An Author on the Mystery of Woman
Barbey D’Aurevilly
In Paris for some time past, Lemerre has been publishing the collected works of the Norman author, Barbey D’Aurevilly. They are edited by a lady who was a friend of the author’s, and from time to time a new volume falls like a heavy weight on the book-market. They march along in two columns—the first is called Les Oeuvres et les Hommes, and consists of reviews of books and plays long since forgotten. These criticisms, most of which were written hurriedly during the many years when he occupied the post of critic to a paper which exists no more, are issued in a set of fine quarto volumes with beautiful, clear print. The second series consists of his novels and short stories, containing much imperishable matter belonging to that everlasting species that was, is and will be as enduring as the primal laws of existence, and these are published in the most fascinating little octavo volumes with pearl lettering, so fine that after two hours’ reading our eyes are quite worn out and our heads begin to whirl. It was thus ordained by feminine wisdom. The ephemeral criticisms were to take their stand in monumental form as appropriate counter-balance, while the imperishable novels were to look as pretty and dainty as possible and to behave with as much coyness as young maidens in the presence of the reader, because it was thought that they possessed attraction enough, even when it was necessary to enjoy them with the help of a microscope. Let us hope that the cunning lady was not mistaken; but Barbey D’Aurevilly was not a popular author in his lifetime, and it is to be feared that the trying circumstances under which he has lately been placed within reach of the public will serve to frighten away omnivorous readers and all who are in the habit of reading quickly.
It may be that this young lady, now grown old, who nursed the man of seventy and eighty with a mixture of motherly love and hero-worship, who served and cheered him and now carefully guards herself from appearing as the editor of his works, although the entire literary world of Paris recognises her as such—it may be that in this she has preserved the same course of exclusiveness which was the peculiar characteristic of her author during his life-time. Perhaps she does not wish that the common herd should read him? Perhaps she has chosen the nonpareil type for the purpose of raising a protecting barrier between him and the reading public? It may be her wish to admit only the strong souls and genuine readers who can stand the test of small print, and who have no objection to spoiling their eyes; readers of the kind who never swallow any book, who only care to digest a couple of pages a day. There are not more than two hundred such readers in Europe and about as many in Boston and New York. But these two hundred will love her author and carry his memory with them to the grave.
When Barbey D’Aurevilly died a few years ago in a small room in one of the quiet side streets off the Bon Marché, little more was known of him either in the history of literature or in his public life than that he used to dress in a very eccentric and remarkable manner in his younger days, and that both in his conversation and in his writings he displayed an obsolete and antiquated form of Catholicism. It was not likely that a man such as he would be considered a great author; Hugo and Gautier, Dumas fils and Zola were very different people. They occupied themselves with “modern problems,” they were liberal and radical, pessimists and writers who described the habits and customs of the day. None of them were reactionary, least of all orthodox Catholics. And latterly, when the Church has regained her influence, and devotion has increased to so great an extent that even the profoundly sceptical Bourget finds it convenient to become more and more Catholic in every new book that he writes,—even this did not make any appreciable difference to Barbey. He is too strong, too liberal, too radical and too terribly realistic to be welcomed by modern piety. In these days of exploding bombs, the anxious souls who take refuge under the dreamy arches of the Church do not want to be still more terrified by the reading of books. Times may change as they like, but Barbey D’Aurevilly never was in harmony with the spirit of the age, he is not in harmony with it now, and in the form that his friend has published his books, there is ample prospect of his continuing to remain out of harmony with it.
A man who has such a difficult and doubtful prospect of fame must be already a great author—or nothing at all.
Paul Bourget was of the former opinion when, after Barbey’s death, he wrote a clever and valuable essay upon him, aided by the advantage of a personal acquaintance. This essay is now out of print; he omitted to republish it in his Etudes Psychologiques on celebrities of the age, like the Goncourts, Amiel, Turgenev, even Taine and Stendhal. For Barbey is too strong, he leaves the Renaissance figure of Stendhal far behind.
