘But Otto, with unselfconscious confidence in his own health and strength, looked down on Vincent for the poisonous charm he emanated to gullible associates.’ But Eline, much to her sister’s irritation, takes to having long, lazy, philosophical conversations with him:
‘So you believe that everything is preordained, and that when I think I am doing something out of my own free will I am really only doing it because …?’
‘You only think it’s your free will, but your will is nothing other than the outcome of hundreds and thousands of previous socalled occurrences. Yes indeed, that is what I believe.’
[…]
‘You believe, for instance, that if I marry Otto all I’m doing is following a preordained path?’
But only seconds after she asks him this, Vincent, in poor condition anyway, faints. The effect on Eline of both his remarks and his swoon is astonishing, and yet, on reflection – for this is a novel of great subtlety in its psychological and social observation – perhaps we should not be so very astonished. Eline now begins to wonder that ‘her love for Otto might not be enough after all’; for an instant she has seen behind her imaginings of her married life-to-come an alarming ‘ghost’. Vincent’s faint draws her, emotionally, romantically, towards him – though there is no evidence of any deeper feeling for her on his part than cousinly affection and gratitude. (Indeed, perhaps if there had been, she would not be so drawn.) Couperus, born in 1863, was twelve years the senior of Carl-Gustav Jung (1875–1961) yet Eline Vere (1889) strikingly anticipates key Jungian ideas, present also in his subsequent fiction. Vincent, sick, seedy, idle, is the shadow to Otto in Eline’s psyche, and indeed embodies important features of her own self. Hence her fleeting but frightening vision of the ‘ghost’, which is this shadow’s projection. Eline’s consequent casting-off of the Otto she still loves – causing her genuine anguish in which, for all her egotism, concern for the rejected young man is a strong component – is, in truth, an unconsciously motivated attempt to assert her personality in all its complexity on behalf of its unending quest, its driving need for wholeness. It may also be seen, of course, as a revolt against that very pre-ordination – societal and/or circumstantial – that her cousin was proclaiming before he passed out.
But there is more still to be discovered in Eline’s action. Her moods, her nervousness, her preposterous fantasies which spiral away from those who have inspired them, her bouts of illness (or indefinable unwellness) may exasperate us readers almost as much as they do her elder sister, Betsy. But when we stand back and view them collectively, do they not reveal her unwitting, instinctive recognition of what is dead or dull in her society, of what may be pleasing, even admirable on the agreeable, convention-hallowed surface but which never addresses what runs deeper? In hoping for a suspension of time’s movement, Eline at twenty-three may have been entertaining the dreams of a silly adolescent, but is she not, in the very fervour of her wishes, also fighting herself and her own frightening powers of understanding? Hasn’t she all along had an appreciation of life’s darker side – whereas the less complicated Otto, at any rate up to this point, has not? Eline’s problems derive from her not knowing how to cope with her troubling appreciation, receiving no guidance here from the largely stultifying codes by which her more adjusted friends and relations live.
Eline’s rejection of Otto constitutes the heart, both structural and moral, of the novel. As the above adumbrates, her action is a far from simple matter. Lionel Trilling wrote about Jane Austen’s novel Emma (in Beyond Culture, 1975): ‘We never know where to have it. If we finish it at night and think we know what it is up to, we wake the next morning to believe it is up to something quite else; it has become a different book.’ This holds true for Eline Vere too. And in both cases the book’s ability to change itself in our minds is inextricable from the delineation of the woman who gives it its title.
…
Louis Couperus was only twenty-six when Eline Vere came out, and had previously published only unsatisfactory and derivative poems (in 1883 and 1884). Though it is a literary artefact of precocious sophistication and accomplishment, the novel is also palpably the creation of a young man whose years were a great advantage to him in its composition. For Couperus is still very much of the milieu he is re-creating, aware though he is of its limitations and faults, and he clearly was intimately familiar, as a member himself of youthful Hague society, of the very pleasures, expectations and hopes he ascribes to his large cast of characters, almost all of them his contemporaries. Their gossip and banter, their flirtations, their little tiffs and misunderstandings and reconciliations, their plans for and doubts about the nature of their future adult lives convince us (and never more so than in Ina Rilke’s spirited and linguistically sensitive English) because they are done essentially from the inside. A young man like Etienne van Erlevoort, lazy and industrious, facetious and affectionate by turns, springs to life off the pages – on which he performs no absolutely essential dramatic act – as though a relation of the author’s own, slyly observed over many years, were being presented to us.
Youth surely accounts also for the infectious physicality of the work. We disport ourselves with its characters at the beaches and by the dunes of Scheveningen, and deep in the woods of Gelderland too; we are present at amiable wrestling matches, ending with one boy leapfrogging over his partner, and are right there on the little boat as it is steered down a country stream past thick pads of waterlilies. These are all triumphs of the writer’s kinaesthetic powers, and stand in contrast to, and perhaps at variance with, his other less healthy and wholesome aesthetic abilities, when he draws us near that sombre and threatening shadow-land which those such as Vincent Vere know only too well.
