FRENCH ESSAYS AND PROFILES
 
 FRENCH 
 ESSAYS AND PROFILES 
 
 BY 
 STUART HENRY 
 
 AUTHOR OF "hours WITH FAMOUS PARISIANS," 
 
 "villa elsa," etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. BUTTON y COMPANY 
 
 681 FIFTH AVENUE
 
 Copyright, 1921, 
 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Printed In the TTnitel States of America
 
 pa 
 
 TO 
 THAT SEVERE AND AFFECTIONATE CRITIC 
 
 MY WIFE 
 
 0^. 
 
 '"^25
 
 NOTE 
 
 Certain of these articles have appeared in The 
 Bookman and The Criterion of New York and in 
 The Contemporary Review and St. James's Budget 
 of London. 
 
 Most of the subjects of the Profiles have been 
 personal acquaintances of the author.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 i. The Poetic Legacy of Leconte de Lisle . 3 
 
 His Nature and His East 3 
 
 His Philosophy 9 
 
 Physical and Inner Sensibilities 20 
 
 Imagination and Fancy 24 
 
 Artistic and Esthetic Sensibilities .... 25 
 
 Style 31 
 
 Concluding Comment 34 
 
 ii. The Daughter of the French Romantics . 39 
 
 Madame Marie Mennessier-Nodier ... 41 
 
 iii. The Great Era of the French Ballet . . 89 
 
 The Famous Danseuses 91 
 
 The Transformation in the Ballet from Taglione 
 
 to 1900 118 
 
 iv. The Sociological Role of the Forest . . 155 
 
 V. Hedda Gabler and the Parisians . . . 173 
 
 vi. The Production of Noted Persons in France 187 
 
 vii. The Gray and Gay Race 197 
 
 PROFILES 
 
 i. Jules Claretie 209 
 
 ii. Francois Coppee 217 
 
 iii. Coquelin the Elder 223 
 
 vii
 
 viii Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 iv. Dumas the Elder 231 
 
 V. Dumas the Younger 241 
 
 vi. Judith Gautier 249 
 
 vii, Henry Greville 257 
 
 viii. Gyp . 267 
 
 ix. Jeanne Hugo 275 
 
 X. Jules Lemaitre 281 
 
 xi. Pierre Loti 287 
 
 xii. Rosita Mauri 297 
 
 xiii. Frederic Mistral 303 
 
 xiv. Georges Pellisier 311 
 
 XV. Edouard Rod 317 
 
 xvi. RosNY THE Elder 323 
 
 xvii. ViCTO^iEN Sardou 329
 
 ESS A YS 
 
 i. The Poetic Legacy of Leconte de Lisle
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Leconte de Lisle was born in 1818 in the French He de la 
 Reunion, east of Madagascar. He traveled in the Indies and 
 settled in Paris in 1848. A pension and a cross of honor were 
 soon given him by the French Empire for his literary work, though 
 he had joined the Republican movement. 
 
 He dropped politics for literature, maintaining all the while a 
 remarkably independent attitude, and soon became the leader of 
 a new school called the Parnassian in recognition of its antique 
 or classic types as contrasted with the Romantic which had been 
 in vogue. 
 
 Leconte de Lisle was professedly hostile to modernity and to 
 religion, and difficult in his relations with men. Hating women, 
 he never married, yet held a salon. He was a stately and elegant 
 figure of protest, cold in his disillusionment and skepticism. Yet 
 his temperament of a grand or imposing nature attracted as well 
 as dominated. He wrote and translated plays of the classic order 
 which were presented, but his fame rests on the three volumes of 
 verse with which the following essay deals: "Poemes antiques" 
 (1852), "Poemes barbares" (1862), and "Poemes tragiques" 
 (1884). He was made a member of the Academy in 1886, re- 
 placing the dead Victor Hugo. He died in Paris in 1894.
 
 ^ 
 
 <^r& 
 
 FRENCH ESSAYS 
 AND PROFILES 
 
 THE POETIC LEGACY OF LECONTE 
 
 DE LISLE 
 
 HIS NATURE AND HIS EAST 
 
 IN SO far as Leconte de Lisle is a philosopher, he 
 appears to follow Alfred de Vigny among mod- 
 erns, and to look, upon the universe as a senseless, 
 implacable spectacle which mocks at human joys and is 
 dumb to human sufferings. This attitude is a feature 
 of what is usually called his cult of the insensible. His 
 longing to be absorbed into "the impassible beauty" of 
 Nature, and to be consumed into "the eternal silence 
 and oblivion of the stars," is a part of his dream of 
 Nirvana. In some of his verse, however, he represents 
 the vivified forms and moods of Nature which the 
 Romantics had made familiar, and communes with, and 
 draws solace from, landscape and sea. In "Juin" he 
 says: "Perfume well the heart which is going to taste 
 life; and dip it in the peace and the freshness of the 
 skies. O Sun, pour thy flood of purple into the 
 exhausted soul." Again in "Nox" : "O seas, O dream- 
 ing forests, pious voices of the world, you have 
 responded during my unfortunate days; you have 
 
 3
 
 4 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 soothed my empty sadness; and in my heart also you 
 sing forever!" 
 
 Many passages of like import are found where the 
 poet treats Nature as a friend and a refuge. How 
 then does he reconcile this with his dictum that 
 Nature is cruelly impassive — that it "does not hear our 
 cries of love and anathema"? The confusion appears 
 to come from the fact that Nature reflects our own 
 varying attitudes toward it — it is dumb to us, or a 
 friendly solace, as we are dumb or friendly to it — and, 
 too, from the general fact that, in his impassible 
 moods, Leconte de Lisle contemplates it as it appears 
 mutely en bloc and at a distance, while in his com- 
 panionable moments he finds comfort in the appear- 
 ances of the earth's surface close about him. In any 
 event the poet's attitude toward Nature is incoherent, 
 for he has unconsciously attempted to follow the cold 
 dicta of Vigny and also the expanding sentiments of 
 the Nature-loving Hugo — both and all formed into 
 his Buddhist cult which therefore presents the incon- 
 gruous creed of proclaiming the derisive muteness of 
 sky and space, and of worshiping them, at the same 
 time, as the balm for human woes. 
 
 It is for its ornamental beauty that Nature is almost 
 incomparable in the pages of Leconte de Lisle. With 
 the Vigny idea of it as an inanimate decoration, the 
 poet composed all that verse wherein Nature is enam- 
 eled with the splendor of the orient and the tropics; 
 or is employed as an ornate background fit for the 
 tragic stage of his epic verse, as in "Ka'in"; or is repre- 
 sented in dull, leaden wastes "marked with a sign of
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 5 
 
 wrath" — the commencement of the world's frozen 
 death — as in his poems on the North. His domain of 
 Nature is never meant to be French, and is employed 
 by him mainly as a theme — avowedly exotic — to justify 
 the display of his artistic love of grandeurs. Animals 
 and the firmament are his favorite subjects. In this he 
 follows Hugo — conspicuously so in his hankering for 
 the animal kingdom. His verse descriptive of wild 
 beasts is perhaps the most effective of all his poetry 
 on Nature. 
 
 His universe Is, for the most part, glazed, poly- 
 chrome. Its dawns have "metallic lips," its waves are 
 emerald, its clouds are bronze, just as on sceneries of 
 porcelain. Action, gayety, perfume, color, perspective 
 and the manifold beauties of real life and the real world 
 are to be looked for here as if on Sevres vases. And 
 yet with all his patient toil on this rime and rhythm 
 of enamel, you feel that he is, like Hugo, always 
 magnificently out of doors and abroad in space. This 
 is one of the two great features of his poetry on 
 Nature. The other is that he makes the tropical sun 
 burn intensely on his stanzas. The rays of Sol glint 
 fiercely and gloriously on his chromatic wares. 
 
 We drift naturally here into his Eastern region. 
 The descriptions of his Hindoo nature as seen in 
 "Bhagavat," for instance, do not differ essentially 
 from those usually found in his Greek verse; but in 
 "Le Desert" and other poems, we have the true, 
 vibrant, equatorial realm. Likewise, there may be 
 found in his oriental verse types of women which 
 resemble the Greek; and then there is his genuine,
 
 6 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 tropical type as described in "Le Manchy." In "La 
 Verandah," one of his richest and truest lyric colora- 
 tions, we have a Persian princess in all the elegance of 
 a royal Iranian siesta. The incidents which afford him 
 the opportunity of covering page after page with deco- 
 rative verse are the simplest and most conventional 
 imaginable. He is in no sense an inventor of tales nor 
 an original observer and profound meditator on life 
 and occurrences. As far as information, ideas and inti- 
 mate knowledge of realities go, one seems to need 
 scarcely more than a common encyclopedia in reading 
 his verse; for he has employed the common stock of 
 instruction and observation rather than relied on any- 
 thing gleaned by himself from original and personal 
 sources. 
 
 It is, however, to be emphasized that he was a 
 savant. He was in reality an admirable scholar, and 
 eminently so in com^Darison with his Romantic prede- 
 cessors who were far from being erudite. But the 
 point sought to be made is that Leconte de Lisle got 
 everything at facile second hand. Although he was to 
 some extent familiar with the East, most of his poetry 
 (all of it, in fact, being written in France) bears the dis- 
 tinct mark of having -been studied among the tropical 
 life in the Jardin des Plantes, because he gives us the 
 clear impression of having observed his animals a few 
 feet away, like a sculptor of lions who scrutinizes his 
 models in a cage. This, in its turn, has its interest and 
 value, for while the Romantics beheld largely through 
 their fancy, Leconte de Lisle strove for a closer reality
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 7 
 
 — a marked step In the evolution to Naturalism from 
 imaginative Romanticism. 
 
 To continue to note the limitations of his East. We 
 do not find in all this verse the description of a Hindoo 
 temple, a bit of Himalayan scenery, a dancing girl 
 writhing in soft clashes of pearls, a native custom nor 
 a religious rite, nor anything to indicate that he has a 
 special and exotic knowledge of his own. There is 
 scarcely a line which hints that he was born on an isle 
 In the Indian ocean, and spent the first twenty-five 
 years of his life in the orient. There is nothing of 
 the soft, subtle effect of night and devotional reclusion 
 such as Brangwyn puts on canvases. There is nothing 
 of the soul of Buddhist mysticism. All is hard, exter- 
 nal, and, in a sense, formal and superficial. Granted 
 that the epoch of Valmiki was, as Leconte de Lisle once 
 declared, the equal and counterpart of that of Homer, 
 how far he has come from initiating us into its secret 
 and mysterious glories ! It is as if he had been merely 
 a voyager on southern seas and along eastern shores, 
 stopping here and there at a port, and bringing away 
 a general impression, like one who is on the outside of 
 his topic. 
 
 In all these aspects one quickly realizes how little 
 the poet has really said tiiat is new and orlglrwl in his 
 barbaric pages, and how rvarrow their range is and 
 incomplete their scope. His exteriority and artificiality, 
 however, do not dlsp-lease us here so much as in the 
 themes with which we are more familiar and have an 
 acquaintance of our own. For, in our comparative
 
 8 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 ignorance of the Eastern realm, we look here for vague 
 and general rather than particular impressions, and 
 are not disappointed. Then, too, glittering convention- 
 alities and idealizations are readily passed over on 
 decorated surfaces so immense and brilliant as these. 
 
 Whence, therefore, the merit of this verse? It lies 
 in its prism-changing immobility "which knows neither 
 desires nor tears," in its fixed gloss and glamour, in its 
 elegance whose rimes intercross like palms of gold. 
 The flame and flare of the orient are upon this poetry. 
 It is the tropical world of gigantic colors, of supreme 
 passlveness, of splendid luxuries, and brutalities. It 
 has the sense of immensity and the strength of contour; 
 of glassy, solemn-faced inertia and melancholic stupid- 
 ity. It represents a colossal ennui imprisoned in 
 amazing robes of colored porcelain. Its very short- 
 comings, limitations and monotony are essential to its 
 truly barbaric effect. 
 
 But all is not impassible in the verse of Leconte de 
 Lisle. A part of it presents an exception to the above 
 characterizations of his glazed Nature and his East. 
 In some thirty of his one hundred and seventy-five 
 poems, his physical and inner sensibilities and imagina- 
 tion are alive. Here he makes his verse live, and lives 
 in his verse, in the manner of Hugo. "Les Jungles" is 
 among these poems, and gives us a true sensation of 
 that life wherein Nirvana begins on earth and all is 
 "the shadow of a dream"; and where existence thins 
 out into nothingness in heat-expanding immensities, and 
 finally disappears in its own dimensions without bounds, 
 like a ripple caused by a dropped pebble, to use the
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 9 
 
 poet's own simile. One feels here divinely absorbed 
 out and up into the firmament, like a worshiper of 
 Buddha. We realize the dreaminess of the Hindoo 
 life in the poet's flat-nosed, world-sick bull, whose 
 mournful bellow faintly echoes in our ears across sun- 
 baked plains and lonesome, yawning centuries. It is 
 in accordance with his contempt of human kind and his 
 admiration of great beasts, as we shall see, that he 
 makes his brutes, rather than his human beings, live 
 and express his sensibilities and sentiments. Much 
 less effective as a living picture is his "Le Manchy" 
 with its maid than "Les Jungles" with its behemoth. 
 
 HIS PHILOSOPHY 
 
 In the main Leconte de Lisle seems to follow 
 Vigny in holding tha*t human existence is a "somber 
 accident between two infinite states of unconscious- 
 ness." -He considers life an affliction, since life is made 
 up of arrtbition an*d passion; and he maintains that the 
 business of man is to kill desire. At times, though, he 
 Is haunted with the fear that as the sun and the planets 
 are destroyed only to produce new globes, so death is 
 perhaps but a birth into a new life of struggle, in a 
 long and slow — in an everlasting — evolution toward 
 beatific extinction in Nirvana. The Ecclesiast has said : 
 "A living dog is better than a dead lion. Except eat- 
 ing and drinking, all is but shadow and smoke. And 
 the world is old, and the nothingness of living fills the 
 black tomb. . . . Ancient lover of the sun, who thus 
 dost groan, inevitable death is also a lie. Happy he
 
 10 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 who might engulf himself into it in one bound! Al- 
 ways, forever, in the intoxication and the horror of im- 
 mortality I listen, terrified, to the long roar of the eter- 
 nal Life." And again, "I envy thee who, in the calm and 
 black grave, art free of life, and no longer doth know 
 the shame of thinking and the horror of being a man." 
 Several years before the publication of the two poems 
 here quoted from. Sully Prudhomme had given expres- 
 sion in his verse to his dread of being eternally a man 
 — to his fear of immortality. 
 
 It is in the poem "La Maya" that Leconte de Lisle 
 pictures his philosophic conception of the universe as 
 nothing but a system of illusions: "Life is composed 
 inexhaustibly of the whirlpool, without end, of vain 
 appearances"; and yet in reality (for he was made up 
 of contradictions) he treated the world, in general and 
 particular, in a most concrete and intractable fashion. 
 
 He is, therefore, essentially Brahmanic or Buddhist 
 in his views of life and death. He would ignore the 
 exisftence of God and the soul, and any supernatural or 
 mystic powers, as these terms are understood by the 
 Christian world. In his eyes Christianity has availed 
 nothing — indeed worse than nothing. "Where are the 
 promised Gods?" he asks. "Time, O Nazarene, has 
 accepted Thy challenge; two thousand years have suf- 
 ficed to finish a God, and nothing has palpitated in his 
 barren ashes." He holds that Christ was a despairing 
 philosopher — one who uttered "a cry of distress for 
 the last time." The dogmas and practices of the 
 Catholic Church — Christianity — i-n the Middle Ages 
 are held up in contempt and terror by him in scores of
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle ii 
 
 pages. These were hideous centuries, he exclaims, 
 "of faith, leprosy and famine, of the doctrine of eter- 
 nal damnation, of Jacques Bonhomme in rags, of the 
 persecution of the Jews and the Albigenses." He 
 exposes to view the old-time cruelties of the Church 
 and Its cloistral systems of indolence and sensuality. In 
 "Le Corbeau," a raven discourses on the futility of the 
 deluge because of its failure to wipe life completely 
 from the earth's surface. It is perhaps in "Ka'i'n" 
 though that Leconte de Lisle shows most boldly his 
 antagonistic attitude toward the scheme of Christian- 
 ity — a scheme which, he would say, has troubled the 
 world's repose and the serenity which the oriental reli- 
 gions had been cultivating from time immemorial. 
 The poem represents the dream of Thogorma, son of 
 Elam, It is the vision of Cain sleeping the sleep of 
 centuries in his city of "Henokhia." A cavalier, com- 
 ing from across the plains, knocks at its gates and cries 
 out: "Evil to thee, silent sleeper, vile flesh, man that 
 the eternal vengeance has damned, thou who hast never 
 believed, never hoped!" 
 
 Whereupon Cain, the Avenger, awakes and would 
 justify himself, saying: — Thy assassin is the divine 
 iniquity, not I. Jehovah blinded me with the fire of 
 his wrath, I should have loved Eden, but I was dis- 
 inJierited from it before my time. I was born in a cry 
 of horror in the brambles, and he who engendered me 
 reproached me for having lived, and she who conceived 
 me never smiled upon me. "What wrong had I done? 
 And I ask of the implacable Master, What care I for 
 life at the price which thou sellest it? An angel
 
 12 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 appeared to me and commanded me to pray and pros- 
 trate myself before this Master that I hate. I refused 
 in my offended and tortured dignity, and he precipi- 
 tated me into crime. And I prophesy that man, servile, 
 mean, envious, will multiply after the flood; that God, 
 jealous and lying, will demand of him to adore, and he 
 will refuse. God will seek to destroy the human race, 
 but I will resuscitate the submerged cities; and the 
 little children of the avenged nations will laugh in their 
 cradles, not knowing his name, for he will annihilate 
 himself in his sterility. — 
 
 The one motto, then, which expresses the funda- 
 mental, all-absorbing idea around which groups the 
 Buddhist cult of Leconte de Lisle is: — I hate life and 
 all life! Passion, instinct, ambition, hope and every- 
 thing that teases human action, should not (he de- 
 clares) tempt him who is happily on the course toward 
 impassibility, for they are all devices which end in grief 
 and misery. Nature, he announces, is a decoration 
 mutely scornful of us; man is a vile and empty coward, 
 and woman is false; religions which inspire anything 
 except the desire of annihilation and the practices of a 
 resigned despair, are cruel deceptions. — 
 
 We are confronted, nevertheless, with all that verse 
 wherein the poet drops his creed of the insensible and 
 gives vent to the cries of his soul. 
 
 Is it not, one may ask, but the spectacle of his 
 enthusiastic youth in conflict with his pessimistic 
 maturity and old age? For he frequently refers to the 
 happiness of his young years when all was the prospect 
 of delight. He loved then, he says, the fierce war of
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 13 
 
 the seas, and knew the beauties of hope and the sensa- 
 tions of joy. Yet with the exception of the illusions of 
 his youth, nothing ever seems to have afforded him 
 satisfaction save the thought that there may be extinc- 
 tion in death. He exclaims in one poem: "The secret 
 of life is in the closed tombs; that which no longer 
 exists owes its state to its having existed; and the final 
 nothingness of beings and things is the unique reason 
 of their reality." "Nature will interrupt the din of 
 humanity with one stroke," he affirms in "Solvet 
 seclum." And it will not be when happiness is recon- 
 quered under magnificent skies. It will be when "the 
 Globe with all which inhabits it, sterile block torn from 
 its immense orbit, stupid, blind, filled with the last 
 outcries . . . staves its old and miserable crust against 
 some immobile universe." 
 
 In this wise his wrathful reproaches to fate, his 
 despairful, depressing contemplations on human des- 
 tiny, freely mingle with his cult of the impassible, with 
 his religion of Nirvana. And all this storm and calm 
 of pessimism are due to the fact, as he gives us to 
 understand, that the ambitious desires of his youth 
 have not been gratified. Yet, if we probe coldly to 
 the naked truth, we can but find that he was a proud, 
 disdainful soul, wrapped in a colossal egotism. And 
 as he seemed as a poet to know only how to be ungra- 
 cious, and to put his hand out in contempt against all 
 men and things, he found, to speak in a crude way, all 
 hands against him. For there is not a word in his 
 poetry which discloses that he ever truly loved a person 
 or was ever loved of any one. He does not offer an
 
 14 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 exclamation of sympathy or tenderness. No sentence 
 of his breathes a sweetness of heart or kindles a pity; 
 nor does any of his verse give the feeling that it is the 
 result of gentleness outraged, of self-sacrifice abused, 
 of true nobility crushed down. If you have a sorrow, 
 the comfort you get from his volumes must be strained 
 out of the brutal response: "Why dost thou not die, 
 then, miserable coward?" 
 
 Humanity, especially modern humanity, Is character- 
 ized by him en bloc as a vulgar dolt, as a "ravenous 
 plebeian." In our age, he proclaims, the muses are 
 mocked, divine mendicants; evil is at its full; the air of 
 the century is bad for the ulcerated minds; impure 
 ugliness is the queen of the world. In short, he 
 addresses to the nineteenth century his sonnet, "Aux 
 Modernes" (1872) : "Your brain is empty like your 
 bosom . . , and drowned in the nothingness of 
 supreme ennuis, you will stupidly die in filling your 
 pockets." In face of this wholesale ana'thema, we have 
 his most flattering and unreserved, though cold, tribute 
 to those "modernes" who are called the Parisians. He 
 says in "Le Sacre de Paris": "Star of nations, Paris! 
 Nurse of the great dead and celebrated living, vener- 
 able in the face of jealous centuries . . . offer thy free 
 glory and thy grand agony as an example to the uni- 
 verse." And, too, he lays an exalted tribute at the 
 feet of Rome — Italy — in his poem "A I'ltalle," 
 
 He therefore gives frank evidence, in spite of all his 
 pessimism, that the human race, with its Rome and 
 Paris, has not lived in vain since the days of the 
 Greeks; nor is the future so empty as he would have us
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 15 
 
 believe, since he proclaims that France is at the helm 
 of modern civilization. Evidently it never occurred to 
 him to try to reconcile his cult of the impassible with 
 his lofty laudations of Greece and Italy. Was it 
 because Greece was grandly impassible that "her heart, 
 overflowing with passions on fire," moves his raptures? 
 Or was Rome nobly pursuing the insensible when she 
 offered, as he says, the illustrious example to the world 
 of her lacerated, palpitating bosom, and her lips of 
 gold with their endless sob? 
 
 But it is not alone the disillusions of his young years 
 that explain why he affected to curse and despise our 
 century and all centuries since the Greek era. In his 
 prefaces he gave another reason, namely, that poetry 
 has not followed in the paths marked out by Homer, 
 iEschylus and Sophocles. Since the day of Sophocles, 
 he announced, decadence and barbarism have invaded 
 the human mind and killed art. Dante, Shakespeare, 
 Milton, had shown the force and height of their indi- 
 vidual genius, yet their language and conceptions were 
 barbaric. And he declared his special abhorrence of 
 the modern poets — the Romantics — who aired their 
 personal woes and love affairs in verse. All this, and 
 much more, the poet came to acknowledge as nonsense 
 by suppressing his prefaces from his later editions, and 
 formally retracting their contents, in effect, in his eulo- 
 gium of Victor Hugo before the Academy. For, on 
 this occasion, after more than thirty years, he pro- 
 claimed Hugo — the incarnation of all that is barbar- 
 ous and deplorable in poetry according to our poet's 
 previous standards — the equal of iEschylus. As the
 
 i6 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 talents of Leconte de Lisle developed more and more 
 exclusively into admitted non-Hellenic realms, he must 
 certainly have recognized, after a time, that he had be- 
 come professedly a barbarian himself and, as such, was 
 responsible, so far as he well could be, for modern 
 decadence, since he was infusing the barbaric into Greek 
 ideals. And he may have come to perceive, too, that 
 his achievements had been made possible by those very 
 Romantic poets whom he was reacting against and 
 despising, and that his poetic fortune was the product 
 of their direct legacies. 
 
 Thus he sweeps away his own pessimistic dicta as 
 often as he brings them to a practical and personal test, 
 for it was during the siege of Paris that he wrote 
 "Le Sacre de Paris," when the city was merely getting 
 its just deserts, judged by the criteria with which he 
 tested this "assassinating century." And it was in his 
 discourse at the Academy that, after his numerous 
 attempts to be received by those immortal "modernes" 
 whom he was supposed to disdain, he returned thanks, 
 in the form virtually of an encomium, to the modern 
 world in general — the humor of which occasion was 
 very properly seized by his recipient, Dumas the 
 Younger. 
 
 One is left but to conclude that the poet's philosophy 
 of life and his ideas in general are as contradictory and 
 empty in vital essence, as confirmed by his own pen, as 
 they are harsh and brutal in their elegance. He can 
 be shown, in a score of ways, to stand conspicuously 
 in his own light, with a certain naivete or affectation as 
 colossal as are his solemnity and autocracy. And yet,
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 17 
 
 as poets go, he must pass for an intellectual one, for, 
 while he is neither an original, complex nor subtle 
 thinker, he does reproduce phases of thought and gives 
 a marked intellectual cast to many of his poems; and 
 he was an erudite. What one notes, however, is that 
 the French poet who is thus to be singled out specially 
 as a savant, and who strove to introduce the intellec- 
 tual into the realm of the poetic Muse, is perhaps far 
 less rational than any of his great confreres, as meas- 
 ured by modern standards. 
 
 He leaves us as unconcerned over his personal verse 
 as over his enameled lyrics. As he has no sympathy 
 for us, in his pachydermatous spleen, we have no sym- 
 pathy for his groans, nor any interest in nor serious 
 respect for his ideas. They are both and all the 
 product of an indolent, slow-moving, oriental tem- 
 perament anchored in the Occident (a temperament 
 which tends to engender pessimistic disappointment in 
 an egoistic soul), and they are born of one long, 
 immense huff of a really proud, defiant poet to whom 
 blessings and honors came too slowly to gratify his 
 ambitions. And yet, with all this mood of being out 
 of joint with his time, and with all the affectation in 
 his attitude and dogmatism, there was a kind of cour- 
 age and nobility in his example — that of an isolated 
 and challenging personality, who appeared to ask no 
 favors of man or God, and granted none. This, 
 together with his barbaric spirit which belonged neither 
 to our clime nor characteristically to our century, made 
 him a figure truly and notably unique, and, in a sense, 
 subhme, as he pulled back sullenly in the traces of
 
 i8 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 modern civilization. And as a result, his poetic prod- 
 uct is, in a way, as striking an instance as Baudelaire's 
 of the heautont'tmorumenos. 
 
 He has been called a "moderne" by contemporary 
 French critics (in their reaction against the idea of 
 their predecessors that he was a preterist), because he 
 belongs to the modern school of pessimists, and is a 
 logical link in the chain of later French thought. But 
 this, while true in one view, seems only to confuse the 
 meaning of things. It amounts to saying that he was 
 a "moderne" because he was a preterist. Musset and 
 Sully Prudhomme, for instance, are "modernes" because 
 their poetic temperaments, sensibilities and themes 
 belong to no age but our own. The ideals of Leconte 
 de Lisle, on the contrary, are not in any sense inherent 
 in our epoch — they do not distinguish it. His pessi- 
 mism and orientalism are as old as history; and it was 
 precisely by extolling the past and seeking to bury him- 
 self in it that he endeavored to react against modern 
 ideas and tendencies. 
 
 And finally, to pass on, it is to be observed that he 
 does not follow his own Buddhist creed and cult, for 
 there is in his volume, as we have noted, nothing of 
 that love and pity which made Gautama announce his 
 doctrines to mankind. The poet lacks that atmosphere 
 of infinite kindliness and of universal charity which dif- 
 fuses a soft fragrance and comforting balm in Buddha's 
 world. By contrast, we have in Leconte de Lisle an 
 elegant epicure of brutality, a lover of the insensate 
 luxury of harsh cruelties, the apostle of the barbaric 
 deadening of the loftier instincts and of the deafening
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 19 
 
 of the finer voices of duty. One of the great and wise 
 men of our era gave famlHar expression to the modern 
 impulse toward tolerance by saying that he did not 
 know how to draw an indictment against a whole 
 nation. Leconte de Lisle sought to draw an indictment 
 against Man, Woman, Nature and God, in a heartless 
 and sumptuous display of verse. 
 
 He, then, introduced to the realm of French poetry 
 something of the Buddhist philosophy and scheme of 
 life. In this he merely put a Hindoo garb around the 
 pessimism of Vigny, only that he reversed the Vigny 
 attitude by hating "the majesty of human sufferings" 
 and worshiping implacable Nature and Space, whence 
 the explanation that humanity, compared with Nature, 
 occupies little place in his poetic output. In like man- 
 ner, he gave a new dress to Baudelaire's theme of 
 fatalistic heredity and to his black twisting demon of 
 ennui, and also to Sully Prudhomme's thesis about the 
 shuddering thought of immortality. He did cast the 
 writings and tortures of the one, and the refined 
 hyperesthesia of the other, in a barbaric calm and 
 indifference — in a Buddhist impassibleness. To the 
 love and concern of the Romantic school for frail 
 humanity and its enthusiastic ephemeralities, he op- 
 posed the love and cult of the insensibly eternal and 
 distant — of the inanimate things of beauty which give 
 pleasure without pain, because they neither change nor 
 die.
 
 20 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 PHYSICAL AND INNER SENSIBILITIES 
 
 The poetic product, considered as one body, of 
 Leconte de Lisle is like a behemoth lying in the sun, 
 and giving once in a while an evidence of life. Here 
 and there his verse shows a twitch of existence and a 
 use of the sensory organs. Most of these awakenings 
 of his physical sensibilities (observed in the thirty of 
 his poems already referred to) are found in the middle 
 portion of the "Barbares." His favorite way of mak- 
 ing us perceive that his immobile beasts are living, is by 
 referring to their occasional twinges of "comfort" or 
 discomfort. He offers, too, here and there a glimpse 
 of a lizard, hot with the fires of noon, his flight spark- 
 ling through red grass. In "Les Jungles" we feel the 
 awful heat and torpor of noontide in India. In "Le 
 Desert," a flaming, endless sky and plain are present to 
 our consciousness. We hear now and then some lone- 
 some beast's cry piercing the stillness of the night. At 
 times one's sense of smell seems seized with a burning 
 perfume or an aroma of "live flesh"; and in the last 
 two lines of "Le Sommeil de Leilah," our salivary 
 glands are tempted. 
 
 It is thus, in brief moments and at long intervals, 
 that we see, hear, feel, smell and taste in the verse of 
 Leconte de Lisle. It is thus that his East, with its 
 splendors of furnaced desert, of shining, hot, brass 
 skies, of baked silence — in a word, the superb realm of 
 the vertical sun — is reflected in certain of his poems. 
 In this phase he merely extends Hugo's great world 
 of physical sensibilities into the East, for Leconte de
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 21 
 
 Lisle, alone of the major French poets (if we except 
 Baudelaire) , has given us the feeling of the true tropics. 
 
 Following Hugo, too, he had a particular gift for 
 immensity, and with it, naturally, a slowness and 
 heaviness — his East is never light-winged nor swift. 
 He gives us the sense of tremendous expanses across 
 the earth's surface and space; he makes enormous bulls 
 loom in his stanzas; magnificent carnivora haunt there, 
 and huge birds wheel slowly in solitary flights — all add- 
 ing a fitting notion of stolidity, tedium vita and 
 brutish epic dimension, to the Boeotian inertia of his 
 verse. In "Les Elephants" there is a real and massive 
 effect of a troop of monstrous elephants in the very act 
 of unsettling the equilibrium of a desert and troubling 
 the tranquil symmetries of its horizon. We seem 
 conscious that these colossuses have passed by — that a 
 gigantic mass has moved across the level of this poem, 
 which begins and ends with the flatness and stillness of 
 an infinite waste of sand. The sense of size and of 
 outdoor immensity, and the effect of making the trop- 
 ical sun burn in that portion of his verse which is 
 vibrant, and scintillate on his enameled pages as if on 
 glaring porcelain surfaces at noon — these, and these 
 alone, are the commanding results which the physical 
 sensibilities of Leconte de Lisle seem to offer. 
 
 His inner sensibilities are simple and primitive. His 
 emotions are behemoth-like. They are apt to be 
 aroused by the bellowings of bulls; for the poet says in 
 "Les Bucoliastes" : "Laugh of woman and song of 
 lark at dawn are sounds soft to the ear and often 
 desired; but nothing equals the amorous and sonorous
 
 22 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 voice of a three-year-old bull that bellows across the 
 meadows." This bovine sentimentality will appear 
 ridiculous to the reader, but it is a logical part of the 
 poet's adoration of beasts and his contempt for human- 
 kind. The roar of animals across lonesome wastes and 
 down the silent depths of thick, tropical forests, and 
 similar barbaric effects, awaken in him vague, elephan- 
 tine regrets akin to purely physical sensibilities, and 
 they produce the charm of his true barbaric disposition. 
 For beasts, and for the vast, melancholic array of 
 Eastern skies as they glow across the plains of his soul, 
 the sufferings and tenderness of man, woman and child 
 are disdained and ignored. These big-girted, almost 
 inert, longings and mournfulnesses, together with his 
 pessimistic hatreds and curses, comprise the sum and 
 substance of the verse which his inner sensibilities 
 genuinely inspire. 
 
 His women are either enameled objects suitable to 
 his ornate and, therefore, sumptuous lyrics, or are 
 lifeless, scenic forms, as in his epopees, or are fitted in 
 a general way to an impersonal, insensible Muse. In 
 a very few poems he gives the personal turn of a poetic 
 lover to his verse, but this is always a patent conven- 
 tionality. He seemed absolutely denuded of the true 
 sentiment for living woman; and it was not a question 
 of choice with him. The proof of his attempt and 
 failure to be a love poet is seen in several poesies found 
 in his early editions and since suppressed. Among 
 them "Les Bois," for instance, is an illustration of 
 the sheer commonplaceness he displayed when he 
 attempted to be a sentimental lover.
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 23 
 
 This is not all. He affected to despise woman from 
 principle as bitterly as Vigny — not, of course, the 
 grand, impassible goddess types like the Venus of 
 Melos or Hypatia, but woman who is the mother, 
 sister, wife, daughter. He refers to the theme only 
 in two brief expressions. One of them is a character- 
 ization of love as the "falsehood of a moment," and 
 the other is: "Woman is much more bitter than the 
 tomb." He discloses in "La Vipere" his inability, 
 shared by certain of his confreres, to conceive of 
 woman other than as one of two extremes : a lofty, 
 non-existent type to be adored like a goddess of liberty 
 — a white vision of a cold virgin; or a mere corporeal 
 creature signifying that love is physical, and as such 
 tends to baseness. 
 
 Woman, the living and spiritual companion of man, 
 was unknown to Leconte de Lisle. There are his 
 "Le Manchy" and several other poems where his 
 physical view of her is, as it were, refined, idealized. 
 But here she still exists only in the body, only by reason 
 of her external charms, garb and surroundings: his 
 conception of her Is never relieved nor elevated by any 
 of the mental, moral and soulful aspects which enter, 
 in Sully Prudhomme, into her higher and truer 
 realizations. 
 
 Hence he is by no means absolutely impassible, for, 
 although he is not a poet of sensitive flesh and heart 
 strings like Musset, he is not insensible like a stone. It 
 was his aim to produce a decided degree of insensibility 
 on the nerves of modern poetry. And so, whenever 
 emotivity is set astir in his pages, it is that of a lower
 
 24 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 order of life — of big animals or lazy Buddhist devo- 
 tees. The charm of the slight phase of sentimentality 
 in the last stanza of "Le Manchy," so much quoted to 
 show that he is not impassible, lies in its exotic and 
 immobile flavor, because it is a very primitive and 
 formal type of sentiment for this modern epoch which 
 excels in the complex, keen, and varied representations 
 of emotional life. 
 
 Likewise, his art of verse is impersonal compared 
 with that of Musset, yet it is by no means as imper- 
 sonal as it would have been if he had only written in the 
 style of his "Hypatie and Cyrille." His personality 
 is revealed distinctly in his pages. Their comparative 
 insensibility is his own comparative individual insensi- 
 bility; and, too, he has not avoided the use of personal 
 pronouns. But, taking his volumes as a whole, they 
 make for impassibility in a most eminent degree : his 
 great attempt, as represented by four-fifths of his 
 poems, is to cap his nerves with the cement of indiffer- 
 ence and "mute pride," and to let no humanity (to fol- 
 low the hint of the famous line of Lamartine) beat 
 under the thick coating, or shining scaly armor, of his 
 verse. 
 
 IMAGINATION AND FANCY 
 
 Parnassianism, as illustrated in the main by Leconte 
 de Lisle, tends to emasculate imagination, for it would 
 deprive the imaginative of emotion. The decorative 
 art, since it should present a certain evenness of sur- 
 face, shuns the vivid employment of distance, perspec- 
 tive, heights and depths, and all the proper imagina-
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 25 
 
 tive effects. In "Kain" we observe the manner in which 
 the imaginative quality is affected by the concern for 
 decorative aims and for the technical coating of this 
 verse. The flood scene in the last stanzas of the poem 
 is an example of how factitious ornateness can destroy 
 a dream. The same is true of Leconte de Lisle's lyric 
 verse where his art is akin to that of enameling, as will 
 be noted farther on. Glazed processes of all kinds 
 necessarily chill and kill imagination and fancy because 
 both are sacrificed to the prudence required by the 
 mechanical necessities of the glazed art. It is for this 
 reason that porcelain painting is largely confined to 
 copyings. Fancy in Leconte de Lisle's pages, there- 
 fore, is neither creative, lively, gay, versatile nor 
 feather-winged. It never captivates with sudden 
 charm. 
 
 But to this general statement there is a grand excep- 
 tion which shows that he was endowed with, and could 
 display magnificently, the imaginative faculty. The 
 exception may be observed, as we have remarked, in 
 about one-fifth of his verse where his emotions heave 
 heavily, and the pageantries of the East pass into our 
 souls. Here, with the aid of a carefully wrought style, 
 he opened up for the imagination the colossal vision of 
 the sun-burned tropics. 
 
 ARTISTIC AND ESTHETIC SENSIBILITIES 
 
 Leconte de Lisle's admiration of the inanimate uni- 
 verse is not a return to the Classic. It is merely 
 Romanticism insensibilized and decorated, since the
 
 2.6 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Romantic love of the spectacle of the universe and of 
 the exotic is the fond of his art. In this evolution from 
 the Romantic to the artistic — to Parnassianism — his 
 name is not chronologically the first one in France. 
 The year his first volume appeared (1852) some of 
 the "Emaux et Camees" of Gautier were put forth in 
 book form. It was indeed Gautier who, in the verse 
 which he had been publishing for twenty years, gave 
 birth to the Parnassian idea; but as he was, in a sense, 
 toyishly content with his tiny cameos and their exquis- 
 ite impeccableness, it fell to the lot of Leconte de Lisle, 
 with the East in his eyes, to lead the Parnassian 
 school. 
 
 In inquiring briefly into the nature of his artistic and 
 esthetic sensibilities as they are exhibited in his poetry, 
 we should separate his verse into two general kinds: 
 the epic and the lyric. His decorative epic verse is 
 usually of the sort seen, for instance, in Cormon's 
 "Cain" in the Luxembourg, or in Bonnat's fresco of 
 St. Denis in the Pantheon. In the one case it is dryly 
 effaced and sterilized; in the other it is characterized 
 by bold, hard schemes of masses and colors, being full- 
 bodied and solidly tangible. Since our poet exhibited 
 a marked concern for the fabrication of verse, and, in 
 his best examples, for the fine juxtaposition of ele- 
 ments that are congruous to his theme, it is his techni- 
 cally realistic and artistic processes which engage the 
 main attention. He has the considerable honor of 
 standing as the representative in poetry of all that 
 latter-day French epic wherein the aim for scientific 
 and esthetic truth dominates. In this treatment of
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 27 
 
 epopees he owes little if anything to Hugo, for the 
 epic poetry of the latter is conceived and composed 
 wholly on Romantic plans. 
 
 It was Hugo and not Leconte de Lisle, however, 
 who introduced the epic Muse into modern French 
 poetry, and fully developed it in various phases almost 
 before Leconte de Lisle had published the "Antiques." 
 For instance, there is Hugo's Napoleonic epic at Its 
 height in the "Expiation" (1852), while the epic In 
 Leconte de Lisle did not evolve until several years 
 after. The lyrical and descriptive verse came first in 
 the development of his poetic talents. Hugo was the 
 first modern French poet to write famous epopees, but 
 those of Leconte de Lisle are of a different species. 
 
 His decorative art in its lyric form displays his love 
 for Eastern ornament and elegance, for the enameled 
 blaze of violent colorations. It has revealed a realm 
 of flamboyant gorgeousness. This is proper to his 
 barbaric theme, and one may well ask, What modern 
 poet has given the world such a resplendent volume of 
 oriental verse as the "Barbares," or Indeed the 
 "Tragiques"? 
 
 It Is the fashion at present to offer wholesale praise 
 of his erudite care for local color and for scientific and 
 artistic truth, and he merits in these respects great 
 tributes because of his Influence and his achievements, 
 In contrast with the Ignorance of the Romantics. It 
 should be pointed out, however, that his artistic proc- 
 esses and erudition are often false and unscientific, 
 judged by the standards of to-day, when, grace to him 
 as much as to any one, the world has become more
 
 28 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 exacting in these matters. Take his use of colors. He 
 does not always employ them with a knowledge of 
 scientific values, and brings into barbaric and unedu- 
 cated display hues which have no affinity for one an- 
 other. Possibly he had this partially in mind when, as 
 is reported, he very correctly referred to himself on 
 one occasion as a "luministe" rather than a "coloriste." 
 In other words, he is apt to employ tints like a 
 decorator of porcelain. He will say, for instance : 
 "All her charming body shines like a lily in the violets." 
 Why violet tesf Because it rimes with the bandelettes. 
 Of course this produces a disagreeable effect on any 
 one familiar with the values of color. Violet has no 
 sympathy for the white of the lily or of flesh. The only 
 excuse which may be offered is that he is not describing 
 life here but a "medal." 
 
 We could easily show how he mixes the East into his 
 Greece, and Greece into his North. Hydromel, rose- 
 colors, naked women, laughing springtide nature, 
 florid dawns, vermilion air, are frequently his material 
 in his verse on the North. In "Christine," Septentrio- 
 nality is only indicated in the "black pines." Other- 
 wise the setting of the poem is austral. Elves are 
 defined usually as northern sprites which are supposed 
 to haunt hills and wild spots; but in his "Les Elfes" we 
 have "prairie elves" dancing on a plain and crowned 
 with thyme and marjoram which are not distinctly 
 northern plants. The certain impuissance, or sterility, 
 which reigns over so much of his verse is due, in part 
 at least, to this hybridism. By contrast, the artistic 
 and educated skill of Gautier, under all such tests, was
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 29 
 
 faultless so far as he went, for he was in reality an 
 artist first and a poet afterward. 
 
 No, the rare value of the artistic and esthetic sensi- 
 bilities, as displayed by Leconte de Lisle, lies elsewhere. 
 It is to be found in the fact that he united emotion and 
 imagination with mentality — the mentality which is 
 shown by erudite and scientific groupings of verse. In 
 Hugo we have the extreme where emotion and fancy — 
 the vast and the vague — sweep over the artistic and the 
 microscopically technical. In Gautier, there is the 
 opposite extreme where the artistic, and the niceness 
 of term, exclude almost all else. In his pages the clear- 
 ness of contour destroys the expanse of fancy and 
 reduces all to a miniature domain. But in the thirty 
 poems of Leconte de Lisle to which we have been 
 referring, we find a union of emotion and vision with 
 regular and patient construction of verse. Here the 
 immense spaces of a strong imagination are wedded to 
 careful execution — the result giving precision of out- 
 line to sense of size. He falls short of Hugo for the 
 one series of qualities, and does not equal Gautier for 
 absolute impeccability as an artist; but he offers to the 
 modern French Muse of poetry the first signal example 
 of a juste milieu — a just middle ground. 
 
 Hereof consists the supreme interest of his artistic 
 and esthetic role. It represents the blending in out- 
 door life of technical Naturalism, or Realism, with 
 expanding Idealism. One feels that these pages reflect 
 the true East, the real tropical sun, its genuine color, 
 and that the poet has studied his animals from a near 
 view with something of a realistic truth; and yet, at
 
 30 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 the same time, he makes emphatically for Idealism in 
 all its length and breadth, uniting therewith scholarly, 
 artistic minuteness, general conformation to theme, 
 scientWc use of language. It is thus that he sought to 
 wed reality with ideality. It may be called the mar- 
 riage of science and poetry. The same is to be said, 
 however, of Gautier, while noting that Gautier dwelt 
 in the artistic domain and not in the veritable universe 
 like Leconte de Lisle. The remark follows that it is 
 in Parnassianism that the great modern realm of 
 science, with its severe methods of observation and 
 exactness, has made its impress on that of French 
 poetry. 
 
 There are in Leconte de Lisle no Impressionist uses 
 of hazes and fogginess^ — the effects of air which throw 
 a sweetness, tenderness and mystery around themes. 
 His penchant for the bold, brilliant sunlight close at 
 hand was too great to permit this. But it may be said 
 that, while the French Impressionist manipulations of 
 light may be traced in poetry directly to Baudelaire 
 in their shadowy and darker schemes — in their chiaro- 
 scuros — on the other hand, with respect to the 
 Impressionist fondness for noon scenes and love of 
 direct, vibrant sunlight, one finds perhaps a natural 
 and original source in the effects of the blaze of the 
 perpendicular sun in the verse of Leconte de Lisle. In 
 comparison with him, Hugo's uses of sunlight, non- 
 tropical as they naturally were, pale in intensity and 
 splendor. But, nevertheless, back of both Baudelaire 
 and Leconte de Lisle stood Hugo with his nights and 
 his noons; and without this grand precursor, who
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 31 
 
 made all things possible to the modern French poet, 
 neither Baudelaire nor Leconte de Lisle could have 
 been what they are. 
 
 STYLE 
 
 It scarcely need be said that style in his pages is a 
 sort of mechanical business wherein the h\bor lima 
 dominates over impulse and spontaneity. As a result, 
 on the whole, his tropes are very commonplace and 
 flatten out the sense and imagery. But it is, for this 
 reason, rare indeed that a metaphor leads him into a 
 rhetorical error as in the sixth stanza from the last in 
 "Kain" where we have : "The sea went on, striding 
 at one fold of its swell . . . the last cries." He dis- 
 plays force of style strikingly now and then as in the 
 sonnet "Aux Modernes." In his decorative epic verse, 
 as seen at its best in "Ka'in," there is a decided sense of 
 strength; but herein he follows and does not greatly 
 surpass Vigny. The verse in "Ka'in" is so factitious, 
 so little possessed of vital vigor, that the strength it 
 has seems that of a great bronze manikin. In effects 
 of mere size, massiveness and expanse, he is unap- 
 proached by any of his confreres^ — always excepting, 
 of course, Victor Hugo. 
 
 But it is to the quality of elegance that Leconte de 
 Lisle gives greatest heed in his style. His style prop- 
 erly partakes of his artistic and barbaric temperament, 
 and gives us displays of profuse gorgeousness rather 
 than examples of finely discriminating choice and its 
 refined chariness — that is to say, heaviness and stolidity
 
 32 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 of adornment rather than deHcacy, grace and variety. 
 His rhetorical elegance, therefore, means especially a 
 beautiful appearance, signifying that language is 
 selected, as far as possible, for its richness of look 
 and sound. And he succeeds perfectly in this wealth of 
 enameled rime and glazed galore, as in the poem 
 "La Verandah" and many other poesies, where costly 
 splendors reign in amazing realms of sumptuous glory. 
 To turn an instant to his Hellenic world, It seems 
 impossible to imagine a deeper crust of decorative 
 Greek beauty laid on verse than in "Le Vase." In 
 this domain of polychrome luster, Leconte de Lisle 
 surpasses all French poets. Here lies his distinguish- 
 ing triumph of style. His elegance would offset any 
 disagreeable effect of the stereotyped processes of his 
 lyric verse, and of the declamatory pose, stilted gesture, 
 and empty colloquy which so freely haunt his epopees. 
 His glazed art consists of the attachment to a set of 
 rimes of a comely or gorgeous vocabulary which dis- 
 plays its uniform variety like a kaleidoscope. 
 
 We have all along referred to his language as enam- 
 eled. This best describes the peculiar temper of his 
 poetry taken as a whole, and especially of his lyric 
 verse. His rime is usually spoken of as marmorean 
 or bronze. It appears too scintillating and highly col- 
 ored for bronze like that in "Les Destinees" of Vigny; 
 nor does it suggest the light, clicking, marble blocks 
 of Gautier's stanzas. But on the vases and paintings 
 in the museum at Sevres, one may trace out and feast 
 his eyes on the glamored sceneries of Leconte de Lisle. 
 His pages possess the glaze and radiance of enameled
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 33 
 
 porcelain. They are somehow inspissated and not 
 translucent — they appear covered with an impermeable 
 gloss. This corresponds to the concreteness of the 
 sculpturesque style of Gautier — concreteness of style 
 being a Parnassian trait. And there seems something 
 peculiarly fitting in this firing process of verse-making 
 when the theme is the burning East. 
 
 The decorative, ornate feature which dominates 
 every other element of style in Leconte de Lisle is, then, 
 substituted for those living, vivid, vital, powerful quali- 
 ties which are the glory of Hugo. Words that burn 
 the lips and thrill with keen life, verse that is a "living 
 body," and all the highest-typed rhetorical gifts which 
 distinguish the greatest poetry, are foreign as a whole 
 to the art of Leconte de Lisle. His words in courting 
 beauty court emptiness — a truly barbaric vacancy of 
 look and hoUowness of sound. Instinctive grace, flexi- 
 bility, airiness, swiftness and the charm of the sudden 
 and unexpected, as well as the great inspired Hugo- 
 esque qualities, are not native to the pen of Leconte de 
 Lisle. His verse is static rather than in motion, dense 
 not fragile, opaque not pellucid, vitreous or vitrified not 
 ethereal, and seems incapable of a mellowing patina. 
 His great and unique gift to the French language is 
 seen, however, when we pose this question: Who before 
 his day would ever have imagined that the French 
 idiom could be made to reflect, with such wealth of 
 broad, daring glare, the immense brilliancy and flaming 
 prismatic colorations of the tropics? The "Barbares" 
 are mirific pages of enameled magnificence, with here 
 and there a heavy sign of a colossal life underneath.
 
