CHAPTER VII
Tarr had Anastasya in solitary promenade two days after this. He had worked the first stage consummately. He swam with ease beside his big hysterical black swan, seeming to guide her with a golden halter. They were swimming with august undulations of thought across the Luxembourg Gardens on this sunny and tasteful evening about four o’clock. The Latins and Scandinavians who strolled on the Latin terrace were each one a microscopic hero, but better turned out than the big doubtful heroes of 1840.
The inviolate, constantly sprinkled and shining lawns by the Lycée Henri Trois were thickly fringed with a sort of seaside humanity, who sat facing them and their coolness as though it had been the sea. Leaving these upland expanses to the sedentary swarms of Mammas and Papas, Tarr and Anastasya crossed over beneath the trees past the children’s carousels grinding out their antediluvian lullabies.
This place represented the richness of four wasted years. Four incredibly gushing, thick years; what had happened to this delightful muck? All this profusion had accomplished for him was to dye the avenues of a Park with personal colour for the rest of his existence.
No one, he was quite convinced, had squandered so much stuff in the neighbourhood of these terraces, ponds, and lawns. So this was more nearly his Park than it was anybody else’s. He should never walk through it without bitter and soothing recognition from it. Well: that was what the Man of Action accomplished. In four idle years he had been, when most inactive, trying the man of action’s job. He had captured a Park!—Well! he had spent himself into the Earth. The trees had his sap in them.
He remembered a day when he had brought a book to the bench there, his mind tearing at it in advance, almost writing it in its energy. He had been full of such unusual faith. The streets around these gardens, in which he had lodged alternately, were so many confluents and tributaries of memory, charging it on all sides with defunct puissant tides. The places, he reflected, where childhood has been spent, or where, later, dreams of energy have been flung away, year after year, are obviously the healthiest spots for a person. But perhaps, although he possessed the Luxembourg Gardens so completely, they were completely possessed by thousands of other people! So many men had begun their childhood of ambition in this neighbourhood. His hopes, too, no doubt, had grown there more softly because of the depth and richness of the bed. A sentimental miasma made artificially in Paris a similar good atmosphere where the mind could healthily exist as was found by artists in brilliant complete and solid times. Paris was like a patent food.
“Elle dit le mot, Anastase, né pour d’éternels parchemins.” He could not, however, get interested. Was it the obstinate Eighteenth Century animal vision? When you plunge into these beings, must they be all quivering with unconsciousness, like life with a cat or a serpent?—But her sex would throw clouds over her eyes. She was a woman. It was no good. Again he must confess Anastasya could only offer him something too serious. He could not play with that. Sex-loyalty to his most habitual lips interfered.
He had the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own power have for those not equals with whom they have been associated. He would have given to Bertha the authority of his own spirit, to prime her with himself that she might meet on equal terms and vanquish any rival. He experienced a slight hostility to Anastasya like a part of Bertha left in himself protesting and jealous. It was chiefly vanity at the thought of this superior woman’s contempt could she see his latest female effort.
“I suppose she knows all about Bertha,” he thought. Kreisler-like, he looked towards the Lipmann women. “Homme sensuel! Homme égoïste!”
She seemed rather shy with him.
“How do you like Paris?” he asked her.
“I don’t know yet. Do you like it?” She had a flatness in speaking English because of her education in the United States.
“I don’t like to be quite so near the centre of the world. You can see all the machinery working. It makes you a natural sceptic. But here I am. I find it difficult to live in London.”
“I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the machinery did not obtrude⸺”
“I don’t feel that. I think that a place like this exists for the rest of the world. It works that the other countries may live and create. That is the rôle France has chosen. The French spirit seems to me rather spare and impoverished at present.”
“You regard it as a mother-drudge?”
“More of a drudge than a mother. We don’t get much really from France, except tidiness.”
“I expect you are ungrateful.”
“Perhaps so. But I cannot get over a dislike for Latin facilities. Suarès finds a northern rhetoric of ideas in Ibsen, for instance, exactly similar to the word-rhetoric of the South. But in Latin countries you have a democracy of vitality, the best things of the earth are in everybody’s mouth and nerves. The artist has to go and find them in the crowd. You can’t have ‘freedom’ both ways. I prefer the artist to be free, and the crowd not to be ‘artists.’ What does all English and German gush or sentiment, about the wonderful, the artistic French nation, etc., amount to? They gush because they find thirty-five million little Bésnards, little Botrels, little Bouchers, or little Bougereaus living together and prettifying their towns and themselves. Imagine England an immense garden city, on Letchworth lines (that is the name of a model Fabian township near London), or Germany (it almost has become that) a huge nouveau-art, reform-dressed, bestatued State. Practically every individual Frenchman of course has the filthiest taste imaginable. You are more astonished when you come across a sound, lonely, and severe artist in France than elsewhere. His vitality is hypnotically beset by an ocean of artistry. His best instinct is to become rather aggressively harsh and simple. The reason that a great artist like Rodin or the Cubists to-day arouse more fury in France than in England, for instance, is not because the French are more interested in Art! They are less interested in art, if anything. It is because they are all ‘artistic’ and all artists in the sense that a cheap illustrator or Mr. Brangwyn, R.A., or Mr. Waterhouse, R.A., are. They are scandalized at good art; the English are inquisitive about and tickled by it, like gaping children. Their social instincts are not so developed and logical.”