It was a sad, quiet worshipper of Barbey’s who first turned my attention to his works. The author had dedicated a small book to her, almost with his dying hand; the dedication was one of those graceful, pathetic inscriptions which are now a lost art. When I began to read him his style influenced me like the sharp, bitter smell and the infinite breadth of the sea, while his descriptions of life’s mystery ran through me like the stab of a knife, causing me to shudder with a suppressed cry as only a woman can cry when she sees the innermost sanctuary of her womanhood exposed to the public gaze. Shakespeare is the only one who has this greatness without mercy, this self-sufficing completeness of a human being, this pride which is justice, moral law, religion and a world to itself. There is nothing so vile, nothing so horrible but would necessarily experience a shudder of exaltation when exposed to the world’s gaze. Barbey D’Aurevilly belongs to the race of Shakespeare.
He belongs to it in the actual sense of the word and also on account of his Norman descent. There is nothing of the Gaul in him either in his moral judgment, in his views of life, or in his sympathies and antipathies. He is a landscape painter, which no truly French writer has ever been, he is a lover of solitude in remote country districts, a lover of nature on the lonely seashore. He is not a townsman and he escapes as often as he can from Paris, the centre which is looked upon by every successful Frenchman as the only beautiful, honourable, interesting and pleasurable place in which to dwell. He has no frivolity, he does not care for pleasure, but on the contrary he has a grandiose mood and an iron grasp of the situations which he describes. He seeks the more veiled sides of human nature, but there is a modesty in his descriptions known only to Northerners, and not to Italians and Gauls. He is the fellow-countryman of Flaubert and Maupassant, but he has none of the plebeian exclusiveness of the first or the Rabelais Gallicism of the second. He is of pure race to an extent that is unheard of and inconceivable—a Scandinavian Norman without any of the ponderous blood of the Anglo-Saxon, so often found in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but which the course of centuries has served to dissipate until it has completely vanished.
When we look at his portrait we are unconsciously reminded of certain pictures by the younger Holbein in the Windsor Gallery and in the collection at Bâle; there is the same peculiar combination of refinement and strength scarcely ever met with among his contemporaries, the same sharp, subtle moulding of the features which is only produced in a race of long standing. His head recalls to our memory another, the head of one who is not long dead, more massive perhaps, less developed, more thoughtful, but with an equally calm expression; a head belonging to the same racial type, with the same proud, princely features, the same prominent nose with the large eyes of a discoverer—the head of a Normandy peasant, of Millet, his fellow-countryman, the creator of a new feeling for nature and a new aspect of nature in art.
The one feature that separates Millet from all other artists, in his drawings far more than in his heavy, dull-coloured paintings, is that he saw his people as one with nature. Where is the difference in Millet’s picture between the flock of ravens alighting on the autumnal field in the midst of the grey eternity of a damp day, and the man and woman who, with rake and spade stuck in the ground beside them, stand praying at the sound of the Angelus in a position which is of itself a silent devotion at the approach of darkness? Just as the forms of the flying ravens break the great self-sufficiency of the landscape and thereby attract attention to it, so the powerful simple outlines of the man and woman are only a more emphatic expression of the solemn silence which the evening casts over the land. Just as Millet places his people in the landscape, as an inseparable part of nature, one with her, so Barbey D’Aurevilly places his characters on the great, lonely sea-coast, on the yellow sands and the long, flat, green meadows of storm-bound Normandy. The outlines here are the same as there, standing out great and simple in their solemnity, silent and weird as fate against the great, simple, peaceful landscape. In the same way that Millet’s women stand firm and immoveable as a mountain against the everlasting heavens, so Barbey D’Aurevilly’s defiant yet submissive women stand in relief against the eternal landscape of their native country, with the same powerful simplicity of Millet’s pictures, inflexible as regards strange and transitory laws, but submissive to the laws that appeal to them from the depths of their own natures.