 34 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 CONCLUDING COMMENT 
 
 Looking at the poetic talent of Leconte de Lisle in 
 its totality, one easily remarks how it is based on, 
 and is a direct outgrowth of, the characteristics of the 
 Romantic school. His East is a continuation of the 
 oriental phase of Romanticism, and his dominating 
 love of Nature is born of Victor Hugo. His Buddhism 
 is a natural feature of his East, and is a pantheistic 
 admiration of the impassible immensities of Space, 
 quite akin to Hugo's commanding pantheistic admira- 
 tion of the calm Firmament, but with the substitution 
 of peace in Nirvana, as the ultimate expression of 
 Space, for Hugo's peace on the bosom of God, as the 
 ultimate expression of the Firmament. The inner and 
 physical sensibilities and imagination of Leconte de 
 Lisle, as displayed in that certain fraction of his poetry 
 where he really gives the true force and glory to his 
 East, are Hugo's own offspring in all that there is of 
 native love of immensity, of fondness for huge beasts, 
 and of other natural features. He continues the 
 Romantic cult of environment, and exaggerates it to 
 an extreme, since he confines himself almost wholly to 
 it. His adoration of externals, of the universe, of the 
 outward, and his comparative disregard of the inner 
 world, are but duplications of Hugo's gifts for Nature, 
 for contours, for that which is without, rather than for 
 the study and portrayal of character, the penetration 
 of the inward life, the conception of interesting and 
 masterly personages. In all these latter phases Hugo
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 35 
 
 was weak, yet at the same time he loved and wor- 
 shiped Man as well as Nature. 
 
 The point of departure of Leconte de Lisle from 
 Romanticism, and the basis of his poetic art, lie funda- 
 mentally in his hate of Man and of the living sensi- 
 bilities, and in his corresponding love of the artistic 
 for its own impassible sake and domain. The key of 
 his philosophy and Parnassianism is to be found in 
 his famous "Midi": "Man, if you believe in and love 
 the luxuries of joys and sorrows, flee the blazing noon, 
 for Nature is empty and the Sun consumes — nothing 
 lives here, nothing is sad or joyous. But if you are 
 undeceived as to the vanities of life, and thirst to forget 
 this agitated world, and wish, knowing neither how to 
 pardon nor to curse, to taste a supreme and dejected 
 voluptuousness, come and seek the Sun's blaze, for He 
 will speak to you in sublime words. Absorb yourself 
 in His implacable flamings!" 
 
 Thus as Hugo, in his tender love and pity of hu- 
 manity, softens his pages with twilights, with evenings, 
 with night and its starry firmament and the more re- 
 clusive, gentle, God-inspiring aspects and phases of 
 Nature, as the fit accompaniment to the human joys and 
 fears which fill his verse, so Leconte de Lisle, in his 
 disdain of humankind, pours upon his poems the open, 
 fierce, relentless blaze of the tropical sun, whose effect 
 he rarely relieves and makes tender by dusks and 
 shadows. This he converted into Parnassianism, to 
 wit: the love of the eternal forms of beauty that do not 
 fade, and the love of toil over the perfecting of elegant
 
 36 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 verse. "La forme est tout, le fond n'est rien" — the 
 form is everything, the content nothing — was a formula 
 which, it is said, Leconte de Lisle often repeated; and 
 herein he, for his part, illustrated a return from the 
 Romantic, which was exotic to France, to the French 
 love and talent for form and the artistic. 
 
 Again, he has shown how poetry can be a science as 
 well as an art, and why a versemaker should be a man 
 of culture and erudition, thus opposing the Romantic 
 idea that poets should be children of Nature, depend- 
 ing on their own impulses and inspirations. He illus- 
 trates, in some thirty of his poems, the quite evenly 
 balanced combination of living sensibilities and imagina- 
 tion on one hand and, on the other, purely artistic sensi- 
 bilities and the severe mechanics of verse — truly a not- 
 able, a unique, performance, and one fraught with 
 great benefits. 
 
 Furthermore, his poetry, which followed in the main 
 the only new course left open after the Romantics, has 
 exercised a strong and, in a way, very wholesome reac- 
 tion against that Romanticism which drifted into hyper- 
 esthesia and loathsome Realism. And at the same time 
 he displayed a brutality (excused in a measure by his 
 elegant striving for the artistic) as pronounced as that 
 of Baudelaire and the Realists. 
 
 We have merely tried in these pages to outline some 
 of the reasons why the name of Leconte de Lisle is to 
 be regarded as the most momentous one in the evolu- 
 tion of French poetry since the epoch that gave flight to 
 the genius of Hugo, Lamartine and Musset — a name 
 that stands for the Parnassian school as Hugo's stands
 
 Poetic Legacy of Leconte De Lisle 37 
 
 for the Romantic. It has not been the purpose here to 
 attempt to expand the merits and revel in the glories 
 of this Parnassianism; nor to show how this neutral 
 conception of the poetic art, as a business of "regular 
 toil," tends, with its almost exclusive regard for ex- 
 ternals, to drag the poetic Muse down to artificial, imi- 
 tative and non-individualistic processes. 
 
 We have noted how imitative Leconte de Lisle was. 
 He partook freely of Hugo; found his ideas in his com- 
 panion poets; came after Gautier in his theory and 
 practice of the artistic and the love of the beautiful; 
 paraphrased the Greek and Latin poets; and boldly 
 imitated any one — even the unique powers of Baude- 
 laire. His lines which are patterned after the fashion 
 of Hugo are countless, and his style in a very general 
 way finds a striking precedent in Vigny. In a word, 
 as one who belongs to the Occident naturally conceives 
 of all the sphere of grand poetry with its peerless peaks 
 and ranges of human interest, he would seem justified 
 in saying that the poetic product of Leconte de Lisle 
 is to be compared with the total output of verse as is 
 the art of porcelain painting with that of Rembrandt 
 and Velazquez. 
 
 But if at times you weary of the fatigues and sor- 
 rows of being a mortal, and, following the precept of 
 the "Midi," can barbarize yourself sufliciently to be- 
 come buried for a time in a realm of Eastern and lone- 
 some splendor whose very imperturbation and empti- 
 ness are a proud solace, bathe yourself for a half day 
 in the tropical sun and strength of these calm pages of 
 spacious verse, and, forgetting the agitations and sen- 
 
 ;5
 
 38 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 sitiveness of weak human life and its petty ambitions, 
 defeats, vanities, contemplate, in these exotic monoto- 
 nies of immobile sky and desert, the glory of that 
 which is implacably beautiful and does not suffer nor 
 pass away. You will then have tasted a truly barbaric 
 mood and a genuine poetic and esthetic pleasure. You 
 will then have experienced something of the impassible 
 and sumptuous absorption into the extinction of 
 Nirvana.
 
 ii. The Daughter of the French Romantics
 
 THE DAUGHTER OF THE FRENCH 
 ROMANTICS 
 
 MADAME MARIE MENNESSIER-NODIER 
 
 THE one great, soul-stirring date in the history 
 of French letters is February 25, 1830. A 
 brother of Hamlet and Faust was then born 
 to France at the Theatre Fran^ais — Hernani ! At last 
 emotion and imagination (which had given poetry to 
 England and music to Germany) had seized the canvas 
 of French literature and from their depths and heights 
 of Mystery, of the Impossible and the pitifully Mortal, 
 were massing and contrasting immense protrusions, per- 
 spectives and chiaroscuros of sentiment, tenderness and 
 fantasy, where all had largely been grisailles, or hue- 
 less level surfaces decorated with a faultless and chilled 
 technic. 
 
 The echoing horn of Hernani announced to the races 
 of earth that French belles-lettres were now to inspire 
 an interest magnificently human rather than mental and 
 artistic. The young men and women of 1830, «who, 
 as M. Legouve remarks, had a particular cachet as 
 had the revolutionists of '89, are the first group of 
 people in the Parisian humanities to step bodily out of 
 their books, grasp us by the hand and say, "We too 
 are of flesh and blood." They are not effaced per- 
 
 41
 
 42 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 sonages eclipsed from their pages into imponderable, 
 griseous, neutral entities, but are our own real brothers 
 and sisters upon whom the word French does not 
 inexorably stamp a nameless, alien meaning. For the 
 volumes from their pens are our passing selves. 
 Youth burns in them and Death trails his horror. Their 
 stanzas and paragraphs sigh and cry out with frailty 
 and sin. In them, illusion nurses longings for the un- 
 heard-of, and fancy paints the distant and exotic. In 
 them, too, the sun shines, flowers breathe forth their 
 perfumes, storms rage, and all nature, life, love, lib- 
 erty, individuality stand forth in tremendous or in com- 
 passionate action. We do not approach these living 
 authors merely to admire and acquire, for we cherish 
 them with a vivifying affection because we are conscious 
 that they suffered and died. 
 
 Thus the literary Anglo-American sojourner in 
 France comes in time to feel for that famous old even- 
 ing of Hernani a personal affection like that which 
 always haunted the melancholy Gautier. It was then 
 that Parisian literature became affianced, for a time 
 at least, to our own, and throbbed with a heart that 
 is our heart. Not only is it the one notable national 
 date in late French letters: it is also the one notable 
 international literary event, whose signification may 
 not be fully interpreted until a century or more shall 
 have passed. 
 
 But the Theatre Frangals was only the scene of the 
 denouement. It is by no means there that the belated 
 Romantic in Paris should love to linger for associations. 
 His "chateau de souvenir" is not where Hernani fought
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 43 
 
 his fight in public, but it should be, specifically, the 
 room where the revolutionary bandit of Victor Hugo 
 was cradled in infancy and trained to grandiose ado- 
 lescence. This room was the nursery of the French 
 Romantics for six years, and their home for two dec- 
 ades, or until about 1844, when their reign had begun 
 to close. It was the salon of Charles Nodier, and sur- 
 passes, for the value of its literary career and influence, 
 perhaps any other French salon. Here was, in reality, 
 "the grand cetiacle." Doubtless no room anywhere 
 exists that can be compared with the Nodier parlor 
 both for the number and fame of its literary friends 
 and for its colossal impulse to letters and art. Here 
 the Romantic French novel and conte found their first 
 and most faithful devotees, and this was true also of 
 the French Romantic Theater and school of painting 
 and school of music with its Henri Reber and his Ger- 
 manic melodies. Here, too, the modern French love 
 for Gothic architecture was bred. And here modern 
 French poetry soared in its fledgling flights. 
 
 It is quite surprising that this great salon is unheard 
 of in America. While many books and essays are writ- 
 ten by Americans on the French salons of previous 
 centuries, none is penned on the salon of Charles No- 
 dier in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. 
 Yet more about it can be known, for Parisian authors 
 have paid tribute to it in scores of enthusiastic and 
 lovely pages of verse and prose. It seems desirable, in 
 consequence, that an attempt be made to remedy in 
 part this lapse in our literary history. 
 
 So, if you wish to idle for a summer's day in this
 
 44 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Parisian domain of Romanticism, let us set off on a 
 morning's quest of the Nodier parlor in its ancient 
 quarter of Paris, and, leaving behind the rude noise 
 and bustle of the boulevards, slip into the footsteps of 
 its memories, and dream, in its haunts, of a glorious 
 past. To find the room, we must hunt the rue de Sully 
 — a certain lonely little street that lies between the 
 Bastille and the eastern point of the He St. Louis. Its 
 southern side is flanked by the monotonous facade of 
 the grim-visaged Arsenal, an almost forgotten pile of 
 the sixteenth centur}'. Old fashioned bas-reliefs of 
 angry-mouthed artillery pieces scowl at us from above 
 its doors and carve their Latin inscriptions into our 
 notice. Through the leafy tree-tops along the rear 
 of the edifice, one catches glimpses of richly hewn mor- 
 tars lining the heights of the cornice and belching forth 
 their wealth of sculptured flame in a sumptuous display 
 that recalls the ornate Renaissance front of the Hotel 
 de la Valette hard by. 
 
 The west pavilion of the Arsenal is regal because 
 of Its role in the life of Henry IV and Sully; for within 
 it were restored, not many years ago, the king's cabinet 
 and bedchamber known traditionally as the "cabinet 
 of Sully." This apartment, where Henry loved to steal 
 in peace from the din of his court, is of the most elab- 
 orate ornamentation, and is said to be perhaps the com- 
 pletest and finest specimen extant of the French interior 
 decorative art of the seventeenth century. But we have 
 not come to search a prince's nook, nor view a seat of 
 royal games and acts, nor read the precious volumes 
 of Henry's love letters to "Mon cher coeur" which he
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 45 
 
 carefully indited in his best hand with here and there 
 an honest blot to show how, like some ardent school- 
 boy, he had screwed down over his pretty task. Nor 
 have we strayed hither to see the old, bethumbed psalter 
 of St. Louis, or the Terence of the due de Berry, or the 
 Bible of Charles V, or to visit the great yellow-volumed 
 library of the Arsenal (the second largest bibliotheque 
 in France) with its pungent smell of leather and its 
 ten or fifteen habitues browsing drowsily over antique 
 tomes. 
 
 We have come. Instead, to open the fourth door of 
 the fagade, mount six steps, and then an ancient, aban- 
 doned stairway whose plain, forlorn majesty sweeps 
 the dust of its oblivion Into our clothes and thoughts 
 at every turn. At the end of Its first flight we open 
 the door, walk in, and find ourselves in the quondam 
 abode of the Nodler family. 
 
 We cannot do better than trace out the rooms and 
 locate their former appointments with the aid of 
 Amaury Duval, who was one of the most devoted 
 guests here during all those years. Let us quote from 
 his description of the Nodler soirees and comment as 
 we edge along, so that we may have the former scene 
 fully before our eyes. 
 
 "After traversing a rather narrow antechamber," one 
 entered the large dining room. It was lighted by a 
 little lamp placed on the stove." • 
 
 This room Is almost empty now. It faces north on 
 the rue de Sully. Its walls are of wood carved In a 
 kind of Louis XIV style, and were latterly painted 
 a yellowish brown. Entering from the east, we see on
 
 46 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 the opposite side the chimney recess where the stove 
 stood. A bust of some abbe of local and modern note 
 adorns the spot, for the rooms at present serve the 
 needs of the Arsenal library. "It is here by the stove 
 on a table near the wall that the guests left their hats, 
 mantles, overcoats and umbrellas. Few of us could 
 afford the luxury of a cab; but neither rain nor snow 
 could keep away the charming young girls and their 
 intrepid dancers." From the south side of the dining 
 room "the guest walked through a little passage, came 
 to the door of the salon, turned the knob as if he were 
 at home — and entered." Here indeed is the selfsame 
 corridor — small, dark, forsaken. We find the door 
 knob and we, too, pass into the famous room. 
 
 At our right on the north side of the salon, on the 
 panel that faced the windows, was placed above a can- 
 opy the portrait of Nodier by Guerin. In the north- 
 west corner stood the statue of Henri IV as a child, 
 molded after the original of Bosio. On the west side 
 was the fireplace, with the fauteull of baron Taylor, 
 the founder of the Societe des artistes, at the north 
 end, and at the south end the armchair of Nodier, just 
 in front of which was the "eternal card table." Then 
 came the door to the chamber of Nodier, on the other 
 side of which was his study adjoined in turn by a little 
 room where books and various domestic things were 
 stored. On the south side of the salon were the two 
 immense windows reaching to the floor. They opened 
 on a small iron balcony which looked out upon an arm 
 of the Seine and the He Louvier. The wall between 
 the windows was relieved by a Scottish landscape from
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 47 
 
 the brush of Regnier, a friend of the household. Un- 
 derneath It was stationed a console supporting a plas- 
 ter bust of Victor Hugo. Those who spun a conte, or 
 distilled from their lips the dewy fervor of their verse, 
 usually stood before the console, rubbing their backs 
 unconsciously against the bust so that In time Its nose 
 became black. This discolored member was one of 
 the familiar themes of amusement of the family and 
 Its Intimates. 
 
 On the'east side of the salon, and next to one of the 
 windows, there was a door which opened Into a kind 
 of anteroom whence one entered the chamber of 
 Madame Nodler. In the middle of the east wall there 
 was the large recess which harbored the old-fashioned 
 square piano. "The two paintings — the Regnier and 
 the Guerin — were, together with a clock In the style 
 of 1820, the only ornaments of this room. Its ancient 
 and sculptured woodwork was painted white. The ap- 
 paratus for lighting the room was as simple as the 
 rest: two lamps on the chimney mantel and two Ar- 
 gand lamps flanking the Nodier portrait. I may add 
 that these two Argands often gave Marie, the charm- 
 ing daughter of the house, occasion to mount lightly 
 on a chair in the attempt to correct their capricious 
 flames at the risk of disengaging a pretty foot to view." 
 The upholstery of the six fauteulls and of the canopy 
 was red casslmere, and the twilled, or double-miiled, 
 curtains of calico at the windows were also red. Thus 
 the defiant color of Romanticism was contrasted against 
 the peaceful, domestic background of the white walls. 
 
 Nowadays the apartment presents a wholly different
 
 48 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 appearance. The walls are hidden by deep shelvings 
 filled with volumes, and in the center there is an enor- 
 mous, improvised stand, or table, whereon books and 
 manuscripts lie strewn about. For, the room is now a 
 part of the Arsenal Library proper, and is only known 
 to the employees and to them very little. The apart- 
 ment is about twenty-five feet square and the ceiling 
 is some thirty feet high. The ceiling was much lower 
 in the epoch of the Nodiers, for a false floor then cut 
 the room horizontally into two unequal parts in order 
 to form of the upper a mezzanine having chambers for 
 Mademoiselle Marie and the servants. There remain 
 to-day the white woodwork sculptured in Louis XV, 
 the chimney place, and the polished old oak floor so 
 intimately known for years to the feet of countless great 
 personages. 
 
 The recess has disappeared, and with it, of course, 
 the famous piano which Liszt was the first to open for 
 Marie. All the furniture has long since strayed from 
 these haunts. Some of it is still in the possession of 
 the Mennessier family. They have, too, the Guerin 
 portrait of Nodier. It is painted in the English style 
 of this master's Chateaubriand and of the Lamartine 
 of Decaisne, as if the subjects were Englishmen rather 
 than Frenchmen. The six chairs and the bergere have 
 been lost to trace, but the family have preserved un- 
 altered the six fauteuils, and indulgently had one of 
 them brought down one day from the attic to gratify 
 my curiosity. It was an oak chair in the cut of the 
 Empire, maintaining its imperial air despite dust and 
 neglect. Its dark red upholstery was trimmed around
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 49 
 
 the borders with yellow stripes which were half torn 
 off and dangling. 
 
 Through the windows of the Nodier salon we may- 
 saunter on the balcony where the melancholy Nodier 
 used to sit and watch the sunsets bathe the neighboring 
 towers of Notre Dame, The little branch of the Seine, 
 the row of poplars along its bank, and the He Louvier 
 have vanished, and now a spacious though quiet boule- 
 vard sweeps by. Beyond, through the trees, one spies 
 extensive wood and coal yards. All this forms at presr 
 ent as lonesome a quarter as in the time of the Nodiers, 
 but the scene was more poetic then. In those decades 
 the mark of the country was upon the spot. Frogs 
 croaked of summer evenings, the humid fragrance of 
 idle water diffused a lazy dreaminess, and the surround- 
 ings had, as Madame Mennessier wrote in after years, 
 "a rustic tint, both lonely and serene." 
 
 And the soirees! Only on Sundays did the family 
 receive in the salon; on other days friends were invited 
 into the chamber of Madame Nodier. On those cele- 
 brated Sunday evenings, Dumas the Elder tells us, 
 conversation and recitations were the rule from eight 
 until ten o'clock, and dancing and cards from ten until 
 one. If Nodier arose and backed up to the fireplace, 
 it meant a story. "Then," Dumas recounts, "we 
 laughed in advance at the conte which was ready to 
 come out of that mouth so ingeniously lined with tine 
 mockeries. We grew silent, and there unrolled from 
 his tongue one of the charming incidents of his youth — 
 a tale that seemed a novel of Longus or an Idyl of 
 Theocritus. It was at once Walter Scott and Perrault.
 
 50 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 . . . When done, Nodier let himself slip down softly 
 into his big fauteuil, smiled, and turned to Lamartine 
 or Hugo with: 'Enough of prose; some verse. Come! 
 Come! Some verse!' One or other of the poets would 
 rise and recite a poem while placing his hands on the 
 back of his armchair, or squaring his shoulders against 
 the paneling. The applause at an end, Marie sat down 
 at the piano, and a brilliant fusee of notes broke forth 
 upon the air. This was the signal for the contredanse. 
 We ranged the chairs and fauteuils, the card players 
 retired to the corners, and those who preferred to talk 
 to Marie and not dance slipped into the alcove. No- 
 dier was one of the first at the card table. From this 
 moment he annihilated himself in his hand, and was 
 completely forgotten. For a long period he would 
 play only bataille, pretending to be of a superior force 
 at this game; but at length he made a concession to 
 the fashion of the day and patronized ecarte." 
 
 One characteristic of the soirees is referred to by 
 nearly every habitue who has written of them. Am- 
 aury Duval described it as follows: "A party of 
 ecarte (the stake never exceeded ten sous) took place 
 in silence in a corner of the salon, and was interrupted 
 only by the occasional loud cries of Nodier exclaiming 
 against the bad luck which never failed to pursue him. 
 About ten o'clock he would raise himself slowly out of 
 his chair and disappear into his chamber through the 
 door behind him. This room had no other entrance 
 except from his study on the opposite side. After a 
 few moments we saw Madame Nodier, with a warming- 
 pan in hand, appear from the door of her chamber, and
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 51 
 
 traverse the groups of dancers on the way to the room 
 of her husband. The contredanse stopped long enough 
 to let her pass; and these tender, domestic attentions 
 had nothing vulgar in our eyes." 
 
 Such were these evenings in their early and more 
 famous period — from 1825 to about 1833. Sainte- 
 Beuve said that they had "the atmosphere of poetry, 
 of grace and of indulgence" ; and Dumas the Elder 
 thus recalled them : "Do you remember our Vigny who 
 at that epoch, perhaps, anticipated his transfiguration 
 but deigned yet to mix with men? Do you remember 
 Lamartine standing before the fireplace and letting roll 
 to our feet the harmonies of his verse? Do you re- 
 member Hugo as he looked at and listened to Lamar- 
 tine? Hugo, alone among us, had the smile of equality 
 on his lips. And all the while, Madame Hugo, play- 
 ing with her beautiful hair, reclined under the canopy as 
 if fatigued with the part of the glory which she sus- 
 tained." 
 
 And Musset, for his part, picturesquely hit off the 
 gatherings in the rue de Sully in blithe and well-known 
 stanzas addressed to Nodier. 
 
 The charm of these soirees certainly lay in the youth- 
 ful enthusiasm and admiration which every one here 
 felt for the other. These were happy reunions of per- 
 sons who were bound together by a common triumphant 
 impulse, and who were immensely fond and proud*of 
 one another. It was this joyous ardor — the memories 
 of which throb with a glorious exultation in the belated 
 Romantic heart — that gave the fated "Classics" their 
 cue to carom hopeless jests against the walls of the
 
 52 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Arsenal. Did not gossips describe these newfangled 
 people in the rue de Sully as too gushing to praise 
 Hugo's recitations of verse in ordinary terms such as — 
 superb — magnificent? They could only punctuate his 
 flights with such expressions as — Cathedral! — Ogive! 
 — Pyramid of Egypt ! 
 
 Of the soirees in their last decade a writer weaves 
 this glimpse into our fancies: "Nodier invited me to 
 his Sunday reunions, and I took care not to forget his 
 invitation. Nothing could be more simple and cordial. 
 They play, they sing, they even dance occasionally. 
 Above all, they converse in a delightful fashion. Hugo, 
 Lamartine and Musset passed along on that route and 
 left a perfume of genius and poetry. But why search 
 so far in the past? For Poetry herself is still there. 
 She is Nodier's daughter, Marie — Madame Mennessier 
 — who realizes for the pleasure of both eyes and ears 
 all the grace and esprit of her father. Amaury Duval 
 has just painted her portrait, yet it has not reproduced 
 her charm. Painting alone cannot render it: it needs 
 also to be interpreted by poetry and music — arts which 
 she herself understands so well, for she writes winning 
 verse and composes. Besides she has a magnificent con- 
 tralto voice. One should hear her sing 'La Captive' of 
 Hugo, the melody by Reber! I have not yet dared to 
 approach her and talk with her for she is always sur- 
 rounded with people. Her groups of young women 
 and habitues are so gay and mirthful that they frighten 
 my susceptible timidity. I converse only with Nodier, 
 and with Madame Nodier who, also, has a great deal 
 of esprit.
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 53 
 
 "The soirees doubtless were not what they had been 
 ten or fifteen years before. The battle had been won. 
 The chiefs had dispersed and rarely came to these 
 Sunday reunions. Excepting the days of the ball, the 
 gatherings were of an intimate character. I found 
 there constantly the same faces of old and young 
 friends. The older men collected around Nodier's card 
 table; the young people formed a more animated circle 
 around Madame Nodier and her winsome daughter, 
 both of whom were escorted by a staff of young women 
 as gay and spirituelles as themselves. Toward the 
 end of the evening we grouped about the piano. Reber 
 would play some of his compositions, or accompany 
 Madame Mennessier as she sang one of his, or one 
 of her own, melodies; for the daughter of Nodier had 
 received at birth all gifts. Besides possessing an orig- 
 inal beauty and an exceptional mind, she was an accom- 
 plished musician, and a poet like her father. At car- 
 nival tide the salon was transformed; they danced there 
 in costumes of Mardi Gras. Nothing could be more 
 inviting. I still see Dumas dancing vis-a-vis his young 
 son who already was sparkling with wit." 
 
 How all literary and artistic France shone here in 
 this salon! Not all, indeed, for Balzac and Gautier did 
 not come to these soirees, although friends of the No- 
 dier family; nor did Chateaubriand, Madame Re- 
 camier, Stendhal, George Sand, Chopin nor Heine. 
 But we may paint in our fancies the pictures of the sev- 
 eral groups that were wont to grace this room we are in 
 and lend glory to its gayeties and intimacies. And in 
 the foreground may be placed Victor Hugo, Lamar-
 
 54 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 tine, Musset, Dumas the Elder, Sainte-Beuve, Dela- 
 croix, and Vigny. 
 
 Then there is to be added the rare duster of amiable 
 and lovely women! The most conspicuous among 
 them was Madame Hugo, both by reason of her im- 
 posing beauty and of the celebrity of her husband, 
 whose followers adored him as a veritable god. Other 
 renowned figures in the scene were Madame Segalas, 
 the duchesse d'Abrantes, and the two leading French 
 poetesses of the nineteenth century — Madame Tastu 
 and Madame Desbordes-Valmore. And to grace the 
 whole display were, of course, Madame Nodier and 
 her daughter. 
 
 But, after all, those oM soirees were scarcely more 
 attractive than the simple family life of the Nodiers. 
 Homespun, instinctive, whole-souled was its daily charm 
 — a charm which was ever blending with that of the 
 Sunday reunions too warmly and thoroughly to en- 
 courage the attempt to separate existence here into 
 two distinct phases. How gratifying this impossibility 
 to tell just where the domestic life ended and the salon 
 life began, or, indeed, to say that there was aught but 
 the first and that once a- week it overflowed into the 
 reception room ! Dumas the Elder tells us of the daily 
 manner in which dinner used to follow its informal 
 course here: 
 
 "The family of Nodier consisted of his wife, his 
 daughter and his sister-in-law. At six o'clock the table 
 was spread. To the plates for the family three or 
 four were added for the regular guests. Once admitted 
 into the amiable intimacy of the household, you went
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 55 
 
 there to dine whenever you pleased. If two or three 
 plates had to be arranged, they were arranged; if the 
 table had to be lengthened, it was lengthened. And 
 woe to him who entered and made the thirteenth, for 
 he was mercilessly forced to eat at a little side table, 
 unless by chance another diner came and released him 
 from exile. 
 
 "I was soon one of the intimates of the house, and 
 my seat at table was once for all fixed between Madame 
 Nodier and Marie. When I appeared at the door, I 
 was received with cries of joy, and every one seized me 
 by the hands and welcomed me. At the end of a year, 
 that which was only a fact became a right. My chair 
 was kept vacant for me until the first courses were re- 
 moved, when the giving of it was hazarded to another; 
 but he who filled it always relinquished it to me even 
 if I did not reach the Arsenal until dessert. . . . Thus 
 we arrived at the end of a charming dinner where all 
 accidents, save bread placed wrong side up, were taken 
 philosophically. . . . Then Madame Nodier rose and 
 went to light the salon. As I did not drink coffee, I 
 often accompanied her, and my height was of great 
 service to her in lighting the lamps." 
 
 Madame Hugo gives us this description of Nodier 
 and his wife and their daily life : "Nodier was usually 
 to be found in his wife's chamber, where he received 
 his friends after dinner with a luminous smile c^n his 
 hollow cheeks. It was a simple room, waxed and shiny, 
 with some portraits on the walls. One entered as if 
 he were at home, Nodier not rising from his chair. 
 His wearied body was half doubled up and his long
 
 56 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 legs crossed as if they dared not separate. His trous- 
 ers did not reach his feet; his arms were as fatigued as 
 his body; and his hands were thin, cold and discolored. 
 And from this lank figure, this awkwardness, this neg- 
 ligence, there disengaged an inexplicable charm. This 
 immense spider spun an invisible web wherein all peo- 
 ple, from children to grand poets, were caught: it was 
 his grace. 
 
 "Sitting vis-a-vis Nodier was Madame Nodier, with 
 her dainty feet half escaping from under her gown. 
 Easy of approach, winning, smiling for her pretty teeth, 
 she received every one with equal pleasure. She never 
 disclosed any vanity of social distinction nor of personal 
 merit. She gave her illustrious guests none of those 
 noisy attentions which are injurious to the humbler 
 visitors. Her face, alert and radiant like a bouquet, 
 enlivened and refreshed one's sight. Her compact 
 beauty, scrupulous toilet, neat intelligence, corrected 
 and completed the general laisser-aller of Nodier. It 
 was an admirable example of precision by the side of 
 nonchalance. 
 
 "One was fortunate indeed to find Nodier talking — 
 no one will ever talk like him. When he was not in a 
 conversational humor, Madame Nodier supplied his 
 place. Ordinarily the tone of the conversation at the 
 Arsenal was rather lively than grave. Entrain, levity, 
 gayety prevailed. One chatted about his neighbors, 
 but without any ill-will or passion. Criticism did not 
 go beyond raillery. Madame Nodier excelled in these 
 delicate mockeries, yet those she loved the most she 
 treated the worst with her tongue. Sensible and posf-
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 57 
 
 tive, she was prompt to seize the ridiculous side of 
 people, for one is only ridiculous when he goes beyond 
 the truth. The tranquillity and slowness of her accent 
 gave piquancy to the original tournure of her remarks. 
 "In his stories Nodier always made himself small, 
 unsuccessful, pitiably winked out. This trait was. In 
 fact, a trait of his character. In his habits he sought 
 to be humble, plain, bourgeois. He wanted to use can- 
 dles, and would have preferred tinplate to silver ware. 
 He only liked brown bread and cabbage soup. Pomp 
 importuned him. He never desired to go to the Opera 
 or the Fran^ais. On the other hand, he never wanted 
 to come away from the Varietes, and was the friend of 
 all the clowns and merrymakers. His literary enthusi- 
 asms were reserved for a company of anonymous great 
 men and obscure geniuses whom he pretended to have 
 unearthed. He did not appear to appreciate very much 
 the true thinkers who have honored our century. In 
 any one else this would have passed for envy, but with 
 him it was rather the inability to support too strong a 
 light — a weakness of 'morale' eyelid. It was the love 
 of darkness and twilight, an instinctive embarrassment, 
 a discreet pudency. Universal, celebrated minds pro- 
 duced on him the effect of full suns and public squares. 
 He felt ill at ease, as if too conspicuous amid such vast 
 glory. He tried to be infant, people, populace. He 
 hated action and responsibility. New things, discover- 
 ies, industrial progress, he little welcomed. He ab- 
 horred railroads. He had the popular superstitions. 
 Thirteen at table, saltcellars upset, Friday, spiders — all 
 were important subjects of terror at the Arsenal."
 
 58 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Madame Nodier was assuredly a true literary help- 
 meet of her husband. He submitted most of his pages 
 to her before their publication. A contemporary re- 
 calls her fondness for the theater and her slight love 
 for toilets of ceremony; while to the eyes of another 
 friend she was "that angelic woman who succeeded in 
 regulating Nodler's stormy life: in communicating the 
 calm and serenity of a beautiful soul to a soul troubled 
 and beaten down." 
 
 Dumas the Elder tells us this of Nodier (the two 
 formed a unique pair and were perfectly mated) : 
 "Nodier was a lovable man, without a vice, but full 
 of faults — of those charming faults which make up 
 the originality of a man of genius. He was prodigal, 
 careless, a lounger like the lazy Figaro — that is to 
 say, a lounger with delight. His dominant shortcom- 
 ing, in the eyes of Madame Nodier at least, was his 
 bibliomania — a fault which was the joy of Nodier and 
 the despair of his wife." And Dumas could go on by 
 the hour, In his amusing, inimitable way, with the his- 
 tory of Nodler's practical joke on a naive friend who 
 was induced to scour the earth for a certain edition, 
 which never existed, of the Bible; with the account of 
 Nodler's frequent views of the wandering Jew; with 
 the story of his having invented and baptized a mar- 
 velous animal which he called the taratantaleo; with 
 the description of the toad five inches long and three 
 inches wide which he pretended to have dug up in 
 Styria; with the tale of the toad and the spider which 
 inhabited the crypt in an unknown church in Normandy, 
 and lived from day to day by sucking the oil out of the
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 59 
 
 lamp precisely at midnight; and with legends of the 
 sundry varieties of despised fauna which Nodier and 
 his companions caged for the menagerie of Romantic 
 literature. 
 
 Nodier's tall, lean homeliness, his melancholy, his 
 habit of telling stories, make him seem to us now a 
 kind of Abraham Lincoln. He was the most generally 
 and genuinely liked of all the men of French letters of 
 his time, unless indeed it was Beranger. He lived here 
 without an enemy in the very midst, and through the 
 whole, of the storm and stress period of modern French 
 letters. Every book that had a preface by him was 
 sure of success. "The chief trait of Nodier, his true 
 gift," another friend (Sainte-Beuve) remarks, "was to 
 be inevitably loved. . . . He was to chance-coming 
 poets the elder brother, the bosom comrade, a com- 
 rade generous, charming, enthusiastic, encouraging, dis- 
 interested, and often in his heart the youngest and most 
 tender of them all." Of the lovable nature of his 
 humor we always recall this sample, which reveals at 
 once so much of his character. To a disciple, who on 
 one occasion had written something fashioned in No- 
 dier's style and had submitted it to him for his opinion, 
 Nodier said: "My friend, I fear this cannot be par- 
 ticularly good, for at first I thought it was my own." 
 
 He was a true Romantic in reality, and his youth and 
 young manhood had been full of romanesque adventure 
 and experience, as may be seen from the Cherubin in- 
 cident. His daughter recounts that Nodier, at the age 
 of ten, fell desperately in love with the moSt beautiful 
 lady in his native town — Besangon. So consumed was
 
 6o French Essays and Profiles 
 
 he by his passion for this angel of loveliness that he 
 finally contrived to pour out his fervor in a billet-doux, 
 revealing to her the dolorous condition of his heart 
 and praying for a rendezvous. To his delight he re- 
 ceived a prompt response in which the lady — a baron- 
 ess, forsooth — promised to be found in the park at eve. 
 Could lover's wishes be more perfectly favored? The 
 lad repaired in breathless rapture to the blissful spot, 
 and, as soon as he perceived a vision of white lace 
 through the twilight and foliage, rushed forward and 
 began to kneel in a confused outburst of immortal ar- 
 dor. But imagine the mortifying ending! Her two 
 adorable, pearly hands caught possession of him and, 
 pitiable to relate, detailed the most humiliating of ma- 
 ternal punishments — he was breezily spanked! To the 
 chagrin of this event Nodier ascribed his timidity, and 
 said he never approached a woman in his life without 
 fearing that he was going to be whipped. It was this 
 love of the unattainable and impracticable, this sad 
 sentimentality, which Hugo sings of in a well-known 
 Ballad apropos of his friend. 
 
 Nodier was virtually a Royalist, yet it appears that 
 "he never had a political opinion. Ever searching the 
 dramatic and the beautiful, he adopted successively all 
 the defeated causes and parties, claiming that they were 
 the most apt to be the nearest right." In literary com- 
 position he was a purist whom the anti-Romantic Acad- 
 emy of that day seemed glad to honor by making him 
 one of its own. "Nodier is the last writer who can be 
 attached to the traditions of the grand century of 
 Louis XIV for purity of taste and delicacy of language.
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 6i 
 
 . . . His last words, vaguely addressed on his death 
 bed to some unknown person, were: *Read Tacitus 
 often and Fenelon — to lend more assurance to your 
 style.' " 
 
 Thus Nodier held a unique and multiform place in 
 the Parisian literary world of his time. As a member 
 of the Institute because of his love for the traditional 
 French idiom, he diffused the Academic influence — that 
 "defunct" something which Gautier's old "Philistines" 
 were feebly trying to preserve by various processes of 
 mummification. The Royalism of Nodier had given 
 him the directorship of the Library here in the rue de 
 Sully, and he therefore had the standing of an official 
 and adherent of the Government. At the same time, 
 however, he was the acknowledged patron — the "fa- 
 ther" — of the French Romantic school. His vivid im- 
 agination and consequent fondness for the curious and 
 the fantastic, and his profoundly emotional nature, 
 bound the young Romantics to him by the closest ties. 
 An adequate explanation of his peculiar and important 
 role with respect to them will be forthcoming when 
 the mystery of the union of the bourgeois and the Bo- 
 hemian in the French Romantic school shall have been 
 thoroughly examined and understood. For Nodier was 
 a sort of Bohemian developed into the faithfulest of 
 husbands; and the Bohemians of art and literature en- 
 tered perfectly at ease into his bourgeois salon. 
 
 As a man of caprice, of bizarre fantasies, of an im- 
 mense liberality and laisser-ailer, he attracted the con- 
 fidence and respect of the youths of the day — all those 
 callow fellows of Bohemian ateliers and holes-in-the-
 
 62 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 wall who wore Carolingian locks and tremendous trous- 
 ers and who had decided to upset the world, but whom 
 people in general shook their heads at and said, "They 
 are fools." And as a home-dwelling man attached to 
 his hearthstone and to his wife and daughter, and who 
 loved as his favorite flower the common columbine as 
 Rousseau had loved the common periwinkle, Nodier 
 spread about him a stronger and directer moral influ- 
 ence than any one of the new school. From his fire- 
 side here where we stand, there were reflected that 
 domestic and bourgeois warmth and color which for 
 the first time were mixing into French prose and verse 
 and were in part to characterize the Romantic litera- 
 ture of France. 
 
 But, before thinking of the role of the Nodier salon, 
 one should know of the young woman who was so 
 richly the excuse of its delicious renown. Marie-An- 
 toinette-Elizabeth Nodier was the only child of Charles 
 Nodier. Born in 1 8 1 1 , she undoubtedly proved, on the 
 whole, the chief attraction here at the Arsenal, whether 
 as a girl, or after 1830, as the wife of M. Mennessier. 
 We have already caught a glimpse of her as she ap- 
 peared to the eyes of a young author in 1840. Sainte- 
 Beuve used to think of Marie as Nodier's "charming 
 daughter, his most faithful image, his most finished 
 work of grace." Another writer describes her as "his 
 (Nodier's) daughter, in whom he saw reflower his 
 esprit and a part of his talent." Still another tells us 
 that "few young girls have had, as much as Marie, 
 that joyous verve which seems to say: I am happy to 
 be living."
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 63 
 
 And this is Madame Hugo's tribute poured out with 
 the enthusiasm of her great affection for her young 
 friend: "Madame Mennessier was youth, life, move- 
 ment, the sparkle of eye, of gesture, of phrase. And 
 with this, an exquisite tact, an extraordinary modera- 
 tion, an incredible understanding of all things in life 
 from the largest to the smallest. She had an unheard- 
 of skill in taking advantage of everything and in ex- 
 ploiting everything — a chiffon as well as a repartee. 
 She made duchesses envious in dresses that a chamber- 
 maid would have disdained. The linen at her wrist 
 was more precious than the lace at the wrists of others. 
 She set off her robes — her ribbons had esprit." 
 
 And the poets sang of her in a chorus of praise. 
 Madame Tastu addressed verse to the black eyes of 
 Marie — a curious error, we may note in passing, for 
 her eyes were not dark. Musset paid homage to her 
 "tete coquette et fleurie," to her purple lips, to her 
 consoling hands "so sage and so gentle," and to her 
 goodness and beauty. And all who are lovers of the 
 verse of Victor Hugo will recall two flying leaves which 
 he addressed to her and inserted among his "Feuilles 
 d'Automne." 
 
 To pass from verse to colors and canvas, we must 
 bring to a close our morning here in the Arsenal, and 
 hie for the afternoon to what was a certain quiet par- 
 lor — the salon of the daughters of Madame Mennes- 
 sier — in a beautiful village outside the southern forti- 
 fications of Paris. For in this room we could linger at 
 will over the copy of Deveria's aquarelle of Marie 
 Nodier. It is dated 1829. The original is apparently
 
 64 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 lost. Deveria painted the hours in aquarelles and 
 Marie Nodier represented the tenth hour of the even- 
 ing. She is portrayed in full toilet and in a loge at the 
 opera. Her robe is pale blue; the slope of her shoul- 
 ders is prolonged in great flying puffs; her head, like 
 that of a Greek goddess, is set gracefully forward to 
 give full value to the lines that curve up to it. Her hair 
 is twirled ambitiously skyward in an immense coiffure 
 decked with extravagant features. The profile of her 
 small round face is that of an ingenue; but the tournure 
 of her pose invites our communicative interest, and 
 promises a gay, cordial young woman who has the gift 
 of conversing and the ease of entertainment. 
 
 Here, too, in this salon could be seen her celebrated 
 portrait by Amaury Duval. It was executed in 1839 
 when she was twenty-eight years old, and has had the 
 strange fate of always pleasing her family and never 
 her friends. Gautier, in his half Bohemian way, used 
 to say of it and of the artist: "Is it necessary for him 
 to be maladroit? There are three hours every day 
 during which she is less ugly than that. He should have 
 chosen them." 
 
 The portrait, despite its deadness of color and a 
 certain artificiality in handling, is on the whole very 
 satisfactory. It is life size. Madame Mennessier here 
 appears in a black, decolletee robe with short sleeves. 
 Her jet black hair comes compactly down over her 
 temples. The nose has an accent of broadness, and 
 the face is squarish, and is overspread as if with the 
 subdued radiance of a youthful motherhood. Her left 
 arm hangs gracefully forward over an arm of the
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 65 
 
 fauteuil. Her right hand gently supports her chin and 
 cheek. The whole attitude indicates the ready con- 
 versationalist. This effect Is heightened wonderfully 
 by the expression of the eyes which, to her family, seem 
 perfectly reproduced. The skill of the painter was here 
 at its best. We love to regard her two grayish-green 
 eyes that bead. In this canvas, with twinkling life, and 
 look straight at us with a frank amiability, telling us 
 that their owner was quick to share a sportive hour, or 
 a serious, comfort-needing mood. They speak of an 
 indescribable mixture of gayety, affection, discretion, 
 and we forget that they are only In a pictur::. One 
 realizes that there exhales from this canvas a woman's 
 lovely dignity and a genial vivacity — the two prevail- 
 ing perfumes in the sachet of her personality. 
 
 She had a bright tongue, yet her full-beating heart 
 was heard in still distlncter messages. She spread about 
 her the charm of a cheerful sympathy, a warm com- 
 radeship. And as the background for all this, there 
 was her domesticity. What gifts and culture she was 
 graced of were mellowed by her tender, homelike na- 
 ture. We do not doubt it was rather for her than 
 ev^en for Nodier himself that those younger Romantics 
 kept coming to the Arsenal. In her they found a sweet, 
 fair-eyed friend, who was enthusiastic for them and 
 proud of them, and to whom It was a genuine pleasure 
 to offer their verses and designs. With her they could 
 talk and sing and dance. They could have at the Ar- 
 senal something of a free Intercourse with a maiden 
 who was exemplifying before their very eyes that 
 womanly purity, emotivity and fireside happiness which
 
 66 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 many of them, leading Bohemian careers adrift in un- 
 domestic Paris, could otherwise dream of only in 
 rimes and colors and contours. 
 
 This atmosphere inspired them with confidence and 
 self-respect, with the crowning promises of utmost ef- 
 fort and of temperate, moral living — all those virtues 
 for which the role of the Nodier salon is to be re- 
 marked, and to which the daughter of the house con- 
 tributed her full and essential part. Surely no other 
 young woman of that epoch diffused among the youth- 
 ful companions and followers of Victor Hugo such an 
 Influence as hers, either in quality or degree. For we 
 cannot think. In this connection, of Madame Recamier 
 nor George Sand. 
 
 The favorite flower of Madame Mennessier was 
 the honeysuckle; and those familiar with the lives of 
 the French Romantics are not surprised that she dis- 
 liked having flowers about her in the house. She could 
 not bear to see them wither and die, and therefore 
 rarely plucked a rose or grouped a bouquet. It Is in- 
 teresting, too, to learn that during her last years she 
 always sat by a window which faced the little stony 
 main street of her village. Instead of by one of the win- 
 dows which looked out over a pretty garden and across 
 the picturesque v^alley of the Blevre. The homely street 
 and Its humble life were company for one who had been 
 surrounded for years by so many brilliant friends. The 
 landscape was too lonely and pensive for her. 
 
 She read much, and the poets of her heart were La- 
 martine and Musset. Among novelists, she preferred 
 Dumas and Octave Feuillet. The novels of George
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 67 
 
 Sand she did not care for and scarcely had ever fingered 
 through one of them. 
 
 It is natural to conclude that her gift of making her- 
 self universally loved, of effacing herself before her 
 companions, accounts for her failure to contribute any- 
 thing notable to art or literature. She was endowed 
 with talents, but she cultivated them modestly and only 
 for her friends and household. She seemed to have 
 no dreams of ambition save for those about -her. Her 
 joyous neglect of self doubtless often impressed her 
 friends with the thought of what she might have done, 
 had she not been content to remain simply a delightful 
 inspiration to others; for, as it is, extravagant are the 
 laudations that have come down to us of her music, 
 her verse and her esprit. Everlasting is the praise; 
 ephemeral was its theme. 
 
 At conversing she must have been remarkably adept 
 in the sense of being irresistibly gay and entertaining. 
 We saw how her portraits speak the conversationalist. 
 Those who knew her in her prime say that one can 
 scarcely form an idea of her entrain when she found 
 some one who was good at repartee and could give quick 
 and salient replies. That such friends and acquaint- 
 ances were in no respect lacking we are offered abun- 
 dant proof, for the bourgeois circle at the Arsenal was 
 surely as successful a company of famous conversers 
 and story-tellers as ever came habitually together even 
 in France. Did not the July Monarchy prove that the 
 gift of esprit was not confined, among the French, to 
 the aristocracy and the populace? Loui'S Philippe, the 
 only bourgeois ruler the greater France has had, ap-
 
 68 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 pears to have been precisely its wittiest monarch. 
 Madame Mennessier was very musical and music- 
 loving. At the piano she was contented with accom- 
 paniments and the little contredanses and waltzes that 
 punctuated and modulated the dancing at the soirees. 
 A friend of hers tells us that Marie Nodier sang three 
 decades before Gounod that which this master has since 
 sung. There is a significant undertone of truth in the 
 above; for the noteworthy, if not notable, trait in 
 Madame Mennessier was her heartfelt color of senti- 
 ment; and it is this that Gounod has woven into music 
 in a more eminent degree than any French composer. 
 She wrote countless songs. She wedded to melody 
 much of Musset's verse and some of Sainte-Beuve and 
 of Victor Hugo. Here in the silence of her parlor we 
 could rove through a pile of her scores. They are 
 neatly penned; the paper is yellow with age and finger- 
 soiled. The melodies are very modest and are chap- 
 eroned by the plainest of correct accompaniments, for 
 she knew nothing of modern harmony. Her songs are 
 completely forgotten, yet for years they were not with- 
 out a certain fame throughout all Paris. 
 
 Her writings consist of a few contes, of "Lettres 
 d'une hirondelle," of her book "Charles Nodier," and 
 of verses. Her unpretending poetic talent may be 
 found at its best by far in the two sonnets which she 
 addressed to Musset under the circumstances revealed 
 by a friend. He recounts: 
 
 "One day in the spring of 1843, I brought some 
 verse to Nodier and among it there was a sonnet to 
 Musset. 'Leave this one with me,' he said, 'it may
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 69 
 
 render us real service. For sometime past Musset has 
 neglected us and appears to forget us. Your sonnet 
 may bring him back to us. My daughter will send it to 
 him, and the ungrateful fellow must come down here 
 and tell us why he is in the sulks.' Madame Mennes- 
 sier at once sent the sonnet to Musset with a letter of 
 the kind she knew how to write, and the next day I re- 
 ceived a note from him thanking me for my poetry and 
 excusing himself from answering in verse — that lan- 
 guage, he delicately added, which I understood so well 
 how to use. Of what does glory consist? If he had 
 addressed me in rime, I should have been celebrated. 
 In any event my sonnet had awakened him. He 
 hastened to the Arsenal, saw his two friends, and, the 
 following day, thanked Madame Mennessier in a son- 
 net for her amiable appeal. She responded in the same 
 form. Musset replied in verse the same day. In short, 
 during three days there was a rapid exchange of rime 
 between the two poets who had been friends from 
 childhood." 
 
