Well!" said the Queen with a fierce laugh, "she is right! I never saw, I think, a more frightful object." At those words Jacinthe thought she should die of grief. Doubt was no longer possible, since to the Queen's eyes as well as to those of the beggar she was ugly. Slowly she lowered her eyelids, and fell fainting on the steps of the throne, looking like a dead woman. But when her lover heard the cruel words, he was by no means resigned; he shouted loudly that either the Queen was mad, or that she had some reason for so gross a lie. He had not time to say a word more; the guards seized him and held him fast. At a sign from the Queen some one advanced, who was the executioner. He was always near the throne, because he might be wanted at any moment. "Do your duty," said the Queen, pointing to the man who had insulted her. The executioner lifted a big sword, while Jacinthe, not knowing where she was, beating the air with her hands, languidly opened one eye, and then two very different cries were heard. One was a shout of joy, for in the bright naked steel Jacinthe saw herself, so deliciously pretty! and the other was a cry of pain, a rattle, because the ugly and wicked Queen gave up the ghost in shame and anger at having also seen herself in the unthought-of mirror. L THE MAN OF LETTERS AST evening, a poet, as yet unknown, was correcting the last sheets of his first book. A famous man of letters, who happened to be there, quickly caught hold of the young man's hand, and said in a rough voice, "Don't send the press proofs! Don't publish those poems!" "You consider them bad?" "I haven't read them, and I don't want to read them. They are possibly excellent. But beware of publishing them." "Why?" "Because, the book once out, you would henceforth be irremediably an author, an artist- that is to say, a monster!" "A monster? "Yes." "Are you a monster, dear master?" «< Certainly! and one of the worst kind; for I have been writing poems, novels, and plays longer than many others." The young man opened his eyes wide. The other, walking up and down the room, violently gesticulating, continued: me : "True, we are honest, upright, and loyal! Twenty or thirty years ago it was the fashion for literary men to borrow a hundred sous and forget to return them; to leave their lodgings without giving the landlord notice; and never to pay, even in a dream, their bootmaker or their tailor. To owe was a sort of duty. Follies of one's youth! The Bohemians have disappeared; literature has become respectable. We have cut our hair and put our affairs in order. We no longer wear red waistcoats; and our concierge bows to us because we give him tips, just as politely as he does to the banker on the ground floor or the lawyer on the second. Good citizens, good husbands, good fathers, we prepare ourselves epitaphs full of honor. I fought in the last war side by side with Henri Regnault; I have a wife to whom I have never given the slightest cause for sorrow; and I myself teach my three children geography and history, and bring them up to have a horror of literature. Better still: it happened to a remarkable turning of the tables-to lend six thousand francs to one of my uncles, an ironmonger at Angoulême, who had foolishly got into difficulties, and not without reading him a severe lecture. In a word, we are orderly, correct persons. But I say we are monsters. For isn't it indeed a monstrous thing, being a man, not to be-not to be able to be- a man like other men? to be unable to love or to hate, to rejoice or to suffer, as others love or hate, rejoice or suffer? And we cannot,- no, no, never, not under any circumstances! Obliged to consider or observe, obliged to study, analyze, in ourselves and outside. ourselves, all feelings, all passions; to be ever on the watch for the result, to follow its development and fall, to consign to our memory the attitudes they bring forth, the language they inspire,we have definitely killed in ourselves the faculty of real emotion, the power of being happy or unhappy with simplicity. We have lost all the holy unctuousness of the soul! It has become impossible for us, when we experience, to confine ourselves to experiencing. We verify, we appraise our hopes, our agonies, our anguish of heart, our joys; we take note of the jealous torments that devour us when she whom we expect does not come to the tryst; our abominable critical sense judges kisses and caresses, compares them, approves of them or not, makes reservations; we discover faults of taste in our transports of joy or grief; we mingle grammar with love, and at the supreme moment of passion, when we say to our terrified mistress, 'Oh, I want you to love me till death!' are victims of the relative pronoun, of the particle. Literature! literature! you have become our heart, our senses, our flesh, our voice. It is not a life that we live-it is a poem, or a novel, or a play. Ah! I would give up all the fame that thirty years of work