Couperus was helped in his chosen task of bringing his own society to life by two important features of the contemporary literary scene. He called Eline Vere ‘A Novel of The Hague’, partly because there actually flourished at the time a popular genre known simply as ‘The Hague novel’. This dealt with the city’s social life, in something of the manner of those English ‘silver-fork’ novels of the period 1825–1850, or of such now-forgotten but once widely-read English novelists of the 1880s as Rhoda Broughton and W. E. Norris. Its principal readers were female, drawn largely from a lower social class than its books’ protagonists; it therefore appealed to their eagerness to hear what was going on in such elegant streets of the Dutch administrative capital as the Nassauplein where Eline lives with Henk and Betsy van Raat, in a house which Couperus himself had inhabited. We can see how Eline Vere, which was hugely successful from the very first, partakes of this category and could meet the wishes of its enthusiasts. From its opening description of the gleeful preparations for a Society tableau vivant to its closing evocation of the ‘quite splendid’ villa furnished ‘with considerable luxury’ in which the recently wed Paul and Frédérique are now living (admittedly not in The Hague but in Heibeek), the novel leaves us in no doubt whatever that we are moving among the well-off and well-conn
ected, whom the author knows at first hand. And a good measure of both the charm and the interest of these people with whom we are concerned does indeed derive from their favoured station: their easy manners and articulate conversation, the pleasantness of the innumerable dinner-parties and expeditions which amply set off their developing personalities, their ability, if they so wish, to yield to impulse and pursue some hobby or passing enthusiasm (Paul van Raat’s excursions into singing and painting conspicuously come to mind), or even to take their time over their studies and thus over deciding what they should be doing in life (Etienne is a good, and a happy, example). And some of them, of course, never do make any satisfactory decision here, and yet do not seem to us much the worse for it; in truth the very leisureliness of their lives gives them enviable scope for exercising fundamentally amiable qualities. The superbly realised Henk van Raat, with his two devoted Ulmer hounds, himself several times likened to a Newfoundland dog, is perhaps the best instance of this. The important plot lines of Paul’s relationship with Frédérique van Erlevoort, Georges de Woude van Bergh’s with Lili Verstraeten, Marie’s with Otto would not at all be out of place in a run-of-the-mill ‘Hague novel’, and, like that genre’s intended readers, we are ceaselessly stirred to read on by asking ourselves (even on rereadings, such are Couperus’s narrative gifts): ‘Will they … or won’t they? Will she … or won’t she?’, such questions and their answers providing the story’s dynamics.
What stands apart from the usual interests of such a novel is, obviously, the portrait of Eline herself – disturbing, multifaceted, unforgettable – which transcends, or, if you like, subverts, the genre in which it commandingly stands, lifting the individual work into another species of literary endeavour entirely.
But a second feature of the literary climate is even more important in considering the production of this twenty-six-year-old author: the enormous reputation then, throughout the reading world, of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). In one of the later chapters we find elderly Madame van Raat reading French and Russian novels, and War and Peace (published 1865–69) is specifically cited.
Tolstoy builds up his great novel from innumerable small episodes of ordinary life, familial, domestic, social and sometimes seemingly trivial (and, we should add here, it is our ease of reception of these and our belief in their complete authenticity that enable us to identify with those they feature when ‘history’ overtakes them in the form of Napoleon and his invasion of Russia). Just as Jane Austen said that ‘three or four families in a country village is just the thing to work on’, Tolstoy spoke of his fiction as deriving from the affairs of the deux cents familles to which he himself belonged. Couperus, in his first novel, was similarly drawn to writing about people of his own class (the only ones probably with whom he feels thoroughly at home), and profited by Tolstoy’s example. Indeed, as we follow the doings of the Van Erlevoorts, Verstraetens, Van Raats, and De Woude van Berghs, we can easily envisage them as friends of Tolstoy’s Rostovs. They would all have been perfectly at home at Natasha’s first ball. (And yet, for all their breeding, with the Van Erlevoorts prominent here, and their money, with the Van Raats the richest, Couperus’s people are far nearer in their values and mores to ourselves than are Tolstoy’s; both their pastimes and their more serious aspirations belong to a modern capitalist society based on commerce rather than to the semi-feudal one we encounter in the great Russian.)
But I suspect that the young Couperus was even more influenced by the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina (published 1875–78). Whereas the cumulative episodes of War and Peace unite into an epic of a people during a significant segment of historical time, those out of which Anna Karenina is constructed are shot through with our intensifying awareness of its central figure, and the predicament she apparently wills onto herself and, involuntarily, onto those close to her. This, unlike its predecessor, is above all a novel of moral and psychological investigation and dissection. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I shall repay’ is the motto Tolstoy chose for it, and in retrospect we can see how it informs every scene, no matter what sense of the humdrum, of the randomness of existence it may also offer. Eline Vere works on us in this manner too. We can see this in the very way Couperus has decided to introduce us to Eline.
From the merry preparations of the young people in the very first chapter she is conspicuously absent. ‘Such a shame Eline is not here!’ her aunt-through-marriage exclaims. ‘She is not feeling very well,’ Madame Verstraeten is told; it is a question of ‘nerves’ apparently, ‘the affliction of the younger generation’.