 Musset himself paid these sonnets of hers a frank 
 compliment in writing his brother at the time: "I have 
 also done several sonnets for Madame Mennessier, 
 who sent me in response two v^ery pretty ones." 
 
 No, and nevertheless, Madame Mennessier is 
 scarcely for an instant to be remembered for what she 
 created, though she will be immortal for what she in- 
 spired. It would be idle for one to attempt to enumer- 
 ate the canvases and the musical scores that lauded her 
 charms, and the countless minor or casual tributes that 
 were paid her in rime. We are curious to learn, though.
 
 70 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 that she had two albums — one as a girl, the other as 
 a young married woman. The latter, containing the 
 Arvers sonnet, I never saw for it was en province. But 
 in the former the present writer found that the opening 
 tribute, dated Nov. i6, 1824, was by Lamartine. It 
 consists of six lines written in a small, neat, but yet not 
 very legible style, in the upper right hand corner of the 
 first page. 
 
 In this album, too, were stanzas by the elder Dumas, 
 Vigny and Victor Hugo. The Dumas verses are penned 
 with the greatest of care in a minute yet clear hand. 
 They are impeccably aligned, showing that he wrote 
 them along the edge of a sheet of paper or a ruler. 
 He was then twenty-one. 
 
 Madame Mennessier unquestionably inspired more 
 of imperishable verse than any other French woman. 
 Besides the three sonnets of Musset to which we have 
 referred, he dedicated to her some well-known lines as 
 a tribute to her for having interpreted in music some 
 of his rimes. Victor Hugo composed as many stanzas 
 in her honor as Musset. 
 
 But the most memorable of the verse which Madame 
 Mennessier called forth was the sonnet of Arvers — 
 everything considered, the most celebrated French son- 
 net of the nineteenth century. Felix Arvers, one of the 
 many minor frequenters of the Arsenal, was a kind 
 of Musset in miniature. All else from his pen proved 
 ephemeral. Nodier, charmed with the sonnet, was al- 
 ways having Arvers recite it at the soirees. The lines 
 were originally written in the second album of Madame 
 Mennessier. They are as follows, with their imperfect
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 71 
 
 punctuation, In the first edition (1833) of the poet's 
 *'Mes Heures Perdues," the words "Sonnet imite de 
 I'ltalien" not appearing in the album. 
 
 "Sonnet imite de I'ltalien." 
 Mon ame a son secret, ma vie a son mystere; 
 Un amour eternel en un moment congu : 
 Le mal est sans espoir, aussi j'ai du le taire, 
 Et celle qui I'a fait n'en a jamais rien su. 
 
 Helas! j'aurai passe pres d'elle inapergu, 
 Toujours a ses cotes, et pourtant solitaire, 
 Et j'aurai jusqu'au bout fait mon temps sur la terre, 
 N'osant rien demander et n'ayant rien regu. 
 
 Pour elle, quoique Dieu I'ait faite douce et tendre, 
 Elle ira son chemin, distraite, et sans entendre 
 Ce murmure d'amour eleve sur ses pas; 
 
 A I'austere devoir, pieusement fidele, 
 
 Elle dira, lisant ces vers tout remplis d'elle: 
 
 "Quelle est done cette femme?" et ne comprendra pas. 
 
 (My heart has its secret, my life, its mystery; an eternal 
 love in a moment conceived. The ill is without hope 
 and so have I concealed it. And she who has caused it 
 has never aught guessed. 
 
 Alas, I have passed near her form unperceived, ever by 
 her side and yet ever alone. I shall have finished my 
 term upon earth, year by year, asking of her nothing 
 and nothing received.
 
 72 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 And she, though God made her gentle and tender, will 
 go her way freely and unaware, without hearing this 
 murmur of love at her feet. 
 
 Correctly faithful to duty will always she ask, on read- 
 ing this verse so filled with her soul, "Who is really this 
 woman?" and never will know.) 
 
 This poem breathes the fragrant, tender loveliness 
 of Madame Mennessier. It was because Arvers con- 
 fined a perfect souvenir of her aroma in this little casket 
 of a sonnet that he was saved to fame, and that some- 
 thing of the incense of her modest glory, which seemed 
 to be daily dissipating in her self-disinterestedness, was 
 preserved in a precious reliquary of rime. What con- 
 firms our feeling that Arvers diffused her charm in 
 rhythm more felicitously than any of his great rivals is 
 an instant's comparison of his sonnet with the two 
 sonnets she sent Musset. We are conscious at once that 
 her verse has more of the strain and quality of his than 
 of Musset's or Hugo's. The same Arverian, low- 
 voiced gentleness, the same warm love-note, are here. 
 The verse of Arvers makes us think only of her — it is 
 thoroughly impregnated with her fragrance. The 
 poems of Hugo and Musset, on the contrary, are 
 mainly filled with the thoughts of themselves. 
 
 We might now attempt to outline more fully the 
 nature of the Nodier salon and its influence. We have
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 73 
 
 seen how Madame Mennessier, in whom the fire- 
 side life and the salon life appeared to intermingle in an 
 inimitable manner, accentuated there a distinguish- 
 ing emotionalism, domesticity and youth. By no means 
 was there absent the background of books, art and cul- 
 ture, yet the artistic and the belletristic were somehow 
 effaced by the presence of those individualistic, blood- 
 throbbing people who laughed and wept, and were 
 vigorously active and human in the flesh. At Nodier's 
 Arsenal, men doted on fantastic imageries, and played 
 in haunted domains of freaks and oddities in a way that 
 seemed half childlike. There, women of copious and 
 facile emotions were quick to sympathize and shed 
 tears. There Victor Hugo, Lamartine and Musset 
 found a plain humanity to work upon with all its senti- 
 mentality as well as naturalness; and, at will, they 
 aroused it into triumphant enthusiasm or melted it into 
 lachrymose weakness. 
 
 For it was the heart that reigned at the Nodiers', and 
 the various moods it was doubtless wont to indulge in 
 there may be seen reflected in the literary pages of 
 those days. At times it was too soft and mushy, too 
 tearfully and feebly good, like the verse of Madame 
 Desbordes-Valmore with its "moonlights and weeping 
 willows." At times it showed that mature sensibility, 
 tolerance and maternal tenderness which were being de- 
 veloped in the volumes of George Sand. Again it dis- 
 played in some hours the kind of emotivity, cor- 
 rected by esprit, vivacity and a clear, independent sense 
 of the ridiculous, which graces the stanzas and para- 
 graphs of Musset. And it was, of course, the symbol
 
 74 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 of the sentiment of the "Interior Hfe" ; for, as has been 
 pointed out, the life of the inner-self then at length 
 created, among the writings of French women, a 
 notable volume in the "Journal" of Eugenie de Guerin. 
 
 The Nodier salon, with its influence for morality and 
 family ties, antedated the bourgeois reign of King 
 Louis Philippe, and existed almost until the new na- 
 tional epoch of 1848. One Is thus led to remark how 
 the Arsenal soirees were distinguished by characteristics 
 not typically French, but English. Its open, unconven- 
 tional, family hospitality was much like that of a 
 country seat In England. It offered the truest and 
 plainest of welcomes, and a conviviality which, in this 
 instance, had only a little "sugared water to pass 
 around." Its virtue lay in simply letting the guests 
 feel chez sol. Madame Hugo remarks that "at the 
 Nodlers' every one held his pleasure in his own hands, 
 and was accountable to no one. Nodier obliterated 
 himself too much ever to repress or interfere with any 
 elan. His friends were more in their own house than 
 in his. Indulgent, gracious and almost feminine, he 
 offered as it were the hospitality-woman." 
 
 This personal, warming-pan comfort, this common, 
 dally life, unaffected by the presence of friends and 
 strangers, this freedom of the daughter in her inter- 
 course with the guests, this predominance of very young 
 people — all this was English, not French. It was but 
 another evidence of the Immense Influx of things Anglo- 
 Saxon into France with the Romantic school, and was 
 naturally of the epoch when a large proportion of 
 French poetry cited Engllsii verses for its texts and
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 75 
 
 mottoes. The idea of English family life here tri- 
 umphed over that of the French chez soi. It was the 
 home invading the salon. The moment the host and 
 guests caught the fashion of appearing and doing much 
 as they pleased in their assemblings, the fate of the his- 
 toric salon was practically sealed; for, as M. Brunetiere 
 has well said, "there would be no salons if each of us 
 brought only our natural selves." Thus the Nodier 
 soirees exemplified in a significant way a transition from 
 the salon of France to the home of England, and illus- 
 trated the eminence of the one and the virtues of the 
 other. 
 
 The traits of the levees at the Arsenal became salient 
 in our minds when we think of the "Classic" reunions 
 of that day. The "Classic" salon of the gay and wanton 
 hermit M. Jouy seems to have been the most inimical 
 and persistent enemy which the Arsenal was blessed 
 with. This antagonist seethed with violent rage when- 
 ever he glanced at any of the soft-eyed lyrics of La- 
 martine. "Whimperer!" he woi^ld exclaim. "You are 
 lamenting, are you? You are poitrinaire, are you? 
 What do you suppose I care? The dying poet! Eh 
 bien ! then die of your grief, blockhead — you won't be 
 the first one!" And so we can fancy how M. Jouy 
 could suddenly forget his gayety and descend into the 
 bowels of direst wrath whenever a certain small word 
 was even whispered in his presence. That word was 
 Hugo. 
 
 The characteristics of the Nodier salon and its liter- 
 ary role are brought into a bolder and broader relief 
 when we reread what Brunetiere has signaled as the
 
 76 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 effect of woman and the salons on French literature 
 down to the close of the eighteenth century. The In- 
 fluence for presentable respectability and social seem- 
 llness In appearance and bearing, which Brunetlere 
 points out as the first lesson of the earlier salons, finds 
 Its complement in the Influence at the Arsenal for 
 morality, or the something that makes for the Ideal of 
 family. As the precleuses declared against the vulgar, 
 the offensive, the coarsely wanton in letters, so the 
 Arsenal stood as a protest against social irregularities 
 and excesses and against the brutalities of the rights of 
 passion which characterized so many pages of the turbu- 
 lent young Romantics, and which Bohemlanism insisted 
 in attaching as a tail to the kite of the new school. 
 So while Gautier and his chums were vigorously repre- 
 senting "liberality" and independence at the evening of 
 Hernani, Marie Nodler and her companions were there 
 unconsciously representing the claims and charms of 
 simple virtue. 
 
 As distinguished from "elegance in precision, perfec- 
 tion in the measure, and, with the greatest writers, 
 lucidity In profoundness," which were the results of the 
 role of the traditional salons, there were to be found 
 at the Nodlers', as we have seen, the two mates whose 
 marriage had led to Romanticism, namely, emotion 
 with Its consciousness of weak and suffering mortality, 
 and, as an alleviation or safety valve therefor, imagi- 
 nation with Its realms of Faith and of fantastic diver- 
 sion. Precision of outline here disappeared in the shift- 
 ing moods and vague reaches of sentiment: the correct 
 brain yielded to the overflowing heart which Ignores
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 77 
 
 formalities and symmetries. The old-time feminine 
 impulse for form was succeeded by the new feminine 
 impulse for "matter," since no estheticism nor preciosity 
 affected the Arsenal nor ever courted with perfumed 
 graces any of its characteristic habitues. Corseted 
 and bepowdered refinement here gave way before 
 sweet, fresh-faced tenderness and sympathy; and the 
 cult of caste and station, with its indifference to the 
 rights or feelings of others, melted somewhat into the 
 cult of self-sacrifice, or of the claims that come from 
 without. Thus the old salons emphasized the aristo- 
 craticalness of French belles-lettres and kept them for 
 two or three centuries removed from the people. It re- 
 mained for the Nodier salon to bring French letters 
 down, so far as a salon could, from the world of the 
 upper class. The vivified and mortal-like volumes of 
 the Romantics were not for the nobility of France. 
 This new literature was, in some phases, for the bour- 
 geoisie and, in others, for the Bohemians and the 
 populace. It stirred the hearts, fancies and hopes of 
 the people (using this word in its broadest sense), and 
 bequeathed to France a popular literature. Therefore, 
 while the literary reunions of the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries exemplified the "artificial and the 
 superficial," and the aristocratic and solidarity, the 
 Nodier circle taught naturalness and genuineness, 
 democracy and individualism. It was the salon-Rous- 
 seau, in the best sense of the term. 
 
 Again, the salons of Brunetiere were, as he says, far 
 from encouraging any pursuits of the Indefinable or 
 any excursions into the domains of the Dark and In-
 
 78 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 scrutable. There were no Hamlets and Fausts In 
 classic French literature, and the pages of Racine and 
 Moliere were untroubled by questions of free will and 
 destiny. But in the grand ccnaclc of the Nodiers, it 
 was precisely this love for the Unknowable, and for the 
 realms of chiaroscuros which were the hovering coun- 
 terpart and product of the Romantic deification of the 
 Middle Ages, that gave the medieval Hernani to French 
 belles-lettres. Imagination never could paint too 
 strangely, terribly or darkly, nor fantasy limn the bor- 
 ders or margins of life too fantastically or grotesquely, 
 to suit the wondering hearers of Hugo and Nodier. 
 
 And so, while the old aristocratic salons contributed 
 to works of fiction — to the novel — and notably to the 
 theater, the Arsenal associated itself with, and con- 
 tributed to, the rise and growth of modern French 
 poetry and of the French Romantic literature and art 
 in their various phases. It is left for the twentieth 
 century to determine whether the women of 1830 oc- 
 casioned a wealth of "Letters" and "Correspondence" 
 equaling, when measured by every standard, that of any 
 previous isochronal epoch in France. But if it shall be 
 found that they have not, it will be for the reason 
 that they were enriching French literature in other and 
 superior ways; for they were either poets putting their 
 communications into the form of verse, or novelists 
 publishing their confessions and confidences under the 
 guise of romances, or solitaires writing "Diaries" and 
 "Journals." As for the art of conversation, wherein 
 the French have excelled alike in all times, the women 
 at the Arsenal doubtless displayed less scintillating bril-
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 79 
 
 llance, less glinting mentality and preciosity in their 
 liveliness of tongue than their fair predecessors; yet 
 their colloquies must surely have shown more human- 
 ness and more spontaneous and colorful variety. 
 
 One observes then, in a word, with respect to the 
 comparative characteristics of the Nodier salon, how 
 the home life there began to "kill" the salon; how an 
 English type of living succeeded to a French type of 
 living; how the bourgeois dethroned the aristocrat, 
 and liberty and liberality unloosened the hold of Court 
 and tradition in all things; how French belles-lettres 
 were popularized as well as romanticized; how the 
 natural took precedence over the artificial, and the 
 youthful over the old; how the individualistic rose up 
 out of the social; how the heart and the inner sensibili- 
 ties, color and the moral, displaced brain, mentality, 
 form and the decorative, in the quasi triumph of the 
 human over the artistic; and how Imagination, the pic- 
 turesque, the bizarre, the cult of the shapeless Unseen 
 and of the obscure Unknown, were imported into the 
 typically bright, sane, symmetrical, mundane sphere of 
 French literary activity. 
 
 What a pity that Madame Mennessier-Nodler left 
 no Journal or Memoirs! Her knowledge of the lettered 
 life in France during the whole of the exciting Ro- 
 mantic epoch, her recollections of her countless great 
 friends in their early, fame-striving years, her reasons 
 for esteeming each of them Individually, and her ac-
 
 8o French Essays and Profiles 
 
 counts of how they were generally regarded In their 
 young careers, and of the belletristic gossip and small 
 talk of the day, would have been of unfailing interest 
 and no little profit to posterity. 
 
 She liked the man Balzac and respected him. She 
 knew him quite well despite the fact that he was scarce- 
 ly visible to the world at large. No one in her circle 
 ever dreamt in the 1830's that he would become what 
 the marvelous Balzac is to us. He wrote novels, it 
 was understood, but no one thought of asking if any- 
 body had perused them, for every one was writing fic- 
 tion and verse in those days. Madame Mennessier 
 never in her whole life read one of his volumes, and 
 naturally never could quite comprehend his posthumous 
 glory. 
 
 She recounted this incident. "There was at that time 
 [1842 or 3, not long before Nodier's death] a vacant 
 fauteuil at the Academy, and Balzac was a candidate. 
 One day he issued forth from my father's study, passed 
 through the salon, and came and sat down by me. I 
 asked him laughingly: 'Have you something of the look 
 of a nonplussed canvasser? Is it possible, by chance, that 
 my Immortal has refused you his voice?' — 'You could 
 not guess what his answer was to me,' replied Balzac 
 with an emotion all the more noticeable in his case, be- 
 cause it was not his nature to be easily moved. 'His 
 response was: I will do better than give you my vote, 
 my friend. I will leave you my place.' " 
 
 Madame Mennessier held Delacroix in high honor; 
 and Lamartine and also Vigny, with his own seraphic 
 and distinguished air, left her sweet and precious mem-
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 8i 
 
 ones. Lamartine wrote her this touching letter to- 
 ward the humiliating and hopeless end of his career. 
 "Your 'Souvenirs' [of Charles Nodier], so opportune 
 and so profound and so amiable, is one of the best 
 fortunes of my life! This letter arrives in the very- 
 depths of my trouble, and consoles me so far as it is 
 possible to console me. Know that you have done me 
 great good. That will encourage you to recommence. 
 I am here for three weeks in the midst of tribulations 
 and lacerations of soul. France is without heart, but 
 you have enough for all." 
 
 Jules Janin, who was constantly bumbling and buz- 
 zing about like a May beetle, was one of her most inti- 
 mate friends, and they were uncommonly lively and 
 espiegle when together. She had a quiet horror of 
 Sainte-Beuve whose tongue, which appeared to be en- 
 couraged by his biographic methods in literary criticism, 
 could taint the very air with suspicion. 
 
 The Hugo and Nodier families were most closely as- 
 sociated during the earlier period of the Romantic 
 movement, and Madame Hugo and Marie Nodier were 
 for fifteen years like sisters to each other. Nodier and 
 Hugo went in company to Rheims to be present at the 
 coronation of Charles X. It was also in 1824 that the 
 Hugo and Nodier households together made their ex- 
 cursion to the Alps. 
 
 It was a famous tour full of incident and merriment, 
 and daily inspired both verse and song in the two poets. 
 Nodier was the clown of the party, and crowned their 
 alpestrine ascension with a typically sublime and fan- 
 tastic climax when he presented Victor Hugo to Mont
 
 82 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Blanc. Hugo's career after 1840 swept him outside 
 the range of the intimacy and modest personal interest 
 of Madame Mennessier. The Hugo who was peer of 
 France, politician, statesman, exile, she did not know 
 nor understand, and therefore she could not glory in 
 nor sympathize with him. He was no longer for her 
 the young gifted friend who had a lovable family and 
 was almost a brother to her. 
 
 That he, on the other hand, always retained some- 
 thing of the feeling which he displayed in the 1830's in 
 his verse to her. Is evidenced by this letter which he 
 wrote her near the end of his banishment. "Dear 
 Marie, it's my fete — this bouquet which has come from 
 you. I have just read an exquisite page of your book 
 'Charles Nodler.' Charles Nodier! what a tender and 
 beautiful name! The name of your father, the name 
 of my brother ! He left you his soul, and you have put 
 it in this book. You have his style, you have his con- 
 versation, you have his charm plus your own. By what 
 means are you able to be his daughter and to seem at 
 the same time his muse? You have taken up his quill, 
 but I think it must have fallen from your own wings. 
 You were his sweet angel. Merci et brava for your 
 tender and touching volume, the embalmment of a 
 noble memory! My wife has wept with emotion. I 
 embrace the good and charming souls who surround 
 you, and I kneel at your feet. Ave Maria." 
 
 Musset and Madame Mennessier were mates from 
 childhood. He was by one year her senior. Their af- 
 fection for each other was almost that of lovers. She 
 was faithfully on his side in the Musset-Sand imbroglio.
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 83 
 
 She knew well enough how infantile, impetuous, erring 
 he was, yet she believed heartily in his excellent in- 
 tentions and in his essential manliness and truthfulness, 
 and she deplored his suffering nature and career. As 
 for George Sand, Madame Mennessier had never met 
 her; and, whatever might be said of Musset, the pen 
 and habits of living of the author of "Indiana" placed 
 her, during that epoch, apart from the women of self- 
 respecting Parisian households. 
 
 We have noticed how Musset sang of Madame Men- 
 nessier in verse, and we realize how he felt a touch of 
 truth in writing her one day, in his characteristic way, 
 apropos of the "respectable Arsenal where we had 
 danced at fifteen." He exclaimed: "Alas, we have all 
 become great personages, and la gloire, which does not 
 dance, has separated everything. La gloire has per- 
 mitted you, at least, to remain what you were — one of 
 the most charming and spirituelles women in this stupid 
 epoch." 
 
 But none of the illustrious friends of Madame Men- 
 nessier showed a more sincere and abounding affection 
 for her in his way than the elder Dumas. He lives, in 
 his whole big presence of body and heart, in this note 
 which he sent her in 1867 '^^ acknowledgment of her 
 "Charles Nodier." "I received your letter and your 
 volume this morning. To-night the book lies read 
 through! I have just relived forty years. I swear to 
 you, Marie, that one of my great regrets in not believ- 
 ing in the immortality of the soul, is to have to say to 
 myself that I shall never see your father again. And 
 if I do not hasten to you and embrace you, perhaps I
 
 84 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 shall never see you again. Your father is the man 
 whom I have loved the most tenderly. You are the 
 woman, although you have never suspected it, whom I 
 have loved the most paternally! You have written a 
 beautiful book which has something saintly about it. 
 Au revoir, Marie. If we never see each other again — 
 Adieu! Bon, voila, I discover that I have used a half 
 sheet. You merit, nevertheless, a whole one. All my 
 tenderness of heart to you." 
 
 How romantic and poetic it was for Dumas the 
 Elder to salute her from the harbor of Tunis on a cer- 
 tain December morning in 1846! His boat was 
 anchored there and he had been wakened at dawn by a 
 vivid dream. It had taken such full possession of him 
 that he could not shake off its charm, so he forthwith 
 addressed her who had been "the queen" in his sleep. 
 He described his vision of a "salon of white panel work. 
 In the recess of this salon, and seated before a piano 
 where her fingers wandered carelessly, there was a 
 woman, inspired and pensive — a muse and a saint. I 
 recognized this woman, and I murmured as if she 
 could hear me : — 'I greet you, Marie, full of grace — 
 my thoughts are with you.' " 
 
 Speaking again of "this recess where the piano stood 
 and where you sang," he exclaimed: "It is indeed rare 
 that I do not say to myself, when I write a chapter 
 which pleases me, or when I finish a book that is well 
 done — 'Marie Nodier, that precious spirit, will read 
 this!' " And after giving a description of those who 
 were always present at the old soirees, he thus closed 
 the tender, emotional missive: "And, finally, that little
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 85 
 
 girl, slipping back and forth among all the poets, paint- 
 ers, composers, great men — the men of esprit and the 
 savants! That little girl whom I took in the hollow 
 of my hand and held up as if she were a statuette of 
 Barye or Pradier! O, mon Dieu, mon Dieu, what has 
 become of it all, Marie? . . . Vigny has become 
 invisible; Lamartine is depute; Hugo is peer of France; 
 and my son and I are at Carthage!" 
 
 Such was this letter, filled with an affection that 
 seemed born of a loverlike paternity — filled with the 
 vision which effaced for Dumas that morning the mirific 
 bay and panorama of Tunis and their hints of mirage. 
 We too were full of this dream of her and of the old 
 salon in the Arsenal as we passed one eve the little 
 gray-walled cemetery of the flowery-laned village of 
 Fontenay-aux-Roses in the environs of Paris. Entering 
 and standing by her grave, we let the fragrance of her 
 delicious souvenir trail over our consciousness; we 
 scented the sanctuary of our love and veneration for 
 her remembrance with the incense of the Arvers sonnet. 
 And there came to our lips the words of Sainte-Beuve 
 almost as if they had been written for her, instead of 
 for her dead father fifty years ago — "the name of him 
 (her) who has been lothing, who has been able to do 
 nothing, who has had no other power than that of 
 pleasing and charming — this name was in a moment 
 upon our tongues, and every one shed tears." 
 
 The praise of her was sung of a sweet, simple wo- 
 manhood. She was worshiped for this in all its pure es- 
 sence and filial naturalness. Living long and well until 
 the age of eighty-two, she was destined to be known to
 
 86 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 no catalogue of art, nor anthology, nor history of noted 
 French women; nor did even wealth display its glamour 
 about her, since she was a daughter without dot, for 
 whom her father had to sell his library in order to 
 provide her trousseau. Glory, with his profane love 
 of earthly fame and noise of deed, records her not be- 
 cause she did nothing; but her illustrious friends, in a 
 beautiful cult which delights the heart and refreshes the 
 soul, preserved to posterity her memory for what she 
 was — something that is more precious to the Christian 
 ideal. She might have said with another: "My talent 
 perhaps would have been greater, if I had not been a 
 wife and mother." For that matter, Madame Men- 
 nessier was of her race in that French women have 
 always been inspirers rather than creators in literature 
 and art. Yet we scarcely think of Madame Mennes- 
 sier as French. Her memory belongs to every clime 
 and country. She was an ideal that would flee the 
 thought of race and sect and locality. No national 
 boundary is so high and no race pride or prejudice so 
 narrow as to resist the winning legend of her charm. 
 She was a cosmopolitan type. Parisian in her gayety, 
 esprit and conversational gifts, German in her music, 
 English in her free girl's life and in her hospitable 
 domesticity, she unconsciously infuses us with a lesson 
 of the sisterhood of races and the brotherhood of man. 
 As we turned to go, overflowing with these thoughts 
 and feelings, the little stock of vendible flowers at the 
 cemetery gate looked us significantly in the eyes. And, 
 full of the impulse of the moment, we took two roses
 
 Daughter of the French Romantics 87 
 
 and laid them on her tomb — a red rose for the Ro- 
 mantic school, a white rose in token of her sainted 
 womanliness, and both to her honor as the true and 
 adored daughter of the French Romantics. Then we 
 closed the gate softly and came away in the dusk.
 
 iii. The Great Era of the French Ballet
 
 THE GREAT ERA OF THE FRENCH BALLET 
 
 I THE FAMOUS DANSEUSES 
 
 ANY inquiry into the evolution in the nineteenth 
 century ballet tempts only a word about that 
 long period of the dance which coursed from 
 the era of Louis XIV, its first magnificent patron in 
 France, to the epoch of Taglioni. Yet during the eigh- 
 teenth century the theater dance flourished preeminently 
 among the Parisians. One reads of Camargo who, 
 about 1730, leaped the first entrechat in their capital. 
 She mounted entrechats-4. Thirty years later en- 
 trechats-6 were seen there, followed after a time by 
 entrechats-8. 
 
 In her days, too, there was the famous Salle, whom 
 Voltaire made the pendant to her in some memorable 
 verses. Salle invented the ballet-pantomime and did 
 more to form the ballet into what it is to-day than any 
 danseuse before Taglioni. One learns that the dance 
 of Salle was naive, graceful, frilled neither with gam- 
 bades nor sauts, and that she never scaled an entrechat 
 nor twirled a pirouette. 
 
 Ballets were the favorable diversion in the fetes of 
 the Court and nobility in- those times, as may be judged 
 from the fact that the famous duchess of Maine dis- 
 ported in at least thirty-seven. The theater dance sup- 
 t 91
 
 92 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 plied the models for the manners and courtesies of 
 society. French politeness and grace were due in no 
 small measure to the cult of the ballet among the best 
 classes. 
 
 It is well known that the dancer Martel said he could 
 always tell a statesman by his walk. For, as a rule, the 
 leading Frenchmen of the century not only loved the 
 spectacular dance, but took pride in imitating its ele- 
 gancies. Frederick the Great, the then Frenchman of 
 Germany, spoke from experience when he observed 
 that he "should rather manage an army than a ballet, 
 for it is easier to win a battle than make a ballet 
 dance." 
 
 In the second half of the eighteenth century the 
 ballet, as an art of the theater, progressed far more 
 than during the years before 1750. It was after this 
 year that Noverre crystallized, as it were, the mod- 
 ern "ballet of action" (ballet-pantomime). His 
 "Letters" on the dance will doubtless ever remain the 
 most classic literary composition on the subject. 
 
 Then came Vestris, more celebrated than any male 
 dancer whose name has descended with history. He 
 was famous for his dancing and for his remark : "There 
 are only three men in Europe: the king of Prusshy, 
 mossieu de Voltaire, and me." Probably the greatest 
 danseuse of that time was la Guimard, whose sumptu- 
 ous style of living and noisy career caused her to be, 
 in a way, quite a formida^ble rival to the Court itself, 
 adept as it was in the matter of sensations. Under 
 Napoleon and the Restoration, the theater dance was
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 93 
 
 relatively Insignificant until, suddenly, Taglloni ap- 
 peared and Idealized It, 
 
 The male dancer predominated In the ballet before 
 the era of Taglloni. It was he who developed and 
 displayed the dance as Blasis described It about 1829 In 
 his scholarly and authoritative book. On the other 
 hand, by contrast, the danseuse relied largely on grace- 
 ful attitudes, wavlngs of arms, poses of head, and co- 
 quetries of smiles and toilets. She did not revel In the 
 dances par en haut with all their dexterous liveliness. 
 Her art was comparatively confined to the upper half 
 of the body. She sought to be a Ninon de L'enclos In 
 the role of a ballet personage — a kind of grand dame 
 who did not seek to triumph by difficult evolutions. 
 
 Blasis laid down this rule: "Men must dance In a 
 manner very different from women; the temps de vlg- 
 ueur* and bold, majestic exertlons'of the former, would 
 have a disagreeable effect In the latter, who must shine 
 and delight by lithesome, graceful motions, by neat and 
 pretty steps on the ground (terre-a-terre) , and by a 
 decent voluptuousness and abandon In all attitudes." 
 
 The Illustrative evidence of the simplicity of the art 
 of the danseuse before Taglloni Is seen In the plates 
 that Blasis produces. Herein the ballerine Is shown as 
 wearing a thin robe reaching almost, if not fully, to the 
 ankle, and clinging somewhat to the body — a garment 
 which would make severe pas impossible. Her foot, in 
 these many engravings, Is lifted above the level of the 
 knee only In two instances, and then scarcely up to the 
 
 *A temps de vigueur is any vigorous movement of the legs.
 
 94 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 plane of the hip, and, too, behind, not in front; so that 
 she details but the easiest movements and always pre- 
 serves the most decorous attitudes. Nevertheless, the 
 methods were sensualistic as taught by Vestris, the 
 great teacher of the dance in Paris in the early part of 
 the nineteenth century. Vestris seemed to think that 
 the dance should seduce — should corrupt, in fact. 
 
 All the foregoing, however, was quickly to be for- 
 gotten for a new and ideal art with which a dancer 
 known as Taglioni, who had a daughter named Marie, 
 was to inspire the world. The divertissements dis- 
 played by the ballerine of to-day date in France from 
 about 1829 when Marie Taglioni finally signed a long 
 engagement with the directors of the Grand Opera. 
 Of her performance, and of that of her brilliant succes- 
 sors, there is really little exact, satisfactory knowledge, 
 since the art of the danseuse, like that of the orator, 
 the singer, the actor, melts into air and is apt to be lost 
 to precise trace. 
 
 One learns- that Taglioni was born in 1804, in Stock- 
 holm, of Italian parents, and was consequently twenty- 
 four years of age when she was first engaged at the 
 Paris Opera. Her father trained her, and they fol- 
 lowed their own fantasies in their profession. They 
 had enjoyed perfect independence before they came to 
 Paris, for they had never been connected regularly with 
 a theater. 
 
 Free from the corsets of the then school, their dance 
 donned the draperies of inspiration. Castil-Blaze re- 
 marked that Taglioni's grace was naive; that her pas
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 95 
 
 were at once seemly and voluptuous; that she was 
 gifted with an extreme lightness; and that the newness 
 of her effects came from Nature and not from rubric. 
 Her sylphlike manner, he repeats, was elegant, facile, 
 and of gentle contours. 
 
 Dr. Veron, who was the director of the Paris Opera 
 when Taglloni soared into the fullest flight of her glory, 
 noted her lightness, her elevation,* and above all her 
 ballon.** He emphasizes that her dance partook of 
 delicacy, taste and authority; that she possessed a 
 naivete almost mystically religious; that all women 
 were her enthusiastic champions because her art was 
 so modest and refined and her homeliness so excep- 
 tional. He writes that her legs suggested those of 
 Diana; that her bust was short and narrow and that 
 her arms were very long. This explains why she was 
 sometimes called the "little hunchback." He says that 
 she did not lack esprit, and was fond of raillery. She 
 plied her task during four hours a day. Neither 
 fatigue, perspiration, nor tears on her part ever per- 
 suaded her father to shirk the daily lesson. She re- 
 ceived six thousand dollars a year, with three months' 
 leave of absence. 
 
 Unfortunately, Blasis's volume, which is to-day the 
 best general and practical authority on the dance, since 
 Noverre has become somewhat archaic and circum- 
 scribed, was written a little before Taglioni's time, and 
 he never mentions her name. Adice testified that she 
 
 * To appear elevated from the ground. 
 
 ** To have ballon is to be able to leap lightly from the stage to a 
 great height.
 
 96 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 excelled in executing an adage* with aplomb and pre- 
 cision. In 1856, Saint-Leon, the great choregraph, 
 thus spoke of her: "Taglioni did not dance better than 
 her precursors, but her dance differed in kind. She was 
 above all remarkable because of a mixture of poetry 
 and simplicity, of grace and suavity. She was criticized 
 at first because she almost always held her arms 
 lowered, and carried her body bent forward; still these 
 happy defects made her a sensation. She did not heed 
 so much the rules of the 'school' as did the danseuses 
 before her time, yet more than do our danseuses 
 of to-day. 
 
 "Her gift was a certain something that charmed, and 
 created a furor. She educated the public thenceforth 
 to demand a talent type — a star. She concentrated all 
 interest on herself, and ballets, whose effects reposed in 
 the ensemble, went out of fashion. The environment of 
 the corps de ballet was effaced so that it might not dis- 
 tract attention from the queen of the evening. Even 
 the glory of the male dancer hopelessly paled because, 
 in trying unsuccessfully to invent for himself some new 
 mode that would correspond to Taglioni's creation, he 
 lost 'school.' " 
 
 (Notice may at once be called to the fact that Saint- 
 Leon erred in observing that Taglioni did not dance 
 better than her precursors. His confusion arises be- 
 cause he does not happen to distinguish between male 
 and female dancers. Taglioni may not have detailed, 
 and probably, on the whole, did not detail, so much 
 
 * Adages, or developpes, are various poses. These poses, leaped, 
 make up the greater part of the dance.
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 97 
 
 difficult skill as her male forerunners; but she certainly 
 achieved more expert and exhausting pas and evolu- 
 tions and displayed more grace than her female prede- 
 cessors, as will be remarked further on.) 
 
 There was in 1900, in Paris, a venerable gentleman 
 who had been connected with the ballet for sixty years. 
 He saw Taglioni dance, likewise nearly all of the bal- 
 lerines who have appeared in France since her day. He 
 said that she was a little taller and larger than Fanny 
 Elssler; that, while the latter had a prettier face, Tag- 
 lioni was better proportioned and had more harniony 
 of physique; and that she outdanced Elssler, for it 
 was the mere art of the dance that won with her, 
 whereas Elssler freely exploited on the stage her claims 
 as a seductive woman. He also said, comparing Ta- 
 glioni with her successors, that she was good in dra- 
 matic pantomime; that she mounted very well on the 
 pointes while not relying on them particularly; and 
 that she paid little notice to pirouettes on the pointes. 
 
 The accepted French account of her runs about like 
 this: — We are told that she personified delicate grace, 
 exquisite taste, correctness, aerial lightness and chaste- 
 ness. She coiled in facile undulations; her arms curved 
 in an elegance of action; her feet posed on, or skimmed 
 over, the ground without noise, as if she were a sylph. 
 Appearing and disappearing like a dream, a vision, she 
 was now a veritable winged caprice, and then a tender, 
 affecting elegy, with her eyes bathed in tears and her 
 wings fallen. She writhed in no lascivious contortions, 
 and offered no sensualities. She poetized the dance. — 
 
 "La Sylphide" and "la Fille du Danube" were her
 
 98 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 finest triumphs; yet scarcely less famous were her 
 creations of the pas tyrolienne in Rossini's "Tell," and 
 the pas de fascination in Meyerbeer's "Robert le 
 Diable." She was not a woman but a charm, and be- 
 came the synonym of the purest traditions of that 
 Terpsichorean art which is ideal and neither realistic 
 nor voluptuous. 
 
 Many of the greatest men of literature in that day 
 were fond of singing her praises. Balzac, Thackera/ 
 and Musset wrote of her, and Banville versified her as 
 the daughter of the sylphs. Gautier refers to her 
 vaporous grace, and to her "chaste school which makes 
 of the dance an almost immaterial art by reason of a 
 modest distinction, of a retiring reserve, and of a vir- 
 ginal diaphaneity." 
 
 In attempting, from the foregoing, to fashion in 
 one's vision with something like precise fancy the aerial 
 model of her art, the word sylph seems best to serve 
 the purpose. Lithe, suave, airy, Taglioni must have 
 appeared as of the skies. She transposed the dance 
 into the key of mythology and gave it the classic 
 phrasing. Her winged celerities and hoverings, her 
 fragile moods of tear-gauzed sorrow and flitting vi- 
 vacities, all molded into the sculpturesque danse noble 
 — the "dance serious" and ideal. 
 
 There were no excesses, no boldnesses, no self-tor- 
 turings, no self-consciousness. It was an impersonal 
 representation, in which the warm-handed, individual- 
 istic woman was effaced in a type of removed and re- 
 frigerant ethereality. She transferred the fancied 
 pantheons of Greece and Rome, in their traceries of
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 99 
 
 neat proportions and white vistas, to the crepuscular 
 world of blue gleams and slate-colored hues which a 
 stage moonlight spreads abroad in the realms of the 
 modern theater. She attached the seal of classicality 
 to an art which had been mincing artificially, coquet- 
 tishly, wantonly, in the domains of the ancien regime. 
 
 Taglioni not only etherealized the dance but she de- 
 tailed a more elaborate performance than the dan.- 
 seuses who preceded her. A reference to Blasis's 
 work proves this conclusively. It is true that she did 
 not follow what was called "the school" so closely as 
 they, yet following the dry rules of "the school" does 
 not produce a star, for none of the ballerines from 
 Salle and Camargo to Taglioni is remembered merely 
 for her dancing. The fact that Taglioni's skirts were 
 slightly convex and were shorter and stiffer than those 
 of her predecessors indicates that she accomplished 
 more expert pas than had ever been known. 
 
 In the first place, she indulged somewhat in pointe 
 dancing, whereas that had not been practiced by either 
 her male or female predecessors. There is no chapter 
 on pointes in the book of Blasis. He speaks of them, 
 but his illustrations show that he means what are called 
 nowadays demi-pointes — balancing on the toe, not on 
 the tip of the toe — an altogether different and more 
 difficult performance. Furthermore, Taglioni was the 
 first to claim the grande vigueur for her sex, and to 
 create the ballon for which she is famous. The ballon 
 is one of the most exhausting and crucial exhibitions on 
 the ballet stage, yet the word is scarcely mentioned, if 
 at all, by Blasis.
 
 100 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 This fully explains the significant result of the Ta- 
 glionization of the dance, namely, that the scepter of 
 Terpsichorean glory was therein definitively snatched 
 by woman from the hand of man. Before Taglioni's 
 day, most of the distinctively great dancers were men, 
 and to them the art owed most of its progress. Since 
 her time, nearly all the leading artists have been 
 women; the transformations of the dance have been due 
 to their revelations; and it has indeed become almost 
 wholly their own prize. The point of departure for 
 the new and aerial art of Taghoni lay in the free and 
 dexterous use of the legs. In their skill of flight she 
 could buoy up her lightness and grand ballon and make 
 herself seem a shapely form floating hither and thither. 
 Her arms, face and body entered fully into the easy 
 harmony of her evolutions, so that one part of her 
 person was not sacrificed for another, and she was 
 therefore able to present a perfect ensemble of volatile 
 grace such as is fancied in a sylph. 
 
 When one muses over the Taglioni tradition, he 
 may think of the contrast offered by this striking pas- 
 sage in the "Journal" of Alfred de Vigny : "If I were a 
 painter, I should like to be a Raphael-black; angelic 
 form, somber color." Were one a dancer, would she 
 not divinely long to be a Taglioni-white ; sylphine form, 
 color of the cool Pentelic? 
 
 The Elsslers were Germans. The two sisters came 
 to Paris in 1834. Therese was a tall, large woman, 
 and the Viennese called her The Majestic One. Energy 
 and virility characterized her. She was a very correct
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet loi 
 
 and schooled danseuse. Her more celebrated sister, 
 Fanny, was born in Vienna in 1810. About 1840 she 
 toured in America where, as she wrote Gautier with de- 
 light, "people throw flowers into my carriage and men 
 lift their hats to me in the street." 
 
 A sketch of her is thus traced by a contemporary: 
 "Inimitable delicacy, gentleness, a fine and light dis- 
 tinction in bearing, a supple agihty, a coquetry always 
 active and ardent, the art of fascination, a sensuous in- 
 telligence which is reflected by her whole body, and, 
 finally, a delicious mincing air, are the outlines of her 
 portrait. Her person is in accord with her talent. Her 
 body is slender; her face noble and piquant, and its ex- 
 pression distinguished, spirituelle and provoking; her 
 glances are soft and caressing, and speak without ef- 
 frontery. She even transforms some defects into at- 
 tractions. Her feeble and wearied appearance appears 
 to testify that secret ardors burn within her. She 
 dances to charm, to trample the spectator under foot. 
 Taglioni revealed to us the dance of heaven; Elssler 
 desires the love of man. If the one is the sister of the 
 angels, the other is the most adorable of the daughters 
 of earth." 
 
 The usual memorial of her is about as follows: — 
 Her beauty was frail and delicate. She possessed great 
 talent, but the expression of the pantomime, substituted 
 for the charm of the dance, was what people admired in 
 her. She had grace and executed tours de force on the 
 pointes. She was reproached for a lack of lightness, 
 yet her mobile face and the vivacity of her gestures lent
 
 102 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 themselves marvelously to the play of the passions, and 
 she left traditions in all her roles. The cachucha* was 
 her triumph, and she made all Europe know its signifi- 
 cation. With her castanets and her mimicry full of 
 meaning and admirably served by entrancing music, she 
 caused the public to forget Taglioni for a moment, 
 though she did not equal the latter in the art of the 
 dance. Elssler never approached the stage without 
 terror, but her fear gave way to a furious gayety as 
 soon as the orchestra struck up. — 
 
 It was remarked that she had no grand elans, still 
 she exhibited a highly-wrought finish, and executed a 
 trill of battements like Paganini's bow. Gautier says, 
 in speaking of her as the cachucha incarnate compared 
 with Taglioni as the incarnation of a sylph: "She is 
 masculinity effeminated, like Antlnoiis. Her move- 
 ments are made up of this dual nature: with all her 
 amorous languor and feminine gentleness, one feels 
 the brusque strength and the steel-limbed agility of a 
 young athlete. She is the first to introduce at the 
 Opera — the sanctuary of the classic pirouette — a 
 fougue, a petulance and a passionate temperament. 
 
 "They call her, by way of compliment, a Spaniard of 
 the North. This double trait is a subject for criticism, 
 not praise. She is German by reason of her smile, 
 whiteness of her skin, form of face, placidness of brow; 
 she is Spanish by reason of her hair, her little feet, her 
 small, slender hands, the somewhat bold curving at 
 the hips. Two natures, two temperaments, combat 
 
 * The cachucha is a Spanish dance which combines the qualities of 
 the rapid fandango with those of the more majestic bolero: that is 
 to say, it is sometimes calm, sometimes gay, sometimes passionate.
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 103 
 
 each other in her, and her beauty would gain if it could 
 decide for one or the other of these two types. She 
 is pretty, yet she lacks a race; she hesitates between 
 Spain and Germany. And this indecision announces it- 
 self in the matter of sex: her hips are but slightly de- 
 veloped and her chest does not exceed the curves of 
 the antique Hermaphrodite. While she is a very charm- 
 ing woman, she would be the most charming boy in the 
 world." 
 
 Referring to her in 1838, Gautier wrote: *'Fanny 
 has a fire, an entrain, and a suppleness beyond imagina- 
 tion. She accords to her poses a proud, spirited ac- 
 cent — something so bravely voluptuous that it would 
 make the most enraged dancers of Seville burn with 
 envy. Her cachucha is becoming thoroughly Spanish. 
 She daily gives way more and more to this divine dance 
 strewn with languors and petulances. It seems rather 
 singular that a Spanish dance has been brought to us 
 by a German; but genius, is it not of all countries?" 
 
 It is apparent that Fanny Elssler lacked the mytho- 
 logical, aerial grace of Taglioni. She was a woman 
 first, a danseuse afterward. She associated the dance 
 with her Germanic passion for music, and consumed all 
 in the glowing sensuousness of a strongly feminine 
 nature. Hence she was good in pantomime. Her 
 mimicry was "full of finesse in that she imitated turn by 
 turn, and with remarkable truth, comedian, coquette, 
 quarreling page, and libertine." 
 
 This preeminence of beauty, sensuous coquetry, ver- 
 tiginous vivacity, and disposition to indulge in tours de 
 force, made her, in the ballet era since 1829, the first
 
 104 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 and most celebrated danseuse de demi-caractere, and 
 the companion in fame of Taglioni, the impersonal per- 
 fection of the danse noble. Fanny Elssler moved not 
 along the classic lines of a generalized ideality that 
 seems of no race nor epoch; but she characterized her 
 dance by her warm-limbed individuality, and by her 
 sentiments of locality and nationality, as immortalized 
 in her cachucha. By these terre-a-terre and more real- 
 istic features of the dance, she made up so very largely 
 for her comparative lack of the grander Taglioni 
 motives — grande vigueur, grand ballon. 
 
 Carlotta Grisi quickly danced into Parisian favor in 
 1840. She was taught by the famous Perrot who be- 
 came her husband. She created "Giselle," one of the 
 renowned -ballets of the century. Its libretto was partly 
 from the pen of Gautier, who seemed always to look 
 back upon "Giselle" with a satisfacti-on only surpassed 
 by that with which he recalled the battle of Hernani. 
 "Giselle" was the greatest triumph of the Grisi, al- 
 though in "la Peri" she accomplished a perilous leap 
 which, it is said, has never been undertaken in the same 
 way by any one. She danced for pleasure — coming, 
 going, bounding hither and thither, and charming all 
 hearts with her bright, laughing face as well as by the 
 perfection of her method. 
 
 Gautier, who soon came under her spell and aban- 
 doned somewhat his ardor for the art of Elssler, 
 writes of Carlotta: "Her dance is light and correct. 
 She is aerial, and modest like Elssler, and has a happy 
 and communicative gayety. She was a singer and loved 
 music, and her career hesitated sometime between Eu-
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 105 
 
 terpe and Terpsichore. Carlotta has rhythmic har- 
 mony of movement, finish of detail, and elegance and 
 neatness of pose. In pantomime, she omits no traits 
 of gentleness, naivete, sentiment and expression, and 
 her play has grace and vigor. She dances as if sport- 
 ing, and all scenes are easy for her." 
 
 Carlotta Grisi married the art of Elssler to that of 
 Taglioni, Indeed, she "held an intermediate place be- 
 tween them." She added lightness to the one and joy- 
 ousness to the other without equaling either. She gave 
 a delicate, classic form to the dance of Elssler and, 
 possessed of a birdlike and sunny Italian temperament, 
 she capered from Taglioni's realm into the domain of 
 demi-caractere. La Grisi was Elssler and Taglioni 
 blended in miniature. She suggested perhaps one of 
 Gautier's own "Emaux et Camees" enlivened into joy- 
 ousness. What Elssler had done for Germany and 
 Spain, vis-a-vis the mythological (the Greek) concep- 
 tion of Taglioni, Grisi did for Italy. Her memory, so 
 lauded by Gautier, remains one of the most delightful 
 souvenirs that haunt the Paris Opera. 
 
 During the epoch of Grisi, there was seen in Paris 
 a danseuse of whom very little information can be 
 gathered from literature. It was Priora. She is said 
 to have been a large, elegant, distinguished looking 
 person, and was of so cold a nature that she never 
 laughed or smiled on or off the stage. Those who 
 saw her say that she perfected the danse noble: that 
 she had more correctness and reach, more stately 
 grandeur, more of a lofty flight, than Taglioni. 
 
 After Grisi, one comes to a new variety of dance
 
 io6 French Essavs and Profiles 
 
 which was impersonated by the dainty and piquant 
 Cerrito. She was of Italian origin. She came to the 
 Opera in Paris in 1847, ^"^ was reengaged five years 
 later. In London about 1845, she had danced a pas 
 de quatre with Taglioni, Elssler and Grisi. The world 
 will doubtless never witness again such a group of 
 danseuses as was this, for therein the four most hon- 
 ored fairies of the modern dance interlaced their steps. 
 
 Fanny Cerrito took up the wreath of glory which 
 Grisi had left behind in the French capital. It appears 
 that she was as light as a caprice, that her dance was 
 wholly one of fantasy, that she captivated by her en- 
 train, and that the Italians called her "the fourth 
 Grace" because of the charm of her person. The 
 flowery though commonplace bust of her in the private 
 foyer of the Paris Opera shows a sweet face delicate- 
 ly textured and neatly compact, a mincing yet mobile 
 mouth, and shoulders that sloped in wonderful curves 
 downward. Saint-Leon writes only this of his wife: 
 "Cerrito is a reproduction of Taglioni but more 
 naive. She is a dancer of inspiration and nature, with 
 less school than either Taglioni or Elssler." 
 