Just as Millet’s peasant woman strides across the melancholy field, weak yet unhesitating, individualistic, yet ever the same woman who yesterday was, to-day is, and to-morrow will be, so L’Ensorcelée, the large-proportioned, plain-thinking daughter of an ancient and aristocratic house, wanders home from church across the fields in spring, with the glow of an eternal flame in her honest face—the glow of a passion conceived in church when in the pulpit she descried the man whom she is proud to own as her master at the first glance. This woman is the childless wife of a rich plebeian at the time of the French Revolution; and the man—is he any different from that peasant of Millet’s who draws on his coat, standing alone on the broad plains after a hard day’s work? The mantle of an emperor in the picture of a coronation is not more imposing than this raised arm, standing in relief against the grey heavens, and commanding respect as though it were engaged in the performance of a fearful and holy action, instead of being merely the outline of a strong, rough, tired figure in a lonely field. And what is it but the peasant strength and peasant greatness of this former Chouan, now a priest of Barbey’s, that attracts the nobleman’s daughter, wife of the parvenu, when she sees him in church during the procession and catches sight of his face hidden beneath the cowl,—a face that has been unrecognisably lacerated in battle against the soldiers of the French Revolution,—at the sight of which she is consumed with a mad, wild, passionate love. She was a woman in whom her own sub-conscious strength called for the strongest man, and felt with a shudder of injured pride: This one is the strongest! And he is the strongest, for this inflexible conspirator will not allow himself to be led astray by any woman, and L’Ensorcelée, conscious of the destruction of her womanhood, conscious also of the ignominy of having married beneath her, drowns herself.
This is one of Barbey’s women who perished, a woman with the nature of a mighty ancestress whose pride in her race and family was long suppressed by a marriage repugnant to her inmost instincts, till at last, in a moment of fearful agitation, she revolted. The same primal instinct accompanied by the same horrible, unrelenting spirit, where the conscience is dead during the perpetration of a crime, appears in that unparalleled story, called Le Bonheur dans le Crime. A proud, pure girl poisons the wife of the man whom she loves, and poisons her with as much ease as a lover might have done in the days of the early Italian Renaissance—(one of those incomprehensible women with the passionate lips, as Botticelli paints them)—she poisons the wife under his very eyes, with his silent consent, and then, in the same house, with the same furniture, surrounded by the same solitary sequestered nature, these two celebrate their honeymoon, which lasts without interruption for weeks, months, years, scores of years, and they are true to one another and happy for a whole life-time; not only do they feel no remorse, but they are able to live without giving a single thought to the past. This would not suit Protestant standards, yet these are people such as Shakespeare depicted, figures such as Millet in his pictures placed against the horizon, beings of whom Burkhardt writes in his work on the Italian Renaissance. Conventional characters they are not, but conventional characters are frequently incomplete natures, whereas an individual character is a complete being, a being who is fully developed and who possesses a standard of his own.
How else are we to describe that daughter of the bourgeoisie who comes home from the convent where she was educated, to be watched by her parents with a severity that is now unknown? She steals away night after night with bared feet along the stone passages, passes through the bedroom where her parents are and goes to the young officer who is quartered in their house, and one night she dies in his arms, dies so silently and suddenly that she is dead before he has recovered his self-possession. What men are able to transport women into such an ungovernable passion of love? Woman does not create her own passion like man; she is what man makes her. He either binds her instincts or loosens them, he makes her good or bad, cold or passionate, according to the manner in which his temperament affects hers, and according to how great or how small a degree he himself is the man. Barbey’s men are a race peculiar to themselves; they in their various characters, ages, and persons are always himself—natures without lead and sand in their veins, with the fire, the tension, the nervous energy of a full-blooded race.
It is not the Frenchwoman whom Barbey describes, and no Frenchman either could or would describe her as he has done. He is no more of a Gaul than Millet, any more than the Italians of the early Renaissance were real Romans. Like the author Tolstoy, in whom the Mongolian blood is more clearly manifested as he grows older, so with Barbey and Millet, the two great Normans, the Teutonic element appears on the surface, the same element that we recognise in the pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites, and which was afterwards set aside by the intrusion of the Spaniards and the Classics. Millet’s landscapes represent the Teutonic aspect of nature; while Barbey’s writings are the essence of the Teutonic style, with its characteristic expansion, its abrupt pauses, its utter indifference with regard to the main point, its dislike of concluding the story as soon as the climax is reached. It is here that we find the Teutonic sense for the infinite—a feeling that is the peculiar property of a people who dwell near the sea—a kind of absorption into nature, whither men vanish like black spots. Both are equally possessed of that feeling for the real which has not existed anywhere in the same degree since the days of the early Italian Renaissance. Millet shews it in the reality of his drawing, Barbey in the reality of individualism in the sexes. It is in this that Barbey stands alone and unequalled by any of the authors of the present day or of the past, and it is this that reminds us that three hundred years of physical and spiritual refinement of human feeling and comprehension lie between him and the age of Shakespeare.