“But what difference does the attitude of the crowd make to the artist?”
“Well, we were talking about Paris, which is the creation of the crowd. The man thinking in these gardens to-day, the man thinking on the quays of Amsterdam three centuries ago, think much the same thoughts. Thought is like climate and chemistry. It even has its physical type. But the individual’s projection of himself he must entrust to his milieu. I maintain that the artist’s work is nowhere so unsafe as in the hands of an ‘artistic’ vulgarly alive public. The other question is his relation to the receptive world, and his bread and cheese. Paris is, to begin with, no good for bread and cheese, except as a market to which American and Russian millionaire dealers come. Its intelligence is of great use. But no friendship is a substitute for the blood-tie; and intelligence is no substitute for the response that can only come from the narrower recognition of your kind. This applies to the best type of art rather than work of very personal genius. Country is left behind by that. Intelligence also.”
“Don’t you think that work of very personal genius often has a country? It may break through accidents of birth to perfect conditions somewhere; not necessarily contemporary ones or those of the country it happens in?”
“I suppose you could find a country or a time for almost anything. But I am sure that the best has in reality no Time and no Country. That is why it accepts without fuss any country or time for what they are worth; thence the seeming contradiction, that it is always actual. It is alive, and nationality is a portion of actuality.”
“But is the best work always ‘actual’ and up to date?”
“It always has that appearance. It’s manners are perfect.”
“I am not so sure that manners cannot be overdone. A personal code is as good as the current code.”
“The point seems to me to be, in that connexion, that manners are not very important. You use them as you use coins.”
“The most effectual men have always been those whose notions were diametrically opposed to those of their time,” she said carefully.
“I don’t think that is so; except in so far as all effectual men are always the enemies of every time. With that fundamental divergence, they give a weight of impartiality to the supreme thesis and need of their age. Any opinion of their fellows that they adopt they support with the uncanny authority of a plea from a hostile camp. All activity on the part of a good mind has the stimulus of a paradox. To produce is the sacrifice of genius.”
They seemed to have an exotic grace to him as they promenaded their sinuous healthy intellects in this eighteenth-century landscape. There was no other pair of people who could talk like that on those terraces. They were both of them barbarians, head and shoulders taller than the polished stock around. And they were highly strung and graceful. They were out of place.
“Your philosophy reminds me of Jean-Jacques,” she said.
“Does it? How do you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Well, your hostility to a tidy rabble, and preference for a rough and uncultivated bed to build on brings to mind ‘wild nature’ and the doctrine of the natural man. You want a human landscape similar to Jean-Jacques’ rocks and water falls.”
“I see what you mean. But I also notice that the temper of my theories is the exact opposite of Jean-Jacques’.—He raved over and poetized his wild nature and naturalness generally and put it forward as an ideal. My point of view is that it is a question of expediency only. I do not for a moment sentimentalize crudeness. I maintain that that crude and unformed bed, or backing, is absolutely essential to maximum fineness; just as crudity in an individual’s composition is necessary for him to be able to create. There is no more absolute value in stupidity and formlessness than there is in dung. But they are just as necessary. The conditions of creation and of life disgust me. The birth of a work of art is as dirty as that of a baby. But I consider that my most irremediable follies have come from fastidiousness; not the other thing. If you are going to work or perform, you must make up your mind to have dirty hands most part of the time. Similarly, you must praise chaos and filth. It is put there for you. Incense is, I believe, camels’ dung. When you praise, you do so with dung. When you see men fighting, robbing each other, behaving meanly or breaking out into violent vulgarities, you must conventionally clap your hands. If you have not the stomach to do that, you cannot be a creative artist. If people stopped behaving in that way, you could not be a creative artist.”
“So you would discourage virtue, self-sacrifice, and graceful behaviour?”
“No, praise them very much. Also praise deceit, lechery, and panic. Whatever a man does, praise him. In that way you will be acting as the artist does; If you are not an artist, you will not act in that way. An artist should be as impartial as God.”
“Is God impartial?”
“We disintegrate. His dream is no doubt ignorant of our classifications.”
“Rousseau again⸺?”
“If you really want to saddle me with that Swiss, I will help you. My enthusiasm for art has made me fond of chaos. It is the artist’s fate almost always to be exiled among the slaves. The artist who takes his job seriously gets his sensibility blunted. He is less squeamish than other people and less discriminating.”
“He becomes in fact less of an artist?”
“An artist is a cold card, with a hide like a rhinoceros.”
“You are poetizing him! But if that is so, wouldn’t it be better to be something else?”
“No, I think it’s about the best thing to be.”
“With his women companions, sweethearts, he is also apt to be undiscriminating.”
“He is notorious for that!”
“I think that is a pity. Then that is because I am a woman, and am conscious of not being a slave.”
“But then such women as you are condemned also to find themselves surrounded by slaves!”
“Your frequentation of the abject has not caused you to forget one banal art!”
“You tempt me to abandon art. Art is the refuge of the shy.”
“Are you shy?”
“Yes.”
“You need not be.”
Her revolving hips and thudding skirts carried her forward with the orchestral majesty of a simple ship. He suddenly became conscious of the monotonous racket.
At that moment the drums beat to close the gardens. They had dinner in a Bouillon near the Seine. They parted about ten o’clock.