 Cerrito created the danse de fantaisie. It came and 
 went with her. No one has ever put a competent foot 
 in any part of her repertoire Her cajolery seems to 
 have been indefinably fanciful and light-trimmed — 
 something that the eye and pen could scarcely seize. It 
 was not her dancing that won, for she was not really 
 a remarkable danseuse. She triumphed with her co- 
 quetry, and with her witching manner. It was the 
 art of the ingenue spiced up by an experienced woman.
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 107 
 
 Much of the credit of her creations was due to her 
 husband. 
 
 Another Italian, Rosati, furnished a type quite dif- 
 ferent from any yet described. She came to Paris in 
 1853. Her tradition runs after this fashion: — A 
 woman with a feverish head and a look lugubrious and 
 Satanic. She excelled in the genre vigorous, noble and 
 pathetic; scarcely less striking in laughing and informal 
 roles; unequaled when she expressed passion. The 
 most delicate nuances were rendered by her mimicry 
 with precision and distinctness. Nothing vague in 
 her sentiments; yet she endeavored to ignore details, 
 thinking that a few well selected traits sufficed to pro- 
 duce the most surprising effects. Her gestures were 
 simple, and her attitudes full of grace and harmony. 
 She left, notably in "la Sonnambula," ineffaceable sou- 
 venirs. Ingenious and intelligent in the conception of 
 impersonations, now fiery and then affecting, now en- 
 gulfed in despair, and then ravished as if by the ecstasy 
 of delightful reveries, she realized in pantomime what 
 Ristori accomplished in the drama. — Those who 
 danced with her say that Rosati was a pretty, well-pro- 
 portioned brunette of about the size of Mile. Subra, 
 and that she was the greatest of all pantomime bal- 
 lerines, and also an exceptionally good comrade. 
 
 Here at length entered the drama into the dance. 
 Rosati was a tragic actress who expressed the grander 
 moods of human nature with everything but the voice. 
 In her there seethed the black passions of Italy as if 
 she had come from some brimstone Vesuvius. She 
 exalted the danse de demi-caractere into epic mimicry;
 
 io8 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 she had the gift of heroic contours. She was the last 
 as well as the first in France, in the nineteenth century 
 at least, to outline the loftiest reach and effectiveness 
 of the pantomime, 
 
 Ferraris made her debut in Paris in 1856. Her tri- 
 umph in the "Elfes" and in "Orfa" was noteworthy. 
 She surpassed herself in "Graziosa" (1861), and was 
 called "the rival of Elssler." It is recorded that she 
 had brilliant and varied action, that she was light and 
 graceful with an expressive pantomime, that her play 
 was bold and that she conceived the dance (de demi- 
 caractere) in its purest, most elevated, most erudite 
 Italian type. 
 
 In poor Emma Livry, a French girl, the Parisians 
 were promised a revival of the danse noble of Taglioni. 
 She had but commenced her career when she became 
 the victim of a horrible accident. Her costume caught 
 fire at a rehearsal and, after eight months of a martyr- 
 dom of torture, she died. All Paris suffered with her 
 pain, and did full honor to her memory at the inter- 
 ment. 
 
 Her bust in the Opera exhibits a large-framed, home- 
 ly face, yet one that is intelligent, sympathetic and 
 kind — in marked contrast to that of the dainty and 
 simpering Cerrito, its companion in the private foyer. 
 Emma Livry first appeared in 1858 in "la Sylphide," 
 Taglioni's magical creation, and the public hailed her 
 classic art with a national pride. Taglioni herself came 
 from her villa on Lake Como to welcome her latest 
 rival in fame. She one day gave her portrait to the 
 young danseuse, with this happy conceit: "Make me
 
 The Great Era of the Frencll Ballet 109 
 
 forgotten; do not forget me." Emma Livry intro- 
 duced only two roles. One of them was "le Papillon" 
 — a ballet composed in part by Taglioni who, at that 
 epoch, tarried in Paris some time. Emma Livry was 
 truly a danseuse noble. She confined the dance to its 
 classic simplicity and nymphean elegance. 
 
 Gautier, the admirer of all ballerines, thus speaks of 
 her: "In catching a glimpse of her across the trans- 
 parences of her draperies, whose borders her feet 
 scarcely lifted, one would have said she was a happy 
 shadow, an elysian apparition, sporting in a bluish ray. 
 She had an imponderable lightness, and her silent flight 
 traversed space without our hearing even a thrill in the 
 air. She imitated the butterfly in 'le Papillon' — a 
 butterfly that poses on flowers and does not bend them. 
 And alas! like one, she burned her wings in the flames; 
 and two white butterflies, as if they wished to escort 
 the funeral cortege of a sister, winged their snowy way 
 above her white coffin during its whole journey to the 
 cemetery. 
 
 "This incident, in which the Greeks would have seen 
 a poetic symbol, was remarked by thousands of per- 
 sons in the great multitude that followed the burial 
 chariot. On her tomb what epitaph shall be traced if 
 not the one that was conceived by an ancient poet for 
 some Emma Livry of antiquity? — 'O earth, weigh 
 lightly upon me; I have weighed so lightly upon thee.' 
 The public wished to honor the modest virtue of this 
 pure life, in whose presence scandal has ever been 
 silent. If anything can console the sorrow of the 
 mother, it is the fact that there were in the proces-
 
 no Frciicli Essays and Profiles 
 
 slon, among the celebrities of the Opera, two sisters of 
 charity who had cared for her daughter in the Chris- 
 tian agony of the poor girl." 
 
 Boschetti, a danseuse from Milan, came to Paris 
 about 1 863 and met with much enthusiasm. Pretty and 
 small, she was only seen, as a rule, in "little ballets." 
 It is claimed that she had, to French eyes, a rival in 
 the correct, graceful and modest Mourawieff. Bos- 
 chetti, it is said, reveled in prodigious bounds and delir- 
 ious pirouettes. She displayed a passionate fougue 
 and a voluptuous suppleness. 
 
 The usual French comment on her was about as fol- 
 lows: — This Italian has been criticized because she de- 
 ployed an exaggerated mimicry; but it has been over- 
 looked that the Italian choregraphs have always ele- 
 vated the pantomime to a degree of expression reached 
 in no other country. Boschetti has transported to our 
 stage the historic, traditional pantomime of which our 
 dilettants know little. Her style consists more of the 
 Neapolitan tarantella than of the Spanish bolero. It is 
 not without grace, nobility and majesty, in spite of 
 its impetuosities. She recalls an ardent sky and a 
 burning earth's surface. In 1864 her triumph was 
 complete in Brussels where she executed the dances 
 of many races. — 
 
 The dance of Boschetti, like that of Rosati, was an 
 Italian transposition of the danse de demi-caractere 
 into the realm of pantomime. But she did not tread 
 along such grandiose lines of the art as Rosati: she 
 seems to have given the furor of the tarantella to the 
 ballet, and the frolic of Pulcinella to the pantomime.
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet iii 
 
 Rita Sangalli was a Milanese, and created In New- 
 York the principal role in "Black Crook." She danced 
 throughout the United States from east to west, and 
 experienced various characteristic phases of frontier 
 life in America. In the Far West she often went armed 
 in order to defend herself from the Indians; and many 
 times she took gold dust and game in pay for her per- 
 formances in mining towns where coins and bills were a 
 scarce medium of exchange. 
 
 She was first billed at the Opera in Paris in 1872. 
 The occasion was the revival of "la Source" of Delibes, 
 wherein she met with a gratifying success as the fairy 
 in the enchanted grotto. She shared In the ceremonies 
 in connection with the opening of the New Opera in 
 1875. It appears, however, that Sangalli was not an 
 accomplished ballerine. Those who can speak from 
 personal knowledge say that she was comparatively 
 ignorant of the art; that when she was engaged at the 
 Opera, she had to have lessons for eight months be- 
 fore she was considered ready to grace its boards; 
 that her superb physique and her marvelous tours des 
 reins, not her dancing, brought her fame. 
 
 In Leontlne Beaugrand, a Parislenne, the Opera had 
 a child of its own. She began to assume important 
 roles In 1864. Gautier spoke of her dance as "grace- 
 ful, correct and light-winged." She was called "an 
 ornamentist who, in a flight, makes a design of her 
 taquetes and her pointes. It is exquisite, slender, deli- 
 cate, like a fabric of lace." Banville wrote of her: 
 "She is simple, true and elegant by nature; she is cor- 
 rectly spirited; she is born of the rules of the dance and
 
 112 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 of its purest traditions." Beaugrand's greatest success 
 is said to have been in "Coppelia" in 1871, in which she 
 took up the score left by Bozzacchi. This role was 
 conceived originally for Beaugrand. 
 
 Notwithstanding all this praise, it appears that 
 Beaugrand had "no chance" — was not favored of for- 
 tune. Nearly always she saw the best roles distributed 
 to strangers, for the reason that the Opera public gen- 
 erally prefers the exotic sensation of a foreign baya- 
 dere. A native ballerine, however excellent her art, 
 does not magnetize so much money into the coffers of 
 the Opera as a danseuse who comes from afar. 
 
 Beaugrand had the French traditions of delicacy, 
 lightness and refinements coupled with pointes of steel. 
 Her lofty bearing made her known, despite her dimin- 
 utiveness, as "the marshal of the dance." Her sudden 
 retirement from the Opera raised a storm of protests, 
 though without avail. The "Beaugrand question" was 
 the theme of the day, and called out tributes for her 
 even from such distinguished pens as that of Sully 
 Prudhomme who arabesqued her neat fame in one of 
 his most fragile sonnets. Although a danseuse noble 
 in type, she was so small that she presented, as It were, 
 the danse noble of a little girl. She fully understood 
 herself, and dignified her profession, even if in a minia- 
 ture way. 
 
 Mile. Fonta was an intelligent and finished danseuse 
 noble — the most truly noble of any ballerine at the 
 Opera toward 1890, for she had what Beaugrand 
 lacked, namely, size. She retired from the stage, but 
 was to be seen for several years in the drawing rooms
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 113 
 
 of the French metropolis. Of Marie Vernon, Fioretti, 
 Granzow, Mourawieff, Merante, Salvioni, Fatou, little 
 has been written, and they did not contribute in a note- 
 worthy way to the development of the dance. Boz- 
 zacchi, who created the principal role in "Coppelia," 
 died prematurely in Paris during the siege. She prom- 
 ised a decided talent. 
 
 Coming to the two stars who were preserving at the 
 close of the century the best memorials of the dance 
 at the Paris Opera, one found the danse noble illus- 
 trated by Mile. Subra and the danse de demi-caractere 
 by Mile. Mauri. Born in Paris and educated entirely 
 there, Subra had what is called "school." She made 
 her debut in 1881 in the ballet of Thomas's "Hamlet," 
 and in 1882 took Bozzacchi's role in "Coppelia." She 
 was considered an unusually beautiful ballet woman, 
 and was corseted in a neat and refined distinction of 
 grace. Her beauty and elegance of manner outrivaled 
 her dancing. 
 
 Her person, however, showed what a well-meaning 
 yet awkward artisan Nature sometimes is. She had, 
 with good height and a pretty face, a large, squarish, 
 handsome body with an ample bust. As a result her 
 body, expressing neither litheness nor emotion, was 
 plethorically refractory to all dances. And her limbs 
 did not belong to it. They were trim, sculptural and 
 full of poseful cadences. Her legs, in their daintiness 
 and natty chasteness, recalled those of Diana of Gabies. 
 While her body gave her a fine presence and elevation 
 for the danse noble, her thin limbs destroyed in her 
 the possibility of realizing its perfection.
 
 114 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Her grace, then, was that of the limbs and not of 
 the ensemble, since her physique lacked symmetry and 
 any suggestion of sylphine harmony. But the grace 
 of the legs was defective in that it was restrained 
 rather than intuitive and open-flung, for they were 
 necessarily conscious of the unnatural burden which 
 the well-developed body imposed upon them. They 
 always kept well under it perforce, instead of capri- 
 ciously skimming about as if having little to support. 
 
 By contrast, her lovely arms and hands were freely 
 and exquisitely interlaced in her dance. One perhaps 
 never before noticed hands — whereon, as Verlaine 
 would say, "a delicacy has left its succinct entasis" — 
 representing and interpreting so much with a grace so 
 impeccable. Thus the elegance of Subra was more 
 statuesque than Terpsichorean; and her limbs, in their 
 plastic contours of motion, contributed delectably to 
 the spectacle of a marmorean figure in movement, from 
 which any hint of the wasp-waisted, air-blown Pari- 
 sienne was quite whisked away. 
 
 Subra offered much charm and much hopeless incon- 
 gruity. Never of the air, never melting into music, 
 and conceived of no celerities nor supplenesses, her 
 evolutions and attitudes were confirmed in the habits of 
 verticalness — of action up and down. Yet she had a 
 good ballon; she was distinguished, never banal or sen- 
 sational; she performed with taste, with a cultured and 
 instinctive regard for esthetic effect. Her pas sug- 
 gested little worth noting. Possessed of no originality, 
 she invented nothing. She executed correctly without 
 inspiration or naivete the velocities which had been
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 115 
 
 outlined for her. Her toilets, on the other hand, were 
 remarkable for their fascinating style and becoming- 
 ness. And it was with them, together with her beauty, 
 her grace of Paros and her chaste decorum, that she 
 succeeded as a sightly ministress in the Taglioni tra- 
 dition. 
 
 The danse de demi-caractere was personified at the 
 Paris Opera at the close of the century by Mile. Rosita 
 Mauri, who was the veritable queen of the ballet in 
 France for that whole generation. She was the daugh- 
 ter of a Spanish master of ballet, and began her dex- 
 terous career in Milan. Finally at La Scala there Gou- 
 nod remarked her. This led to her appearance in his 
 "Polyeucte" in Paris in 1878. In 1879 ^he French 
 secured her permanently. She received nine thousand 
 dollars a year, with one month's leave of absence. She 
 created many roles. 
 
 Her form, in its ensemble, was much superior to 
 that of Subra. It had harmony and was indeed quite 
 perfect for a danseuse de demi-caractere in that epoch. 
 Her body was somewhat slender, of easy contours, and 
 not refractory to the dance. Her grace, suiting the 
 character of her dance, was of course unlike that of 
 Sufbra. It was less distinguished, less refined, less 
 classically correct. She h*ad, in opposition, the freer 
 girth of a torrid physique as well as the spirited loyal- 
 ty and very feminine nature of a high-metaled Span- 
 ish woman. It was that certain desinvolture which 
 comes to an athletic performer — a large and disjointed 
 facility of limb. That is to say, her characteristic note 
 was strength. To muscular rapidity rather than to
 
 ii6 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 transcendent elegance was ascribable her maestrla. 
 
 Thus she triumphed not by polish of action, beauty 
 and charm of toilet, but by her Spanish chic, as it were, 
 and above all by her skill in pas. Her dance, signal- 
 ized by its dexterous power, was of the legs. The rest 
 of her body was largely sacrificed to them. Never- 
 theless, the attention, confined to her lower limbs, was 
 well repaid, for in observing them during an act of 
 ballet one might learn, for the first time perhaps, what 
 intelligence, strength and expertness may be columned 
 forth and flourished about by a well-trained pair of 
 legs, and might note how capacious their scope for ex- 
 pression. 
 
 And it was with them that the Mauri courted fine 
 grace. Her feet were handled with an unapproachable 
 effectiveness and ease. It was precisely with them that 
 she gave vent to that fieriness — that endiablement — for 
 which she was noted, and which was the Terpsichorean 
 expression of her athletic vigor fusing in a hot tempera- 
 ment. The French world had never seen a star with 
 such a competent pair of lower limbs as these. 
 
 Subra had the presence, elevation and ballon of the 
 danse noble, and Mauri had a very mobile parcours* 
 and masterly pas on the ground. Her entrechats and 
 batterie** were not so lofty and hence naturally not so 
 
 * Parcours denotes the ability to cover all parts of the stage 
 with a rapid effectiveness. Temps parcourus are varied evolutions 
 performed while quickly traversing the scene. 
 
 ** The batterie designates the repeated action of leaping in the 
 air, curving the legs open, and crossing the feet several times before 
 reaching ground. The entrechat is a light and brilliant leap during 
 which the dancer crosses his feet rapidly and alights in certain 
 positions or attitudes.
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 117 
 
 brilliant as those of Subra, yet they were more skill- 
 fully and ambitiously performed, and therefore really 
 merited more praise. Subra, with a pointed foot, 
 mounted on showier pointes; but Mauri, having a foot 
 partly ''square" and partly "pointed," whirled truer 
 pirouettes on the pointes than any of her precursors or 
 companions. In fact she rarely, if ever, turned a pirou- 
 ette on the instep, since a "square" foot supports sure 
 and easy, though not brilliant, pirouettes on the pointes. 
 The instep of the danseuse noble is naturally stronger 
 than that of the danseuse de demi-caractere for she has 
 to mount higher. a 
 
 Mauri kept her laurels by her imposing, expert 
 energies. She was indefatigable and ingenious, and 
 had the art of fanning the spectators into enthusiasm 
 when she flipped a cabriole or escaladed a soubresaut. 
 She did not display the dry, fine scintillations of French 
 radiance, nor the poetry and "school" of Subra (with 
 her grace of molding music into gesture), nor sylphine 
 lightness ; but she knew how to stride down the parallels 
 of some masterful waltz as it swayed back and forth 
 across the levels of three score of violin bows. She 
 had a marked personality, as befits the demi-caractere, 
 burnt ardor into the boards by her pas, and was thus 
 notably a danseuse and a genuine virtuosa. 
 
 A word about male dancers may be inserted here. 
 Taglioni, Gardel, Noblet, Petipa, Perrot, Saint-Leon, 
 Merante, have been applauded in Paris since Vestris, 
 yet their glory, as already noted, has been eclipsed by 
 that of the danseuses. The list wound up worthily in 
 the 1890's in the person of Vazquez — "friend Vaz-
 
 Ii8 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 quez," as he was popularly known among the personnel 
 at the Opera.* lie had been on its boards from the 
 age of ten. He became "first dancer" after appearing 
 with Beaugrand in the Fandango. 
 
 All that could have been suggested to make him 
 ideal in his art was a little more brilliancy of batterie 
 and a little more height. He had all the rest — grace, 
 vigor, Spanish suppleness, a handsome form, the flavor 
 of a good-humored seriousness. Doubtless none of his 
 famous precursors equaled him in the number of diffi- 
 cult pas which he offered. The male dancer of the time 
 of Vestris knew nothing of pointe dancing; and if one 
 glances at the illustrations in the book of Blasis, he 
 will observe that the dancer represented therein never 
 lifts the foot and leg higher than the hip, showing that 
 the present high-foot evolutions were not then known 
 even to male dancers. 
 
 II THE TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE BALLET FROM 
 
 TAGLIONI TO I9OO 
 
 From the above figurines in the realm of Terpsi- 
 chore, one observes that there are four types of the 
 ballet dance. They are the danse noble, as conceived 
 and detailed in an unrivaled manner by Taglioni, and 
 finally represented by Mile. Subra; the danse de demi- 
 caractere, as first outlined by Fanny Elssler and finally 
 interpreted by Mile. Mauri; the danse of fantaisie of 
 Cerrito; and, to conclude, there is what may be called 
 
 * To Vazquez, the author has been under great obligations for 
 a generous amount of information and for very many interesting 
 courtesies and cordial favors.
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 119 
 
 the danse de pantomime, as made notable by Rosati. 
 The danse comlque disappeared from the boards. The 
 danse de fantalsie is essentially a form of the danse de 
 demi-caractere. In the danse de pantomime, wherein 
 the mimicry rather than the dancing takes the lead, the 
 Italians (one may almost say the Neapolitans with 
 their Pulcinella) have always surpassed. The panto- 
 mime was in ancient times a Roman, not a Greek, 
 creation, and hence it seems to have ever been pre- 
 eminently an art of the boot-leg peninsula. 
 
 The two great types of the modern ballet-dance, the 
 danse noble and the danse de demi-caractere, corre- 
 spond to the classic and romantic styles in literature. 
 It is worthy of notice that just when the Romantic 
 school was bursting into triumph in France, Taglioni 
 was fashioning in Paris the classic models of ballet 
 dancing. But she was quickly followed by the ro- 
 mantic, music-spun Elssler from Germany. 
 
 The danseuse noble is occupied with molding formal 
 outlines and impersonal contours into ideal motion — 
 with form rather than sentiment and color. The danse 
 noble is largely confined to mythological scenes where 
 nymphs disport in white moonlights and sylphs glisten 
 across dark vistas. Its utmost possibilities seem to 
 have been almost perfectly realized by Taglioni, so 
 that it offers little scope for new inspirations. It has 
 given way before the demi-caractere in later times 
 much as the classic has given way before the romantic 
 in France. 
 
 As an illustration of typical Greek dancing — or, one 
 may say, of the danse noble of the ancient Hellenes —
 
 120 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 there is an account of Taglioni in Palladio's Teatro 
 Olimpico at Vicenza in 1842. This edifice was de- 
 signed according to the plans of ancient theaters, and 
 Taglioni was imitating, on the spur of the moment for 
 a little party of friends, those classic ballerines known 
 as the danseuses de Pompeii. The commentator says: 
 "Taglioni knew at once how to put herself in harmony 
 with the surroundings. She held up her dress a little 
 with both hands. The dance was as if performed by a 
 statue. She turned no pirouette; she formed no ob- 
 tuse angle with the legs; she did not stand on one 
 toe; she did not spin dizzily around. She remained 
 nearly the whole time in one spot, while her feet de- 
 claimed lovely, noble, ancient rhythms, and her little 
 head swayed hither and thither. Had he seen her then, 
 Theodor Mundt would not have said: 'Taglioni dances 
 Goethe.' He would have exclaimed: 'Taglioni dances 
 Sappho, Anacreon and Catullus!'" 
 
 The danse de demi-caractere is romantic and ex- 
 pansive because it skirts about in the exotic, in the senti- 
 mental, in the individualistic, in the sensational. 
 National, provincial and village dances, as well as 
 dances of sailors, of draperies, of colors, enter under its 
 name. It scours all lands and pries into all vocations 
 for new pas and divertissements. It renews itself in 
 the themes of such dancers of fantasy as was Carmen- 
 cita, and in such caprices as was Loie Fuller's dance of 
 colored robes. Thus it has variety, and is susceptible 
 of progress in its continual transformations. It is more 
 terra-a-terre than the elevated, aerial danse noble. 
 
 To appreciate the great characteristic of the ballet
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 121 
 
 dance in modern times, one only needs to compare It for 
 a moment with the Greek art. We do not need to read 
 Lessing, Flaxman, Charles Blanc and other authorities 
 on ancient sculpture and on the Greek notion of Terp- 
 sichorean cadence to learn that the conception of the 
 dance among the Greeks developed from the Idea of 
 repose and pose. The generous length of their draper- 
 ies and the comparative primitiveness and simplicity of 
 their music at once prove this. A statuesque race, they 
 made the body the center of notice In dancing. The 
 lirnjbs served only to accommodate, to accentuate, to ex- 
 tend, its harmonies. The symmetry of the body did not 
 suffer from the distracting effect of vigorously inde- 
 pendent gesticulations of arms and legs, to say nothing 
 of their violencles and excesses of action. Their mo- 
 tions were reposefuUy downward Instead of energetic- 
 ally up and outward, so that they remained distinctly 
 the expression of the body and within its range. 
 
 Under these conditions, drapery became a true and 
 Intimate companion of the gestures of the dancer, and 
 caressed the vision of the spectator by its participation 
 in the sports of the body and limbs — by its folds, con- 
 volutions and cascades. Terpsichore herself is rep- 
 resented as copiously enfolded in draperies which fall 
 amply on the ground. 
 
 The starting point for Christian art, to speak in an 
 Imperfect way, was movement rather than repose. 
 The new religion meant struggle, agitation. Vigorous 
 celerity may be said to characterize things nervously 
 modern fr.om things reposefully Greek, and thus be- 
 comes the play which distinguishes the modern from
 
 122 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 the ancient Terpsichorean art. Swiftness, strength, 
 airiness, and complicated and adroit action dispute for 
 the favor of the modern public. The attention is di- 
 rected to the limbs, not the body. These traits, as 
 we have seen, were developed only by the male dancer 
 before Taglioni appeared. She claimed them for her 
 sex, and added to them a classic flavor of inspiration 
 and poetry. 
 
 In observing the evolution of the ballet-dance since 
 her day, the attention remains confined to the danseuse. 
 The male dancer may be dropped from notice. The 
 ballerine has gradually improved in the matter of dif- 
 ficult pas and tours de force, and skilled celerity has 
 become more and more emphasized. Of course Ta- 
 glioni, and with reason, is always despairingly cited 
 as a model of perfection for her elevation and ballon; 
 but her celerity, being sylphlike, had little of that force 
 and energy (to us so familiar) which come of muscled 
 strength. She distinguished herself from her precur- 
 sors by using the legs more liberally and deftly. It is 
 precisely because she employed freely and harmoniously 
 all parts of her person that her dance will ever remain 
 ideal. Before her day, the ballerines sacrificed the 
 legs to the upper half of the body, and since her time 
 they have sacrificed the upper half, and the ensemble 
 of the person, to the lower half. 
 
 The Terpsichorean action in the last sixty years of 
 the century had by degrees descended exclusively to the 
 lower limbs, and had become more athletic and virile. 
 This is an indication of the sway which the romantic 
 danse de demi-caractere had borne over the classic
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 123 
 
 danse noble in the decades since Taglioni. The neglect 
 of the face, arms and body had resulted in, or was the 
 result of, the marked decadence of the pantomime. 
 The pantomime was insignificant at the Paris Opera 
 toward 1900. None of the ballerines there danced 
 very well above the hips or knew how to express her- 
 self adequately with the upper parts of the person. 
 Mile. Laus alone had something of the gift of mimicry. 
 
 The disuse of the upper half of the person by the 
 danseuses in that epoch accounts, then, for the fact that 
 the dance had lost so much of its poetic aeriality as well 
 as so much of its pantomimic effectiveness. On the 
 other hand, in the deft manipulations of the leg and 
 foot, the ballerines of 1900 outrivaled the star of 
 forty and sixty years before. The reason for this is 
 that they relinquished almost everything to this end. 
 Mile. Mauri traversed regions of the terre-a-terre do- 
 mains that were little explored by Taglioni and Elssler, 
 and indulged in complications of steps of which they 
 doubtless did not dream. 
 
 Pirouettes on the points of the toes, hardly known to 
 Taglioni, had become in recent times the piece de 
 resistance of every ballerine who slipped a glissade or 
 spread an echappe, no matter if her renown was as 
 small as her skirt. Adice seemed to be complaining 
 in 1859 that no one longer dared attack a double tour 
 of pirouettes on the instep. What would he say if he 
 saw the present generation reveling prodigally in them 
 and in the much more difficult pirouettes on the 
 pointes? Pointe dancing, the favorite fin de siecle 
 variety, was evidence that the dance had to some ex-
 
 124 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 tent descended even from the legs to the feet, since 
 pointes test and display nothing but the ghttering skill 
 and firmness of instep and toe. 
 
 The upshot of all this is that, as indicated above, 
 the ballet danseuse toward 1900 presented no inspired 
 ensemble and no harmonies of action as compared with 
 her great predecessors, because she only half observed 
 the rule: "One should dance with the legs, and ex- 
 press sentiments with the rest of the person." The 
 ballerine of eighty years before filled the mind's eye, 
 after an evening of ballet, with the vision of a moonlit 
 fairy, or of a graceful woman quivering under the am- 
 orous lash of impulsive music. It was from first to 
 last an illusion born of an artistic oneness of concep- 
 tion meant to captivate by its air-woven, or warm- 
 bodied, idealities. 
 
 The ballet danseuse of the latter day was apt to 
 come out somewhat prosaically like a gymnast, as if she 
 meant to say: "I am going to interpret some music by 
 tours de force with my legs." She stood erect at one 
 corner of the stage, enchained with a wonderfully ex- 
 pert energy her adages and pointes, wound up brusque- 
 ly over in the diagonal corner, bowed, and walked away 
 with no elegance of retreating, with no charm of dis- 
 solving view. It was an athletic performance, a feat of 
 putting music into muscle, rather than a dream of 
 ethereal grace. This style of the Romantic dance, in 
 which something like acrobatism was encountered, cor- 
 responds in a measure to that decadent phase of the 
 French Romantic school of poetry wherein rhymsters,
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 125 
 
 led by Victor Hugo himself in so many of his pages, 
 sought to astonish by wonderful feats in verse. 
 
 As a result of the fact that the dance had evolved 
 so noticeably into an art for the legs and feet, the pas 
 became more varied, elaborate and perfect than ever. 
 A word about them is essential to the present theme. 
 The two fundamental actions of the dancer are to bend 
 the knees and raise up to the erect posture — se plier 
 et se relever. His first aim Is to becorne bien place — 
 to become solidly seated in his attitudes and move- 
 ments: to display an unwavering equilibrium. 
 
 The first five positions, in one of which the per- 
 former ordinarily stands when he begins a pas, form 
 the scale, as it were, of the dance. From these ele- 
 mentary attitudes develop all the motions of the limbs 
 outward and upward, and in two planes — either along 
 the ground or In the air. The movements on the 
 ground (a terre) have In nearly every instance their 
 duplicate in the air (en I'air), or temps sautes (leaped) 
 — as degages-a-terre, degages en I'air; ronds-de-jambe- 
 a-terre and en I'air. But en I'air in this part of the 
 ritual virtually means not higher than the ankle or 
 knee (demi-hauteur) , though the performer may 
 transport these actions higher In the air if he wishes. 
 The training of the limbs for supple strength and 
 gracefulness consists of "detaching" them from the 
 body. This Is accomplished by the exercises of the 
 degages, ronds-de-jambe, plies, the first lessons in 
 pointes, and all kinds of battements. 
 
 After these come the adages which constitute the
 
 126 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 principal part of the dance. They are sometimes called 
 developpes because they are, one may say, develop- 
 ments from the first five positions, and also from all 
 the elementary motions which admit of being trans- 
 posed into the air. The adages develop either a la 
 seconde position (straight out at the side) or a la 
 quatrieme devant (straight out in front), or a la qua- 
 trieme derriere (straight out behind). The adages are 
 multiple and embrace, if need be, the outermost and 
 uppermost reaches of the limbs. 
 
 Nevertheless the adages are largely attitudes, for 
 here the arms come into full play and combine with 
 the whole person in harmonious actions and postures, 
 whence arise all the poses, developpes ouverts and 
 croises, arabesques, and, indeed, pirouettes. There 
 are innumerable pirouettes. 
 
 The above movements form the framework of the 
 dance. They are followed by various little series of 
 tours or pas which, on the whole, really leave the dis- 
 tinct domain of exercises, express bits of sentiments 
 and moods, and interpret phrases of music. The most 
 usual of these pas are glissades, echappes, coupes, 
 jettes, brises, assembles, fouettes, pas de bourree, cab- 
 rioles, soubresauts, entrechats. 
 
 There are entrechats-3, -4, -5, -6, -8. Entrechats-8 
 (separating the feet four times and bringing them to- 
 gether as many times while leaping from one of the 
 first five positions) are quite a rare feat. Blasis, writ- 
 ing in 1830, said that entrechats had been performed 
 as high as 14. Vazquez made them at 14 in private. 
 Entrechats-6 are the variety usually produced on the
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 127 
 
 stage, being less difficult and at the same time more 
 brilliant than entrechats-8. 
 
 All the pas now mentioned constitute the whole tech- 
 nic — the whole mechanism — of the dance, and there- 
 fore they belong as well to the danse de demi-caractere 
 as to the danse noble. Pirouettes on the pointes are the 
 most modern of the regular pas. It appears that the 
 first pirouette of any sort ever seen in Paris was whirled 
 In 1766, and was imported from Stuttgart. It was 
 simply a pirouette on the flat of the foot. A dancer 
 may turn eight pirouettes on the instep, although only 
 the first four can be turned well. He may turn three 
 pirouettes on the pointes, yet only the first two can be 
 achieved satisfactorily. 
 
 Pointes are the most steely and glittering of pas, but 
 the general supposition that they are the most difficult 
 is erroneous. More trying on the many resources of 
 the danseuse are the temps parcourus when skillfully 
 varied in rapid successions of modest, unanticipated 
 tours, and also the batterie when beaten brilliantly back 
 and forth across the stage, and also the ballon when 
 floated swiftly and loftily hither and thither. In the 
 temps parcourus, at the same time, there is much less 
 visible athleticism and more of the spontaneous poetry 
 of motion than in the pointe. They give the most scope 
 to the possibilities of the gracefully unexpected; for 
 it is the pleasure of agreeable surprise which consti- 
 tutes the great charm in all art. 
 
 A danseuse is not recognized as a danseuse noble 
 because of certain pas, but because she has a dominat- 
 ing presence, elevation, and a high and light ballon.
 
 128 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Either regal majesty of bearing or airy elevation of 
 movement must characterize her. The ballon of Ta- 
 glioni will never be equaled, at least in reputation. 
 
 A danseuse de demi-caractere, in her turn, is not 
 recognized as such by certain pas, but because she lacks 
 the traits of appearance, and the aerialty, of the dan- 
 seuse noble. She is always shorter than the latter and 
 less distinguished in presence; yet she is warmer, more 
 individualistic, and has entrain. Her parcours depends 
 on her pliable energies and is thus distinguished from 
 that of the longer limbed, lofty danseuse noble. Also 
 her batterie must have a fiery force to hold its own 
 with the more elevated batterie of her classic rival. 
 
 To lower the pointes well — to alight on the toe and 
 then on the heel, instead of on the flat foot — is neces- 
 sary in a good batterie. The dancer whose lower limbs 
 are en dehors (knees turned out) is capable of the most 
 brilliant batterie, for his legs cross at the ankles instead 
 of higher up, form a larger oval opening, and thus, 
 letting the day penetrate fully between, make the most 
 of the light and shade effects, or what is called the 
 chiaroscuro of the dance. 
 
 Of course it is quite true that the danse de demi- 
 caractere claims properly and solely all character pas, 
 and also all the national dances such as the Italian 
 tarantella — the most rapid of dances — and the Four- 
 lane of the Venetian gondoliers; the Spanish bolero and 
 cachucha, and the famous fandango — the swiftest and 
 one of the oldest of the Spanish movements; the Polish 
 cracovienne, the tyrolienne, la Russe, and so on. Yet 
 a danseuse noble, in the last generation, was apt to
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 129 
 
 illustrate these character features, since the distinction 
 between noble and caractere was not then so much re- 
 spected as formerly. Adice was scolding in 1859 ^^' 
 cause the genres had become interlaced, and exclaimed: 
 "One great reason why Taglioni succeeded so well was, 
 not that she was better formed or that her pas were 
 inimitable, but that she adopted the danse noble and 
 kept to it!" 
 
 Any chapter on pas closes with a long list of them 
 representing the highest artistic possibilities of the 
 dance as a difficult combination of grace and vigor, and 
 as an interpretation of melody. An opera-ballet and 
 usually a grand opera have one or more celebrated pas. 
 They are an ambitious linking together of steps and 
 poses which express a strain of music in the full variety 
 of its meaning. There are, for instance, the pas de 
 tyrolienne in "William Tell," the pas dc fascination in 
 "Robert le Diable," the pas des abeilles in "la Juive." 
 
 Indeed, the Meyerbeer opera, which came into glory 
 in Taglioni's day, is notable for its grand scenes of 
 ballet and, consequently, its pas. Among such subse- 
 quent conceptions in France are the pas de sabotiere and 
 the masterly Breton Gigue in "la Korrigane," preceded 
 in "Coppelia" by the pas de la poupee which has the 
 loveliest fame of all the pas which have been created 
 in Paris in later times. 
 
 Such enchainments of action are conceived to de- 
 lineate gayety, passion, sorrow, and even death as illus- 
 trated in the scene of death in "la Source," where, as 
 has been said, the spectator is scarcely able to retain 
 his tears. Were one a Symbolist, he would perhaps
 
 130 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 hold that pas represent colors, and that, character- 
 istically, the pas of Mile. Mauri were red and those of 
 Mile. Subra, pale green and peach. Paul Renouard, 
 taking the theater lights into view, has executed some 
 designs in which he rendered a pirouette croisee by 
 amethyst and flesh tint, a joyous leap in the air by yel- 
 low and mauve, an arabesque ouverte by faint green 
 and lilac. Thus one observes how descriptive taste and 
 artistic refinement enter into the realm of the pas, and 
 how varied are the possibilities of the ballet dance. 
 
 In the evolution, since the epoch of Taglioni, of the 
 Terpsichorean art into the lower limbs, they became 
 latterly the protruding means of developing its esthetic 
 features. The decadent pantomime, losing its simpler 
 ideality and poetry, had more or less disappeared, as 
 we have noted, from the upper half and the ensemble 
 of the person into the skillful feats and complicated 
 Interpretations of the lower half. 
 
 This leads up to the question of grace. The word 
 grace generally refers to charm of motion, or of motion 
 briefly arrested in poses, not to mere physical symmetry 
 or that beauty of outline and feature which predom- 
 inates, and constitutes the attraction, in the usual "beau- 
 tiful woman." It is apparent that this is the meaning 
 proper to the art of the dance. Grace of motion and 
 grace of motion checked momentarily In its flights, 
 rather than elegance of form or perfection of limb, 
 distinguish the dance from the plastic and static world 
 of sculpture. The thought in the one is on movement, 
 In the other on repose. 
 
 Now there appears to be a grace which belongs to
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 131 
 
 the ordinary actions of life, to the everyday world of 
 the home, the salon, the streets; and there is another 
 species of grace, the Terpsichorean type, which sug- 
 gests mythological or romantic characters and trans- 
 lates ballet music, and which a danseuse must manifest 
 in order to triumph. In the grace of common actions — 
 in the salon grace, we may say — the French, by uni- 
 versal consent, surpass; yet they are not the most ideal 
 dancers either in ballet or ballroom. Their grace — in 
 a measure circumscribed and saccadee, and wherein the 
 bony framework of the body is in evidence as is natural 
 to a Northern race — does not expand and lend itself 
 with a whole-souled irresistibleness to the passion of 
 music. The great dancers of both sexes in France have 
 come, in nearly every instance, from the supple, free- 
 limbed, unossified south. 
 
 This salon grace, then, does not appear to be a 
 requisite for ballet dancing. Taglioni is said to have 
 displayed little of it in private life. The dance is con- 
 cerned only with Terpsichorean elegance; and beauty, 
 too, should give way before it, for the most exquisite 
 grace is usually, or at least very frequently, found in 
 persons who are physically unprepossessing. Herein 
 Nature seems disposed to follow the law of compensa- 
 tion. The epoch-making ballerines have by no means 
 been very beautiful women. Indeed it is claimed that 
 the dance reacts against the desire for beauty, because 
 ballet dancing, while developing elegance of movement, 
 somewhat destroys the symmetry of face and bust, since 
 it tends to drag downward the upper half of the person. 
 
 Of course agreeable features and symmetrical out-
 
 132 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 lines of body and limb are necessary to a certain degree 
 in a bayadere, and perfection is reached when perfect 
 form is wedded to perfect grace; but Terpsichor.e 
 means dancing first and comeliness afterward. Ballet 
 music is to be rendered by motion, not by beauty. 
 Hence the dance becomes decadent as soon as beauty is 
 made to go before grace. Many a veritable sylph has 
 been obliged to retire from the stage because she pos- 
 sessed erratic lineaments; still one cares relatively little 
 whether a singer has an exaggerated nose or mouth 
 provided he is gifted with a rare voice. Likewise, regu- 
 larity of feature should not be exacted in a woman who 
 has a divine grace of dance. 
 
 The fact that there are always many danseuses on 
 the stage who have little grace may be explained, in 
 part at least. A danseuse should begin training about 
 the age of eight. Very crude of action are the eight- 
 year-old girls of the common people, for it is of the 
 common classes that most ballerines come. It appears 
 impossible to foretell whether a tiny maid may turn 
 into a graceful danseuse. Herein the art of the dance 
 is held to be unlike that of singing. The professor of 
 song knows that his young pupil has an ear for music 
 and at least something of a voice. But the girl who 
 wishes to attempt the dance may present no trace what- 
 ever of elegance, and eventually be able to transform 
 herself at pleasure into an idyl of lovely motion; or 
 she may have grace at first and yet develop after a 
 year's training into nothing save inelegance. 
 
 It results that she is accepted on presentation as a 
 pupil if she has good health and good proportions.
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 133 
 
 Thus many danseuses, to whom grace has been rather 
 severely denied, become sujets, because they have toiled 
 faithfully and are not uncomely The case of Leontine 
 Beaugrand is a favorable example of the discriminating 
 taste of the Parisians. She was adored by them for 
 her elegance of motion and consummate knowledge of 
 the dance, in spite of the fact that she was quite small 
 and had a very prominent nose. 
 
 One would find it difficult to prove that beauty is 
 to-day a greater obstacle in the path of Terpsichorean 
 grace than in the year 1830; but it is obviously true 
 that the supremacy of grace in ballet dancing suffered 
 somewhat from the fact that the modern art became 
 comparatively one of athletic tours de force with the 
 legs. The French of the later epoch probably craved, 
 more than their grandfathers, displays of nervous en- 
 ergy and vigorous rapidity; and grace was therefore of 
 rather less consideration than formerly. A dancer 
 does not, can not, give such heed to elegance of move- 
 ment when executing a feat that would test the powers 
 of a professional gymnast, as when performing simple 
 and slow evolutions. 
 
 It can be very well claimed that there was as much 
 grace presented in the ballet in 1900 as ever, but that 
 it was of a different sort and expressed in a different 
 manner. One may urge that it was grace of caractere 
 rather than of the noble and classic type, and was less 
 supremely apparent to the casual observer because it 
 was more technical and complicated and subject to more 
 difficult conditions. It is nevertheless certain, as will 
 be seen farther on, that, if there were not an actual
 
 134 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 decadence in grace, the ballet, in the present epoch hav- 
 ing improved in other ways, depended less for success 
 on mere elegance of action than ever before. 
 
 The great crucial test for a dancer is his posture 
 when in the air and not when he is on the ground, for 
 most dancers nowadays move very well on the ground. 
 But rare indeed is the performer who en I'air adopts 
 the proper attitude and grace of pose. 
 
 Another crucial test for a dancer is his profile. How- 
 ever graceful and skilled his dancing when viewed from 
 the front, his profile is apt to prove an awkward and 
 unpleasant spectacle. A ballet seen in action from the 
 side is nearly always an ungainly sight, even if it pre- 
 sent a charming appearance when facing the public. 
 A dancer should be graceful when observed from any 
 direction. It is in the matter of profile and attitude in 
 air that the French professional, although he may dance 
 acceptably in front and a terre, is almost sure to be in- 
 ferior to an Italian or a Spaniard, because he is of a 
 harder framework. 
 
 A performer like Vazquez, a Spaniard, was almost 
 as agreeable when seen in profile, or in air, as in front, 
 since he offered nothing but soft curves and mellow 
 poses. The danseuse of 1900 was sadly neglectful of 
 her movements and attitudes on the stage when not 
 dancing, because she detailed pas rather than embodied 
 roles. Even if one only dances pas, she should stand, 
 walk and listen gracefully instead of lounging about 
 and holding herself together in a prosaic or banal 
 manner. 
 
 It may be noted, in passing, that the spectator, who
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 135 
 
 wishes to enjoy the best effects of the ensemble of a 
 ballet should be in an upper box facing the stage; but 
 if he would observe the pas and the skill of the indi- 
 vidual dancer, he should be on a level with the per- 
 former's eyes, or a little above. When on a level lower 
 than the dancer, all the possible elegance of the art is 
 lost. In the Grand Opera at Paris, the last row of the 
 parterre is the best place for the savant on questions of 
 the dance. 
 
 One thing that the Greeks understood better than 
 modern people, perhaps, is the fact that the light should 
 come from above, instead of from below as on modern 
 stages. Of course the Greeks had only to deal with 
 daylight, while latter-day masters of choregraphy have 
 had to deal with night and lights. But every one knows 
 how light thrown from above beautifies, and how unat- 
 tractive it will render a handsome face when thrown 
 from below. So, too, if one looks at a face from above, 
 it always appears beautiful; if one looks at it from be- 
 low, it appears homely. This applies as well to the 
 human form. A danseuse is at the greatest disad- 
 vantage if the spectators are a little below the level of 
 her eyes. The arm does not seem to move gracefully 
 when a person is looking up at it, because its least ex- 
 pressive part is seen in a small and awkward range of 
 movement. 
 
 The question of grace, which was being discussed 
 above, has a complement in that of costume. The 
 ballet costume is a result, not a cause. Taglioni's toilet 
 clasped her high in the waist and descended below the 
 knees in a line that departed modestly from the body.
 
 136 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 It was irreproachably proper, like her dance, being 
 essentially the traditional garment of women. Still, as 
 already noted, it was shorter and more convex than that 
 of her less decorous precursors whom Vestris taught. 
 
 As the dance has gradually lowered into the legs, 
 the costume of necessity has become shorter, more 
 stiffly convex and stands farther away from the body, 
 in order not to interfere with the action of the lower 
 limbs. The ballet skirts are shorter and more convexly 
 horizontal than ever because the legs are employed 
 with more expert vigor. While the costume has as- 
 cended from below, it has at the same time descended 
 on the waist, so that it covers much less of the person 
 than formerly. 
 
 The typical convex ballet skirt of the later time is 
 in no sense ideal. It is wholly without the pale of the 
 graceful and the picturesque. An ideal costume should 
 follow the lines of the body, hide its shortcomings, 
 blend its parts, soften its effects, and appear as if 
 natural to the wearer. The unloveliness of the con- 
 temporary ballet toilet as a thing of artistic meaning 
 and beauty is only accentuated when clapped around the 
 waist like an inverted soup-tureen, and thus is made to 
 destroy the outlines of the wearer's form. For it cuts 
 the body hopelessly into two parts, each possessing 
 two members, and gives the limbs the appearance of 
 dangling and scurrying about as if the action of the 
 arms had as little relation as possible to that of the 
 legs. It emphasizes defects, which must be industri- 
 ously corrected by "splicing," and induces the ballerine 
 to be careless of her walk and bearing when not danc-
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 137 
 
 ing. It is because the danseur wears a costume which 
 discloses distinctly the whole contour of the person 
 that he carries himself, as has been remarked, much 
 better on the stage, when not performing, than the 
 danseuse. 
 
 The masculine attire is more favorable for this pur- 
 pose than even the Taglioni dress, since the latter garb 
 hid so much of the outline of the body. The present 
 convex skirts are especially destructive of the effects 
 of the danse noble. They tend to dissipate its nobility 
 and weigh down on its loftiness and aeriality, because 
 they are neither, on the one hand, queenly nor, on the 
 other, vertical and soaringly balloon-like. 
 
 And so the old-time, the old-fashioned, lover of Ta- 
 glioni's style would say: "One excess results from an- 
 other. Your excess of dancing in the legs has devel- 
 oped an outrage in the way of a costume." No other 
 toilet seems possible so long as the dance remains 
 largely one of the lower limbs, and so long as the spec- 
 tator demands the skirt even in the reminiscent and 
 abortive form of the present jupe de tulle. The dif- 
 ficulty arises from trying to adjust the notion of the 
 skirt to the idea of vigorous action for the legs. 
 
 Yet the members of the ballet as well as the public 
 seem unwilling to part with this garment. Few sug- 
 gestions, however lovely, of terraces and cascades of 
 ribbons and roses as a substitute around the waist and 
 hips for the jupe, evoke aught but exclamations of 
 terror from the ballet danseuse, for she shuns travesty 
 and the thought of being divorced from any hint of the 
 petticoat. Greek art offers no solution of the problem,
 
 138 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 since the Greeks did not deal with expert motions in 
 the legs. Even the meager garb of Diana of Ver- 
 sailles would not serve, because its alternate flappings, 
 cleavings, to the body lines would annoy the danseuse 
 and prove homely. It is only meant for walking and 
 running as befits the goddess of the chase. 
 
 Nothing can apparently be done but to make the 
 latter day inartistic garment as delectable a sight as 
 may be; and indeed never before recent times have 
 there been expended and displayed on the toilet of 
 the ballerine so much money and taste and such vari- 
 eties of material and color. The result is not wholly 
 without success as was seen sometimes in the attires of 
 Mile. Subra, and occasionally in certain caprices of 
 the ballet costume. The convex skirt has, it is true, 
 some redeeming points. It traces the waist firmly 
 and daintily, thereby giving more prominence to the 
 bust and more daintiness to the whole person. It hides 
 the graceless bulge at the hips, and has the practical 
 effect of throwing the lower limbs boldly into relief as 
 is proper in a dance of the legs. 
 
 Furthermore, one errs in fancying that its shortness 
 and convex horizontalness are ascribable to a liking, 
 often gratuitously said to be greater now than in the 
 year 1830, for equivocal display. They are due to the 
 necessity of freer leg action; and the expert vigorous- 
 ness of motion tends to correct the hint of impropriety 
 because, as in the case of the female acrobats in tights, 
 the attention is occupied with the dexterity and variety 
 of the evolutions and feats. Still the fact must not be
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 139 
 
 ignored that this costume can more naturally be made 
 to contribute to any unseemly motives of brazen-bodied 
 danseuses than the Taglioni dress which, while not 
 artistically beautiful, suggested a virgin pudency quite 
 puritanic. 
 