His first youthful work, Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas is broad as a novel by Bulwer and as full of feeling as a poem by Lamartine; already here he strikes the key in which woman’s inmost soul vibrates, resounds and awakens to a sense of its most intimate and complicated delight in man. Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas is woman’s eternal affection, which eternally manifests itself, even when the woman is no longer young; she is the beloved mother whom the man, especially when he is quite young, loves more ardently than he could possibly love a young girl, and through him she becomes a mother—a matron already in her soul. Both in his aphorisms and in the most popular of his novels, Vieille Maîtresse, Barbey continually returns to this deepest of all man’s passions for the woman whom he sees growing old beside him, and who for him grows young again; the woman to whom he is bound by a thousand inextricable memories, memories of his childhood when his own mother was young, memories of youthful happiness and of his own youthful manhood spent with this same woman, whom he still loves. A refined man expects a great deal from woman, and in her who binds him with the cords of love, he will always love the whole woman—the girl, the wife, the mother.
Woman is for Barbey the tragic, by reason of her inevitable destiny. Woman’s age is more sharply defined than man’s; her youth is more limited. She is unconscious of her own being, and when she realises it, she also realises her destiny. She stands so strong and fearless beneath the pressure of nature, that man cannot think of it without a shudder of intense compassion like that which inspired the deepest of Barbey’s stories, called by him Une Histoire Sans Nom. The subject of this extraordinary story is a woman who becomes a mother without wishing, without even knowing it. Kleist has described a case somewhat similar in one of his novels, only there the woman is experienced and understands what has happened. Kleist shows little sympathy in his development of the plot, which he describes from the man’s point of view, and the novel ends happily; Barbey, on the contrary, lays a peculiar stress on the tragic element, on the woman’s passiveness,—the reason of her eternal subjection to man—which renders her unable to do anything towards the furtherance or the hindrance of her inevitable destiny. An innocent young girl of sixteen lives alone in the old family mansion with her mother, by whom she is sternly watched, and where no one is admitted save a missionary preacher of the strictest order who is going his round from church to church. This unsuspecting child has begun to wander in her sleep without attracting the notice either of her mother or the maid, and one night, while she is in a somnambulant condition, the monk meets her on the doorstep and through him she becomes a mother. The following day he goes off on his mission, and both mother and daughter congratulate themselves that the melancholy man has departed. Time passes, until there is no longer any doubt, and the mother begins to torture the daughter, determined to discover how and through whom this can have occurred; the miserable child is terrified and can explain nothing. In this dreadful condition, under circumstances which woman only of all creatures of the earth has to endure, the poor girl’s mind undergoes a terrible trial which results in idiotcy.
Barbey’s descriptions are physical rather than psychical, and only women can judge of the truth of his psychological divinations, and judge—not with words, but with the quivering of their nervous fibres. It relates not to this one case only, but to thousands of other cases, which to a man would appear quite human and endurable,—cases, not of violence, but merely of error and self-deception.
There is one thing that is known only to ourselves, and that is that woman’s most inexorable task-master is woman, as in this instance, when the otherwise irreproachable mother torments her dearly-loved child. If only on account of this one novel, Barbey may be said to belong to the future, when there will exist a psychology of man and woman and human conditions, of which the germs are only just beginning to show themselves in him and in one or two others.
But what of his Catholicism? He lets the monk die after having undergone a severe penance in a Trappist monastery, after which he receives absolution and is duly reconciled with Heaven. Everything that has broken with nature can be reconciled in nature, because all life is only a fragment and a groping in the darkness, and in the deepest sense there exists no immutable link between cause and effect, crime and punishment. The innocent must suffer more than human martyrdom, while the guilty escapes with an insignificant, but as he supposes, just penance. Barbey’s Catholicism is that great, deep, intuitive understanding that fathoms all humanity.