have brought me, in order to weep for one single moment without perceiving that I am weeping!" Translation of Elizabeth Lee. GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-) BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL HAT Robert Browning is among English poets, George Meredith is among English novelists. A writer of genius who had no predecessors and who can have no posterity, the isolation of Meredith is inherent in the very constitution of his remarkable novels. These are so completely of the man himself that their kind will perish with him. Their weaknesses elude the imitation of the most scholarly contortionists of English. Their strength is altogether superlative and unique. GEORGE MEREDITH In the preface to a late work Meredith writes: "The forecast may be hazarded that if we do not speedily embrace philosophy in fiction, the art is doomed to extinction." The Meredithian principle of the novel is summed up in this prophecy. There have not been wanting critics to whom the lusty embraces of art with philosophy in Mr. Meredith's novels seem productive of little but intolerable weariness to the reader. Be this as it may, the writer of 'The Egoist' and of the Tragic Comedians' has been scrupulously faithful to his ideal of what constitutes vitality in fiction. He never descends to the deadening vulgarity of an intricate plot, nor does he swamp character in incident. His men and women reveal themselves by their subtle play upon one another in the slow progress of situations lifelike in their apparent unimportance. They are actors not in a romance nor in a melodrama, but in a drama of philosophy. Sometimes this philosophy of Meredith's lies like a cloak of lead about the delicate form of his rare poetical imagination. The enchanting lines can only be faintly traced through the formless shroud. The man who wrote this love passage in 'Richard Feverel' might seem to have made sad uses of philosophy in his later books: "The sweet heaven-bird shivered out his song above him. The gracious glory of heaven fell upon his soul. He touched her hand, not moving his eyes from her nor speaking: and she with a soft word of farewell passed across the stile, and up the pathway through the dewy shades of the copse, and out of the arch of the light, away from his eyes." From the delight of pure beauty like this, the reader passes to sentences where the metaphysician has buried the artist and poet under the unhewn masses of his thought. "A witty woman is a treasure: a witty beauty is a power. Has she actual beauty, actual wit? not an empty, tidal, material beauty that passes current among pretty flippancy or staggering pretentiousness? Grant the combination: she will appear a veritable queen of her period, fit for homage, at least meriting a disposition to believe the best of her in the teeth of foul rumor; because the well of true wit is truth itself, the gathering of the precious drops of right reason, wisdom's lighting; and no soul possessing it and dispensing it can justly be a target for the world, however well armed the world confronting her. Our contemporary world, that Old Credulity and stone-hurling urchin in one, supposes it possible for a woman to be mentally active up to the point of spiritual clarity, and also fleshly vile a guide to life and a biter at the fruits of death-both open mind and a hypocrite.» Between these two passages there is apparently a great gulf fixed, but they are equally expressive of the genius of George Meredith. He is a poet whose passion for mind has led him far enough away from the poetical environment. Of all English novelists, none approach him in his absorption in the minds of men. He weaves his novels not around what men do, but what they think. Mental sensations form the subject-matter of his chapters. He delights in minute analyses, which, as in 'The Egoist,' reveal human nature unclothed. He laughs over his own amazing discoveries, but he seldom victimizes a woman. What sympathy he has with his creations falls to the lot of his heroines. The minds of women are to George Meredith the most fascinating subjects of research in the universe. He may jest at times over their contradictions; but he attributes their worst features to man, who should have been the civilizer of woman, but who has been instead the refined savage, gloating over "veiled, virginal dolls." Meredith, who was born in 1828, was many years in revealing himself to the British public, who loved him not. He had published a volume of verse in 1851, and he was known to the narrow circle of his friends as a poet only. His first wife was the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, who was in a sense the spiritual progenitor of George Meredith the novelist. The eccentric author of 'Headlong Hall' and 'Maid Marian,' whose novels are peopled with "perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners," might well have influenced the author of 'One of Our Conquerors.' |