 There is one variety of the skirt of to-day which 
 should be discountenanced. It is the one which reaches 
 some three feet away from the body so that the wearer 
 appears to be a kind of St. Patrick's cross frisking 
 about on one end. This is both unlovely and ridiculous. 
 The lower border of the costume should not stand out 
 farther than two feet at most, so as not to interfere 
 seriously with the main idea in the appearance of the 
 human form, namely, that its significance and beauty 
 proceed first of all from its perpendicularity. 
 
 But costumes are only appendages to the dance. Its 
 master spirit is music. The dance expresses to the eye 
 what ballet melodies speak of to the ear. The dance 
 music of the Greeks was comparatively rudimentary, 
 and the ballet in France, before the time of Taglioni, 
 was in general indifferently favored by Euterpe. Music 
 is essentially a nineteenth century art. It administers 
 better than the other arts to the modern nervous love 
 for complicated energies and muscled rapidities. 
 
 One is tempted to say that it is the grand opera of 
 our era which made possible the Augustan period of the 
 ballet. Precisely when Rossini, Meyerbeer and their 
 compeers came into glory with the grandiose Romantic 
 opera, ballet dancing commenced its great flight with 
 Taglioni in the tyrolienne of "William Tell." How-
 
 140 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 ever, Taglioni's style demanded the more classically 
 turned scores of that day, for it was comparatively a 
 simple and light design of enlacing arabesques. 
 
 If one inquire closely into the nature of the trans- 
 formation in ballet music since Taglioni's day, he will 
 probably remark that it has proceeded along three 
 general lines. First, there has developed the dispo- 
 sition to weave meshy harmonies in such rapid and con- 
 voluted successions that the danseuse, in one tour of 
 pas, is forced to link together several different senti- 
 ments. She has not merely to "trace the ciphers of 
 love" (to quote a madrigal phrase of the Louis XIV 
 era) along the simple cadences of a neat, distinct mel- 
 ody, she must also execute responses to the more 
 labyrinthine moods and tremendous fancies of a mod- 
 ern orchestra of a hundred and twenty musicians with 
 its occasional masses of crashing sounds. She must 
 confront and match its tours de force with her tours 
 de force of lower limb. 
 
 Thus it is but natural that she dreads to buffet in 
 opera the great billows of harmony which roll up over 
 the footlights, and that she always prays for simple 
 scores. Ballet-music has never been so highly devel- 
 oped and so technically and beautifully effective as in 
 the present epoch. And this is coincident with the 
 evolution of the dance into more intricate vigors and, 
 therefore, into the legs. For the legs and feet can in- 
 terpret more expertly and literally than the body and 
 arms the complexities of the modern partition with its 
 varied and realistic authority and its sensuous court- 
 ship of romantic ideality.
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 141 
 
 The next significant line of development in ballet 
 music is indicated by the familiar word leitmotif. A 
 musical motive may be attached to a role nowadays, 
 and the orchestra may enter fully and directly into the 
 sentiments and caprices capered on the stage. 
 
 And again, and thirdly, if one listens attentively to 
 the typical ballet music of the epoch from 1830 to 
 i860, he will remark in a general way that it indicates 
 on the boards the traceries of the pas (the geometrical 
 curves interlined on the floor by the danseuse) without 
 concretely embodying forth her physical self in move- 
 ments. It is, one may say, more diaphanous than tan- 
 gible. It marks time rather than incorporates attitudes 
 and motions: it describes the idea of dancing rather 
 than the plastic body of the dance itself. 
 
 With the growth of the Romantic and the Realistic 
 schools, however, dance music for the theater indulged 
 more and more in picturesque sentiment, took on more 
 of substance and reality, and cultivated a more inti- 
 mate footing with the danseuse and her art. The re- 
 sult was the perfection of ballet music, as all dancers 
 call it — that of the late Leo Delibes. His music vis- 
 ualizes the ballerine: it presents her corporeally to the 
 senses. He possessed what the French term physical 
 sensibilities, and could mold music into the palpable 
 charms of woman. He had, simply, the grace of con- 
 tours and of plasticity, as had Gautier. 
 
 Delibes not only chalks out on the boards the dia- 
 gram of the evolutions, but he shows the tournure of 
 the limbs, and sculptures forth the pas into the air. A 
 phrase or strain of his music describes what the dan-
 
 142 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 seuse is doing. It scrapes courtesies with her, it ig- 
 nites her fancies into flamboyant developpes, it ca- 
 resses the outlines of her more suave moods. Never 
 sensual, but ever richly, at times exquisitely, sensuous, 
 his music is of and for the ballet. The danseuse is 
 always enthusiastic over Delibes, for he lived in her 
 domains, he understood her and her vocation, and his 
 music sympathetically, captivatingly, insists on develop- 
 ing in her all the possibilities of Terpsichore. And this 
 is the case even if she has only memory and not a pas- 
 sion for music; for a ballerine need not have an ear 
 for melody, although it is unquestionably better that 
 she should. 
 
 Among the famous ballets seen in France between 
 1829 and 1863 were "la Sylphide," "la Fille du Dan- 
 ube," "Giselle," "la Peri." Since then have been 
 created in Paris for the danse noble, "la Source" and 
 "Sylvia," each by Delibes; and for the danse de demi- 
 caractere, "Coppelia," by Delibes. "Coppelia" is the 
 delicious triumph of French ballets. Its libretto is 
 from an experienced pen; and its mounting was the last 
 work of Saint-Leon, by far the greatest of French 
 choregraphers. 
 
 Very little of the music of the celebrated opera-bal- 
 lets of other days was performed toward 1900 in 
 Paris. The memories of the danseuses of that epoch 
 were idolized, and their composers unremembered. 
 But Delibes was immortalized, and already the cre- 
 ators of his roles were almost forgotten. Music 
 seemed in a measure to have eclipsed the ballet star. 
 And not without reason, for one perhaps fancies some
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 143 
 
 scores of modern ballet music more than any dancing. 
 
 There is an irresistible strain in "Coppelia" (Delibes, 
 1870) which echoes, in the realm of the ballerine, what 
 became a characteristic note in French poetry about 
 1865. It is a strain of incurable love wherein de- 
 licious energies thrill and spiritedly leap forth with 
 refined brilliancy and then, stricken gently but hope- 
 lessly back in a decadent chord, recede in the anemic 
 ecstasies of a distinguished heartache — in languors that 
 elegantly isolate until they forsake one in exquisite 
 forlornness. In the evolution of French ballet music, 
 "Coppelia" is also the first and most seductive scene of 
 niffht music. It perfectly reflects its environment — 
 evenings of ballet at the opera. It loses much of its 
 charm if played afternoons in a park. It is not for 
 daylight, for it shares in the sensuousness of lighted 
 stage and in the insinuations of perfumed loges. 
 
 To enjoy ballet dancing thoroughly one should not 
 only have an ear for music but be able to some extent 
 to appreciate its phrases and moods. Otherwise he 
 cannot understand how human movements mold the 
 meaning of the orchestra; he cannot fully delight in 
 those refined sensations which are born of the hymen 
 of the grace of music and the grace of motion. Each 
 note calls for an action (un temps) or a pose, each 
 phrase for a pas, each strain for a chaining together 
 of evolutions and attitudes. A trained musical ear is 
 more necessary to-day than ever for the spectator. 
 
 Yet there is, among the average onlookers at an 
 opera, scarcely one person in five hundred who has a 
 knowledge and an intelligent conception of Terpsi-
 
 144 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 chorean grace, who knows when a danseuse is correctly 
 interpreting the music, and who thrills with enlightened 
 pleasure when she really melts into its embraces. It 
 is safe to say that the ballet, at its best, affords some- 
 thing of this cultured entertainment to not more than 
 thirty persons among the two thousand who frequent 
 the Grand Opera in Paris. For not only are the re- 
 fining aspects of the theater dance difficult to appraise, 
 but its unfavorable features and its imperfections are 
 always strikingly apparent. To many people it seems 
 a meaningless, graceless spectacle wherein men and 
 women are grimacing and kicking about. Perhaps Rus- 
 kin had this in mind, among other things, when he 
 branded with his righteous pen the modern "mean, car- 
 peted, gauze-veiled, mincing sensuality of curls and 
 crisping pins, out of which [he believed] nothing can 
 come but moral enervation and mental paralysis." 
 
 One is prepared now to pose intelligently the ques- 
 tion for the year 1900, Was the ballet then in deca- 
 dence? Every one seemed to be saying that it was.- 
 Distinguished musical critics like Weber of '^Le 
 Temps" took this for granted. Even the ballet bat- 
 talion at the Paris Opera professed to share this 
 opinion. They declared that there were no dancers any 
 more; the professors of the dance claimed that there 
 were none left in their classes; and the Paris master of 
 the ballet himself insisted with refreshing modesty 
 that there were no masters of the ballet in his epoch. 
 
 But all this should not necessarily mislead one, for 
 every generation has clamored about the degeneracy 
 of the ballet. Adice, writing toward the year i860,
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 145 
 
 bewailed its fallen condition; Saint-Leon treated of the 
 decadence of the dance in a well-written essay in 1856; 
 and there were critics who were complaining of the 
 same thing between 1830 and 1840. And yet that 
 period is looked back upon as the golden age of the 
 dance. 
 
 When the decadence of the ballet was spoken of 
 toward 1900, decadence of the pantomime was un- 
 consciously meant. The two are not the same thing. 
 In pantomime the attention is on the dumb show; in 
 the ballet, it is on the dancing. "Coppelia," for in- 
 stance, is sometimes called a ballet-pantomime because 
 there is acting in it, but it is properly a ballet, and is 
 always designated as such by savants in the art, since 
 the interest attaches to the pas as pleasing, dexterous 
 Interpretations of music. A ballet may be either purely 
 a ballet danse, or it may be a mixed ballet wherein the 
 pantomime is outshone by the dancing. 
 
 The pantomime, it is true, was in decadence, but the 
 ballet as a whole could not be said to have been. Sev- 
 eral features made up its charm: first and mainly, the 
 dancing (with its frequent pantomimic effects), then 
 the music, and then the accessories of costume and 
 scenery. By dividing the modern era of the ballet Into 
 two equal epochs — 1829 to 1863, and 1863 to 1897 — 
 one can clearly and fairly discover what features have 
 declined or progressed. The ballet, in so far as It 
 pertains to pantomime, shares naturally, in the second 
 epoch, in the general decline of the pantomime. 
 
 Therefore, as seen above, the ballet was notably in 
 decadence in the use of the upper and the more panto-
 
 146 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 mimic part of the body, and in the art of producing 
 graceful effects and ideal conceptions with the whole 
 person — that is to say, with the ensemble of the dancer 
 as embodied in a role. And then the danseuses of the 
 second epoch will never be so famous and seem so in- 
 comparable to posterity as those of the first epoch, 
 and justly so notwithstanding the comparative lack in 
 the latter of adroitness and pas; for the first epoch was 
 marvelously fertile in inspired artists of the dance who 
 were unique in the various styles which they conceived. 
 
 In other aspects the ballet was superior in the second 
 period toward 1900, The legs and feet were far more 
 skilled, and consequently the pas were more expert. 
 The star of 1900 could render, literally and perfectly, 
 a more intricate score of music than could any of her 
 famous predecessors. Even in the indifferent ballet "la 
 Maladetta," created at the Grand Opera in Paris about 
 1893, it was edifying to see how completely and ef- 
 fectively every mood of the orchestra was expressed 
 by a tour de pas. For it is notably herein, as indicated 
 above with respect to Delibes, that the best dance music 
 of latter times surpasses. It is ballet music written to 
 be danced by women. The motives and harmonies are 
 wedded to a pas; they are more sympathetic and col- 
 ored, and are apt to be more distinguished in senti- 
 ment than the musical themes for Terpsichore in the 
 earlier epoch. 
 
 In passing, one may note Gounod's melodious ballet 
 music, and also that of Massenet whose style, though 
 unlike Gounod's, is frequently entrancing for the dance, 
 since he makes up for rich coloring and plasticity by
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 147 
 
 his finely-wrought sensuousness and ravishingly com- 
 plicated energy. His music is to be criticized at times 
 for certain tints of sensualism. Voluptuousness taints 
 the charm in the ballet as quickly as in any other art. 
 The sensuality of his scores, however, is of a most re- 
 fined and mentalized type. 
 
 Along with the development in ballet music, and also 
 in pas and in the improvement of their execution, there 
 is to be noted again the increased taste and elegance dis- 
 played toward 1900 In costuming, notwithstanding the 
 refractoriness which the typical ballet skirt of our epoch 
 manifests toward artistic loveliness. Likewise, incred- 
 ible progress was shown in the matter of scenery. To 
 understand how immeasurably superior the stage ap- 
 pointments are at present compared with those of 
 Taglioni's day, the reader need but peruse the criticism 
 of Castil-Blaze in 1832 on the innovations in stage 
 decorations. Primitive attempts were then just being 
 made to substitute material objects representing trees, 
 rocks, houses, for merely painted scenes shoved across 
 the stage in sight of the spectators. 
 
 Castil-Blaze put his naive complaints and curious 
 logic into this language: "The new system of decora- 
 tions at the Opera takes away all the magic, because 
 It does not permit the change of scene to be accom- 
 plished In view. These big, solid objects destroy the 
 perspective. The more material the decorations, the 
 farther will they be from the truth. The canvases 
 painted by the Italians succeed each other on the stage 
 with rapidity, and are better than all these mountains 
 whose construction requires three quarters of an hour."
 
 148 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 As for the corps de ballet, it is probably not so se- 
 verely disciplined to-day as in the earlier epoch, but 
 this is due In a certain sense to its progress, in that 
 it is much larger than formerly and has to achieve more 
 difficult tours. For the pas must be easy to permit a 
 corps de ballet to perform with precision and in per- 
 fect unison. It is agreed that the ballet in Paris to- 
 ward 1900 was not trained so thoroughly as in Milan 
 or Vienna. 
 
 Thus it is to be remarked that, while that epoch had 
 no Taglioni nor Elssler, no Cerrito nor Rosati, al- 
 though the star of 1900 was more skilled in pas and 
 in mere dancing than they, it contributed, and with all 
 that this means, a matchless masterpiece in the form of 
 a ballet — "Coppelia." The comparative decline of the 
 star toward 1900 was, taken alone, a sign of decadence 
 in the dance, just as was the intermixing of genres. 
 Yet her decline was to be explained by the fact that 
 while she had been formerly the cynosure in the ballet 
 (and this furnishes the reason why one famous ballerine 
 formerly succeeded another so rapidly in public favor), 
 the center of attention was distributed In the 1890's be- 
 tween the incomparable skill of pas and the surpassing 
 effects of the immense corps de ballet and of the music 
 and decorations. 
 
 Therefore a danseuse like Mile, Mauri could remain 
 so long In reign. The star was yet a great attraction, 
 though no longer the exclusive one. Her art at the 
 same time had become In a sense more of an expert 
 business and less of a caprice and Inspiration. 
 
 But looking at the matter broadly, the decline of
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 149 
 
 the star did not necessarily evidence a decadence of the 
 ballet. Saint-Leon wrote in 1856 that her glory had 
 begun to fade and that the ballet d'ensemble would 
 again come in vogue. It has been noticed above that 
 Taglioni drove the ballet d'ensemble from the stage 
 by concentrating all the attention on herself. With 
 her the star, not the ballet, became the object of in- 
 terest, and this was doubtless looked upon by many 
 in her time as a decline of the ballet into the sensations 
 of a single ballerine. 
 
 Hence, traditionally and logically, the ballet as seen 
 in the last generation of the century was nearer the 
 complete conception of the term than at any time since 
 Taglioni, because no one feature was significantly sac- 
 rificed to another. It was the regular ballet d'ensemble 
 wherein the simple evolutions of the quadrilles shared 
 honors with the displays of the star. One seems there- 
 fore wholly justified in concluding, after averaging all 
 its aspects in the length and breadth of their meaning, 
 that the ballet in 1900 excelled, or at least held its own 
 with, that of any other epoch. 
 
 It would be idle, even if the decadence of the ballet 
 were a fact, to treat it as if a return to the art of 
 Taglioni's decade were either possible or desirable. 
 Modern spectators, lovers of complicated Romantic 
 effects and nervously adroit energies, would soon find 
 Taglioni tame in one of her great roles. 
 
 The men of the present time crave rightly enough 
 the grace and the ideal of a warmer, more colorful, 
 more vigorous type than our grandfathers knew of. 
 The dancing in the latter's day was comparatively cold
 
 150 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 and distant. As the Parisians of the modern epoch 
 prefer orchestral harmonies to simple melodies, so 
 they prefer grand enchainments of dexterous pas to the 
 simple roles of classic grace. They romanesquely love 
 the fougue of richly developed music and evolutions in- 
 stead of the slow and white cameo elegance of simple 
 adagios. This explains why the professor of the dance 
 to-day keeps exclaiming to his pupil: "More vigor! 
 More fire!" and not: "More repose! More ele- 
 gance!" The generation of 1900, to speak compara- 
 tively, had lost taste for simple mythological grace, for 
 formal correctness, and for cool poetry in the Terpsi- 
 chorean art; and it had gained in the fondness for the 
 execution of pas, and for variety and entrain. 
 
 The ballet in France had not declined in 1900. It 
 had simply transformed and, on the whole, improved. 
 And it was less difficult to determine this than to have 
 said what transformations it was then passing through. 
 It might have seemed that pointe dancing was begin- 
 ning to go out of favor a little, yet one was scarcely 
 justified in hazarding even this statement. Pointes 
 have been so long the feature with the ballerine, and 
 are detailed so prominently as the ultimate achieve- 
 ment of the dance, that it would be natural if the public 
 inclined at length to weary of them. 
 
 The latter-day audience, full of the love for im- 
 mensities and masses, was doubtless more disposed 
 than its predecessors to prefer, to single danseuses, com- 
 panies of them — several performers executing a pas in 
 unison and with "linear perfection." Genuine applause 
 is always awakened by ten or twelve ballerines accur-
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 151 
 
 ately lined down the stage in the single pose of an ara- 
 besque ouverte, while this elementary attitude in one 
 ballerine is scarcely noticed. 
 
 Such a growing preference for groups would be asso- 
 ciated with the relative decadence of the star, and 
 would seem to be proven by the increasing size of bal- 
 lets,* and also by the magnificent sceneries of our epoch, 
 since groups alone give display to grand stage effects. 
 This taste for clusters of danseuses showed a whole- 
 some fondness for the simpler phases of the dancing 
 art, in contrast with the complex admiration which the 
 virtuosity of a star cultivates in the spectator. 
 
 It was a question three generations ago whether men 
 are needed in the dance. Their number was first di- 
 minished in the ballet at the Paris Opera in 1832, while 
 at the same time the number of danseuses was increased. 
 It was about 1846 that the roles of men began to be 
 taken there by women. Mile. Sangalli called notice in 
 the 1870's to the fact that some people held the male 
 dancer indispensable, and others thought him useless, 
 since his roles could be assumed by women in his guise. 
 She said: "My opinion is that man is absolutely neces- 
 sary in a ballet. He contrasts with the grace and 
 beauty of woman in a more effective way than travesty 
 permits. But while I maintain that he is indispensable 
 in the pas d'ensemble and in groups, I maintain that he 
 is useless in the soli." 
 
 One readily agrees with the above, though it is 
 
 * The regular ballet at the Grand Opera in Paris consisted in 
 1900 of two stars, forty sujets and petits sujets, twenty coryphees, 
 three mimes, forty members of the two quadrilles, and upward of a 
 hundred other persons.
 
 152 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 preferable that the male dancer be retained in one or 
 two of the soli of a ballet. He may not be especially 
 interesting to male spectators, but he may be to women. 
 Furthermore, it is the general opinion that the stars 
 and the sujets should be drilled by men rather than by 
 women. Mile. Mauri in the 1890's was emphatic on 
 this point. The most efficient professor is the man who 
 teaches well and dances better than even a star. All 
 the ballet queens of former times were educated by 
 famous male dancers. Women as professors of sujets 
 were then unknown, while latterly at the Opera in 
 Paris there were only one or two men teaching. This 
 shows how the dance in France has passed into the 
 hands of women. It has made progress on the whole; 
 still there are great opportunities for improvement, 
 and more men as professors would doubtless lead to 
 this. 
 
 By abandoning altogether the solo male dancer, the 
 art of masculine dancing would be lost, and the absence 
 of its imposing vigor would doubtless be regrettable for 
 more reasons than one. No artist of either sex at the 
 Opera in Paris in the 1890's married vigor and grace 
 so well as Vazquez; no one presented such a perfect 
 profile as he nor took such model attitudes when 
 launched in air. To do away with the danseur or ef- 
 face him into mere roles of accompaniment where he 
 only tosses up the danseuse — a performance usually 
 exaggerated — would tend to make the ballet more lax 
 in discipline and would have removed, in this instance, 
 a man who doubtless surpassed, when supple rapidity, 
 virile elegance and skillful pas are considered, any
 
 The Great Era of the French Ballet 153 
 
 male dancer known to Terpslchorean literature. It is 
 true there was In his time no agitation of the above 
 question; but male dancers in the classic ballet continue 
 to be passing from public favor, and relatively fewer 
 of them were of late employed in soli at the Paris 
 Opera. 
 
 As a general comment with which to approach the 
 close of this essay, it may be said that the modern cult 
 of the body for health and beauty might be advanta- 
 geously extended more and more from the domains of 
 mere athletics to the ballet realms of refined grace and 
 elegant vigor. This is the practical object of the dance. 
 
 As for the spiritual part, one may hazard the saying 
 of the philosopher Jouffroy that the dance "makes souls 
 appear by means of the body." And, indeed, those who 
 think the dance necessarily sacrifices the head to the 
 feet might be enlightened by perusing a forgotten little 
 book by a danseuse named Mademoiselle Michelet, 
 entitled "Bluettes antimondaines d'une danseuse," 
 wherein the author reverently promenades back and 
 forth in serious philosophical disquisitions on religion 
 with as much ease as she doubtless displayed in her 
 ballon and temps parcourus. 
 
 Since 1900 the ballet or opera dance has departed 
 with quite a radical completeness from what has been 
 shown in the preceding pages with reference to the 
 past century. The Classic ballets — the danse noble as 
 exhibited by Subra — are retained for those operas for 
 which they were written. They are not being devel- 
 oped. They appear to be a fixed and past type.
 
 154 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 The Romantic ballets — the danse de demi-caractere 
 as represented by Mauri — have, however, been remark- 
 ably developed since 1900 and are still being developed 
 in fashions which are not only extraordinary from al- 
 most every standpoint but are almost beyond criti- 
 cism. For originality, variety, ingenuity, color, beauty, 
 natural human grace the contemporary Russian types 
 surpass the most extravagant dreams of the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 Its ballets now seem much restricted, much clothed, 
 artificial, thus still attaching to the restrained traditions 
 of antiquity. But our present-day publics are, by con- 
 trast, unperturbedly accustomed to bare feet, bare 
 legs and greatly bared bodies, which lend a wholesome 
 natural freedom and grace in ways that would have 
 shocked past generations. 
 
 Bare feet preclude pointe (or toe) dancing which 
 was the revelation and marvel of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury ballets. Pointe dancing is and likely always will 
 be the most exacting feature of the dance, since it must 
 be begun in childhood and requires a long and severe 
 training. Most of the present popular dancers cannot 
 dance on the toes and are, therefore, only at best semi- 
 professionals. The great modern professionals like 
 Pavlova can perform on the pointes as well as in every 
 other mode. Pointe dancing must seemingly be re- 
 tained along with the new barefoot forms in order 
 to denote a strictly first class art. 
 
 As France was the perfected home of the nineteenth 
 century ballets, so is Russia the perfected home of what 
 promises to be the twentieth century models.
 
 iv. The Sociological Role of the Forest
 
 THE SOCIOLOGICAL ROLE OF THE FOREST 
 
 In Fontalnebleau. August. 
 
 THESE outlines for a speculative essay have 
 been noted down as I pass the hours under 
 these beautiful beeches and heroic pines, and 
 recall in comparison the effaced stateliness of the Valois 
 Compiegne and the green of Soignies. 
 
 Historically, Fontainebleau can well be called the 
 most important of all woods, as will be readily attested 
 by the readers of the history of Napoleon, of the 
 French Courts and, indeed, of nearly all French epochs. 
 In the arts this identical forest's associations are rela- 
 tively as prominent. Not to speak alone of the Barbi- 
 zon school which nestled In these borders, scores of 
 well-known artists and litterateurs have had and have 
 their homes here or near by. For literature, too, has 
 been enriched by the soul of Fontainebleau. A very 
 large number of great personages in varied walks of 
 life have here sought seclusion in sojourn or residence. 
 Not only political and religious events and military 
 movements but many famous hunting parties, high so- 
 cial functions, romantic episodes, picturesque love af- 
 fairs of note, have claimed this spot for their own. 
 
 All this has been often celebrated and by many a 
 masterly pen and brush. But of Fontainebleau's won- 
 derful and charming example in a sociological role, 
 
 157
 
 158 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 little has been said for the general reader. In this 
 respect these woods are scarcely less notable, identi- 
 fied as they are with the course of human development 
 and valuable as a thing of loveliness and as a care- 
 fully nurtured product of man's highest nature. 
 
 To bring out this scantily recognized asjDect, the few 
 following pages are sketched in the way of suggestive 
 contemplation. 
 
 Of the earth's four great surface features termed 
 the sea, the mountain, the forest and the plain, the last 
 does not appear to have been Nature's source of, or 
 background to, any of the later leading civilizations or 
 any controlling civilizing factor or race sentiment. The 
 mountain seems to have inspired, or become associated 
 with, merely the sentiment of political freedom — the 
 love of physical independence. And this has only been 
 true in modern times, for the Greeks and Romans 
 scarcely recognized mountains as the origin of any 
 notable and practical kind of inspiration. For that 
 matter, Holland, whose mountains are its beffrois, has 
 played at least as prominent a part as Switzerland in 
 the history of political liberty. This comparatively 
 narrow role of the mountains is doubtless ascribable 
 to their sparse and more or less remote population, 
 and to the difficulties they offer to human intercom- 
 munication. 
 
 Thus notice is drawn at once to the sea and to the 
 forest as the great physiographical backgrounds of the 
 later civilizations. It occurs immediately to us to say 
 that the sea, rather than the forest, lay back of the
 
 The Sociological Role of the Forest 159 
 
 Greek and Roman cults of enlightenment. The prom- 
 inent Nature-basis of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the JEndd, 
 and of the Hellenic and the Roman history and myth- 
 ology, is the sea. Athens and Rome were near the 
 borders of a large water. The chief modern European 
 capitals, on the contrary, are inland amidst forestal 
 interiors. When, in the Middle Ages, civilization began 
 its new life north in mid-Europe, it was natural that 
 the forest should supplant the sea as the physiograph- 
 ical basis of sociological development. And this ap- 
 pears indeed true : the forest is the mise-en-scene for 
 the epic of Charlemagne, and for the action of the 
 whole distinctively modern civilization. 
 
 Before attempting to sketch the theme of the socio- 
 logical contrasts of sea and forest, it would be well per- 
 haps to agree, for the sake of clearness and brevity, 
 that the two words ancients and ancient shall refer to 
 the Greeks and Romans; and that the terms neo-an- 
 cients and neo-ancient shall designate the Roman Cath- 
 olics and their church, since it is the direct successor of 
 the old Roman religion and preserves visible traces of 
 many of the Latin forms, rites and traditions, while 
 evidencing that especial devotion to unity and beauty 
 which is ever the mark of the ancient civilization. And 
 by the words modern and modernity we shall signify 
 that which is to be distinguished as modern — all moral, 
 intellectual and art revolts, revolutions and important 
 changes which have sprung from or characterize the 
 later Europe, and not Greece or ancient Rome. 
 
 In considering the relation of the sea and the forest 
 to the arts in their usual order, we note that we com-
 
 i6o French Essays and Profiles 
 
 monly think of the Gothic as the significantly modern 
 type of architecture. And what is a Gothic cathedral, 
 as is so often pointed out, but a bit of grand forest 
 petrified? There is a succession of Gothic churches on 
 either hand as we walk through the woods. The trees, 
 stretching away in semblance of rows, are the columns, 
 and they unfold skyward into the vault of Heaven, just 
 as the pillars of a cathedral upfurl into the arching 
 roof. You see alleys for aisles, copses for chapels, and 
 glad'es for the interceptions of nave and transept. The 
 branches, sprigs, leaves and the fretted top of a forest 
 — all in their aspiring tendency upward — are Nature's 
 prototypes for the fragile, lacelike Gothic groined 
 vaults, pinnacles. A wood, with its masses of sorrow- 
 ful religious shade cheered up by light from above, ex- 
 emplifies the Interior of a Gothic church. 
 
 The forest, that is to say the tree, Is architectural 
 in principle. It has a variety that is harmonious and 
 chordal and that blends with the majesty of the whole. 
 If Ruskin's definitions of symmetry and proportion are 
 acceptable — "The property of a tree in sending out 
 equal branches on opposite sides is symmetrical; its 
 sending out shorter and smaller toward the top, pro- 
 portional" — we remark how the sea could not well be 
 the Nature-source of inspiration for Gothic architec- 
 ture, because the sea typifies least of all the pro- 
 portional. 
 
 But the forest (the tree) does prefigure the modern 
 Gothic tendency to upwardness, or more specifically 
 the idea of vertlcalness, which is the main principle of 
 proportion. In contrast, the architecture of the an-
 
 The Sociological Role of the Forest i6i 
 
 cients, like the sea, is characterized by the horizontal, 
 not the vertical — by levels, not heights. The prevail- 
 ing sense of levelness in the ancients was the expression 
 of, or accompaniment to, their creed of fatality. The 
 relative importance given the column in Greek and 
 Roman architecture was perfectly representative of the 
 mortal struggle of lifting up against the horizontal 
 dead weight of human destiny. In the Greek temple, 
 the columns stand for this struggle upward, while the 
 roof symbolizes 
 
 The leveling weight 
 Of mortal fate! 
 
 We may say that Gothic architecture was the in- 
 stinctive uprising of the French and the German against 
 the ancient and neo-ancient influences. In this upris- 
 ing of the Gothic spirit were displayed the French love 
 for lightness, airiness, delicacy, and the German love 
 for somber depths and lofty solemn grandeurs — all 
 reaching up through the zone of earth's fatality toward 
 God and consequently hope. That Catholicism should 
 have seized hold of the Gothic types in churches only 
 illustrates its neo-ancient nature. 
 
 As for sculpture, we find its characteristic of bare- 
 ness illustrated in the sea. The nakedness and the open- 
 ness of the sea are reflected in statuary, and accentuate 
 an opposition to the modern characteristic of clothed- 
 ness, for which Nature furnishes an associate in the 
 leafy, secluding forest. Hence arises that affinity be- 
 tween the sea and sculpture In their mutual suggestion
 
 i62 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 of lubricity. Their slippery smoothness has ever sug- 
 gested the lubricous, for which term the forest presents 
 no synonym. Venus was born not of a tree but of the 
 lascivious wave whose tongue lapped the contours of 
 her nude beauty. The powers of expression inherent 
 in the sea and in sculpture lie only in the surface. The 
 ocean's straight lines and curves, its emphasis on con- 
 vexity and outline, all signalize it as the great Nature- 
 symbol of the exterior and of the Greek genius for 
 form — that which makes for the visibly effective. 
 
 In painting, the ancients seem to have heeded 6orm 
 rather than color. The function of perspective being 
 to do that for design which chiaroscuro does for color 
 — to modulate, to soften and to render agreeable — it 
 appears that the ancients understood and employed 
 perspective successfully, but not chiaroscuro. The lat- 
 ter is a modern means of expression in painting. It is 
 obvious that, in Nature, chiaroscuro is best studied in 
 the forest (where there is the play of varied light 
 against dark backgrounds), and that the sea supplied 
 the ancients with the most striking illustration of the 
 laws of perspective. 
 
 In admitting that chiaroscuro may serve to distin- 
 guish painting from the other arts and is more ex- 
 pressive of, and the more closely associated with, the 
 emotional and the moral than are design and form 
 which are more mental, we are led to the fact that the 
 greatest age in painting came after the era of the an- 
 cients, and produced eminently a moral — a Christian 
 — art. Moral motifs are forest motifs, we shall note. 
 In the glorified use of color by the Italian painters, we
 
 The Sociological Role of the Forest 163 
 
 may see Italy's revolt or deflection from what the 
 world had hitherto accepted as the ancient influences, 
 just as in Gothic architecture lay the northern re- 
 action and self-assertiveness from the ancient domin- 
 ion. 
 
 In modern, and hence in Christian, painting ver- 
 tical rays prevail — rays rising Heavenward; and they 
 are illustrated in Nature by the forest whose growth 
 is upward. The ancient, or pagan, painting, we may 
 safely say, was characterized, like the ancient archi- 
 tecture and its sea, by horizontal lines representative of 
 the Greek and Roman fatalism and materialism. It 
 seems, therefore, natural that Millet and Theo. Rous- 
 seau, born of Nature and of the Romantic school 
 in France, had their homes here in the Fontainebleau 
 woods and not by the sea. The forest, with its hope- 
 ful beams and streams of life against moral depths of 
 shade, and with its delicate, chiaroscuro effects, its 
 points and broken, diflicult, fragments of color and 
 form, made Fontainebleau, rather than the overpower- 
 ing sea, a suitable abode and object of worship for 
 the men of Barbizon. For these were precisely the 
 first French painters of the earnest soul — the interior — 
 of things as well as of surfaces. 
 
 Music, the distinctively modern art, has its Nature- 
 source in the forest rather than in the sea, because, for 
 one reason, the forest echoes — it enhances the value 
 of sound both as to volume and sweetness. The sea 
 represents echoless expanse, whereas the forest can 
 transform the crudest clangor into celestial harmonies. 
 A touch of the breeze on the leaf-limbed harpchords
 
 164 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 of the woods produces delicious minors; while the dull 
 moan, the fatalistic roar, of the sea suggest noise and 
 power, not music. The triumph of the Romantic school 
 in music had its direct Nature-source in the woods, 
 whether we think of the forestal operas of the forest- 
 haunting Weber, or of the Wagner music-dramas with 
 their medieval themes and mid-European associations, 
 or of the French Romantic operas where the cors de 
 chasse resound and the mise-en-scene presents forests 
 instead of the ocean. Silvan Germany has given the 
 grandest music to the world. 
 
 What is true of the arts with respect to the sea and 
 the forest may be expected to be likewise true of lit- 
 erature. But this branch of the subject would demand 
 nothing less than a volume. 
 
 We may pass on to note how intimately the forest is 
 allied to the modern religion of Protestantism and to 
 the modem institution of the home. Protestantism, 
 that sturdy moral revolution, came from wooded parts 
 of Europe. The wood is the great Nature-source and 
 emblem of all that is "agreeable to our moral nature 
 in its purity and perfection." The forest's silence, 
 depths and shade inspire the impulse for morality and 
 love of religious liberty and of silent contemplation. 
 Wherever Protestants held sway, there were forests, 
 and the forests were preserved. Wherever Protes- 
 tants were persecuted and forced to flee, their flight 
 was followed by the devastation of the woods. 
 
 This was the case in France, and it was notably the 
 case in Spain where the Inquisition, the severest of
 
 The Sociological Role of the Forest 165 
 
 Catholic persecutions, was accompanied by the widest 
 destruction of forests by human han-ds that man has 
 perhaps ever seen. The Spaniard's "hatred of a tree" 
 is proverbial. The disposition of Catholicism, in the 
 main, has been inimical to the forest and propitiatory 
 to the sea. It is a fitting coincidence that Victor Hugo, 
 the anti-Catholic leader of Romanticism in French Ut- 
 erature, wished to be buried in some forest, while his 
 Catholic mate and pendant Chateaubriand desired that 
 his own remains repose near the sea. And, accordingly, 
 the tomb of the immortal Rene was reared by the ocean 
 at St. Male. 
 
 A forest is Nature's expression of the idea of the 
 home. The home signifies an interior, and the forest 
 and a Gothic church emphasize the interior; while in 
 the sea (as we have noted) and in the Greek, temple, 
 the exterior is the particular manifestation. The ocean 
 suggests homelessness, and the ancients had no homes. 
 The home came from the forest races. A forest means 
 shelter, protection, and stands for the individual's right 
 to quiet and seclusion. 
 
 Thus shade — an attribute which distinctly separates 
 the forest from the sea — becomes a distinguishing char- 
 acteristic between the art, religion and life of the an- 
 cients and of the moderns. An immense, fierce sunlight- 
 irradiates the sea-entwined lands of the ancient Hel- 
 lenes and Romans, while shade and shadow gloom the 
 countries of the North and their modern civilization. 
 And together with the umbrageous and interior effects 
 of the forest, which is, as we have seen,
 
 i66 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 "True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home," 
 
 there is the inward quality of tenderness which we may 
 oppose to the exterior effect of grace in the Greeks. 
 How aptly does the familiar line 
 
 "Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender," 
 
 describe the Greek spirit I 
 
 Since the forest is so closely the prototype and as- 
 sociate of the Gothic church and of the home, it may 
 be said to bear a like relation to the communal motive 
 which has come down to us from the Middle Ages. 
 Sabatier, in his life of St. Francis of Assisi, describes 
 the Gothic cathedrals (and also forests, we may add in 
 extension of the idea) as the representative triumph 
 of communal institutions. He calls the Gothic churches 
 "the lay churches of the thirteenth century built by the 
 people and for the people: the true communal houses 
 of our old cities — museums, granaries, chambers of 
 commerce, palaces of justice, depots of archives, even 
 bourses de travail." 
 
 In this wise might we very briefly indicate how the 
 sea is the Nature -type for the ancient civilization, and 
 how the forest is the Nature-type for the modern civ- 
 ilization — how the forest is Nature's sociological back- 
 ground of the distinctive deflections of modernity from 
 antiquity: Gothic architecture in France, the religious 
 cult of glorious, appealing color in Italy, and Protes- 
 tantism and the home in Germany. While the trend 
 of the ancient civilization was outward like the sea,
 
 The Sociological Role of the Forest 167 
 
 that of the modern (and Christian) world is dualistic, 
 being upward like a tree and inward — interiorward — 
 like a forest. The contrast of modern verticalness and 
 ancient levelness is neatly set forth in the history of the 
 evolution of oratory. In modern oratory, one of the 
 most characteristic gestures is that of raising the hand 
 high to Heaven. The classic Cicero, on the contrary, 
 held that the gesture of an orator may extend wide as 
 the arms can reach, yet it should never pass the summit 
 of the head. 
 
 To pass from these more general considerations 
 which Fontainebleau forest inspires, we may not less 
 enjoy an intimate acquaintance with it as a symbol of 
 what a tree and a large majestic wood signify. 
 
 If one studies the forest as a whole and for itself 
 alone, he soon comes to regard it, not as a meaningless 
 group of trees, but as an organic, sentient, intelligent 
 body. The tree, for its part, breathes, absorbs, grows, 
 reposes, dies, like man. It has youth, maturity and 
 old age, and exhibits individual peculiarities of form 
 and complexion. It develops an individualistic career, 
 and is by nature aggressive or self-defending or both. 
 It craves warmth. Its whole life, in imitation of man's, 
 is a struggle upward for hght. Trees requiring the 
 most light content themselves with the poorest soil, 
 and vice versa. How like a human being who, as he 
 ascends more in the intellectual and moral scale and 
 possesses more light and more enlightened content-
 
 i68 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 ment, cares less (at least we wish to think so) for the 
 material things of earth! 
 
 The tree resembles the individual, the forest re- 
 sembles the nation, and trees of the same kind, a race. 
 Forests are republics — "those green republics," as Sully 
 Prudhomme sings — whose whole is made up of a col- 
 lection of individuals, whereas the ocean is typical of 
 an empire wherein the sense of oneness overwhelms all 
 else. There are race conflicts among trees as among 
 men. We hear that a great war is going on at present 
 between the broad-leaved trees on one side and the 
 conifers on the other — those arboreal republicans and 
 Cossacks. And we are told that our broad-leaved 
 friends are gradually winning the contest, and rightly 
 too since they are of a higher order than the conifers. 
 
 A wood like a people perpetuates itself best by cross- 
 breeding. A forest of one variety of tree is not so 
 vigorous or long-lived as a multigenerous forest. It 
 was long ago noticed here in the forest of Fontaine- 
 bleau that oaks mingled In due proportion with beeches 
 flourish robustly for five or six centuries, and that if 
 unmixed with other trees, they begin to decay and 
 die at the top after forty or fifty years. Thus a diversi- 
 fied society is as essential to the highest development 
 of a forest as it is to that of a people. Cork oak 
 forests thrive especially in, and are particularly charac- 
 teristic of, France where the cork industry is perhaps as 
 important as that of champagne. And the amiable 
 humorist would be apt to remark: Like races, like for- 
 ests — the French, resembling their cork forests, are 
 precisely the lightest of races.
 
 The Sociological Role of the Forest 169 
 
 Forests were the home of our arboreal predecessors. 
 They were also the friends of our historic ancestors. 
 Wherever large forests have been felled, a permanent 
 scourge has followed. The mistral was, it is said, the 
 result of the devastation by the Romans of the wooded 
 heights of the Cevennes. "The people thought this 
 wind a curse sent of God. They raised altars to it and 
 offered sacrifices to appease its rage." Revolutions in 
 France have been accompanied usually, if not always, 
 by lawless crusades against the woods. The peasants 
 naturally associated forests with feudalism and royalty, 
 because the forests, under the ancient regime, were 
 mainly kept by the nobility for the chase, thus depriv- 
 ing the tillers of the soil of ground needed for agri- 
 culture. 
 
 It is claimed that the rise and fall of nations have 
 been coincident with the conservation and destruction 
 of forests. The quality of the brick of the Romans, 
 we are often told, improved with the growth of Rome, 
 was unexcelled during the era of her magnificent pros- 
 perity, and decayed with her decline. Forests were so 
 rapidly destroyed during the period of her downfall 
 that the cost of wood increased, and her brick, being as 
 a result less thoroughly burned, became thicker and con- 
 sequently poorer. The decadence of Spain has been 
 freely ascribed to the felling of her forests, while the 
 rise of England has been attributed to the wood-wealth 
 of her colonies and the resultant supply of lumber for 
 ship-building. The Iberian peninsula has a less 
 wooded area proportionate to its size than any other 
 European country save Denmark and Britain.
 
 lyo French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Turning from Catholic Spain we find, as might be 
 expected, that Protestant Germany took the lead in 
 the matter of conserving and caring for forests. The 
 scientific world has now well established the fact that 
 the forest is the material friend, and not the enemy, of 
 man and of agriculture. Injurious insects do not breed 
 in or near it. Worm-eating birds dwell along its bor- 
 ders. It combats miasms and malarias. It is a moder- 
 ator of climatic extremes and of the furies of Nature. 
 It equalizes temperature, humidity and drought. It 
 makes the hot months more moist and cool, and the 
 cold months more dry and mild. It warms and protects 
 in winter; it shades and cools in summer. 
 
 The forest is naturally much closer than the sea to 
 the types and forms of civilized institutions. Here on 
 this majestic road through this great Fontainebleau 
 wood in which there is, strange to say, neither water 
 nor bird, we have, on our right, a pine forest of the 
 north and, on our left, a beech forest of a more south- 
 ern latitude. Two zones, two species, of civilization 
 are thus pictured to us as we loiter along. Here to- 
 ward the cold north is the red heather amid the sullen 
 bowlders; and there toward the smiling south are the 
 warm, soft, inviting lawns of beech-leaves. What de- 
 licious glimpses yonder up those paths that lead their 
 greenways through the solitudes of beech and pine I 
 How loyal to one's soul those rows of trees bristling 
 the edge of that blue oriflamme of distant hills and 
 standing dimly athwart the misty air as if sentineling 
 the frontier of the Other-World! 
 
 Silviculturists detail at length the intellectual inter-
 
 The Sociological Role of the Forest 171 
 
 est that the woods present. Naturalists tell us that for- 
 est animals are. more social, sympathetic and quicker- 
 witted than surface animals. The forest sharpens the 
 faculties of observation and clears up the brain. It is 
 a specific cerebral tonic. We have already referred to 
 its ethical and spiritual influence. In representing the 
 interior and the upward it represents character, while 
 the sea symbolizes the charm and polish of grace — of 
 the exterior in life. The forest inspires trust, a com- 
 forting snugness of existence, while the sea deadens our 
 finer instincts, sensibilities and hopes by its inexorable 
 openness and unpitying brutality. It seems to picture 
 to us the impotency of man, the hopelessness of eter- 
 nity, the cruelty of the infinite. It teaches fear, and the 
 forest, faith. The wood-chopper has confidence at the 
 bottom of his heart, and the fisherman, terror. 
 
 The sea is pagan; the forest is Christian. The sea 
 suggests waste, destruction, death. Unlike the forest, 
 it does not stand for growth. From the beginning of 
 time, it has terrified the torchbearers of civilization 
 and has angrily blocked the spread of progress. It 
 destroys history and the past. The ocean and its ally 
 sand are persistent enemies of man. Human works are 
 washed away by the sea and are conserved by the for- 
 est. The forest preserves tradition and fact. It is the 
 friend of the past and of the future; and within its 
 bosom may be felt, 
 
 "The life where hope and memory are as one." 
 
 In view of the forest's wholesome and effective 
 role, we see why the nemophilis may urge that the for-
 
 172 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 est is more truly a desirable rest resort for Christian 
 man than is the seashore. To the grandeur and fierce- 
 ness of the sea, the forest opposes sweetness, tender- 
 ness. In the woods one escapes the glare of the burn- 
 ing sun, the relentless winds, the driving rains and 
 storms — all the powerful, sudden, harmful, extreme 
 manifestations of Nature which sweep the sea coast. 
 It is the barbarousness in us that the ocean arouses 
 with its spectacular ominousness; while the woods ap- 
 peal to our higher, more refined selves. We recall 
 Ruskin's remark: "As I have grown older, the aspects 
 of Nature conducive to human life have become hourly- 
 more dear to me; and I had rather now see a brown 
 harvest field than the brightest Aurora Borealis." 
 
 The seaside is, in our day, more popular in summer 
 than the forest. Likely the reason for this is that 
 wealth and fashion can better display their show by the 
 ocean where Nature flaunts her wildest schemes of 
 gigantic, massed colors. The forest subdues the sen- 
 sational, and has no society columns. Perhaps most 
 modern people, like Madame Bovary, love the sea for 
 its tempests — for its colossal arena that sets off the 
 ceaseless contrasts and terrific violences of Pan. One 
 notes how naturally Ruskin turns to the sea for his 
 figure of speech when he exclaims that those who love 
 variety and change are the weakest-minded and the 
 hardest-hearted: that the hardest-hearted "hold by no 
 cords of affection to any shore, but drive with the waves 
 that cast up noise and dirt." 
 
 Are there not those who would say that there is, 
 sociologically, too much of the sea and too little of the 
 forest in our modern civilization?
 
 V. Hedda Gabler and the Parisians
 
 HEDDA GABLER AND THE PARISIANS 
 
 HEDDA GABLER" has taken its place as one 
 of the most significant and influential plays 
 of modern times. Even by those who do not 
 enjoy it, the importance of its originality, not to speak 
 of its prominence, is perforce admitted. The reactions 
 it excited in the French, who stood forth so alien to its 
 milieu and its type, were an interesting test and a salient 
 result which vividly bring out Parisian tastes and stand- 
 ards of social life. 
 
 A study of their view of it when first produced in 
 France seems, therefore, well worth while. The con- 
 trasts are lucid and striking and set forth in relief 
 French character and disposition as expressed in con- 
 nection with the dramatic art. 
 
 Why did not the French understand "Hedda 
 Gabler"? Of all Ibsen's plays, it is perhaps the least 
 Norwegian, being apparently in accord with French 
 ideas in the following respects: 
 
 It ha.s_ tio problem or thesi s. Its moral is not brought 
 into bold relief. It is not surcharged with the enig- 
 matic, fatalistic, terrible weirdness of "The Wild 
 Duck," nor has it the vague, evanescent romance of 
 •The Lady from the Sea." "Hedda Gabler" is bur- 
 dened with no monologues, no long tirades. The dia- 
 logue throughout is natural, ingenious, nervous and 
 
 175
 
 176 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 well sustained. This is especially to the F'rench taste. 
 With them conversation is usually the life of the play, 
 and it must be bright and entertaining. What the 
 characters say should be simply the result of the dia- 
 logical encounter, and not of premeditation — or, in 
 other words, no forced replies. The conversations in 
 "Hedda Gabler" are of this nature. Since the piece 
 has no great, broad strokes, no excesses of coloration, 
 no oppressive weight of despondency, the mind of the 
 spectator is not distracted for a moment from the dia- 
 logue. The characters find, French-like, their best, 
 their complete, expression in their interrelations. No 
 bewildering perspectives are disclosed in the progress 
 of the plot, and the characters are developed in the 
 familiar light of every-day existence. The play is 
 simple in its conception, structure and action, and 
 Ibsen has observed in it the laws of order, discretion 
 and delicacy — the "medium qualities" which the 
 Parisians prefer. 
 
 Thus it would appear at first that the answer to our 
 question — Why did not the French understand "Hedda 
 Gabler" ? — must be found in the profound contrasts be- 
 tween the French and the Norwegian environments. 
 Since a play is apt to be the typical product of a climate 
 and natural scenery, and of a people and its religious, 
 political and social conditions, the Scandinavian drama 
 is properly individualistic. The Norwegian, under his 
 lowering clouds, among his wild ridges, along his jag- 
 ged, abysmal fiords and by his sullen seas, ever verges 
 toward the brink of the tragic. By contrast, grega- 
 riousness is one of the chief characteristics of the
 
 Hedda Gabler and the Parisians 177 
 
 French. The city is their ideal and "one must do like 
 the others" is their guiding rule of action. They are 
 relatively free from egoism and personal ambition. 
 Their vanity is displayed in their admiration of Paris 
 and of France — in a word, of their race. The Scan- 
 dinavian is radical and intense as an individual, and, 
 driven by his imagination, he always tries to go to the 
 very end. The French are radical and extreme as a 
 nation rather than as individuals. Impersonality thus 
 characterizes their drama: the ensemble is the mark of 
 their plays. 
 