So we do not meet Eline until the second chapter, and when we do, we encounter her at nighttime, at half-past two in the morning. (To the British and American readers of today these members of Hague society keep astoundingly late hours, just as they all have a surprising amount to drink.) And we first see her ‘looking rather pale in a white flannel peignoir, with her hair loose and flowing,’ the last a favourite symbol in nineteenth-century paintings, from the Pre-Raphaelites through to Edvard Munch, of a girl’s rejection of the restraints of conventional respectability. ‘Languorous and graceful’, Eline has absented herself from the jollifications of her peers through a ‘whim of indolence and ennui’, and has been regretting it ever since, unable to relieve her melancholy even by reading. When her brother-in-law, Henk, chides her for yielding to yet another black mood – Henk, the first man she was ever seriously attracted to, and who, probably more than any other, still holds her heart – she breaks down in tears:
The urge to pour her heart out was too strong to resist. What was she living for? What use could she be to anyone? She wandered about the room, wringing her hands and lamenting without pause. She didn’t care if she died within the hour, she didn’t care about anything at all, it was just that existence was so futile, so useless, without anything she could wholeheartedly devote herself to, and it was all becoming too much to bear.
What is Eline’s malady, and what is its meaning when viewed in the context of her social world? Which is also to ask, what is its meaning for the novel as a whole? In Anna Karenina’s case the cause of her undoing is her trust in the truth of passion over other truths, other considerations. On account of this trust she undervalues the importance of society itself, which exacts retribution on her of both an outward and an inward kind. This is not to say that Tolstoy accepts society on its own (so often hypocritical or cynical) evaluation; far from it. But he does believe that it is only through principled unselfishness that a satisfactory life can be led, and that this entails taking society into account. We see in Anna Karenina how the erratic Levin, who, like War and Peace’s Pierre before him, has a normal man’s dissolute past, realizes that a reciprocally giving married life with Kitty will benefit not just himself but the larger world as well.
Such thinking is present also in Eline Vere. Paul van Raat is as silly and selfish as young men often are, indeed maybe more so than many because of the wealth and lofty social position into which he was born, the very thought of which makes him proud and a touch reckless. But he is also warm-hearted and observant of others, and through the love he feels for Frédérique and the marriage with her that he will sustain, he can not only repay his debts to society but make it a better place (this being fittingly emblemised in his becoming Mayor of a comparatively small provincial community). But Eline will make no contribution of this kind whatsoever. In common with Tolstoy’s Anna, what she will bequeath to the society that has produced and nurtured her is a death that at once distresses and disconcerts it. Why? What went wrong?
Eline’s flaw is not, like the Russian tragic heroine’s, related to intensity of sexual reaction. If anything Eline strikes us as deficient in normal erotic feelings. The baritone Fabrice, Otto for the greater part (she has to be cajoled into accepting him as fiancé), Vincent, the mysterious figure of Lawrence St Clare – there is no evidence that she is sexually aroused by any of them. Nor is there much evidence that men generally, while admiring her beauty and her social gr
ace, respond to her physically, as – to take examples from literature – men, including her own husband, do to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, or those in Christiania’s élite do to Hedda Gabler in Ibsen’s virtually contemporaneous play (1890). What attractions Eline feels for the men in her life, what emotions they have brought out in her very quickly dissolve into daydream. Fabrice – whose picture she will buy for her albums, like any starstruck shop-girl – scarcely has any reality for her off the boards of the stage on which he sings Gounod. Vincent’s secretive disposition, compounded by his insecurities of money and health, she soon distorts into a novelette invalid’s yearning for love, which she could somehow in a fantasy-world encounter. Even Otto, for whom she does know something not unlike love, becomes for her chiefly an embodiment of masculine good sense on which she will be able eternally to depend.
Unlike Emma Bovary or Hedda Gabler, however, Eline is not unintelligent or even notably unintellectual, nor – as Ibsen, in his preparatory notes on his play, says of Hedda – conventional. Couperus is insistent that Eline’s English is positively good, and her French is clearly proficient also: she reads as well as speaks both languages. She is interested in the arts, even if she does have an inordinate admiration for Ouida (!), is cognisant of cultures outside the Netherlands, and, if anything, is rather too much at ease among the bohemian, heterodox folk whom her uncle Daniel and his younger wife, Eliza, take up with. Her discussions with Vincent might not impress a professional philosopher any more than they please her irascible sister, Betsy, but they show her to have, for all her languor, a certain liveliness of mind, a wish to explore further than the bounds of the immediately perceptible. It is hard to imagine the other young members of her circle engaging in them. Furthermore she has the ability – often, admittedly, coming to the fore too late or with insufficient force – to stand back from her fantasies and even her behaviour. (Think of her sad, bemused awareness of how badly she can behave to kind old Madame van Raat.) Likewise, she has the ability to discern the sham even when it is she herself who, through her heightened theatrical tendencies, is doing the shamming. When, in her despair, she turns to church-going, she can see through her own religiosity – so akin to the swooning over opera which led her to idolise the sorry, shabby Fabrice – and also through the hypocrisies of her fellow worshippers.
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