 Silence is as necessary to the Scandinavian as con- 
 versation is to the Parisian. While the former talks in 
 dumb terms and broken sentences, the latter is at his 
 best when he converses. At the same time the French- 
 man learns especially by sight. He must see^ literally, 
 in order to comprehend well. As the eye requires 
 form, proportion and precision for Its visual pabulum, 
 the result is that these qualities are essential to his 
 drama. But In the dark domains of the North the 
 eye Is of less artistic importance, and the plays of the 
 dreaming Norwegian are comparatively vague and 
 amorphous. With him, likewise, there is no marvel 
 without a veil. With the Parisian, nothing that is 
 veiled is marvelous. 
 
 Now, where do these Scandinavian traits develop in 
 "Hedda Gabler"? Notably In the three prominent 
 characters. The three persons whom the Parisians did 
 not understand are Hedda, Loevborg and Madam 
 Elvsted. In what ways were they enigmas? Let us 
 take Sarcey as an influential representative of the tra-
 
 178 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 ditional French ideas of the drama and discuss briefly 
 his questions and criticisms. He used to confess in 
 "Le Temps," with some satisfaction, his inability to 
 discover much except downright stupidity in these roles. 
 He described Hedda as, at least in Act I, a Norwegian 
 Madame Bovary. She has married a young savant 
 who is not blessed with riches, and who adores her 
 sillily without knowing the rebellions and rancors which 
 agitate her. Sarcey insisted that Flaubert handled the 
 plot with much more fidelity to nature than Ibsen. 
 That was true for Sarcey, but not for the Scandinavian; 
 and it is difficult for the unvoyaged Frenchmen to be- 
 lieve, not to say realize, that types of character not 
 found in France may be found elsewhere. Hedda has 
 flirted in the past with a Bohemian of genius, Loev- 
 borg; and in repelling his advances on one occasion, 
 she leveled a pistol at him. He resorted to drink, and 
 she married Tesman. She gave up Loevborg as hope- 
 lessly debauched, and he passed from her mind. 
 
 However, Loevborg becomes acquainted with the 
 young and childless Madam Elvsted who, in her de- 
 votion to him, reforms him. He is the instructor of 
 her husband's children. She aids Loevborg in his liter- 
 ary work, and is deeply interested in the book which 
 he is writing. His head is somewhat turned by its great 
 success and he suddenly disappears from the Elvsted 
 mansion. Madam Elvsted, who has no affection for 
 her elderly, unloving husband, goes in search of Loev- 
 borg, fearing that he may fall into his old habits. She 
 calls on Hedda whom she had known. Hedda, hear- 
 ing of Loevborg's reformation and Madam Elvsted's
 
 Hedda Gabler and the Parisians 179 
 
 literary collaboration with him, is seized, as Sarcey 
 said, with "infernal thoughts." He could not imagine 
 what their source is, nor why, henceforth, she acts so 
 distractedly. He complained that she nowhere clears 
 the mystery, and that her words and actions are ex- 
 tremely incoherent. 
 
 To an Anglo-American, however, this character pre- 
 sents little difficulty, for he has known Hedda Gablers, 
 or can easily imagine them. Having lost her mother at 
 an early age, Hedda has been carelessly reared by her 
 father. General Gabler. We picture her as a pale, 
 thin-haired person with martial-like shoulder knots, and 
 a suggestion of the Bernhardt cincture. She has cold, 
 steel-gray, challenging eyes. She is a high-strung, 
 dramatic young woman, with a false or unfortunate 
 theory of life. Mediocre, but egotistic and ambitious, 
 she has, what the French call, a desire to "knock 
 about." Wishing no domestic nor maternal duties, 
 she married the fumbling Tesman because he, of her 
 many cavaliers, was the only one who offered her any 
 kind of a future. After all her fond dreams, she finds 
 herself entering upon a long, dull married existence 
 with a boyish man, a bookworm, who, while he has 
 promise, develops no traits that correspond with her 
 theatrical ideas. She does not love him, nor can she 
 love any one. Ambition takes the place of affection in 
 her nature. She failed to save Loevborg because she 
 did not love him. 
 
 Madam Elvsted's call is, therefore, an awful revela- 
 tion to the high-metaled Hedda. All in a moment she 
 understands that she is of no vital importance to any
 
 I 
 
 1 80 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 person — that she has no role in the world. She real- 
 izes that she is no part of her husband's career; that it 
 can never bring her into the sort of relief which she 
 craves; that she has had no real influence even over 
 Loevborg, the man who loved her passionately and who 
 was best suited to her ambitions. She sees that she is 
 destined to be a doll — a domestic nonentity^ Hence 1 
 her despair and the source of her "infernal thoughts";} 
 and she simply gives vent to her genuine feelings when 
 she exclaims in her dramatic way: "I long to ha/e 
 power for once in my life over a human destiny 1" / 
 
 I was reading Hedda Gabler one morning to a 
 French friend, a professor in one of the Paris lycees. 
 He found it dehghtful until I reached the above sen- 
 tence, and I could not induce him to listen to another 
 word of the play. "Why," he said, "a character in a 
 drama must love somebody, or be moved by a distinct 
 motive or some concrete passion, and not by vague 
 ideas and abstractions. Instead of exclaiming 'I love 
 Loevborg!' she cries out, 'I want to be of importance to 
 some one — any one.' Hedda is cracked, and you can 
 never make a true drama with a crazy person or a fool 
 for the principal character. The play is absurd." 
 
 The foregoing is a fair statement of what appeared 
 to be Sarcey's ideas of the conception and characters of 
 the drama in general and of Hedda Gabler in particu- 
 lar. But to us, Hedda is neither insane nor a fool; 
 she is simply terribly mistaken. From her standpoint, 
 she thinks and acts logically, she measures her sur- 
 roundings, she plans with complete self-possession, 
 and she perceives clearly the end toward which she
 
 Hedda Gabler and the Parisians i8i 
 
 is precipitating herself. Yet, mortal-like, she fails to 
 understand that the fault is in herself and not in those 
 about her. Her environment is as she has organized it. 
 Her ennui and unhappiness come from her own color- 
 less, cold nature. Brack, the social villain in the play, 
 strikes the head of the difficulty when he says to her: 
 "I think the trouble is that you have never known any- 
 thing really stimulating." 
 
 The Parisians looked at Hedda only from their point 
 of view, and not without reason for she is largely a 
 French character. She is feverish, dramatic. She is, 
 individually considered, just the type of sensational 
 heroine so often staged in France. But the Parisians 
 could not imagine why she should take such a tragic, 
 diaboHcal course. Married, she is free to exploit her 
 ambitions; and if Loevborg is unavailable, why, they 
 asked, does she not find another gallant, since it is ad- 
 mitted that she only wishes comradeship? The expli- 
 cation of it Is that this Is hardly possible in monoga- 
 mous Scandinavia. They ignored her environment, 
 and hence, whenever it influences her, she seems to 
 them absurd or crack-brained. They could not well 
 believe, judging from her temperament and misdeeds, 
 that she is virtuous. They could not easily see why 
 Hedda, to whom the all-night's festivities of her hus- 
 band, Loevborg and Brack were quite the reverse of 
 shocking, should live in such fear of scandal. They 
 did not realize that scandal in a Norwegian town is 
 different from scandal In Paris. 
 
 In other words, remembering that this drama shows, 
 as Ibsen himself explains, the result of the contact of
 
 i82 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 two social environments which cannot comprehend each 
 other — Hedda as opposed to good old Aunt Juliana — 
 we may affirm that its first performance in the French 
 capital illustrated, as well, how the Parisian milieu, 
 represented by Hedda the individual, did not compre- 
 hend the Scandinavian milieu, represented by her do- 
 mestic, untheatrical surroundings. 
 
 Loevborg, also, was without signification to the 
 French. They could not appreciate the ado made over 
 his indulging in a glass of liquor, nor conceive why he 
 should kill himself because of a single carousal. There 
 are rarely drunkards, as we understand the term, among 
 the better French classes. Consequently the Parisians 
 are never solicitous about any one's drinking habits. 
 As for an occasional gay night, that does not appear a 
 sufficient cause to them for the fatal or moral despair 
 of a young man. Thus the character of Loevborg, to 
 us so natural and tragic, was ridiculous to them. 
 
 The last of these Ibsen "fools" was the gentle, 
 sympathetic Madam Elvsted, whom it is unnecessary, 
 for the present purpose, to discuss. Yet, what is more 
 familiar to Americans than the role of a married 
 woman who undertakes to reform a young man? 
 French people are not apt to concern themselves in a 
 missionary way about the private life of others. 
 Madam Elvsted's course could only be explained by 
 them on the ground that she is simply a little goose. 
 
 When Hedda burns the book because it is the infant 
 of Loevborg and Madam Elvsted; when, in giving him 
 the fatal pistol, she bids him end his life gracefully;
 
 Hedda Gabler and the Parisians 183 
 
 when, after learning that the ball entered the stomach 
 instead of the temple or breast, she exclaims: "It is 
 finished! Oh, what a curse of ridicule and vulgarity 
 attaches to everything that I merely touch!" — the 
 French remarked that such performances are only the 
 freaks of idiots or the nonsense of simpletons. 
 
 The difference in environment affects more or less, 
 also, the art in this play. For instance, its dialogue 
 apparently possesses, as we have noticed, the qualifica- 
 tions which the French consider necessary for success- 
 ful stage conversation, yet its art naturally escaped 
 them. This was due, among other things, to its low 
 relief, of which the following example is taken from a 
 conversation between Hedda and the cicisbeo Brack — 
 just the scene one would expect the French to enjoy. 
 
 BRACK 
 
 All that I ask for is a pleasant little circle of as- 
 sociates whom I can serve by word and deed, and 
 among whom I can be allowed to come and go — as 
 a tried friend 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 Of the husband, do you mean? 
 
 BRACK 
 
 (Bows.) Well, above all, of the wife. And of the 
 husband too, of course that's understood. Don't you 
 know that an arrangement of this kind, which one 
 might call triangular, is really very agreeable to all 
 three ?
 
 184 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 Yes, more than once on our trip I realized the need 
 of a third person. Ugh ! Those tete-a-tete in the 
 coupe. 
 
 BRACK 
 
 Happily, the wedding journey is over now. 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 {Shakes her head.) The journey will be a long one 
 — a very long one. I have only reached the first sta- 
 tion. 
 
 BRACK 
 
 Well, one jumps out then and moves about a little, 
 you know. 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 I never get out. 
 
 BRACK 
 Really — never? 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 No, for there is always some one who 
 
 BRACK 
 
 {Laughing.) Who looks at one's ankles, you mean? 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 Precisely. 
 
 BRACK 
 
 Well, but, dear me 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 {With a forbidding gesture.) I don't like that. I 
 prefer to remain tete-a-tete.
 
 Hedda Gabler and the Parisians 185 
 
 BRACK 
 
 But if a third person gets into the coupe? 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 Ah, that would be different. 
 
 BRACK 
 
 A tried, sympathetic friend 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 — Entertaining one with all sorts of lively sub- 
 jects 
 
 BRACK 
 
 — ^And not at all a specialist/ 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 {/Audibly drawing in her breath.) Ah, that would 
 be a great relief. 
 
 BRACK 
 
 {Looking around as he hears the outer door open.) 
 The triangle is closing up. 
 
 HEDDA 
 
 {Whispers.) And the train is starting again. 
 Tesman, the husband, enters. 
 
 This passage was lost to a Parisian audience. Here 
 are two metaphors, Hedda's continued double entendre 
 and Brack's indirect persistence — a tragedy under the 
 guise of badinage — all carried along together some 
 time without any eclats! This complicated grouping 
 of ideas and figures of speech in an inconspicuous way
 
 i86 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 without a sally or a scintillation, is not the French man- 
 ner of dealing with stage dialogue. 
 
 And, then, the ordonnance of the play is arranged by 
 endowing Hedda with no heroic traits. If she be not a 
 fool or an insane person we must admit, the French 
 have argued, that she is in no sense worthy of the first 
 role. She not only does not attract us: she hardly 
 even wins our sympathy in her distress. Above all she 
 is demoralizing. Hence they wondered why the Eng- 
 lish, who are always seeking the moral everywhere, 
 should have taken early notice of this drama. 
 
 Loevborg, not Hedda, the Parisians told us, Is the 
 true center of the plot. He has genius, fire, nobility. 
 He possesses truly a heroic quality. But here a figu- 
 rante Is the heroine, they have maintained, and in ef- 
 facing the hero in order to give prominence to her, 
 Ibsen created a deformed play. How far this is from 
 satisfying the French demand for unity, symmetry, 
 ordonnance and form everywhere in the drama I
 
 vi. The Production of Noted Persons in 
 
 France
 
 THE PRODUCTION OF NOTED PERSONS 
 
 IN FRANCE 
 
 A LIST which I have gleaned of noteworthy per- 
 sons born in France in the nineteenth century 
 yields a total of 1424, of whom 32 are women. 
 Artists have not been included. The table is made up 
 very largely of names known to literature, science, juris- 
 prudence, politics, theology. It is merely hoped here 
 to give in a general way, so far as this schedule goes, 
 some notion as to the comparative merits of Paris and 
 the different provinces and grand divisions of France 
 in the matter of productions of persons of note. 
 
 Two tests — that of area and that of population — 
 may be applied. 
 
 But first of all we may observe, in a parenthetical 
 paragraph, that the national capital contributed 335 of 
 our noted persons, or about 23%, at a time when Paris 
 represented only about 4% of the population of 
 France. This showing quite justifies, in its way, the 
 French glorification of the metropolis on the Seine. 
 Strikingly superior appear to be the chances of distinc- 
 tion for a Frenchman who is born in Paris instead of in 
 a province. 
 
 Now applying, first, the test of area to the grand 
 divisions of France, we notice that the grand division 
 most fertile in noteworthy people in proportion to its 
 
 J89
 
 190 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 area is the North where there was produced one noted 
 person for evxry 90 square miles. Next comes the 
 Northeast, presenting one for every 130 square miles. 
 Then the East; next the Northwest. The Center, the 
 South and, poorest of all, the West make the least 
 creditable showings. Accordingly the parts of France 
 richest in noted people lie along, or adjacent to, the 
 most densely settled of the bordering foreign regions. 
 
 If we divide France into east and west halves along 
 the meridian of Paris we find nearly three persons of 
 note born in the east half to two in the west half. If 
 we cut France into north and south halves along a line 
 drawn a little to the south of Bourges we have, exclud- 
 ing Paris, four persons of note born in the north half 
 to three in the south half. 
 
 Remarking next the merits of the French provinces 
 with respect to their production of noted people as com- 
 pared with their areas, we observe that, in the leading 
 group. He de France, Lyonnais, Flanders and then 
 Artois lead in this order. The city of Lyons brings up 
 Lyonnais. (For lucidity we are using the old-time 
 historic nomenclature of the provinces.) The marked 
 inferiority of Picardy to her surrounding sisters should 
 be remarked and appears by no means sufficiently ex- 
 plained by the fact that her capital, Amiens, was com- 
 paratively small. Provence is quite ahead of Langue- 
 doc, Normandy of course outranks Brittany, and Bur- 
 gundy leads Champagne. The provinces that have a 
 good showing while containing not one of the leading 
 cities of France are notably Artois, followed by Angou- 
 mois.
 
 Production of Noted Persons in France 191 
 
 Passing now from the test of area to that of popula- 
 tion we find, noting first the grand divisions, that the 
 Southeast is the most fertile in noteworthy people 
 in proportion to its population. The Southeast gives 
 one name out of every block of 22,000 inhabitants. 
 Then come the Northeast, then the North, then the 
 East. Comparing the results which we find here with 
 those corresponding under the test by area, we remark 
 that the Northeast occupies the second place in both 
 cases, the first being held by the North as to area and 
 by the Southeast as to population. The East and the 
 North are, in each instance, among the first four. The 
 West is last under both tests. This, we may note here, 
 is true also with respect to the provinces. That is to 
 say, the provinces and grand divisions most prolific of 
 noted persons in proportion to area are most prolific in 
 proportion to population. The exceptions, however, 
 appear to be of a decided nature. As a rule, the test by 
 area is, I find, a very fair guide for the test by popula- 
 tion. 
 
 One notices that the east half of France occupies the 
 first rank and that it produces one noted person per 
 25,000 inhabitants. The north half of France ranks 
 second as to area and fourth as to population. We 
 are struck by this confirmation of the fact that the land 
 of the French is distinctly a continental country. While 
 France is oceanic by her geographical situation and 
 partly Mediterranean by her history, she appears in- 
 land in geographical location and in the annals of her 
 intellectual productivity. The region lying in a gen- 
 eral way toward Germany surpasses, notwithstanding
 
 192 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 its Champagne "pouilleuse," the region lying toward 
 Italy and forming the great northwestern exit-area of 
 the Roman civilization. 
 
 The north half of France, with its cereals and rich 
 diversity of products, outranks the south half with its 
 wealth of vineyards. The Alsatians, the Lorraines, 
 the Franks, lead the Normans, the Celts, the Meri- 
 dionaux. Brachycephaly triumphs here over dolicho- 
 cephaly, and the Teutonic over the "Latin." The con- 
 tinental east half of France, where the summers are the 
 hottest and the winters are coldest, is both actually and 
 relatively more prolific in noted persons than the mari- 
 time west half where the Gulf Stream diffuses a warm 
 and moist equableness. The extremes of heat and 
 cold are most marked in the Northeast, which rivals 
 even the He de France in bearing noteworthy sons. 
 The inhabitants of the Northeast are described as 
 "prompt to anger and to enterprise." The Southeast 
 is famous for its violent caprices of atmosphere and its 
 impetuous torrents, whence the passionate temperament 
 of its people and their "brusque returns to indolence 
 and languor." This invites the assumption that the 
 Northeast, the Southeast and the Biscayan land, with 
 its Gascons, contribute the element of nervous energy 
 and lightly explosive irritableness to French life, char- 
 acter and history. 
 
 The counteracting element of conservativeness, 
 which is, in some phases, sheer backwardness and, in 
 others, clever thrift and admirable prudence, must be 
 looked for in the central plateau (the "negative pole" 
 of France) ; and in the land of the dreamy, progress-
 
 Production of Noted Persons in France 193 
 
 shunning Breton; and also in the province of the slow, 
 scrutinous Norman where the climate is moderate, the 
 features of the earth's surface are effaced into a com- 
 parative commonplaceness, and the streams have a 
 thick, flat flow. And it is, indeed, a neat coincidence 
 that the French race, which is distinguished by its 
 genius for symmetry and ordonnance and for a pro- 
 nounced sense of precise form, should dwell in a land 
 possessing such a graceful equilibrium and compact ele- 
 gance of general outline. 
 
 If we submit the French provinces to the test of 
 population (always excluding Paris when we speak of 
 He de France), we see He de France leading, then 
 Provence, Touraine and Burgundy in this order. Tou- 
 raine, which has played a modest role in our other lists, 
 is well to the fore here, with Picardy always lingering 
 in the rear. Flanders and Normandy appear far from 
 the top. Provence, which is decidedly in advance of 
 Languedoc, still holds rank among the leading provin- 
 ces. Champagne presents her usual weak record. As 
 in the test by area, the provinces cutting the poorest 
 figure here lie for the most part in the center and west. 
 
 Measuring these results with those corresponding 
 under the area test, one sees He de France at the head 
 of both lists. But I discover that Alsace was a precious 
 bit of territory to France in the way of bearing men 
 of note. That Lorraine did not match her appears ex- 
 plained by the fact that the eastern-southeastern slope 
 of the Vosges is much milder and more fertile than the 
 northwestern. 
 
 If Normandy holds a somewhat disappointing posi-
 
 194 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 tion, being excelled by seven provinces in the test of 
 area and by sixteen in the test of population, what shall 
 be said of Picardy's very low rank? For we read of 
 the Picardians: "A powerful race, quick of thought and 
 yet tenacious and persevering, they unite the qualities 
 of the Meridionaux with those of the people of the 
 north." Languedoc, whose "towns do not wish to be 
 ports," stands as the average between the highest and 
 lowest, being easily outmatched by her maritime sister, 
 Provence. Burgundy, with her wines which have such 
 a mysteriously strong effect on the brain, leads the 
 region of the Bordeaux wines; and Normandy, with 
 her cider, yields precedence to both. The sparkle and 
 exhilaration of champange do not save its "barren" 
 home — Champagne — from comparative insignificance; 
 and we also find Poitou, famous for its jackasses, and 
 the Amorican peninsula well toward the foot of the 
 row. 
 
 I learn from our compilations that the population 
 shifted very perceptibly from country to city. And, 
 indeed, it is confidently said that in a reasonably near 
 future the most of the inhabitants of France will be 
 urban — that the peasant will give way before the arti- 
 san, the workman and the commercial folk. One hun- 
 dred and twenty-five years ago the French population 
 was eminently rural or agricultural: the peasant was 
 "maitre de France." It has been shown that toward 
 1830 only about one-fourth of the inhabitants of 
 France dwelt in cities or towns having over 2,000 
 souls. Nevertheless, it is safe to estimate that this 
 one-fourth — namely, the urban population — contribu-
 
 Production of Noted Persons in France 195 
 
 ted about 50 per cent of the noted persons of France, 
 since Paris alone furnished 25 per cent. In other 
 words, a French person stood in the nineteenth century 
 a much better chance of becoming noteworthy if born 
 in a city or town than if born in the country or in a 
 village. 
 
 Now we may take our 1424 noteworthy people 
 we started out with and arrange them according to 
 their callings. 
 
 About one-fourth of the 97 poets whom we find 
 among our list hail from Paris. After Paris, the 
 southern provinces appear to be richest in versifiers. 
 
 Of the 78 writers of fiction, Paris claims about 
 one-third. lie de France and Languedoc come next 
 with seven each, and then Brittany with five. 
 
 Of the 57 playwrights, Paris furnishes three-fifths, 
 the rest being thoroughly scattered. 
 
 Of the 479 "litterateurs," Paris has nearly one- 
 fourth, and Normandy and Guienne excel the other 
 provinces. 
 
 Of the 174 journalists, Paris has about two-ninths, 
 and Guienne and Normandy head the provinces. 
 
 Of the 70 historians, Paris has yielded about one- 
 third. 
 
 Of the 28 savants, Paris has 4, being behind Brit- 
 tany with 5. 
 
 Of the 58 jurisprudents, Paris gives about one-sixth 
 and is closely pushed by her own province. He de 
 France. 
 
 Of the 68 politicists, Paris has about two-sevenths 
 and Brittany comes first among the provinces.
 
 196 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Of the 265 scientists, Paris furnishes about 30 per 
 cent while Guienne and Normandy are at the top of 
 the list of the country commonwealths. 
 
 Of the 50 theologians, Paris is credited with one- 
 tenth, being equaled by Guienne and by Languedoc. 
 
 Guienne, Languedoc and Provence — the three south- 
 ern sisters — outrival any other three provinces in 
 poetry and hold their own as to "litterateurs" and 
 scientists, while they are overmatched by the North in 
 history and are absolutely devoid of savants. Nor- 
 mandy, in this table, does not seem to justify her repu- 
 tation for litigiousness, for she does not lead her 
 sisters in jurisprudents. 
 
 And we may close our list of comparisons by yoking 
 Brittany and Guienne together and finding the former 
 in advance in savants and writers of fiction, while 
 dragging wofully behind in "litterateurs," journalists 
 and scientists.
 
 vii. The Gray and Gay Race
 
 THE GRAY AND GAY RACE 
 
 THE French are a gray people who live in a 
 gray metropolis and in a gray country. Paris 
 lies in a limestone region and is built of gray 
 stone. A large part of the city is undermined by 
 ancient quarries. Its roofs, pavements, trottoirs and 
 bridges are gray. The absence of smoke and dirt per- 
 mits time to deepen leisurely the color of the stone and 
 to transform the city into a mosaic of gray. Old 
 shades are being replaced constantly by new hues 
 which, in their turn, ripen with age. The interior ef- 
 fect of Notre Dame with its great ashen-colored win- 
 dows, and of the Invalides where Napoleon lies, is 
 characteristically gray. 
 
 The tints of the Seine vary from a grayish green to 
 a deep steel gray. French soils and notably French 
 skies are griseous. All about one in France is "this 
 air that is never blue," as Gautier described it. French 
 towns and villages are grizzled. Their buildings are 
 either of gray stone or are plastered over, and their 
 roofs are usually a faded brown. This color of town 
 and village seems to change as soon as the Belgian 
 frontier is crossed. French verdure and landscapes 
 possess a reseda, and the French cemeteries are wholly 
 gray. 
 
 Gray Paris and gray northern France are as con- 
 
 199
 
 200 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 colorous as Nature can well permit in a fertile and 
 temperate latitude. Thus the fact may be accounted 
 for that, as a rule, the eyes of Parisians and their gar- 
 ments are gray or grayish. The general appearance 
 of French peasants is griseous. And there are propor- 
 tionally more gray horses in northern France than in 
 other countries. It is the home of the gray Norman 
 thoroughbred. 
 
 This grayness of the French suggests two traits or 
 qualities of the race: 
 
 First — Gray is the color of moderation. And are 
 not the French the most prudent and moderate of all 
 the great modern peoples? A Parisian is conservative 
 to a fault. He does not overwork or overplay. He is 
 not apt to fail to do to-day what to-morrow he will 
 feel most contented to have done. Easily satisfied, he 
 needs little to amuse him. The Parisians are, as Renan 
 says of the Greeks, cheerfully philosophical and sober 
 in their pleasures. In testimony of this, the careful 
 observer will remark that their faces seem creditably 
 free from indications of excessive indulgence. 
 
 Second — Gray, the color of brain matter, is the color 
 of mentality. That the gray Parisian is preeminently 
 sane would thus appear inevitable; hence his moderate- 
 ness. He worships le bon sens — the head. Acquiring 
 and enjoying largely through the medium of the brain, 
 he leads an active mental life. French art and litera- 
 ture are, above all things, rational. What a French- 
 man seizes in a song or a picture is especially the mean- 
 ing of the words, the subject, the idea — the sense be-
 
 The Gray and Gay Race 201 
 
 fore the passion or illusion. French music in the main 
 produces a kind of cerebral pleasure. It is occasion- 
 ally exquisite and nearly always refined and chaste. 
 Even the Parisian ballet music, a realm where one 
 would expect to find reveling that astonishing licentious- 
 ness which Teutonic races impute to the French, is 
 almost purely mental in its charm and signally free 
 from sensual taint. 
 
 Before the Romantic epoch in France the complex- 
 ion of French literature was gray, as Gautier re- 
 marked; and he wielded a vigorous hand in changing 
 this dominant hue into red at the battle of Hernani. 
 But in our day the sanglant scarlets of the Romantic 
 triumph — colorations so especially reflected across the 
 prisms of the glorious Flugo and de Lisle — are neu- 
 tralizing and masking themselves gradually into ma- 
 turer tints, and compromising on the national griseous. 
 
 The favorite color in the French schools of painting 
 is gray or, to speak paradoxically, the absence of color. 
 Gray was its general tone before the time of the 
 Romanticists who introduced, in Paris, variety of hue 
 as appropriate of emotion. Yet the grandiose Roman- 
 tic school was not born of France. While it is true that 
 gray cannot always be said to prevail at the Champs- 
 Elysees or in any of the Independent salons, still the 
 color of French canvases, as the violent Romantic in- 
 fluence fades away, will become more and more mental- 
 ized and subdued and be characterized by a grayish 
 disposition. 
 
 For, to the French, gray is the hue of truth, ideality
 
 202 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 and of life itself. Their devotion to form and ordon- 
 nance before color and romantic effects is a gray, and 
 hence a mental, trait. 
 
 Inquiring into the original significance of the word 
 gray, we find that it comes mainly from expressions 
 meaning old — "that which has white hair" — and that 
 it generally designates old age. And, indeed, the gray 
 French are not to be distinguished as a race of young 
 people. There is in France relatively little youth that 
 is young in years. French lads work hard and steadily. 
 As a result they have their baccalaureate at the Sor- 
 bonne at eighteen or nineteen, and it corresponds to 
 the degree which the average English and American 
 collegiate earns at twenty-one. French boys do not 
 possess that wealth of juvenile literature, sport and 
 liberty which makes youth in the United States so long 
 and pleasant. They have comparatively little time in 
 which to be really young. 
 
 On the other hand, elderly Frenchmen, though they 
 rarely regret their boyhood and seldom refer to it 
 with pleasure, are inclined to wear youthful cuts of 
 clothes and gay cravats and to insist on loving the 
 world. How true were Flaubert's words when he 
 described the men at the marquis's ball which Madame 
 Bovary attended! "Those who were beginning to 
 grow old had a juvenile air, while something of matur- 
 ity was seen on the faces of the younger men." Ma- 
 ture and aged Parisian ladies are famous for their gay 
 hats, lively ribbons and daring toilets, yet their maiden 
 daughters are garbed in sober stuffs. French girls are 
 driven by urgent tasks and have little company save
 
 The Gray and Gay Race 203 
 
 that of their elders. They learn what they know of 
 youth after marriage. Michelet expressed it aptly 
 when he said: "One is not born young in France but 
 one becomes young." 
 
 The idea of the inexistence of young youth in the 
 land of the Seine was first distinctly suggested to me 
 by the eighteenth century portraits of young persons 
 in the Louvre. Gray is the predominant color in these 
 paintings. Maidens are almost invariably represented 
 in griseous costumes with whitish head-dresses and as 
 having gray flesh. The most noted among these can- 
 vases are Greuze's pictures of girls with their gray- 
 ish garments and complexions and their dull, faded 
 blond hair. I have seen their types among the French 
 middle classes. 
 
 Gray seems to have become the characteristic color 
 of the French costume and coiffure about the com- 
 mencement of the eighteenth century. It was then that 
 the word grisette tripped into the French language. 
 Of significant importance in that epoch was the fash- 
 ion of powdering the hair so that it had a gray appear- 
 ance. The radical sense of grizzled (^mled) is 
 dusted or powdered over, and this meaning would 
 properly come from gray which indicated those who 
 have white hair. 
 
 The gray mode of coiffure was partly the result of 
 the fact that Louis XIV, in his last years, was per- 
 suaded to wear powdered peruques by the argument 
 that "the use of powder equalizes all ages and softens 
 the expression of the face." A courtier of the time 
 said: "Everybody nowadays wants to be old in order
 
 204 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 to be sage." In 1788 a French authority, referring to 
 the universal use of powdered coiffures, wrote: 
 "Powdered hair, while being convenient, is essential to 
 decorum and has been regarded by civilized peoples 
 as of the first necessity." This gray fashion for the 
 young and the aged prevailed in France throughout 
 the eighteenth century. Youth was rendered old — a 
 French trait still to-day. 
 
 And this leads affirmatively to the question, Are not 
 the gray French in reality the only senescent modern 
 people of importance? Their unique mental life — 
 mental because it does not lose itself in the heart-ex- 
 panding and soul-stirring enthusiasms and illusions of 
 young youth, since there is little of that in France — 
 associates itself naturally with senescence. English 
 observers, in attesting the old-headedness of their 
 practical neighbors across the Channel, appear to 
 prove that the dominating ambition of a Frenchman is 
 to possess a competency. He has a horror of having 
 nothing but prospects — of trusting to the Future and 
 Providence. French love affairs and marriages, as 
 every one knows, are prudently controlled by money 
 considerations. These customs, as well as most if 
 not all French customs, are typical of old age; and 
 consequently, to the student of the quaintly pat and 
 fitting, would it not seem proper that French bank 
 notes should have a grayish cast? 
 
 Another evidence of the senescence (thus ration- 
 ally displayed) of the French is the fact that they are 
 not only smaller in stature than any of their leading 
 rivals but are the only great people threatened by a
 
 The Gray and Gay Race 205 
 
 decreasing population. The causes of the depopula- 
 tion of France are apparently radical and irremediable 
 because they arise from senescence. 
 
 In this wise, it might appear to the pessimist that 
 the French have passed their maturity and are in de- 
 cay. If we are to assume that the salient apex of their 
 civilization was the age of Louis XIV, the decline 
 clearly commenced in the eighteenth century — the time 
 when gray (the mark of the old) began to be the char- 
 acteristic color of the French people. Rousseau's cult 
 of the "vert" (green), the French Revolution, the 
 genius of the exotic Napoleon, and the imported Ro- 
 mantic school with its red corpuscles, infused new 
 life and arrested the decay of France. But once more, 
 the pessimist may argue, it is face to face with its 
 natural and courted destiny — extinction. This destiny 
 may be deferred in the future as in the past by un- 
 foreseen agencies and events. In any case the decline 
 of the French will be very gentle and slow, and their 
 fate will in no wise hinder their brilliant, glorious light 
 from shining on and on like that of the Greeks. 
 
 It is natural for an Anglo-American to ask. Why 
 then are the old and gray French precisely the gayest 
 of peoples? — for gray does not suggest gayety to us. 
 Etymology seems to answer the question. Wedgwood 
 treats gay and gray about as follows: — 
 
 Originally gay and gray probably came from words 
 signifying parti-colored — from words meaning speck- 
 led and mottled. Perhaps the true origin may be 
 found in the analogy by which expressions of concep- 
 tions dependent on the faculty of hearing are extended
 
 2o6 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 to those of a similar character dependent on sight. 
 Thus broken, conspicuous color would naturally be 
 taken from a broken, chattering, gay sound. The word 
 signifying liveliness of color appears to have been 
 transferred to the expression of liveliness of disposi- 
 tion. — 
 
 Was it quite by accident that the gay French shop- 
 girl and sewing girl wore gray dresses and were called 
 grisettes — the word for gray being gris? And is not 
 to be discovered here the correct explanation of the 
 French verb se griser, to get tipsy? It is reasonable to 
 suppose that this expression was introduced to hit off 
 the nervous, noisy state of a tipsy Frenchman, and 
 that it has veritably no connection with the German 
 benebeln which typically describes the placidly be- 
 clouded condition of an inebriated Teuton? 
 
 Therefore, for the very reason that a race is gray, 
 it should be gay — gayness being grayness and grayety 
 being gayety. The French are uniquely represented 
 by these two traits. Beranger understood this as if by 
 instinct when he wrote the well-known song, "The Gay 
 Little Gray Man of Paris." Our Anglo-Saxon race 
 associates gray with somberness, lack-luster infestiv- 
 Ity and the gloom of advanced years. We have lost 
 its gay signification and the French have kept it. With 
 them gray old age does not make itself felt as forlorn 
 or sad. On the contrary, it assumes a wonderful 
 sprightliness. The grandparents are apt to be the 
 most vivacious members of Parisian families. Vivacity 
 is the French interpretation of second childhood. They 
 believe that gayety is the natural, happy lot of all old
 
 The Gray and Gay Race 207 
 
 people who have lived temperately and well. They 
 are far from sharing those Puritan penances which re- 
 sign the last years of life to the mournful shadows of 
 the tomb. 
 
 And it may seem suggestive thus to note how ety- 
 mology, with its roots deep in the hoary past, appears 
 to nod its venerable branches in approval of the cheer- 
 ful and profound lesson which the gray French teach 
 the world, namely this : Gayety is the proper attribute 
 of old age as well as of practical, moderate and mental 
 living.
 
 PROFILES 
 
 i. Jules Claretie
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Jules Claretie was born at Limoges in 1840 and died in 
 1913. He was one of the most popular Frenchmen of his time. 
 He became an ardent Republican, unlike many other French 
 writers who dated from the Second Empire. He was an agree- 
 able talker and indefatigably industrious. He held the position 
 of Administrateur-General of the Theatre Frangais from 1885.
 
 JULES CLARETIE 
 
 JULES CLARETIE was often to be seen walking 
 rapidly up the Avenue de I'Opera, with his kindly, 
 open, humanitarian, bearded countenance a little 
 upturned, typical of his frank, glad-handed, aspiring 
 nature. One observed a figure in the usual French- 
 man's modest, carelessly fitting habit, the ends of the 
 overcoat sagging down, and the inevitable umbrella 
 and neckcloth. A medium sized man, with a slight 
 literary stoop. 
 
 To wait for a word with him in the green room of 
 the Fran?ais or on its private staircase where one 
 quails under the battery of shining, challenging glances 
 from those fine-spun, high-wrought actresses lying 
 in wait to waylay the Administrator for a better role, 
 was to tarry for a man ever ready and apparently anx- 
 ious to see you. But with no time. "Won't you 
 kindly write and tell me what I can do for you?" Thus 
 would come at length his friendly response and re- 
 quest. 
 
 In that dramatic household you realized somewhat 
 the daily hardships he underwent with so much benev- 
 olence during those twenty-eight years of service at the 
 hardest post of its kind in the world. What a marvel 
 to maneuver that highly spiced company of esthetes and 
 exquisites — players and coquettes — charming, spoiled 
 
 211
 
 212 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 children of genius and talent — perfumed with vanity, 
 keyed-up in delicately strained tensions, intertwined in 
 fine nets of intrigue, and living in daily intimacy on one 
 another's nerves! 
 
 Quite representative of the best moral elements of 
 France Claretie proved, however, a master in man- 
 aging that befluttered dovecote of petticoats. And it 
 was the Comedie too in one of its most valued and 
 varied epochs. He wrote, it is true, with Henry Cain 
 "la Navarraise" for Massenet. But there was in his 
 make-up neither lyrisme nor much of that clinging, 
 feverish color of sexual grace which appeals in a great 
 deal of Massenet's music. 
 
 When traveling, Claretie remained thoroughly 
 French — a racial trait in French tourists. His ex- 
 cursions into Germany did not prevent this gracious 
 man from maintaining a distinctly anti-German atti- 
 tude in his history called *'La guerre nationale." In 
 his novel "I'Americaine" (1892), one fails to find 
 anything truly American but its subject — divorce. And 
 that was its real topic and excuse. For the Parisians 
 at first chided us and then at length blessed us^for that 
 important custom extended into latter-day France. 
 
 Notwithstanding Claretie's twenty novels, his histor- 
 ies, his uncounted volumes of critical comment and 
 appreciation on Paris life, art and everything else, an 
 evolutionary Brunetiere would say it was natural that 
 Claretie's best creation should be Brichanteau, Come- 
 dian. It is apparently the only permanent and living 
 thing that emerges from his cloud of writings. 
 
 Brichanteau, the gay, facile actor with a heart, is
 
 Jules Claretie 213 
 
 perhaps Claretie himself in the form of a player. 
 Acted by the unduplicated De Feraudy, then flattened 
 out to fit the comedie de salon and "easy to play" class, 
 Brichanteau, matured actor of a little theater, suc- 
 ceeding in his own failure, spirituel, diverting, rolling 
 his r's lilce a performer of the banlieu — Brichanteau 
 lives while Claretie dies. 
 
 To compare this figure with Its famous prototype In 
 Daudet's Delobelle, born some twenty-two years be- 
 fore, is to see the one as on the stage itself and the 
 other as in the pages of a real living novel. Likely 
 Delobelle will always be the greater. For Claretie, 
 first of all and by profession a journalist, was, one may 
 say, ever a journalist. He exemplified the touch-and-go 
 diffuseness and impermanency of the daily newspaper. 
 Daudet was pure literature, looking up toward the 
 supreme and the enduring, and finishing everything 
 down to the smallest of nervous details. Claretie 
 hastened through rather easily, hitting the obvious 
 spots of actuality. 
 
 Born in westerly mid-France in the same year as 
 Daudet (1840), he arrived on the scene In Paris when 
 about eleven. He gradually joined with the Vacquerle 
 set of high-minded, upright men — belated Romantics 
 who did not need to reform. They were to help over- 
 throw the dissipated Empire and to live for the more 
 righteous Republic — agnostic and Protestant. And so 
 he became a journalist at twenty-one, then editor, 
 writer of almost forgotten plays that ran a hundred 
 nights, a universal commentator, breathing only the air 
 from day to day. His books reflect a remarkably full
 
 214 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 picture of his time. Every new idea, movement, emo- 
 tion, thrill of his epoch appear touched up in his 
 thousands of columns. 
 
 It is in his popular "La Vie a Paris," more piquant 
 than aggressive, that Claretie reveals himself ade- 
 quately as a quotidian chronicler. But compare the 
 more distinguished and durable "Vie litteraire" of 
 Anatole France, which easily discovers to view a supe- 
 rior man of books, overshadowing the transient man 
 of journalism in Claretie ! 
 
 He was too good-hearted to be a great talent in let- 
 ters. A man of literary genius, it seems, must have 
 something mean or small about him. Claretie was 
 never mean nor small. He had the willing nature of a 
 philanthropist, a very true love of liberty, a frankly 
 welcome soul. And he was respected as he was be- 
 loved — a person in whom the difficult public conscience 
 of Paris could always at length repose in confidence. 
 Ever hopeful, confiding, looking for the best in almost 
 all things, he remained to the last a felicitous figure, 
 ready, conciliatory, practical. Everybody's assistant 
 and contributor, he survived the writing of numerous 
 prefaces for friends and the keeping track of his own 
 pseudonyms. 
 
 One may crudely say that on the road from Roman- 
 ticism Claretie became an Impressionist. He first ap- 
 peared in 1861 before life and letters in the presence 
 of death at the funeral of the young and wasted Mur- 
 ger. It was the end of the old Boheme with its wan, 
 tubercular loves. But Bohemia never had any attrac- 
 tion for Claretie. He was as far from it literarily
 
 Jules Claretie 215 
 
 in his wholesomeness of nature as he was politically 
 from the regime of the debauched Morny. Claretle's 
 idea of Bohemia was that it lacked passion. He said 
 that Bohemia "Is not the love of liberty — it is only 
 the caprice of liberty." 
 
 To be an Impressionist, however, was not to be a 
 psychologist, in his case. He readily passed by the 
 difficult descents and ascents of the human soul, leav- 
 ing them to younger men like Anatole France, Bour- 
 get, Barres, with their more hesitating inclination to 
 look closely about. 
 
 Claretie added nothing to liberty, fashions or style. 
 Accordingly, perhaps, he was able to maintain at the 
 Comedle Frangalse, as much as humanly possible, a 
 just balance between the Classic and Romantic and be- 
 tween nearly all the old and nearly all the new. To 
 serve well the notional public, the ever-changing Gov- 
 ernment Ministries, the socletalres, the saints and the 
 devil, was the result of a diplomatic acrobatism which 
 he exhibited with an approved skill of equilibrium. It 
 was his great feat to have ridden with victory through 
 all the wars that swept across his reign, and where 
 he always won out with his supremely good tact and 
 good will. 
 
 Such a career as an officer of the nation, a functional 
 administrator for half the span of a life time, would 
 have altogether killed the writer in less of an adapt- 
 able. Industrious and affable litterateur. And to his 
 praise again be it said that such a successfully duplex 
 example is to be found at no time in the past among 
 his distinguished predecessors in the rue Richelieu.
 
 ii. Frangois Coppee
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Francois Coppee was born in Paris in 1842 and lived to the 
 age of 66. Though never strong physically, he produced many 
 plays and poems. He was attached for a while to the Luxem- 
 bourg and the Theatre Frangais libraries, and became a member 
 of the Academy in 1884. He was unmarried, an active Catholic 
 and extremely likable. More than one of his dramas caused 
 disturbances at the theater. Only his stories are read in America. 
 They have a certain popularity but are quite pale beside those of 
 his contemporary Maupassant.
 
 FRANgOIS COPPEE 
 
 THE death of Francois Coppee recalled a man 
 always with something white around his 
 throat and always ailing. Whether he was in 
 his library or passing down the street, the impression 
 of his illness was borne in upon one. 
 
 He was accustomed to go along the pavement ab- 
 sorbed, stoop-shouldered, his hands behind his back, 
 frequently throwing them out and up in earnest Gallic 
 declamation. At home he declaimed — confidingly 
 proclaimed. In this he seemed a pendant to Sardou, 
 who, likewise a man of the theater, was a great de- 
 claimer in his everyday life. 
 
 I often thought of Sardou as a millionaire, dwelling 
 up toward the high, wealthy incline of northern Paris, 
 powerful and with a strong fighting hold on existence 
 amid his costly tapestries and antiques. And then of 
 Coppee, living humbly and unwell, away down on the 
 plain of southern Paris, at the end of the indigent art 
 quarter. Fortunately, however, his prolific pen, in his 
 later days, brought him plenty. 
 
 He occupied for years, with his sister, a modest one- 
 story house in a lonesome street. You entered a yard 
 where the surroundings gave little Intimation of the 
 near presence of one of the best-known litterateurs of 
 France. Like Sardou, Coppee was extremely friendly 
 
 219
 
 220 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 in his home. He welcomed every one, was interested 
 in everything. He talked and moved restlessly about 
 in a favorite red smoking jacket which recalled the 
 famous red coat of the Romantic Gautier. There were 
 cats (he was fond of them), cigarettes and abundant 
 examples of the latest forceful slang. 
 
 In country inns Coppee was sometimes taken to be a 
 commercial traveler. For he idled about, smoked, and 
 told stories with every one. A sample of his popular 
 kind of fun-making was his account of his laundress 
 who called upon him one evening and finding him 
 absent, left this line: Monsieur, Je suis Venus avec 
 le linge. 
 
 In his first poems and tales he reflected the life of 
 the common people living along the southern edges 
 of the Latin and art quarters of Paris. His volume 
 "Les Humbles" made him known as the poet of the 
 Humble. His verse was simple in effect, like his 
 stories. It was written for plain people, and no other 
 writer was then more widely read and beloved by the 
 general French public. 
 
 But there appears, also, in his output an aristocratic 
 strain or association, evidencing his cultivation of the 
 nobility. Counts and marquises were fondled with an 
 admiration which did not seem to conflict with his 
 love and cult of the Humble. 
 
 He was avowedly Catholic. He became latterly one 
 of the leading defenders of the church in its troublous 
 days in France. He was anti-Republican, anti-Dreyfus. 
 He stood against all that is making French history and 
 progress. He was practically opposed to the larger
 
 Frangois Coppee 221 
 
 and Republican liberties and opportunities of those 
 selfsame humble classes whose virtues he sang of so 
 tenderly, so compassionately. 
 
 This conflicting attitude or development appears 
 similar in a way to Brunetiere's, For Brunetiere grew 
 up as a revolutionary, scientific, intellectual agnostic 
 and evolutionist. Then he suddenly went over to the 
 Catholic church, becoming prominently identified as a 
 worshiper of tradition, of conservatism, of sanctified 
 authority, always harking back, to the royalist, aristo- 
 cratic centuries. 
 
 It is strange that though the name of Coppee was 
 among the most retentissants — well-known — names in 
 literary France, there exist two mistaken impressions 
 about him. One is that he was a great poet and great- 
 est as a poet. He was in fact, as indicated above, es- 
 sentially light, weak, fragile, not only as a story writer 
 but as a versifier (except in so far as his plays are 
 verse). He approached neither Verlaine nor Mau- 
 passant. He was successful, but he discovered or felt 
 nothing very new or different. 
 
 Far more important was he as a dramatist. He 
 wrote effective and most admirable stage pieces, always 
 in verse and lyrical by nature. "Le Passant" and oth- 
 ers are little classics. His best drama is "Pour la 
 Couronne." His plays are of a more finished Roman- 
 ticism than Hugo's. They were companions, in a 
 sense, of Richepin's noble, sonorous dramas in rime, 
 but more feminine. It must be remembered, however, 
 that Coppee, ardent in his views on many public ques- 
 tions, created at times, like Sardou, veritable sensa-
 
 222 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 tions on the boards and came into conflict with the 
 political authorities. 
 
 The other mistaken impression about Coppee is that 
 he was really a Parnassian. He identified himself with 
 the Parnassians, it is true, and stood classed with them, 
 yet he was nothing but a Romantic. He exhibited 
 none of the leading Parnassian attributes — hard, im- 
 peccable virtuosity, adoration of impersonal beauty, 
 fondness for the barbarous Exotic. On the contrary 
 he was intimate, personal, sentimental, emphatically 
 emotional — all Romantic qualities. He was a descend- 
 ant of Hugo. Even his cult of the Humble was born 
 direct from Hugo's verse and prose. 
 
 Coppee possessed neither the intellectuality, the 
 ultra-refined sensibilities, the exclusive distinction nor 
 philosophic training of Sully Prudhomme. Nor did 
 he have anything of the mystic and musical mystery 
 and genius of Verlaine, who fathered a school and 
 whose original influence is fertile, fructiferous and in- 
 creasing. Nor did Coppee display any of the glorious, 
 unfeeling brilliance of Leconte de Lisle. 
 
 His fame will not grow. His plays, nevertheless, 
 will remain for no little time a true and living adorn- 
 ment of the Paris stage. Unfortunately they will 
 reach no other, for they lose all in translation. 
 
 Coppee's literary product is characterized by amia- 
 bility, smooth-toned lyrisme and expansive generosity. 
 A winning, popular, beloved figure, he appealed in his 
 books to the hearts of men and women. He softened 
 mankind. He left it more justly human through his 
 emotionalism and through a certain simple and direct 
 nobleness.
 
 iii. Coquelin the Elder
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 CoQUELiN THE Elder, the most celebrated of French comedians 
 of the nineteenth century, came from Boulogne. He died in 1909 
 at the age of 68. When scarcely more than twenty he was in the 
 front rank of players at the Theatre Frangais and was called to 
 perform before the emperor and empress. Of a forceful char- 
 acter, he finally broke with the national theater in 1886. He then 
 began organizing dramatic tours and reaped fame and wealth in 
 all European countries. His appearances in America are well 
 remembered.
 
 COQUELIN THE ELDER 
 
 IT is by comparison that Coquelin's greatness looms 
 forth. We think of his brother, an excellent come- 
 dian, prominent in the second rank. But he faced 
 in the direction of farce while Coquelin the Elder 
 turned always to elegance. The former was a romp, 
 a clown, with his loge full of pictures of chanticleers in 
 honor of the family name; with his unbuttoned pan- 
 tomine; with his embodiments of the common idiocy of 
 humankind — the Monsieurs de Pourceaugnac and 
 other amiable imbeciles of Moliere. They in turn and 
 betimes transform the fastidious stage, parquet and 
 galleries of the Theatre Frangais into a lively circus 
 and "ballet" as in the "Ceremonie," in that ancien pays 
 des femmes et des lavemens — that ancient land of 
 women and purgings. 
 
 Or take the case of M. Got as a different compari- 
 son. He was the compeer of the elder Coquelin — a 
 comedian of the highest genre possible to officialdom 
 in France. His attainments were entirely solid and 
 meritorious. But he was content for nearly half a 
 century to travel daily back and forth by tram or 
 "hirondelle" from his Passy home to the Comedie, like 
 the most inured and decorated chef de bureau of the 
 Government. He lacked those greater gifts which 
 forced his friend out into life and among humanity as 
 
 225
 
 226 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 it is, and his name is little known away from Paris. 
 One of the familiar jests of the Coquelins was apropos 
 of their official-ridden country where "a man without 
 decorations is like a woman without children." 
 
 Coquelin owed his eminence in large part to a rare 
 quality in his profession — personal culture. We think 
 of him as a cultivated, talented person outside his art 
 — one not always and forever exemplifying merely the 
 vis comica. He could paint some; he was an intelli- 
 gent connoisseur; he delivered conferences; he wrote 
 books, critiques, essays — one on that most sensitive, 
 most strictly intellectual, most refined of all French 
 poets, Sully Prudhomme. In fact, to speak of Coque- 
 lin's love and esteem for the poetry and Lucretian phi- 
 losophy of Sully Prudhomme, is to signify in a word 
 how sanely mental, delicately sentimental, finely 
 grained he was. And yet he was born in an humble, 
 ignorant baker's family, in the northern tip of France, 
 without advantages. 
 
 He was certainly unapproached, the master come- 
 dian of his time. Societaire of the Comedie Fran^aise 
 at twenty-three — unique in the case of a man — he 
 truly outgrew its brilliant but restricted confines in 
 twenty years, and expanded over into the tumultuous, 
 ever-modern realm of the theaters on the grand boule- 
 vards and thence into the vast outer world. This was 
 because he possessed the larger virtues of imagination, 
 originality, daring, like his feminine mate Bernhardt. 
 He was as individualistic as he could be in a nation 
 where the ultimate standard is the impersonal. 
 
 The able presentation of contrasting views by Henry
 
 Coquelin the Elder 227 
 
 Irving and by him in their discussion of the final ideal 
 of the player's art correctly denoted the profound, phil- 
 osophical difference between the French and Anglo- 
 Saxons on this subject. As Irving placed the indi- 
 vidualism of the actor above his part, and therefore 
 above the play, as the typical English (and American) 
 point of view, so Coquelin extolled his own racial ideal 
 of the impersonal : the French conception that the 
 role should be greater than the embodier. And it is 
 natural to say that our emphasis on the actor accounts 
 largely for the vast dearth of enduring plays in our 
 Anglo-Saxon world since Shakespeare. In France 
 there are notably playwrights, plays and players; in 
 England and America we have notably stars. 
 
 Comedy is, of course, the genius of the French as 
 tragedy is the genius of the British, and Coquelin was 
 wise in not resting his laurels on Moliere and the con- 
 secrated past. However high Moliere stands in the 
 halls of fame — and he cannot well be placed too high, 
 however much, too, we love the man himself for his 
 extremely human and heart-moving life and character 
 — he appears lacking in certain elements of universal 
 growth. He is restricted more and more to the aca- 
 demic. He does not make a wide, practical appeal 
 outward and downward in modern democracy. This 
 may not be due to his limitations perhaps so much as 
 to the fact that France has been reduced from the 
 position of aristocratic dominance to that of a mere 
 nation among equally prominent nations. 
 
 The mobility and suavity of Coquelin were found 
 identified, as a result, with a varied multitude of roles
 
 228 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 which he created. He represented, as no other come- 
 dian, those two opposite poles of the mimetic art — 
 breadth and exquisiteness. Does an admirer recall him 
 by preference in the social and ethical "Denise"? Or 
 as Labussiere in the thunderous "Thermidor"? Or in 
 the gentle and delicious "Monde ou Ton s'ennuie"? 
 Or, above all, do we think, of him at nearly sixty (when 
 he was officially at the age of honorable retirement and 
 self-consecration to his memories) as adopting and 
 crystallizing the genius of a young and obscure play- 
 wright who belonged to a brand-new generation? The 
 world fell promptly in love with Cyrano and Flam- 
 beau as Coquelin — all so stirring and magical in the 
 golden chimes of the author's Alexandrines. One can 
 scarcely imagine Rostand without his inspirer and vis- 
 ualises What lover of daring variety did not deeply 
 regret this loss in the cast of the too long delayed 
 "Chantecleer"? 
 
 Rire et bien dire — to laugh and to recite well — ^was 
 the characteristic motto in the homes of the Coquelins. 
 Exemplifying their race, they believed with Rabelais 
 that To Laugh is to be Truly a Man. Coquelin did 
 an inestimable service in acquainting foreign peoples 
 with the intimate delights of French comedy of the 
 old classic periods. As a mime he brought corporeally 
 home to other races those perfect pictures of the life 
 and times of that exalted age when civilization looked 
 exclusively to Paris for light. 
 
 His tact, bonhomie, easy accessibility were only too 
 well known. He was adored in France despite the fact 
 that there the dividing lines between schools and
 
 Coquelin the Elder 229 
 
 cliques, between what is official and whafis radical and 
 progressive, are habitually so sharply, so fiercely, 
 drawn. He made and kept friends in all spots of a 
 land where people scarcely hesitate to wound forever 
 those nearest and dearest to them for the sake of a 
 principle in art or literature. Strange as this seems to 
 our Yankee race who take these subjects lukewarmly, 
 not to say chillily, all this is most serious, vital business 
 on the banks of the Seine. It illustrates, in part, how 
 the French strive to exalt the drama by the sacrifice 
 of the individual. And as for what precisely they 
 idealize in comedy, this is nowhere so deftly and com- 
 pactly signalized as in one of the fine sonnets of Sully 
 Prudhomme, dedicated, as it happens, to Coquelin's 
 brother: 
 
 Quel bonheur! n'est-ce pas? de reveiller encore, 
 En honneur des aieux, dans le rire gaulois 
 La gaite du bon sens qu'un beau verbe decore I 
 
 (What joy to awaken again in Gallic laughter, in 
 honor of our ancestors, the gayety of good sense dec- 
 orated by beautiful words!)
 
 iv. Dumas the Elder
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Dumas the Elder died in 1870 when 67 years old. He led a 
 tumultuous life as reflected in his stories. To avoid creditors he 
 traveled for years in foreign lands. Three hundred volumes are 
 credited to his pen. His most widely read novels were written 
 between 1843 and 1850. His best literary fame rests in France 
 on his plays which remain live classics and are accepted without 
 reserve by critics. He antedated Victor Hugo on the French 
 Romantic stage.
 
 DUMAS THE ELDER 
 
 DUMAS was a roistering, rollicking, biuff and 
 blustering blade who, about 1800, came out 
 of the medieval forests of Villers-Cotterets, 
 about fifty miles northeast of Paris — a country of royal 
 woods of the chase, of feudal chateaux and turreted, 
 moated fortresses of the truest Gothic type and period. 
 His color did not of course prove a barrier to him in 
 France where there is none of the American prejudice 
 against the negro. 
 
 Dumas the Elder was not a man. He was a force 
 of Nature. To speak more particularly, he smacked 
 of the campagne — of the French provinces of quon- 
 dam romance and knightly adventure, and quaint old 
 village inns with courts full of vehicles and the smell 
 of hot steeds in the air. Big, thick-set, hairy, he had 
 the handgrasp of a horse-shoer, the voice of an auc- 
 tioneer, and a laugh that was loud, immortal and un- 
 restrained, carrying all persons and things before it. 
 
 Without literary antecedents or well-defined sources 
 of education, he became a master of style, a dialogist 
 having scarcely a peer in the world, an everlasting 
 wonder for belletristic fecundity, invention, facility, 
 imagination. And this too at the time when his friends 
 Balzac and (especially) Victor Hugo were teaching 
 the republic of letters to be astonished at nothing. His 
 
 233
 
 234 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 imagination was so lively, immense, that the truth cut 
 a poor, small figure in his domains. He was in fact 
 such a colossal fantast that people could (it was 
 averred) scarcely believe the opposite of what he said. 
 
 More than this, he lived some fifty mature years 
 with small regard for the laws, rules and conventions 
 which govern men, and without which civilization 
 would be impossible. If there were any safeguarding 
 restrictions he did not ride over, they must simply have 
 escaped his attention. It was in a hearty, impulsive 
 fashion that he existed, happy in his irresponsibilities, 
 with slight concern for the morrow and in total ob- 
 livion of yesterday; a friend of every one, knowing 
 everybody, a prodigious farceur, at home in every cor- 
 ner in France, ready to divide his last sou with the first 
 comer, and never paying if it could well be avoided. 
 His life was essentially that of his most popular heroes, 
 lacking their military aspect. 
 
 Naturally such a character did not tarry long In a 
 place. As Dumas usually could not pay, he moved on 
 — lived en voyage; for thus it often is that those who 
 have not the means to dwell anywhere, seem to have 
 money for travel. In the example of his Musketeers, 
 he was half expected to appear on the scene at any 
 place, at any hour, without warning, but always some- 
 how in the nick of time or at least in a manner apropos, 
 promptly ready to share in the surprises of any fall 
 of the curtain. 
 
 In turning up at a favorite provincial inn like the 
 Hotel de La Cloche at Compiegne or the Cadran Bleu 
 at Fontainebleau, he at once took possession, ordered
 
 Dumas the Elder 235 
 
 everybody about, chucked the hotel maids under the 
 chin, roared out his horselaughs, exploded with huge 
 jokes, converted night into day. Then suddenly some 
 fine morning he would be setting off, paying the host 
 merely with affectionate embraces, feeing the maids 
 with compliments — and the honest renegade and civil- 
 ian swashbuckler was gone, not to be heard of perhaps 
 until from some expensive height in the Alps, or on 
 some prodigal cruise in the Mediterranean. 
 
 He had money only for extravaganzas. It went 
 against the grain of this child of Nature to pay for 
 the necessaries of life out of his Gargantuan earnings. 
 Nor was he sufficiently considerate at any time to try 
 to borrow enough to liquidate all he owed. Conse- 
 quently there followed, in his train, bailiffs or other 
 unpleasant parties, at the urgent instances of creditors 
 who had small taste for literature at their own expense, 
 and were not of the stripe to foster genius by fur- 
 nishing hospitable comforts and cash commodities in 
 exchange for big handshakes and blunderbuss ha-ha- 
 has! 
 
 A French gentleman whom I knew in Paris was in 
 the Alps in the early 1850's. A storm caught him late 
 one afternoon high on a mountain, and he was forced 
 to seek accommodations in a poor sort of chalet. An- 
 other storm-driven tourist soon bustled in, and with 
 jovial boisterousness began trying to have something 
 served for dinner, the proprietor protesting that they 
 stayed at their own risk — he was not prepared for 
 guests. The stranger insisted on at least having 
 chicken. No chicken at hand. Then it would be eggs.
 
 236 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 No eggs, positively. What! not merely two eggs for 
 two famished visitors? Well, perhaps two eggs might 
 be spared, no more; and they would be dear, being 
 from the host's own yard. Eh bien, we'll take the two 
 eggs fried; and since you have your own eggs, you 
 have a hen — I knew you were lying; here's five francs 
 for her. The two men had eggs and chicken for 
 dinner. 
 
 Who was this irrepressible, astonishing stranger? 
 my friend asked himself. They fell to talking of lit- 
 erature at table. My friend's favorite writer proved 
 to be Alexandre Dumas: what youth could resist "The 
 Three Musketeers?" But at this announcement the 
 other, who was much older, indulged in expressions of 
 disgust and wrath. He disapproved of Dumas in 
 round terms — an author with no style, no ideas, in 
 short, an imbecile. A fine literary quarrel thereupon 
 waxed loud and strong, my friend feeling that he must 
 defend the Musketeers, the Count of Monte-Cristo. 
 He excitedly set forth the merits of his author as best 
 he could, smarting under the roustabout arguments 
 and assertions of his vis-a-vis. 
 
 When the young man had finally exhausted the list 
 of his good reasons for adoring Dumas, the stranger 
 broke out in roaring enthusiasm, embraced his com- 
 panion vigorously, exclaiming: 
 
 "My boy, / am Alexandre Dumas!" — to the utter 
 amazement and delight of my friend. 
 
 Dumas took him along as a guest for the next three 
 weeks on a roving Alpine expedition, the former daily
 
 Dumas the Elder 237 
 
 scribbling on inn tables an installment of his story then 
 appearing in a Paris journal. 
 
 So it was with him. Wherever present he filled all 
 the space, loomed on all horizons, made all the noise, 
 partook of everything offered or unoffered. When 
 one of his plays came out, he would occupy a con- 
 spicuous box by the stage and applaud the loudest, 
 laugh the most uproariously at his own jests, and fre- 
 quently, too, when the audience discovered no jest at 
 all and left him to laugh alone. And this, not from 
 egotism, but from an unconscious, incorrigible pro- 
 pensity for having a stupendous good time. 
 
 Apropos, we in America little realize that Dumas 
 the Elder was not only perhaps the greatest modern 
 story-teller, he was one of the leading French play- 
 wrights of the nineteenth century. Of his many 
 dramas his "Henri III et sa cour" (1829) and his 
 "Kean" remain on the Paris repertoires, the former 
 having been the first stage triumph of the French Ro- 
 mantic school, antedating "Hernani" by a year. But 
 more successful was he in comedies, for three of them, 
 written about 1840, are performed regularly at the 
 Frangais, and are chaste and acknowledged classics of 
 their genre and altogether delightful. His famous 
 son, the author of "Camille," therefore came naturally 
 enough by his talent for playwrighting, though in no 
 other respect did he seem to resemble or be in harmony 
 with his father. 
 
 For those who borrow trouble in the thought that 
 Dumas did not write his own stories, or at least all of
 
 238 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 them or all parts of them, and that perhaps he had 
 not the genius to conceive and write them and was ac- 
 cordingly a literary mountebank of farcical propor- 
 tions, it is well to remember that Dumas is acknowl- 
 edged to have written his own plays. He did not 
 turn them over to miscellaneous and unknown gifted 
 persons who were considerate enough not to pen any- 
 thing worth while after he died or before he was 
 born. We should not forget too that in his comedies 
 he presents notably the qualities which we do not as- 
 sociate with his loose, undisciplined personality and 
 fame: namely, the well-modulated, justly interbalanc- 
 ing "medium qualities" which the French so admire, 
 and regard as the expression of the best, the sanest, 
 art. 
 
 Death at last met this indefatigable tourist, this 
 "bon diable," in 1870; and not in a noisy inn of Nor- 
 mandy, or off some Mediterranean island which he had 
 immortalized by his romances, but in his son's villa at 
 Puys, just north of Dieppe. It is a pleasant retreat, 
 in a little wrinkle of the earth, a few rods from the 
 sea. On the hill at the right are the formidable re- 
 mains of some unidentified Gallo-Roman camp. 
 
 The commemorator of Dumas the Man might per- 
 haps find a fortunate theme in the fact that Dumas 
 loved the good women he knew — and there were many 
 of them, and of the best in France — as a devoted 
 father or brother, and not as a lover. He was fond 
 of inscribing in their albums playful sentiments. "To 
 embark on your career with a woman is to embark 
 with a tempest, in which, however, she is the lifeboat."
 
 Dumas the Elder 239 
 
 He liked to send to them from long distances, at rare 
 and all the more precious intervals, affectionate letters 
 and throbbing poesies over which he shed many a tear, 
 and which made them weep for tenderness, and which 
 make our eyes moisten to-day. For he could evoke, 
 with much of the familiar power of his overshadowing 
 mate and friend, Victor Hugo, a gentle memory and 
 womanly feelings for days far removed or for friends 
 long gone or forever.
 
 t
 
 V. Dumas the Younger
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 The famous son of the great Dumas was born in 1824 and 
 died in 1895. He first distinguished himself in 1852 with the play 
 "La Dame aux Camelias" which he constructed from his novel of 
 the same name, published in 1848. His long list of excellent 
 dramas are of the social type, representing the manners of his day. 
 They include "Le demi-monde" (1855) — he invented this term; 
 "La femme de Claude" (1873); "Denise" (1885). He entered 
 the Academy in 1874.
 
 DUMAS THE YOUNGER 
 
 DUMAS THE YOUNGER— Dumas fils—wzs 
 of only medium height and somewhat portly. 
 At your second glance the negroid was evi- 
 dent in his face — the crinkly hair, the skin swarthy, if 
 not in a pronounced way. 
 
 He became the opposite of his father in nearly all 
 respects. The former, by his plays, amassed wealth 
 which he snugly kept together. He led throughout 
 his maturity a conservative, well-ordered existence, be- 
 ing eminently sagacious in his relations with his fellow 
 beings. He lived in becoming luxury, surrounded by 
 fine works of art in which he was a connoisseur. 
 
 Dumas was especially devoted to paintings. Some 
 of those he owned he pointed out to me with relish. 
 Having at first eyed me cautiously, seeing that I was 
 interested in French canvases, he led me up his mar- 
 ble staircase to his bedroom to show me there a large 
 handsome nude hanging above his couch. I have for- 
 gotten the name of the artist, but the work was in 
 the unrelieved realistic style that prevailed before the 
 days of Impressionism. The picture, of forceful skill, 
 appeared too hard in treatment to be insinuatingly 
 seductive. 
 
 Paintings are usually the coins current through 
 whose lore you most easily come to know literary 
 
 243
 
 244 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Frenchmen; and this canvas, in its manner Instead of 
 its subject, let in for me much more light on the na- 
 ture of Dumas the Younger. A sturdy, unappealing, 
 not very communicative, well-rounded character, he 
 was as one held aloof, like this painting, from the view 
 and reach of the general indiscriminating public. He 
 was never expansive nor confiding. He had no airs, 
 cared nothing about attracting attention. On rare oc- 
 casions only did he appear. 
 
 He stood forth, however, as one of the greatest 
 phrase-makers of his half century. Men halted be- 
 fore his wit and sarcasm, keen and trenchant, yet al- 
 ways well-balanced. There was nothing offhand or 
 casual about his use of these weapons. He maturely 
 reasoned out everything he said or did. 
 
 As we mounted his stairs Dumas gave me a sample 
 of his humor, though he was more inclined to wit. It 
 happened that a French scientist had just declared that 
 he was about to perfect a method with his chemicals 
 by which children might be born into the world in lab- 
 oratories in an intelligent, scientific way. The Paris 
 press, as might be expected, were seizing upon this 
 purported discovery with Gallic jibes, developing the 
 promised program with gay deductions. 
 
 My host turned to me with a deep twinkle in his 
 eyes and said: 
 
 "No matter what the clever scientists may pretend, 
 I think the old-fashioned way of producing children 
 in the home instead of in a factory will always be the 
 most satisfactory and popular." 
 
 Dumas maintained the attitude of a social philos-
 
 Dumas the Younger 245 
 
 opher contemplating men and women of class in their 
 interrelations, and setting forth his views and con- 
 clusions in the form of dramas instead of essays or 
 didactic volumes. One of the foremost dramatists of 
 the nineteenth century, he possessed adept and solid 
 merits and contributed realism and logic to the play. 
 He exerted for forty years a serious and powerful 
 influence on the French theater, adding to its art con- 
 scientious and technical truth as well as a masterly 
 psychology as to social conditions and social characters 
 of the highest bourgeois classes — those which stand 
 next to the aristocracy. He sought to unravel com- 
 plexities or sound deluding depths by a sensible can- 
 dor, and to show a practical way out through dignified 
 readjustments and compromises. 
 
 In the plays of Dumas the Younger there is nearly 
 always a character who is of a philosophic turn and 
 out of whose lips come forth the duly weighed pro- 
 nouncements of the author himself. His general atti- 
 tude here was to add common sense, practical seemli- 
 ness and circumspect behavior to the affairs of love. 
 He strove against Romantic passions and Romantic 
 motives among whose tempestuous whirlwinds he had, 
 however, developed into young manhood. If either 
 the brain or the heart had to be sacrificed, he pro- 
 posed that the heart be sacrificed in the self-respecting 
 interest of the common weal. After this fashion, un- 
 like the wayward Romantics, he grew to be, as an 
 intellectual aristocrat, a convinced moralist and an 
 authority on the inexhaustible topic of the domestic 
 triangle. In his last twenty years he oflSciated, as it
 
 246 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 were, as an acknowledged arbiter in the social prob- 
 lems of the salon and boudoir. But while always ex- 
 pressing a comfortable and rational philosophy about 
 human existence, his resigned dicta had an astringent 
 tone and through this sprang into being that irony and 
 wit to which we have referred. 
 
 Dumas was a playwright with theses usually but- 
 tressed by cogent prefaces or pamphlets. He also 
 made use of the press by his infrequent editorials and 
 letters which all Frenchmen read with respect. It 
 was, as indicated, quite the fashion to wait and see 
 what, if anything, Dumas would say as the last word 
 on any subject in his line. As he took more to writing 
 than to the active stage business, his plays, differing 
 from American plays, have great literary quality and 
 are extensively read. 
 
 Unlike his father, Dumas was thoroughly a man of 
 Paris. Beyond its confines, or at least those of his 
 own country, his interests did not go. Paris provided 
 a rich enough mine for him, offering him all the ma- 
 terials that his curiosity wished to resolve. One saw 
 him little indeed out of his own intimate circle — his 
 city house and his country house at Marly and the 
 theater where one of his plays might be in rehearsal. 
 The world-wide aspirations of Sardou and Coquelin 
 did not lure him. 
 
 Hence, his dramas, while so potent and vital in the 
 history of the French theater, are not often played in 
 other lands. The forms of the problems and situa- 
 tions which they analyze and display are admittedly
 
 Dumas the Younger 247 
 
 French and lose their pertinent values once the forti- 
 fications of Paris are passed. 
 
 In having in real life an aversion for the advertising 
 interviewer, the professional gossip, the hero-vi'or- 
 shiper — thus varying in the extreme from his confrere 
 Sardou — Dumas at the same time manifested in his 
 plays a marked dislike for the prude, the Puritan and 
 those social reformers for whom everything is easy 
 and who propose to change human nature and cure all 
 evils in a day. This was to him hypocritical. 
 
 And yet the sympathies of Dumas should not be 
 called inactive. They stood open along rational lines. 
 A reasonable tolerance formed the base of his con- 
 structive social religion. And yet how strangely dif- 
 ferent was this from his father's expansive laxity which 
 knew neither standards nor limits I
 
 vi. Judith Gautier
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Judith Gautier, the talented literary daughter of Theophile 
 Gautier, the celebrated poet, and of Carlotta Grisi, delightful in 
 memories as a ballet queen, was born in 1850. She married the 
 well-known litterateur Catulle Mendes in 1866; was divorced; 
 and married Pierre Loti in 1913. She and Loti collaborated in 
 the play "The Daughter of Heaven," produced in New York. She 
 is an Orientalist, her plays and fiction dealing with Chinese and 
 Japanese subjects.
 
 JUDITH GAUTIER 
 
 THE famous daughter of Theophile Gautier 
 received me one afternoon in her modest 
 Paris salon in the rue Washington. I was 
 struck at once by her resemblance to her father — by 
 her powerful physique, by the dead white color of her 
 face, and by a certain plastic grandeur that would 
 tempt the chisel, and which Gautier loved to hew in 
 snowy blocks of stanzas. 
 
 She spoke of many things. First, of Japanism, since 
 she was one of its earliest devotees in France. The 
 Goncourts had started the fashion, and, for that mat- 
 ter, the exiled Hugo was always painting and carving 
 distorted and sunny Celestials. But Judith Gautier 
 was the first to translate Yellow romances for French 
 readers, and to prepare a Saffron drama for the Paris 
 stage. This drama, "The Merchant of Smiles," was 
 given at the Odeon in 1888, and was played at Daly's 
 in New York under another title. Her Japanese novel 
 "The Usurper" was awarded a prize by the French 
 Academy in 1875, when the author was twenty-five 
 years old. It is a simple oriental tale along whose 
 way you see sumptuous flowers and emerald colored 
 grass, and hear the susurration of citron-tree groves, 
 and mount white stairs leading to purplish skies. 
 "My Japanese books have not met with success in 
 
 251
 
 252 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 England and America," she said In her echoless voice. 
 "I am told that the English and Americans are inter- 
 ested in the Japanese for their grotesque drollery, 
 whereas I have tried to treat the sad side of their 
 nature. No, I am ashamed to confess it, I have never 
 been in the orient — I live there only in the imagination. 
 Foreign souls arouse my curiosity more than foreign 
 localities — people rather than places. Of late I have 
 been giving myself wholly to theater work — writing 
 plays. It is easy and does not take long stretches of 
 time. The difficulty comes in getting your pieces satis- 
 factorily before the public. I am such a poor com- 
 batant — I yield to every one's judgment." 
 
 The subject changed to Wagner. Judith Gautier 
 was one of his most intimate friends. "I was born a 
 Wagnerite," she said. "As far back as I can re- 
 member, his music was magic to me. I was a mere 
 gamine when first I used to see him at Lucerne. He 
 was pleased to proclaim me as one of his patronesses 
 at Bayreuth. He playfully called me his Valkyria — his 
 Erunhild. I have a casket of letters from him. Ah, 
 if he could have lived a few years more ! He had great 
 things yet in store. He told me of the new opera he 
 was meditating. Hindustan was the scene and Buddha 
 was to be introduced. But he had to go — he was 
 very weary — he had suffered so much. No, my book 
 on his poetical work can hardly be found now — it is 
 almost out of print. Baudry made the frontispiece 
 for it — Parsifal. There is the original drawing itself" 
 (indicating a picture on the wall).
 
 Judith Gautier 253 
 
 My kindly hostess observed that I was stealing a 
 glance at the room. She arose and I followed her as 
 she talked of its various souvenirs and ornaments. 
 Two sides of the salon were lined with one continuous 
 Turkish divan, above which ran a continuous mirror 
 with Turkish cloths grouped along its upper border. 
 Light entered through two stained glass windows. 
 One of them had been painted for Theophile Gautier 
 by a Turk, and the poet's name was in the center of it. 
 "The other window I attempted to make myself in 
 imitation of this one." 
 
 There was, opposite, Liszt's photograph embel- 
 lished with his signature and greetings. And some pic- 
 tures of my new friend by her American friend Sar- 
 gent adorned the narrow walls. In one of them she 
 appears as a kind of Madame Chrysanthemum; in an- 
 other she is seen sitting on the green bank of a brook. 
 
 "I have only a pied-a-terre — a mere stopping place 
 — in Paris," she remarked. "I pass most of the year 
 at Dinard. I have there a little brick house that stands 
 right by the edge of the sea — here is a picture of it." 
 She showed me (with the excuse that they were fab- 
 ulously idealized) some photographs of herself as a 
 Valkyria in magnificent attitudes and with small white 
 Valkyrian wings posing on her black hair. There was 
 an aspect of grandiose humility, of valiant strength, of 
 unconscious appeal, in these goddess pictures — a help- 
 less triumph gleaming at me with probing eyes. 
 Amazing eyes, indeed, were the eyes of my hostess! — 
 those two deep torrid lights of lustrous jet shining
 
 254 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 forth from a soul that lived, not in France, but in dis- 
 tant tropics where restless coralline understreams rise 
 and find solace at tranquil ocean surfaces. 
 
 You could read behind this calm mien — beneath this 
 mute and static cast of presence which she inherited 
 from her father — that Judith Gautier had known "im- 
 mortal longings," had tasted of supreme efforts, had 
 been the romantic daughter of a celebrated Romantic 
 poet. And with this you remarked, instead of any 
 hint of formality or parade or extravagances, a noise- 
 less simplicity, a frank modesty, a shrinking confidence 
 — an utter lack of grand manners and social veneer. 
 
 Like George Sand's best books, the books of Judith 
 Gautier are written as if for girls and boys. Her 
 "Cruelties of Love," notwithstanding its sensational 
 title, is but a grouping together of four plain, old- 
 fashioned tales of love such as American girls devour 
 at sixteen. There is nothing French about them ex- 
 cept the language. The same is true of all her pro- 
 ductions: they are exotic to Parisians. I ventured 
 to tell her that her contes were the most like our typical 
 American love stories of any I had ever read in 
 French. 
 
 She led the way back to our seats. The name of 
 Goncourt was mentioned. "Oh, I do not feel that the 
 Goncourts are exact," she said. "I do not recognize 
 my father at all as he appears in their pages. They 
 observed things at little corners, and leave you with 
 general and abiding impressions which should have 
 been noted only as exceptional — accidental. If they 
 happened to see you when you had a cold, you would
 
 Judith Gautier 255 
 
 always have, for their readers, weeping eyes and a 
 strange voice, and, as a result, you would go down in 
 their history as a kind of curious beast." 
 
 We talked again of music, of Bayreuth. She de- 
 scribed the microscopic care with which she had trans- 
 lated Parsifal word for word into French prose, and 
 suggested that one must be a master of his own lan- 
 guage in order to translate well. 
 
 As I came away through the low ante-chamber, and 
 down the five flights of stairs, I was thinking, not of 
 Wagner and his Valkyrias, but of austral seas and 
 white, immobile statues — of a yearning soul from the 
 East locked within the placid contours of some pearl 
 and ivory Buddha.
 
 vii. Henry Greville
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Henry Greville, pseudonym of Madame Durand, died in 
 1902 at the age of 60. Her many works represent an emotional 
 sensationalism in popular fiction. She lived several years in Russia, 
 returning to Paris in 1872. She visited the United States several 
 times on lecture tours. She w^as highly accomplished in languages. 
 Her most successful stories are on Russian themes, depicting Slav 
 characters, customs, habits. The best are "Dosia" (1876) and 
 "Sonia" (1877).
 
 HENRY GREVILLE 
 
 HENRY GREVILLE was the literary heiress 
 of George Sand. At least so said Augier, 
 and so said Octave Feuillet; and in so say- 
 ing they meant the best George Sand: the idyllic 
 George Sand, as in "la Petite Fadette." 
 
 The stories of Madame Alice Durand-Greville have 
 been read far more in our country than those of any 
 other modern French woman — indeed, more than those 
 of any Frangaise of the century save the authors of "la 
 Mare au Diable" and "Corinne." She was, for that 
 matter, known personally to many Americans. In 
 1885-6 she spent six months in our eastern states, giv- 
 ing lectures in French and English. 
 
 Madame Greville seemed really a type of English 
 womanhood. This may be explained by the fact that 
 she was a Norman of pure blood, Normandy being the 
 connecting link between France and England. Fresh 
 air, sunlight, outdoors in the garden, were the daily 
 subjects in her missal. 
 
 Half the year was passed in her country home by 
 the Loire near Angers. From her desk there she could 
 see the sail-spread barks glide picturesquely up and 
 down the river; and there she lived with Nature as 
 George Sand lived in her beloved neighboring prov- 
 ince of Berry. To speak closer the truth, Madame 
 
 259
 
 26o French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Greville treated rural life in a more Naturalistic and 
 practical manner than her great romantic predecessor, 
 for the former was an amateur horticulturalist who 
 produced new varieties of flowers, and delighted to 
 dig in the soil with her hands. 
 
 Her apartment in Paris was near the Exposition 
 buildings. Here in a modest room, on a table gay with 
 two ornamental lamps and three or four bouquets, and, 
 in mid-winter, before a bright wood fire in a grate, 
 she wrote by the side of an erudite and most amiable 
 companion — her husband. Through the window in 
 front of her, there stretched away, between two rows 
 of houses, a vista of southern, light-streaming sky. 
 Without some such constant view of the infinite, Ma- 
 dame Greville would have found it perhaps impossible 
 to write in Paris. 
 
 Adjoining this room was her salon whose walls were 
 enriched by little Henners and by one or two Pointelin 
 landscapes in the Jura. Facing these paintings hung 
 two precious, hand-embroidered, silk tapestries. In 
 fact everywhere in the apartment were specimens of 
 her tapestry work — a cloth on a mantel, a cover on a 
 footstool. It was when weaving (like Penelope) these 
 patterns that she thought out during the winter season 
 the plans of her next stories. Then in summer they 
 were fashioned mentally into shape among her flowers 
 at Bois-Briou. She was able to average two romances 
 a year because, for one reason, she did not put pen to 
 paper until a book was entirely finished in her head, 
 so that she could readily pass before her inner eye 
 each scene and chapter complete to the smallest detail.
 
 Henry Greville 261 
 
 Finally some morning she would sit at her writing table 
 and scribble off manuscript more rapidly than an 
 amanuensis could copy it. 
 
 Her books are for the great public, not for critics 
 and dilettants. They are a wholesome variety of, per- 
 haps we may say, the Naturalistic novel. She took 
 Life — Nature — as she saw them before her, and made 
 them the basis of her stories. The study of human 
 character was her main theme. An event in the life 
 of a friend, or an incident read in a newspaper, would 
 suggest the scheme of a tale. She traced in her mind 
 the chain of circumstances and phases of character 
 which could have led up to that event or incident. She 
 thus proceeded backward from a fact — from some- 
 thing that had happened. 
 
 And occasionally a friend or an acquaintance was 
 offended, discovering how she had portrayed him 
 truthfully. In a more definite sense, her literature was 
 eminently moral. This explained why her stories 
 found such favor in America : they could be entrusted 
 to young girls for whom it is educationally desirable to 
 have pure and simple fiction in simple and normal 
 French. 
 
 Of her seventy volumes, many of which have passed 
 through twenty, thirty, forty editions, Madame Gre- 
 ville had a particular esteem and affection for 
 "I'Aveu," "Peril," "Nikanor," "Clairefontaine," 
 "Cleopatre" and "fipreuvesde RaTssa." The "Temps" 
 as a rule published one of her novels every two years in 
 its feuilleton. Her Russian fiction always had a 
 special success. She thought the Slav soul inexhaust-
 
 262 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 ible in its materials for the romancer. It was Tur- 
 genev who introduced her to the Paris editors on her 
 return to France early in the 1870's from Russia where 
 she had lived some time and had married Professor 
 Durand. Still it was not until 1876, the year of 
 George Sand's death, that Madame Greville obtained 
 a recognition in the French capital, and experienced the 
 pleasure of seeing one of her novels appear in the 
 "Revue des Deux Mondes" while another was appear- 
 ing in the "Journal des Debats." 
 
 Her manual called "The Civil and Moral Instruc- 
 tion of Young Girls" somewhat offended the Roman 
 clergy in Paris. She however regained their favor, 
 and a prelate benevolently remarked on one occasion 
 that she was like an orange tree producing sweet and 
 bitter, perfect and deformed, oranges, but bound to 
 produce. Though a Catholic by birth and rearing, she 
 did not follow the formal practices of Catholicism, and 
 was proud to have the wedding service of her daughter 
 performed by a Protestant clergyman in a Protestant 
 church. 
 
 Madame Greville had physical vigor, strength in 
 constant action, clear, frank eyes, fine, white teeth. 
 Notwithstanding her sturdy appearance she had been 
 well-nigh an invalid for a long time. The many hours 
 of ill health which she passed in bed she employed in 
 mentally writing books, in reading musical scores, and 
 In fixing rimes to fancies in order to calm her nerves. 
 
 A passionate lover of music, she came near choosing 
 a composer's career instead of a novelist's, and could 
 follow, over the conductor's shoulder, the most difficult
 
 Henry Greville 263 
 
 orchestral scores, at least those of Wagner's earlier 
 operas. One day when I called she was reveling in the 
 pleasure of fingering the leaves of a new edition of 
 Schubert which had just been brought in. She was 
 among the first to subscribe for the Lamoureux con- 
 certs — that bold enterprise in which Lamoureux risked 
 his large fortune. 
 
 She went away from America with the impression 
 that we are always out of doors; just as Americans 
 leave France with the notion that the French live in 
 the street. Her one special and vivid recollection was 
 that of being almost killed by Yankee hospitality and 
 New Jersey mosquitoes. Her opinion of America was, 
 "An enormous force badly directed, but with an im- 
 mense and glorious future." 
 
 Her belief in isolation for literary work furnished 
 one reason why her name seldom appeared in the jour- 
 nals and public places of Paris. She was not, as she 
 used to say laughingly, "a slave of the press" like her 
 dear friend Alphonse Daudet; and declared that the 
 greatest triumph of her life was in marrying her 
 daughter without letting a single newspaper get hold 
 of the fact. While Madame Greville avoided pub- 
 licity she was very hospitable. At her Saturdays in 
 the rue de Crenelle you were apt to meet old and 
 young celebrated people — Goncourt and Daudet in 
 their time, Henner, the elder Rosny, the rare Pointelin. 
 Out of her big, kind heart came freely the invitation: 
 "Run down and see us this summer at Bois-Briou. I 
 will show you what a good cook I am." 
 
 Monsieur Durand was her best literary adviser and
 
 264 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 friend. A very modest gentleman, he was most loyally 
 devoted to her service and to her fame. He had given 
 up teaching many years before, and his own province 
 became that of an expert judge of paintings who 
 thought nothing of journeying from one city or town 
 to another far away in order to decide on the original 
 of two disputing canvases. 
 
 Of Madame Greville's poems, written (as indicated 
 above) to pass the hours of ill health and not for 
 publication, one in particular, which she called "Le 
 Depart des Barques" (on the Loire), always exhales 
 for me a delicate, penetrating tenderness worthy of a 
 'Vaine tendresse" of Sully Prudhomme. Of its four 
 stanzas — they lie before me in her handwriting as I pen 
 these words — I cannot refrain from quoting the last 
 two as somewhat fitting to the feelings which come in 
 realizing that she too has passed out into the Beyond. 
 
 Les barques s'en vont, silhouettes greles, 
 On les voit decroitre a I'horizon clair. 
 On s'avise alors qu'elles sont bien freles, 
 Un petit frisson a passe dans I'air. 
 
 On distingue encor leur forme amoindrie, 
 Qui s'efface et fuit tout la-bas, la-bas. 
 On rentre un peu triste, a tout petits pas. ^ . . 
 Ainsi nos enfants, quand on les marie. 
 
 (The barks float away, slim silhouettes. 
 We see them blend into the clear horizon. 
 We realize then what frailty is theirs. 
 A little shiver has passed in the air.
 
 Henry Greville 265 
 
 We still watch their diminishing forms 
 That fade and flee away, far away, 
 And we return home a wee-bit sad, with 
 Little footsteps — as when our children wed.)
 
 viii. Gyp
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Gyp, pseudonym of the Countess de Martel de Janville, 
 was born in 1850. She traced her lineage as a grand-niece of 
 Mirabeau. She produced one hundred and thirty novels or 
 novelettes in thirty years, and originated those popular characters 
 in Parisian life known as Petit Bob (1882), Paulettc (1883) and 
 Loulou (1888). She pictured a semi-dissipated society upon whose 
 flanks she applied the whips of humorous raillery and withering 
 scorn. Her irony flayed many vanities and perversities, yet 
 without anger or bitterness. She became a literary idol of the 
 boulevards, combining the attitudes of an aristocratic lady and a 
 tom-boy with gayety, verve, esprit, vivacity. She stood as a sort 
 of official satirist of French high life, yet a friend of the mob. 
 She knew how to handle risky situations with clever and excusable 
 audacity. Being a master of dialogue, she has been called a 
 modern Lucian in petticoats.
 
 GYP 
 
 HER salon was hung in tapestries. A clock 
 pointing at the wrong hour. Pictures every- 
 where. Among them her portrait by Aublet. 
 And of her daughter a pastel stretching along on a low 
 black satin lounge. A large white porcelain grate with 
 a fire slowly and nobly dying out. Just in front of the 
 grate a gigantic green china frog squatted before a cir- 
 cular sofa. The sofa strewn with illustrated journals, 
 Forain sketches. Crowning its summit a jardiniere, in 
 the form of a dragon, wrathfully displayed a coronet 
 of plants. Griffinesque Japan and patient Ethiopia 
 contributed their distorted fantasies and Atlantean 
 feats to the exotic and eccentric spectacle of the salon. 
 The general tone was of a dark green and yellow, 
 everywhere agitated In rapid curves and brusque 
 designs. 
 
 The furniture and furnishings gave evidence of use 
 and had for that reason a homelike air. The room 
 was evidently lived in. On the right of the grate a 
 huge fauteuil on rollers opened its arms to the visitor. 
 It was Talleyrand's, and in it on Thursday and Sun- 
 day afternoons Anatole France used to sit and visit 
 with his hostess. What tete-a-tete these must have 
 been! On the other side of the grate a Majolica 
 monkey climbed a bell rope. A little back from this 
 
 269
 
 270 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 side of the fireplace stood an English folding screen 
 decorated with those famous caricatures of "Bob" 
 which were once exposed at the Bodiniere. 
 
 Before the folding screen in a yellow fauteuil Gyp 
 would sit in her nervous, unconventional way. Imagine 
 her clad in a loose dress of lemon-colored plush 
 trimmed with white down, a little open at the neck, 
 and a tiny silver bell hanging suspended there against 
 the tegument. And fancy a great brass serpent coiling 
 thrice around her throat. 
 
 She was slight and of medium height. It was ap- 
 parent that to her mind fashion is a stupid conven- 
 tion. No suspicions of powder nor paint nor perfume 
 haunted her presence. Her hair was a dull blond. 
 It was frizzed saucily down over her brow and she 
 now and then brushed it away from her violet-gray 
 eyes. Her face showed that its mistress loved the 
 sun, the wind, the brine of the sea. Doubtless it had 
 never occurred to her to think of being beautiful; but 
 when she smiled, an admirable, adorable expression of 
 sympathy and loyalty endeared her countenance. 
 
 While Gyp conversed her hands dashed about, 
 sometimes hovering around her mouth, sometimes 
 drumming nervously on any convenient object. Her 
 hands were those of a worker. They were capable 
 and strong. And what a racing talker! Yet no ego- 
 tism nor pose nor parade. The furthest possible from 
 all that. 
 
 Gyp was a tom-boy whom Aublet's portrait misrep- 
 resented as a lady of quality. A romping love of in- 
 dependence was the dominant trait of her personality.
 
 Gyp 271 
 
 A Breton born in Brittany and reared in the careless 
 Breton way, she was never reconciled to the artificial 
 or affected conventions of society. She adored her 
 horse, her dog, a hair-in-the-breeze isolation. 
 
 Circumstances introduced her as a madcap girl into 
 the frivolous court circles of the Second Empire, mar- 
 ried her to a count, and associated her, just before 
 1 870, with a demoralized and decaying governing class. 
 Her healthy Breton instincts rescued her from the gen- 
 eral French cataclysm. She saw only too clearly the 
 vanity, immorality, ridiculousness of the world about 
 her and revolted without absolutely sundering any 
 liens. She chanced finally to find a vocation in which 
 she could let her vivacious energies prance and gallop. 
 So she became, behind her merciless face-a-main, a 
 disillusioned observer of the sterile and senseless high- 
 life to which she belonged and of which she was not. 
 She grew to be a playful cynic who lightly enlivened 
 her cynicism with infantile caricatures. The special 
 literary form which she adopted was dialogue. And 
 Gyp's dialogues became a distinctive feature of the 
 Paris literature of her day. 
 
 Her penchant for caricatures did not interfere with 
 her retaining an aristocratic optimism. She remained 
 a faithful Imperialist who believed that the curse of 
 her country was the Third Republic. As the reign of 
 Napoleon Third was the reign of her own illusioned 
 youth, the imperial past appeared gilded to her as she 
 looked back upon it from the discolored realities of 
 later years. By birth, temperament and tastes she was 
 a democrat with a self-sacrificing affection for the
 
 272 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 lowest classes. But she had become an aristocrat by 
 position and profession, and harmonized her popular 
 love of liberty with her Imperialism by believing that 
 the people would be better off under a dynastic regime. 
 
 At the commencement of her literary campaign her 
 risquee attention was especially attracted by the dis- 
 simulating veils which society throws around mankind 
 as created of God. Her "Petit Bob" represented 
 merely her own boyish frankness and impishness vis-a- 
 vis the follies of the social habits and customs which 
 shameface nature. To her, amid the healthful recrea- 
 tions of her open-air existence, Nature seemed more 
 innocent than all these fictions, and she felt that dis- 
 grace and ridicule should fall upon those "civilized" 
 manners and practices which would conceal or distort 
 the natural while freely fostering a half-hidden license. 
 
 With the years she came to sketch travesties of that 
 vie mondaine which first amused her chiefly for its own 
 travesties of Nature. With her everything centered 
 in the word chic which characterized a combination of 
 the gallant, the jaunty, the generous and the aristo- 
 cratic. 
 
 With this watchword chic, she valiantly arabesqued 
 a crusade against bogus creeds and parvenu gods. 
 Most characteristic was her "Gens chics" with its 
 slender pages of indecorous dialogue, its colored 
 hobby-horse caricatures of Jews, of ugly people in their 
 robes de nuit, of graceless young women whose limbs 
 seemed poorly affected by the laws of gravitation. 
 
 Gyp was the first one, or at least the main one, to 
 introduce into Parisian fiction the modern free girl as
 
 Gyp 273 
 
 a desirable Institution, so to speak. Gyp foreshadowed 
 the New French woman who has promised to revolt 
 against her race's traditional ideas of convent captivity 
 and blind ignorance, ingenues and dots. For she was 
 a revolutionist. This was quite fitting in her as a 
 descendant of the great Mirabeau. But she believed 
 that a great big broom would come into play and the 
 French empire be swept back into power. 
 
 "Under the empire," she urged, "there was no 
 misery. To-day what a dreadful state of things ! I 
 hate the parliamentarians. I know the men in Clichy 
 and St, Ouen — all those quarters there — I go riding 
 there with my dog. I love the people, the lowest class, 
 the loafers, the tramps and all that. When the time 
 comes they will march down into Paris very gayly — 
 I'm sure of it. I've never been molested in those parts 
 of town, though my coachman did get stoned at St. 
 Ouen one day when I went to give some money to a 
 ragpicker whose rent I pay. But I've never been 
 harmed or approached. What they lack is a leader. 
 I know we would be apt to get hurt — we who are along 
 the edges. I, for example — it's true I'm not rich — 
 but for my part if it comes to that, to be shot dead is 
 not a disagreeable death — it's chic, I think. I've al- 
 ways fancied it on the contrary. I would try my very 
 best to put on a brave face if they were to put me 
 against a wall and shoot me down — with a Rothschild 
 on each side of me."
 
 IX. Jeanne Hugo
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Jeanne Hugo is the daughter of Victor Hugo's elder son, 
 Charles. His widow married Charles Lockroy, prominent in 
 French political life. She married Leon Daudet, the son of 
 Daudet, but they were divorced. As a child she inspired much 
 poetry written by her grandfather whose well-known "I'Art 
 d'etre grandpere" had her and her brother as its subjects.
 
 JEANNE HUGO 
 
 INDEPENDENT of any incidents or events in her 
 own career, Jeanne Hugo will ever be a part of 
 the Victor Hugo cult — a cult which is over- 
 shadowed in France only by that of Napoleon. Who 
 has not read the volume of rimes called "I'Art d'etre 
 grandpere"? Hugo's beautiful cradle song commenc- 
 ing: 
 
 Jeanne sleeps; she leaves, poor angel banished, 
 
 was running in my head as I went one bright freezing 
 February afternoon to pay my respects to her and to 
 her mother who was then Madame Lockroy. The 
 Lockroy mansion stood on the Avenue Victor Hugo, a 
 few doors below the house where the celebrated poet 
 died. 
 
 I was ushered into a drawing room where, before 
 long, Madame Lockroy and her attractive daughter 
 greeted me. The latter possessed brimming, trans- 
 lucent eyes in which her grandfather used to find for- 
 get-me-nots. 
 
 Of course the conversation revolved around the illus- 
 trious grandfather as a theme. The walls about us 
 were enriched here and there with his grotesque 
 drawings. 
 
 "Yes," said Madame Lockroy enthusiastically, "he 
 
 277
 
 278 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 was always making them at Guernsey. He rarely used 
 a brush or paint — he worked with ink and pen, some- 
 times with a match and a great deal with his thumb. 
 He would usually begin a drawing by dropping a blot 
 of ink on a sheet of paper. Often the form of the 
 blot, with its rays shooting out, suggested his subject — 
 a chateau in a rainstorm, a church and spire In the twi- 
 light, or something of the kind. 
 
 "So he developed the sketch, with chance and ca- 
 price for his guides. That drawing (pointing to a 
 sketch) — you see brown spots in it — that is coffee. He 
 frequently turned a drop or two of coffee on the inked 
 paper, for he was apt to indulge in this sport when fin- 
 ishing his cafe noir after breakfast." 
 
 "Grandpa was simply angelic to me," said the daugh- 
 ter. "I have none but the happiest memories of him. 
 Nearly all those little incidents versified In 'I'Art d'etre 
 grandpere' were true — for instance, the promenades 
 with his two 'marmots' as he called us. Still I was 
 never locked in a dark closet with only dry bread to 
 eat — he invented that story." 
 
 You remember the childlike pleasantry which the 
 poet conceived in a certain poem of twenty-four lines. 
 "Jeanne" had been imprisoned in a dark closet because 
 of misconduct. Her grandpa — compassionate soul — 
 was slyly slipping in a jar of preserves to her. He 
 was discovered by one of the law-and-order party of 
 the household and was to undergo a like punish- 
 ment for this abetting of lawlessness. Whereupon 
 "Jeanne," inspired with sympathetic gratefulness, 
 whispered to him:
 
 Jeanne Hugo 279 
 
 "Then / will bring you some preserves I" 
 
 "Grandpa was always very quiet — he rarely 
 laughed. Here is the only photograph in the world 
 that shows him laughing. He never tried to sing or 
 hum or whistle to me, nor did he ever recite poetry. 
 He told me a story occasionally, but no ghost stories^ — 
 no tales that would frighten me." 
 
 "Hauteville House at Guernsey, where we all lived 
 most of the time," added Madame Lockroy, "was said 
 to be haunted, and when our people first went there — 
 early in the 1850's — they became interested in spirit- 
 ualism. I do not think grandpa ever really beheved 
 in it. 
 
 "He rose at dawn, poured a pitcher of cold water 
 down his back, swallowed a raw egg, drank some cof- 
 fee, and then worked till breakfast time — noon. His 
 habits were English rather than French. He did not 
 have much confidence in doctors and medicine, but he 
 had great faith in hygiene and cold water. Afternoons 
 he read his mail, trifled about the house, amused him- 
 self with his drawings, and from five to seven he always 
 went for a walk." 
 
 Jeanne Hugo will remain one of the most famous 
 of all the maids Victor Hugo sang of in his twenty- 
 five volumes of verse — all those maids whose ABC, 
 he declared in one of his poems to his "Jeanne," "is to 
 have white arms, to be beautiful, to dazzle the depths 
 of the deepest hearts with merely a nothing — a bou- 
 quet, a ribbon, a smile — and to be, by the side of 
 morose, ungrateful man, gentler than the azure, rosier 
 than the rose."
 
 X. Jules Lemaitre
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Jules Lemaitre died in 1914 when 61 years old. He was of 
 the Impressionist School and a reactionary. He never married. 
 The Academy claimed him in 1895. He wrote many notable 
 volumes of literary criticism in the unconventional Impressionistic 
 manner, and also many plays and stories.
 
 JULES LEMAITRE 
 
 JULES LEMAITRE, the distinguished French lit- 
 terateur, pretended to be a sort of rustic. He 
 once said to the present writer, "Que voulez-vous? 
 I'm a kind of peasant in reality, I suppose." This 
 came forth in a shy voice, with a long, gentle shrug 
 of his somewhat stooped shoulders, and a pleasant 
 smile as if frankly avowing an undeniable fact. 
 
 He was not tall nor slender. His eyes were small, 
 bluish, scintillating. High cheek bones. And, at forty, 
 a short, thin growth of reddish whiskers. His manner, 
 very quiet, somewhat abashed. At first nights he was 
 apt to appear carelessly dressed, his top hat not re- 
 cently ironed. He seemed to prefer there to efface 
 himself in a corner with some friend and whisper con- 
 fidences of amusement. 
 
 He used to write in an atelier, his face toward the 
 great glass front of a light-flooded apartment spaced 
 by lofty tapestries. He would say, "I like plenty of 
 light." A favorite habit was to walk to and fro there, 
 smoking cigarettes very deliberately. His literary 
 penates were unpretending. In his early period at 
 least, when he might have freely been called a disciple 
 of Renan, a terra cotta bust of that amiable philos- 
 opher surveyed the precinct with mild eyes of serene 
 skepticism. On the table where Lemaitre wrote he 
 
 283
 
 284 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 managed to rescue a small writing space from the en- 
 croachments of piled-up books. 
 
 Nearby might stand his bicycle, to which he was 
 addicted in his prime. Opening out from the atelier 
 there was a tiny bandbox of a garden, high-walled, 
 with a half dozen trees, in the heart of Paris. In 
 summer he wrote there a good deal. This was a part 
 of his pretended role as a son of the soil. "I adore 
 the country." This meant his natal valley of the Loire. 
 And in fact Lemaitre, like Sarcey, Bouguereau, Hen- 
 ner, impressed one as being of the rural districts — 
 plain manners, simple clothing, usually untrimmed 
 beards. Yet — strange revealment of human nature ! — 
 nothing of the real country was reflected in their 
 works. Lemaitre's literary output, foremostly criti- 
 cal, was refined and difficult to the last boule- 
 vard degree of nicety and disquietude. An early 
 leader among the Impressionists, he was at once non- 
 chalant and hard to suit like a fine, spoiled lady who 
 is both generous and unsatisfied. He was about the 
 first in modern Paris to write of contemporaries as 
 seriously and permanently as if they were ancients. 
 He thus dignified the present. And for this he de- 
 served a long mark. 
 
 His plays, fiction, poetry, did not succeed. His 
 potency grew into the form of dramatic criticism. Yet 
 the dramatic element was not really in him as his 
 dozen plays attest. His literary temperament was 
 somewhat like that of Anatole France, but the two men 
 were wide apart. The latter had the power and magic 
 touch of genius. Lemaitre could only offer a highly
 
 Jules Lemaitre 285 
 
 clever and polished talent. He came under the in- 
 fluence of titled aristocracy (understood to be con- 
 cretely feminine) and allied himself with royalty, no- 
 bility, Catholicism and all that looks backward in 
 France, His confrere embraced the Republic and 
 looked forward. 
 
 This social coefficient contributed to the dual result 
 that Anatole France is a world figure while Lemaitre, 
 starting out at the same time in life with equal oppor- 
 tunity and promise, was but a French figure and on the 
 losing side at that. He was so little in touch with the 
 bent of his race that his excursions into politics were 
 like feeble fireworks winding up in a Versailles 
 fountain. 
 
 Lemaitre was, in short, a man of books, of the 
 study, of subjective analysis, of psychological expert- 
 ness that tended practically to defeat itself or end in a 
 vacancy. At the same time his influence in Paris was 
 very competent and very considerable. Speaking of 
 vacancy, the word "blanc" was a favorite with him, 
 as indicated perhaps by the titles of his books and 
 plays. And he would have been the first to avow mod- 
 estly, quizzically, that this word typified his career. 
 For what, he would have said, is "blanc" after all but 
 a blank?
 
 xi. Pierre Loti
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Pierre Loti, pen name of Julien Viaud, was born of a 
 Huguenot family in 1850 and married Judith Gautier in 1913. The 
 Academy received him in 1891. He has passed his life as a naval 
 officer who voyaged extensively in the orient. He is a playwright, 
 but is celebrated as a prolific novelist of exotic life and scenes.
 
 PIERRE LOTI 
 
 PIERRE LOTI is a short, slender man. He is 
 very quick, lively, in his movements. This 
 must be harmonized with the silent air of mel- 
 ancholy which envelops his face and characterizes his 
 personality. His look, his aura, are the expression of 
 a profound and hopeless sadness as radical and in- 
 eradicable as that of any German philosopher of 
 pessimism. 
 
 He has the delicate, quite graceful manners of a 
 woman, as is habitual with Frenchmen. He occupies 
 little space with his motions and movings about. He 
 has a quiet, frail voice. And then there is his famous 
 shyness. He is extremely retiring. He is naturally 
 in a state of hesitation, genuinely more or less abashed. 
 This personal modesty, it will be remembered, ex- 
 plains how he comes by his curious pen name. At the 
 commencement of his career in his nation's navy, the 
 energetic young Julien Viaud was so exceedingly timid 
 that his comrades scornfully called him Loti — ^the name 
 of a little flower in India which discreetly hides itself. 
 He bravely adopted the name when he published his 
 first book in 1879 at the age of 29. 
 
 I well remember his extreme diffidence in the first 
 three or four years when he appeared as a member at 
 the French Academy. It is true he rarely attended, 
 
 289
 
 290 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 living far from Paris, and being usually kept wide of 
 the civilized world by his naval duties. He was then 
 a stranger in the French capital, knowing none of the 
 great literary Gauls with whom he had been, almost 
 without notice, called upon to associate among the 
 Forty Immortals. He was not a little affrighted by 
 those solemn, austere scenes in that somber little tem- 
 ple where the French belletristic gods are wont to as- 
 semble as on Parnassus. With his hair worn, in re- 
 venge, most fiercely in the pompadour style of those 
 days, he would sit solitary and alone in one of the 
 empty rows of consecrated seats, high up at the back 
 in the assembly. He would look alarmed, much as a 
 small squirrel suddenly imprisoned in a cage. 
 
 Much curiosity and amusement were, indeed, cre- 
 ated in Paris when Pierre Loti was received there at 
 the Academy in 1891 and delivered the customary ad- 
 dress on the departed member whose seat he was tak- 
 ing. He had come from the briny waters of southwest 
 France. He had dwelt on the ocean and not on the 
 Paris boulevards. He had sprung quite spontaneously 
 and by himself alone from the sea (could we so appro- 
 priately say soil in his case?) of French literature. He 
 was not a creature of salons, nor bred on critics' books, 
 nor learned in the pedantic ways of the banks of the 
 Seine. 
 
 Accordingly he approached, at the Academy, the 
 whole difficult heights and "finicky" finish of it all at 
 one most appalling swoop, to speak loosely. And Paris 
 laughed politely in its lace sleeves at this soaring novice
 
 Pierre Loti 291 
 
 in its very midst. For Loti, in his reception address, 
 showed that he was quite innocently unaware of many 
 unwritten conventional things and open secrets of the 
 literary existence in Lutetia; and, with a perverse con- 
 trariety, he emphasized somewhat elaborately some 
 things that every one there had known ever since the 
 cradle. Paris had thus refreshingly caught up to its 
 perfumed bosom a rare, exotic species, and it was a 
 diversion for a time. 
 
 But Loti was very, very clever. Modestly and very 
 irreproachably he soon made the most of everything — 
 of his navy existence, of his museum home down at 
 Rochefort on the sea, and, above all, of his beautiful, 
 sad sentimentality which has always distracted French 
 women with an irresistible love for his melancholy art 
 and his melancholy soul. His attractive eyes would, 
 by the way, emphasize this effect with the fair sex. 
 They are his finest feature — pronounced, of a brown 
 temper, large, liquid and innocent as a gazelle's, and 
 all the more striking because of his smallness of size. 
 
 Loti was born in the celebrated French Protestant 
 city of Rochefort where he has always lived when at 
 home. He came of a very stiff Protestant family, but 
 he has lost all piousness long ago, if he ever had any. 
 He has no religion whatever. Not only this, but his 
 books trouble themselves precious little about what is 
 moral or immoral. They simply go right along un- 
 heedingly, like Nature. In this he is the true tra- 
 ditional sailor who has a wife in every port, exemplify- 
 ing the reputed morals of the wandering sea-life, and
 
 292 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 is only moved with profound feelings when he sails out 
 of a beloved harbor which he is not to see again for 
 five years — or ever. 
 
 This leads up, in truth, to a curious fact. Loti is 
 distinctly a woman's author, and to such an extent that 
 his books are most widely translated in several tongues, 
 and yet they are bereft of any religious or moral senti- 
 ments or aspirations. The literary Loti, with all his 
 blue dreams and his etherealized thoughts, has never 
 tried to make any one better. He seems to have been 
 resolutely determined to leave the world precisely as 
 he found it, only better known. 
 
 He early saw service in war, having made the cam- 
 paign of Tonkin, which incidentally got him in of- 
 ficial disgrace for a year. This was caused by his 
 writing to the "Figaro" criticisms of the behavior of 
 the French soldiers in a certain action. Loti has been 
 "captain of vessel" in the navy since 1906. His life 
 on the sea is, of course, the great distinguishing mark 
 of his literary output. Year after year he has sat 
 out upon his ship's deck describing right at hand the 
 marvelous, unpaintable sunrises and sunsets of the trop- 
 ics and the orient as has no other man in French lit- 
 erature. And in the far off ports he has had months 
 of leisure to describe the strange women of dusky 
 skins whom he frankly loved in French sailor mar- 
 riage fashion. He approached each of these successive 
 idyls of his heart with an aspect of sadness, and wept 
 with each inamorata in genuine tears of salt when he 
 quitted her harbor. Frankness, gentleness, beauty and 
 lack of any profoundness characterize these pictured
 
 Pierre Loti 293 
 
 episodes and inventions of his wandering career, his 
 mark of genius lying in his descriptions. 
 
 Ideas do not signalize Loti's shelfful of books. He 
 is wanting in intellectuality as he is wanting entirely 
 in humor. He is a poet, a painter, of colors, of sen- 
 timent (always of a feminine tournure), of dissolving 
 landscapes and seascapes floating in a wealth of gor- 
 geous hues. He has bathed the whole Levant in the 
 tears of sentimentality. And all the while retro- 
 spective regrets at the futility of human existence have 
 served as his conventional excuse. He is thus a latter- 
 day Romantic, representing that phase of French Ro- 
 manticism which reached out to the orient. Nearly 
 always dealing with impressions, with what is fugitive 
 and fleeting in aspect like his amours, and with what 
 is born and bred of memory and distance, Pierre Loti 
 more narrowly belongs to the Impressionist period of 
 the 1890's, when the pointillistes and all such kin 
 abounded in France. 
 
 He is a great romancer, the French seeming to con- 
 sider "Pecheurs d'Islande" (1886) and "Mon frerc 
 Yves (1892) as his two best works, Loti is only second- 
 arily a dramatist. His first play — a Huguenot play — 
 was brought out in Paris in 1898. And apropos, being 
 quite familiar with our language, he has done the Eng- 
 lish race the honor of translating "King Lear" into 
 French, with the aid of a French collaborator. The 
 translation is in prose and very accurately done. It is 
 characteristic of his sad nature that he should have 
 selected the most woe-begone offering in our literature. 
 
 But Loti's instinct is descriptive, not dramatic. He
 
 294 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 lacks the ramming force, the Impact, the strict hard 
 sense of compression necessary to get himself with 
 great success Into the straltjackets of the Paris drama, 
 with all Its rigid and pitiless rules and regulations. It 
 is true, however, that he has devoted a good deal of 
 attention to the stage In his latter years. He did a 
 Chinese drama, for Instance, with Judith Gautler, the 
 handsome daughter of Theophlle. And Antolne 
 looked upon him with favor. For that matter, he has 
 that knack that all French writers seem to possess — 
 the knack of somi^how being able to write a very good 
 play. The clue Is that the race is naturally dramatic. 
 
 It Is by reason of his romances that Pierre LotI will 
 live — his exotic romances usually of the equatorial 
 lands and realms of the hot eastern suns. His novel- 
 ettes expressed emotions that were new to the Parisi- 
 ans. He painted the barbaric life as well as the bar- 
 baric aspects of oriental countries, waters and forests. 
 He always did this with a large, tender and fluid brush, 
 drenching the scenes well with the odorous dews of 
 poetic longings — distillations that are the fond nour- 
 ishment and inextinguishable pleasure of sentimental 
 women the world over. 
 
 To the degree that M. Vlaud is a woman's writer, 
 he is not a man's author. Men generally do not care 
 for his books. He is too gracile, too feminine, too 
 slender. He Is out of touch with the big harsh bi:u- 
 talltles which most men have to be acquainted with; 
 yet since we have spoken the word — Is there or Is there 
 not brutality in Loti's works? There has always been 
 an argument about this, or about the precise nature
 
 Pierre Loti 295 
 
 of his brutality. Lot! certainly does present a bru- 
 tality to the world in his pages. There is a great deal 
 of the pitiless, of the hardened, of the unheeding. But 
 it is a woman's kind of brutality, not a man's. It is 
 negative rather than positive; negligent rather than 
 active. His Madame Chrysanthemums and his Ma- 
 dame Prunes, with their toyish names, impress one but 
 lightly as with life in a boudoir. To hurt their feel- 
 ings or harm their lives would seem only something 
 like abusing the existence of a butterfly. 
 
 The peculiarity of the frank unconcerned sensuality 
 in Loti's books — so often autobiographic — is, in fact, 
 that he never idealizes love and he never brutalizes it. 
 What makes them generally so acceptable notwith- 
 standing their tropical unconventionality and their free 
 airs of the high seas, is their beautiful style. He is a 
 true French artist. It is his manner, not his matter, 
 which entices. He has a rare and irresistible charm. 
 Under it and back of it are his extremely live sensibili- 
 ties and an imagination that delights to revel in the 
 sensuously lovely. He has painted over and over again 
 glorious and fragrant universes of color and feel- 
 ing that nearly all of us can only dream of and shall 
 never see.
 
 xii. Rosita Mauri
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 RosiTA Mauri, born in Spain in 1856, was for twenty years, 
 beginning in 1879, the leading star in the Paris Opera ballet. She 
 made her debut at the age of ten and danced on most of the great 
 continental stages. She came to Paris under the auspices of 
 Gounod. She was the most skillful dancer de caracterc of her 
 time. She later became an Officer of Public Instruction under the 
 Government.
 
 ROSITA MAURI 
 
 MADEMOISELLE MAURI was the leading 
 ballerine in Paris, and she held this title for 
 two decades! 
 
 Presidents of the Republic came and went; a score 
 of ministries rose into power and fell from grace; 
 countless singers and players had their day and dis- 
 appeared from view in the horizons of the past; but 
 the Mauri shone on as the one star of the first magni- 
 tude in the constellation of the Grand Opera ballet. 
 Seeing her execute the Breton jig in "la Korrigane" 
 of Widor, you understood one reason for her long 
 reign. It was the perfection of brilliant and expert 
 dancing as practiced and displayed in that last genera- 
 tion of the nineteenth century. 
 
 I used to drop in occasionally on Mademoiselle 
 Mauri when I was making a little study of ballet 
 music with Vazquez at the Opera. She lived up four 
 flights, just by the rear entrance of the Opera. An 
 enraged rat terrier, with a deafening bark, always met 
 me at the door. I would be shown into the bluish re- 
 ception room where two fauteuils, facing each other 
 as if in a conversational mood, stood before a closed 
 grate. Or I would be ushered into the Louis XV 
 salon where the chairs and sofas were dressed in white 
 frocks. Sometimes the Mauri would come in abun- 
 
 299
 
 300 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 dantly wrapped in a white shawl or a nubia in the at- 
 tempt to discourage the attack of a violent cold. In 
 such an amiable plight, her rectangular face alone 
 would be visible among her encircling draperies. 
 
 She was ever in a hurry and always sat on the edge 
 of her chair. But she chatted most frankly and freely 
 of her art, and gave voice to decided opinions about 
 the decadence of the ballet, the lack of male profes- 
 sors of the dance, and so on. If you were to ask her 
 what is to be the ballet of the future, she would per- 
 haps imitate the humorous Auber by replying, "That 
 which is danced the longest." 
 
 She appeared, on an average, twice a month at the 
 Grand Opera. She received an annual salary of forty- 
 five thousand francs with a month's leave of absence 
 in July or August. Her vacation was usually passed 
 at her country-place near Salis-de-Bearn between Ba- 
 yonne and Pau, or at some watering place where bac- 
 cara is played. It may be said, though, that while she 
 loved the complications of baccara, she never was able 
 to comprehend the pooling arrangements under which 
 French horse races are run. 
 
 Still, withal, she seemed economical and thrifty. 
 She lived in Paris in a modest noiseless fashion. She 
 wrote to you on inexpensive note paper, and, follow- 
 ing the example of Fanny Elssler and other great bal- 
 lerines, she fell into casual and charming misunder- 
 standings with French orthography. 
 
 She spoke French with a strong accent, for she was 
 Spanish, having been born near Barcelona. Her father 
 was a master of ballet. She had just the form for a
 
 Roslta Mauri 301 
 
 famous danseuse — ample legs and a light body. Her 
 black hair was worn short and frizzed, and was sille at 
 the left side. On the nights of her "premieres" she 
 drank, seven or eight cups of black coffee. A senti- 
 mental Parisian chronicler once augured that she 
 would fly from earth at the setting of the sun on a 
 summer's day. 
 
 The Mauri offered three emphatic traits of char- 
 acter. There was her energy. She was indefatigable 
 In rehearsing her roles, and invariably exhausted her 
 professor and colleagues by the numberless repetitions 
 of her pas. Then, she had a temper of her own, and 
 was said to rule the hosts at the Opera. When her 
 displeasure was aroused during a rehearsal, she ap- 
 peared to be transformed into a kind of gale, and 
 swept through the flies and across the stage like one 
 of her native solanos. At the same time she had the 
 reputation of being charitable with her purse, and she 
 always spoke well of her companions. As a result, 
 one never heard an ill or a jealous word of her.
 
 xiii. Frederic Mistral
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Frederic Mistral died in 1914 at the age of 84. He passed 
 his life in his native south of France and was the leader of the 
 Provencal revival. He aided in founding the Society of Felibres 
 in 1854. They became, in 1876, an extended organization with 
 him as chief. His most widely known production was "Mireio" 
 (1859) from which was taken the libretto for Gounod's opera 
 "Mireille" (1864). Mistral was the author of an immense dic- 
 tionary of Provencal tongues, reviving the idiom of the thirteenth 
 century. The Nobel prize for poetry came to him in 1904.
 
 FREDERIC MISTRAL 
 
 ON Sabbath afternoons in the simple village of 
 Maillane, where Frederic Mistral was born, 
 lived and died, there were wont to promenade 
 up and down the public thoroughfare two columns of 
 people. The one on the left wore deep blue cravats 
 and represented those daring modern fellows who 
 were the radicals and free-thinkers. The other column, 
 on the right, comprised those adhering to the ancient 
 ideas of the throne and the altar. They wore cravats 
 of light blue. 
 
 Mistral was to be found among those wearing the 
 light blue. He was thus true to his wonderful thir- 
 teenth century when the Troubadours reigned with 
 their graces and weaknesses, their romances and super- 
 stitions, their perennial youth and early decay. In 
 fact Mistral and his followers set up a real kingdom 
 of letters, sanctified by rites, glorified by festivals, and 
 crowned with toasts of beflowered rhetoric and rimes 
 in praise of that lovely dead Provengal past of which 
 they were the direct inheritors. Theirs was a knightly 
 round table out in plein air, graced with roses and love, 
 embellished with sunshine and wine, with gay laughter 
 and simple faith, in a realm where elderly men exu- 
 berantly married young wives. 
 
 Successive Queens of the Felibres also reigned — 
 
 30s
 
 3o6 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 women so good to look upon that they appear always 
 to be chosen for their pulchritude — lustrous midnights 
 in their hair, unfathomable depths in their soft black 
 eyes. And the first of them was Mistral's young wife, 
 to whom he was married at forty-six. 
 
 His appearance brought to mind some Southern 
 colonel. He had the emotionalism and lounging ways 
 of our own warm South. His soft hat tossed on 
 across his right ear, his martial mustache, his lordly 
 goatee, his skin tanned by a thousand suns, his hospit- 
 able enthusiasm, suggested a grandee of royal girth 
 and spacious manners, ready to burst forth in expan- 
 sive mirth or quickly to shed a confiding and sympa- 
 thetic tear. 
 
 Much has been written to show his hilarity and frol- 
 icsomeness, especially at the time when Daudet visited 
 their adored Provence. They and their fellows, 
 bearded, loose-limbed, with the jaunty swagger of their 
 warm clime, carried on "high jinks" amid the home 
 folk up and down the river valley. They played 
 pranks, shouted and laughed, absorbed much wine, 
 and reveled in the tales and jests of their boasted local- 
 ity. 
 
 Some conceive of Mistral as a literary aristocrat and 
 Overlord, dwelling in a home rich and beautiful with 
 art objects suggesting the romantic days of Aucassin 
 and Nicolette. They picture him as a luxurious esthete 
 and master dilettant able to linger for months over 
 an archaic rime and toy for years over the memories 
 of a decayed language and literature that had appeared 
 dancing in a few light-hearted pages of history.
 
 Frederic Mistral 307 
 
 Others are led to think of Mistral as a rustic true to 
 his peasant mother, and living in a cottage containing 
 two rooms, one above the other, and companioned by 
 that poor man's friend — a dog. 
 
 Though he was king of the southern half of France 
 — the most famous and beloved man there — he pre- 
 tended in fact to be a sort of clodhopper. In his vil- 
 lage, not far from the medieval Avignon, of royal and 
 papal memories, he was contented for a long lifetime 
 to receive the homages of the world. No well-edu- 
 cated person thought a visit to that province complete 
 without having paid his very welcome respects to the 
 Chief of the Felibres. Citizens of distant America 
 even were numbered in his circle of personal interests. 
 He dedicated a poem to President Roosevelt, and in- 
 cluded Richard Watson Gilder among the acknowl- 
 edged friends of his Society. On Mistral's tomb, built 
 at Aries in 1907, the face of Roosevelt is one of the 
 faces carved in the marble. 
 
 Modest in his life of provincial triumphs. Mistral 
 seemed to have been born under a lucky star. His 
 evenly modeled hands were spoken of as indicating his 
 tranquil life. Good of heart, manly, he had the full 
 leisure to love all that was noble and beautiful. Hav- 
 ing fallen heir to sufficient means from his farmer 
 father, he was always free from economic pressure and 
 could thus slowly do a worthy work that would have 
 been impossible to those of the pen who see the prowl- 
 ing wolf whenever they peek out of doors. 
 
 To labor twenty years, eight hours a day, on a 
 production as little salable as a Provengal dictionary,
 
 3o8 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 though unique and valued as it is, required an assured 
 ease of purse. This toil of love, picking up fragments 
 of one's ancient native idiom from fisher folk, and old 
 housewives at their daily tasks, demanded an occupied, 
 gossiping idleness such as belonged only to a loquacious 
 Felibre. With a dallying beauty and simpleness could 
 he write: "If joy comes not to-day, assuredly it will 
 come to-morrow. And as soon as the violet breathes 
 her perfume, the butterfly will flutter to her; then will 
 the maiden, like a ripening fruit, come to her lover; 
 and the crystal dewdrop will be as radiant as a dia- 
 mond." 
 
 The crowning of his literary fame was precisely his 
 early poem "Mireio" (1859), from which came forth 
 the libretto for Gounod's famous opera of "Mireille." 
 One may well say that it is the most popular opera 
 comique in France save "Carmen" and "Mignon." 
 One of the toasts drunk by the Society of Felibres was: 
 "I drink to Mireille, the most beautiful mirror in 
 which Provence looks at herself." 
 
 Only a few times did the king of the Provencals 
 leave his white, sun-baked roads and the vineyard 
 shores of his gallant river Rhone. A trip to Switzer- 
 land, one to Italy, a few rare journeys to Paris as 
 an uncrowned rustic ruler in that great republic of 
 letters — these sojourns but attested to the loyal de- 
 votion and local pride with which he insisted on dwell- 
 ing firmly at home. Logical in his pride of provincial 
 attitude, he declined to become one of the Immortal 
 Forty on principle. All that was too far away — in 
 Paris.
 
 Frederic Mistral 309 
 
 While it is to be recorded that he succeeded in a 
 highly enviable measure, he at the same time failed 
 in part. Though his literary labors were of undeniable 
 profit and permanence, his career did not swerve the 
 great main modern course of French literature. In- 
 stead of dipping back toward Provencal forms and 
 fashions as Mistral might have wished, it showed de- 
 cided signs of a contrary bent, leaning rather to the 
 contemporary kingdom of slang and tramp philosophy, 
 as witness Richepin's "la Chanson des gueux." The 
 Troubadours were royal tramps, but the latter-day 
 Weary Willies are the hobos of a democracy concern- 
 ing which Mistral had small understanding and sym- 
 pathy. With all his exuberant tendencies that belong 
 to his "boiling South," he had a grave and phlegmatic 
 side, and could expatiate at length on the sadness and 
 shame of present times. His unfriendliness to mo- 
 dernity was shown by his favoring the use of the guillo- 
 tine and disfavoring the modern ascendancy of femi- 
 nism which appeared to mean to him the descent to- 
 ward effeminacy. 
 
 Mistral — last of the veritable Troubadours — was 
 truly gifted in that he was an erudite philologist who 
 possessed a rare creative sense of poetic form. His 
 name had become greater than any direct appeal of the 
 output of his pen; for only to the learned few does 
 the bent of his labors mean anything. It was to the 
 credit of this not ungrateful or ungenerous age that he 
 reaped all the rewards of fame from a public which 
 understood practically nothing of his work. While he 
 humbly pushed away scholastic honors from himself,
 
 310 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 they only crowded the more thickly about his brow. 
 The very nature of his undertaking disarmed criticism. 
 There was none of his compatriots who really cared 
 to say him nay, though he persisted in not using the 
 national language except in translating his own books. 
 He fairly earned his share of the Nobel prize in 
 1904, with the proceeds of which he founded a Pro- 
 vencal museum at Aries. A few months before his 
 death he appropriately wrote: "The days that grow 
 chill and the swelling sea — all things tell me that the 
 winter of my life has come, and that I must without 
 delay gather my olives and offer the virgin oil on the 
 altar of God."
 
 xiv. Georges Pellissier
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Georges Pellissier was born in 1852 and died during the war 
 period. He was a valuable literary critic whose life was hidden 
 in his analytical volumes. He violently attacked Shakespeare's 
 reputation as a playwright.
 
 GEORGES PELLISSIER 
 
 WHEN chatting with Alphonse Daudet one 
 morning, the name of Pellissier was men- 
 tioned. Daudet, noticing that I appeared 
 to be acquainted with PeUissier, said: 
 
 "Let me tell you what I guess about him, for I do 
 not know him and I know no one who does. I merely 
 judge from his article on 'la Petite Paroisse,' but I'm 
 pretty sure I am right. He is a Protestant or, at least, 
 of a Protestant family — his father may be, or may 
 have been, a pastor. You see there was a certain taste 
 of stringent morality biting that article. I don't mean 
 that I think M. Pellissier is orthodox: I mean an en- 
 franchised, liberal Protestant. I fancy he lives alone, 
 works alone, mixes little with the world, that he tries 
 to escape personal influences, prejudices, and entangle- 
 ments in order to be perfectly just as a literary appre- 
 ciator amid the silence of books instead of the noise 
 of the public. 
 
 "He is not after favors and is prodigal of none. 
 He expects severe consideration, and does not wish 
 to be chary of encouragement. Honesty, rationalism, 
 humaneness — those are about his guiding words. And 
 another thing — he is not chauvinistic. In general, our 
 French literary censors are not familiar with other 
 modern countries and literatures, and consciously or 
 
 313
 
 314 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 unconsciously look down on them. Not so, M. Pellls- 
 sler. Some influence or circumstance in his life — I 
 don't know what — has opened him up to a sort of 
 cosmopolitan forbearance — to an international clem- 
 ency of view. Now — how near right am I?" 
 
 Daudet guessed correctly in outline. Pellissier's 
 father was a venerable Protestant pastor on the left 
 bank of the Seine. The family was deistically re- 
 ligious and strongly Republican. Consequently the son 
 was reared abreast of the best commanding influences 
 (not essentially Catholic) which have slowly shaped 
 the destinies of France to-day under the Third Re- 
 public. He was of that excellent class of Parisian 
 people who read the "Temps" and the "Journal des 
 Debats" and applaud the plays of Augier. He mar- 
 ried a Prussian lady who was educated in Paris. Ger- 
 man as well as French was used currently by his chil- 
 dren, although Pellissier only spoke his native tongue. 
 In this way his cosmopolitanism, which Daudet re- 
 marked, may be accounted for. 
 
 Pellissier used to be at home in the silent depths 
 of Passy just on the verge of the Bois de Boulogne. 
 He lived nearly opposite where Brunetiere lived before 
 the latter took his apartments in the rue de Rennes to 
 be near the "Revue des Deux Mondes" and the Sor- 
 bonne. Pellissier shunned society and companionship 
 save that of his family and his bicycle. He divorced 
 himself from his confreres, the theater, public galleries, 
 salons — Paris, in a word; for he believed that a liter- 
 ary critic needs to know books, not careers, personali- 
 ties, gossip. From analogous motives he never at-
 
 Georges PelFissier 315 
 
 tempted verse, playmeking, fiction, or general, non- 
 literary subjects. Alone of all his contemporary 
 French reviewers, he was first and last a critic of let- 
 ters. He did not parade, courted no external ambi- 
 tions, hid his life, and tried to keep the lives of his 
 confreres hidden — even from himself. He had re- 
 fused a chair at the Sorbonne because he felt that 
 there was a certain "snobisme," as he expressed it 
 to me, in its atmosphere. 
 
 His maiden duties as a professor of rhetoric were 
 exercised at Fontenay-aux-Roses — that well-known 
 village south of Paris. Here he wrote his first book — 
 the standard one that gave him at once a high reputa- 
 tion: "Le Mouvement litteraire aux XIX. siecle." 
 
 I used to have the privilege of slipping to Passy on 
 the train and talking with Pellissier about books of 
 the day. He would sit in beslippered ease and smoke 
 cigarettes in a slightly nervous manner while formu- 
 lating literary judgments in the conversational French 
 style. He conversed, as he wrote, with a sober strict- 
 ness of expression, firm, direct and above all logical — 
 few figures of speech, little imagery and color. His 
 aim was the truth, rational, moral, piercing, contract- 
 ing truth, not rounding beauty, not expanding indul- 
 gences or insinuating entertainment. Trenchant was 
 he and lucid, strengthening and sincere. This is what 
 you do not ask of Parisian reviewers as a rule. He 
 preferred to be serious rather than conspicuous at the 
 risk of being frivolous or misleading.
 
 XV. Edouard Rod
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Edouard Rod (pronounced rode) was born in Switzerland in 
 1857 and died in 1910. He lived latterly in Paris. He was an 
 editor, professor of comparative literature, novelist and critic. He 
 lectured in America in 1899. He took up early with Schopen- 
 hauer's pessimism and Wagner's music and published many 
 volumes. He was a serious contemplator and examiner of anxious 
 problems concerning the soul and human destiny.
 
 EDOUARD ROD 
 
 EDOUARD ROD lived in company with ideas. 
 Life came to him second-handed. His exist- 
 ence was neutralized into his classroom, his 
 study, his indoctrinations. His personality was not 
 original, diversified nor piquant. It was sane, regular 
 and praiseworthy even to commonplaceness. There 
 were no pegs on which to hang one's human interest. 
 
 On the only occasion I ever met him he was afflicted 
 with a severe cold. He was bundled up, stuffed up, 
 blinked up. Letters and life seemed through his eyes 
 and feelings to be clogged up, barred off or at any rate 
 dammed. As often as I have thought of him since, 
 that impression has revived and I have always as- 
 sociated stuffiness and uncomfortableness with his liter- 
 ary legacy and outlook. This may illustrate the de- 
 fect or danger of Sainte-Beuve's medium of personality 
 in estimating the output of an author. 
 
 This trivial incident of Monsieur Rod's rheum, 
 however, chances to fit in, in a way, with his innate and 
 incurable pessimism. Yet his pessimism seemed rather 
 a sort of indigestion of the very good things of earth. 
 Success and prosperity were the plats from which he 
 partook at the banquet of life, and still he could not 
 but ask constantly. Why eat ? Why enjoy ? Why live ? 
 
 Far lighter and pleasanter than his quasi masters 
 
 319
 
 320 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 Schopenhauer and Leopardi, he was of plainer, more 
 substantial stuff than the typical Parisian skeptics of 
 his day. One need not look to him for any discon- 
 solate force, intensity, isolated grandeur nor, on the 
 other hand, for any Pyrrhonic brilliancy and irony. 
 He was never an ironist, though he belonged to the 
 little circle of pungent jesters in the sanctum of the 
 "Journal des Debats." In truth he was a genuine pro- 
 fessor rather than a genuine literary man, and most 
 truly belonged with Brunetiere, Faguet and the others 
 in the gray, somber, doctrinal portals of the "Revue 
 des Deux Mondes." 
 
 Born and reared on the banks of the azure Leman 
 with his face toward both Germany and France, Mon- 
 sieur Rod finally decided to be French. In preferring 
 not to develop the exotic within him, and thus not to 
 add a distinctly new segment of horizon to the realm 
 of French letters, he may have missed his greatest op- 
 portunity. If he had held himself aloof from and 
 discussed Paris in his volumes as he held himself aloof 
 from and discussed his theses, he might have originated 
 a more valuable and entertaining work. 
 
 His hybrid nature partly explains that certain steril- 
 ity which nearly always marks his ideas, impulses and 
 productions. For instance, he neutralized the Calvin- 
 istic element within him by believing, like a royalist 
 Frenchman, that the Holy See is on the whole suffi- 
 ciently representative and reformative. If one had 
 objected in the presence of Monsieur Rod to the ef- 
 facement of the individual in the uniformity of Roman- 
 ism, he would have responded by objecting to the per-
 
 Edouard Rod 321 
 
 sonal wranglings rife in the individualistic Protestant 
 parishes such as he was famihar with in his cherished 
 canton of Vaud. 
 
 His stories are to be distinguished from the usual 
 French novel by the fact that they are "clean"; yet, 
 highly alive to the moral demands of the Protestant 
 races, he was under the impression, as he told me, that 
 the "immorality" of his fiction was the reason why it 
 had not found a foothold in England and America. 
 As for his own attitude toward religion, he would 
 believe, but could not — like almost every psychologist 
 of the Renan group. He was a "Calvinist free 
 thinker." 
 
 His pronounced consciousness of mot, the source or 
 sign of his as well as of all pessimism, was neither exag- 
 gerated, eccentric nor ailing. It was intellectual dilet- 
 tantism. His debuts in literature were extremely 
 Naturalistic, but he soon revolted against Zola and 
 willingly classified himself with Bourget and Barres. 
 He was legitimately the truest son of Goethe to be 
 found in the family of contemporary French authors. 
 He characterized Goethe as the father of modern 
 dilettantism, and indicated himself when he defined 
 a goetheen as one who is "above all intelligent or . . . 
 comprehensive" because he embraces subjects rather 
 than penetrates them, interests himself in everything 
 for the purpose of enjoying all his faculties, yet gives 
 himself wholly to nothing; — who is, in brief, largely 
 tolerant and sympathetic because he is indifferent. 
 
 Thus Monsieur Rod's dilettanism — his rather ple- 
 thoric, after-dinner indolence and indifference — as-
 
 322 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 sumed the guise of intellectual luxury. Now and then 
 he exclaimed against such a fate: "Ah, thrice cursed is 
 he who has touched the damned dilettantism!" But 
 the die was cast and nothing was left to him except to 
 make the most of it. And that he did with very good 
 grace, for that matter. After all, like his own Michel 
 Teissier, he loved his ailment. 
 
 Monsieur Rod was born in 1857, and studied at 
 Berne and Berlin and at the Sorbonne. His belletristic 
 career was divided between Paris and Geneva. He re- 
 sided for quite a time on the slopes of the Seine at 
 Auteuil where in his salon on Sunday afternoons one 
 could meet many of the literary celebrities of France. 
 He was a rather large man, fine looking, polished in 
 manner, companionable. His voice was very soft and 
 pleasant, and he had talents as a conferencier. He 
 never liked teaching and apparently cared little for the 
 title of erudite. He studied seriously many varied sub- 
 jects such as Wagner's estheticism, contemporary Ital- 
 ian literature, Pre-Raphaelitism; yet he did not per- 
 mit these exotic chiaroscuros and perspectives to en- 
 rich and beautify the grisaille pages of his fiction.
 
 xvi. Rosny the Elder
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 RosNY THE Elder is the literary name of Joseph Henry 
 BoEX with whom his younger brother Justin collaborated under 
 the combined name of J.-H. Rosny. He is a Naturalistic novelist 
 who was bom in Brussels, lived in London, then settled in Paris. 
 He is a member of the Goncourt Academy. His fiction portrays 
 Socialism, the Salvation Army and kindred themes, dealing with 
 the life of the poor and the laboring classes. He opposed the 
 extreme Realism of Zola. Rosny is not given to detail. He is 
 interested mainly in effective but uncomplicated presentations of 
 characters and subjects.
 
 ROSNY THE ELDER 
 
 TAKEN altogether Rosny is, in his manner, di- 
 dactic with tolerance, digressive while being 
 characteristically logical and lucid, concen- 
 trated and precise without closing to the future or the 
 possible any of the windows of his soul. 
 
 It was at a little soiree of M. Durand, the husband 
 of Henry Greville, that I met the elder Rosny. I had 
 taken him for a college professor as I noticed him 
 conversing, in an earnest, absorbed, strenuous way, 
 across the room. His black beard and hair contrasted 
 with the dead pallor of his skin; he had the erudite 
 stoop; he wore that unhealthy air which comes from a 
 congestion of study. In venturing to chat with him 
 later in the evening, I confirmed his instructing, persua- 
 sive manner in talking, and his care in being perfectly 
 clear. He uses English well, for he long lived in Lon- 
 don, and married an English lady. 
 
 When I went into the refreshment room at M. 
 Durand's, the fragmentary conversation was displaying 
 couleurs de rose, as is natural under such circumstances, 
 and Rosny was beginning: "I am an optimist because" 
 — but, unfortunately, he was Interrupted at this point 
 by incomers who inadvertently silenced the sentence. 
 I, for one, was sorry at the time not to learn Rosny's 
 reasons for his optimism, since it was the fashion with 
 
 325
 
 326 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 the younger literary Frenchmen of the epoch to be 
 dyed in, or tinctured with, pessimism. 
 
 It happened that I came downstairs with him that 
 night in the rue de Crenelle. I saw him wrap himself 
 thickly in his overcoat and turn south on his way to 
 his home in the rue Didot through the empty, lone- 
 some streets of southwest Paris — off toward the 
 Pasteur Institute and among the anarchists (now ex- 
 anarchists) whom Rosny had studied so carefully. I 
 should have feared this journey at such a late hour, for 
 there were ruffians in that homely, half-despairing 
 quarter of the city. 
 
 Rosny wrote in collaboration with a junior brother, 
 and their fiction was put forth under the style of J.-H. 
 Rosny. Personally they did not court publicity. No 
 photograph of them was to be found anywhere, and 
 their names were rarely mentioned in the press. 
 
 Two or three weeks afterward, Rosny the Elder 
 honored me by a call one evening. He told us of the 
 story he was writing about the invisible beings that, 
 he fancied, live among us on this planet, rub shoulders 
 with us, and exist for one another and not for us, as 
 we exist for one another and not for them — a sort of 
 Xipehuz. 
 
 I was tempted to ask him who had written the best 
 essay on the Rosny novels. "M. Pellissier," he re- 
 plied. "His essay is, on the whole, just. It notes my 
 real defects as a writer and appreciates my good points. 
 But — I don't know why it is or should be so — the 
 critics take too long to say a little. At least it seems 
 so to me. And then they are apt to magnify your short-
 
 Rosny the Elder 327 
 
 comings and minimize your commendable qualities. 
 They will remark, 'He is not a bad fellow and does 
 creditable work,' in one paragraph, and then detail 
 and enlarge upon your failings in ten paragraphs. 
 This leaves inevitably a disproportioned, and there- 
 fore unfair, impression in the mind of the reader." 
 
 Rosny thought that the ancient classics and the Louis 
 XIV classics assume too important a role in French 
 education and in French civilization. For him, France 
 is too universitaire. He was forced, as a boy, to read 
 only French books of the 17th century. There were 
 no others in his father's library. 
 
 In spite of himself, Rosny is discursive In his con- 
 versation and oral discussions. He is often obliged 
 to force himself to return to his subject, and this leaves 
 him visibly dissatisfied that the hours are so short and 
 words so exclusive and imperfect. For his brain teems 
 with ideas and conceits, and with the most recently 
 ascertained or adopted facts in many branches of 
 knowledge. Each suggestion awakes a thousand other 
 suggestions In his mind; each fancy points to a thou- 
 sand other fancies across his vision. 
 
 He longs to give voice to it all — to delve, to roam, 
 to explore, to soar; but Time Is ever nudging his elbow 
 and he must hurry away to whatever narrow task he 
 happens to have in hand. Rosny Is one of the few 
 great Frenchmen I ever met who are manifestly rushed 
 in something like our American fashion — never begin- 
 ning, never ending, never really halting. 
 
 As my lamplight shone on his face from my study 
 table that evening, I watched his wide eyes and his
 
 328 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 bloodless, intellectual face. It is very broad at the 
 temples, in indication, I suppose, of his comprehensive 
 mind. He has a way of smacking his lips a little — 
 drawing them together and apart — as he attempts to 
 express exactly his thought. 
 
 One afternoon a month later, he sent me a copy 
 of "I'Autre Femme." I read it the same day. In it 
 the two brother analysts deal with Woman from the 
 French standpoint still (i. e., husband, wife and 
 mistress), but with the fact in view that the Teutonic 
 races are the most aggressive and prolific and yet tend 
 to monogamy. 
 
 This novel is a firm, transparent, psychological 
 study of the terrible moral effect of a liaison on the 
 lover, his wife and their children. The subject is the 
 menage of the wife, and not that of the mistress as 
 is the rule in Parisian fiction. The erring lover is, in 
 this case, an intelligent, serious man who finds his mon- 
 ogamic instinct at war with his polygamous instinct. 
 In his endeavor to reason to a valid and self-satisfying 
 conclusion, he inevitably fails, and falls back, on the 
 traditional argument which he recognizes as stupid — 
 namely, "the right of man because he is a man." This 
 volume is a modest link in the modern evolution of 
 the monogamic impulse in French literature.
 
 xvii. Victorien Sardou
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 ViCTORiEN Sardou died in 1908 at the age of 77. He entered 
 the Academy in 1878. He would likely be called the most cele- 
 brated and influential dramatist of modem times, Ibsen excepted.
 
 VICTORIEN SARDOU 
 
 SARDOU was une vraie ficelle — a wise fox. 
 Madame Bernhardt was likewise one. Indeed 
 they were the most grand and conspicuous ex- 
 amples of their time. It would be hard to say which 
 could have called the turn on the other in a real con- 
 test. But, in fact, through all the wars and scrimmages 
 of the drama and theater in Paris, they remained 
 splendid friends. I certainly felt a bit eerie one day 
 when he suddenly inquired, "Do you know how Sarah's 
 toothache is that she had on Thursday?" To have 
 seen her and him rehearsing together must have been 
 a sight for the gods. 
 
 A familiar view of him by the public was to be had 
 when he was driven through the streets on the way 
 to or from a rehearsal along the sumptuous, gloomy 
 facades of the Louvre, his top hat tilted on the back of 
 his head, a white neckerchief trying to stifle him, his 
 arm reaching out now and then in a dramatic reach to 
 give combativeness to the subject in hand. 
 
 Sardou was one of the very few international 
 Frenchmen. He was a cosmopolitan. He somehow 
 always belonged to the imperial reign — the Second 
 Empire. He had an ambitious outlook toward the 
 outer and greater world, like the Napoleons. Mag- 
 nificent size, loud trumpetings, the power and grandeur 
 
 331
 
 332 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 which dazzle and win the vast common multitudes, the 
 gloire together with something of its ever-sounding 
 emptiness — this was reflected, reechoed, in the showy 
 plays of the later Sardou. He antedated the Third 
 Republic and was not strictly of it or with it. 
 
 It was a fine treat to see him sweeping down his 
 study, thundering against the modern regime — "je vais 
 les embeter! — vous allez voir!" — "I am going to 
 stump them — you will see !" He was a militant gen- 
 eral, a grand agitator, a vehement partisan. He was 
 nevertheless the variety of bourgeois who always looks 
 back to Louis Philippe. Amazingly expansive in his 
 sudden confidences (for he was a southerner), he 
 would send you the next day one of his undecipherable 
 notes suggesting that you do not happen to mention 
 the matter in hand to any one interested. 
 
 No one, of course, has done so much as Sardou 
 to glorify the drama by costly spectacles shining with 
 a wealth of historical details. He had a genius and 
 conscience about stage accuracy, truthful reproduction. 
 He was methodical and tireless. The amount of time 
 and effort he expended on the topic of the French Revo- 
 lution, for instance, was extreme. I once saw his 
 Robespierre data. It was fatiguing to contemplate. 
 He had countless drawers containing everything he 
 could find on every dramatic subject he could hear of 
 in the world. 
 
 A wealthy connoisseur, an alert observer, an expert 
 collector, he was however not strictly a student. He 
 was an excellent business man, shrewd, strongly execu- 
 tive. If you were two or three minutes late, the door 
 
 *
 
 Victorien Sardou 333 
 
 was inexorably closed. You would have to return the 
 next day. He had fifty definite plays rampant in his 
 mind, each greater or more important than the others. 
 He had a hundred projects which he was driving for- 
 ward like an imperator. Energy, adaptability, the 
 most clever resourcefulness, unequaled experience — 
 every one knows he combined all in the highest degree. 
 The effect on the emotions of the public in a theater — 
 he had reduced all that to an absolute science with 
 no one to dispute with him about it. He knew just 
 when and where the average spectator would have to 
 clamp himself to his seat in order not to hit the ceiling. 
 
 Sardou was an accomplished actor, though he was 
 never on the stage. As in the case of Madame Bern- 
 hardt, the best acting he did was going on constantly, 
 every day, in the strictly domestic side of his life. A 
 young American woman once happened to overhear 
 that I was going to see him the next morning. She 
 was "dying" to meet him. Would I not take her? 
 I did, feeling that he would not take exception. As 
 we were leaving his study, he took her hand to say 
 good-by. He put his other palm over both hands and 
 turned to me with the air of a conquered admirer, 
 courtier, and downright friend, admitting, "What 
 beautiful eyes she has!" It was a perfect little piece of 
 stage business and coquetry. 
 
 My young unmarried friend was swept off her feet. 
 She bounded down the boulevard as if a King had 
 proposed to her. "Just think of it!" she kept exclaim- 
 ing. "I shall be able to tell my grandchildren that the 
 great Sardou told their grandmother she had beautiful 
 
 I*.
 
 334 French Essays and Profiles 
 
 eyes." I have always thought that incident turned 
 her to the stage, for she had never dreamed of the 
 theater as a profession. At any rate, she became one 
 of our conspicuous actresses. 
 
 Sardou was truly a great and worthy man. He 
 wrote plays of many different and lasting kinds. We 
 are apt to think only of his large and sometimes doubt- 
 ful sensations in which it was partly his object to 
 epater le monde — dumfound mankind. We are apt 
 to forget that no play touches the true patriotic French 
 heart more direct than "Patrie" (1869), and no home 
 play continues more pleasantly popular among the best 
 bourgeois classes in France than "Nos Intimes" 
 (1861). If we consider the theater in general as it 
 was in i860 and as it is to-day, has any one, if we ex- 
 cept Ibsen, had anything like Sardou's influence upon 
 its developments? 
 
 THE END
 
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