If you repeat my remarks to any of the West Cedar Street circle be sure you tone them down as your discretion will suggest. For yourself you’ll know that I have always had an intense desire to see something of real French life. You’re acquainted with my great sympathy with the French; with my natural tendency to enter into their so supremely fine exploitation of the whole personal consciousness. I sympathise with the artistic temperament; I remember you used sometimes to hint to me that you thought my own temperament too artistic. I don’t consider that in Boston there’s any real sympathy with the artistic temperament; we tend to make everything a matter of right and wrong. And in Boston one can’t live—on ne peut pas vivre, as they say here. I don’t mean one can’t reside—for a great many people manage that; but one can’t live esthetically—I almost venture to say one can’t live sensuously. This is why I’ve always been so much drawn to the French, who are so esthetic, so sensuous, so entirely living. I’m so sorry dear Théophile Gautier has passed away; I should have liked so much to go and see him and tell him all I owe him. He was living when I was here before; but, you know, at that time I was travelling with the Johnsons, who are not esthetic and who used to make me feel rather ashamed of my love and my need of beauty. If I had gone to see the great apostle of that religion I should have had to go clandestinely—en cachette, as they say here; and that’s not my nature; I like to do everything frankly, freely, naïvement, au grand jour. That’s the great thing—to be free, to be frank, to be naïf. Doesn’t Matthew Arnold say that somewhere—or is it Swinburne or Pater?
When I was with the Johnsons everything was superficial, and, as regards life, everything was brought down to the question of right and wrong. They were eternally didactic; art should never be didactic; and what’s life but the finest of arts? Pater has said that so well somewhere. With the Johnsons I’m afraid I lost many opportunities; the whole outlook or at least the whole medium—of feeling, of appreciation—was grey and cottony, I might almost say woolly. Now, however, as I tell you, I’ve determined to take right hold for myself; to look right into European life and judge it without Johnsonian prejudices. I’ve taken up my residence in a French family, in a real Parisian house. You see I’ve the courage of my opinions; I don’t shrink from carrying out my theory that the great thing is to live.
You know I’ve always been intensely interested in Balzac, who never shrank from the reality and whose almost lurid pictures of Parisian life have often haunted me in my wanderings through the old wicked-looking streets on the other side of the river. I’m only sorry that my new friends—my French family—don’t live in the old city, au cour de vieux Paris, as they say here. They live only on the Boulevard Haussmann, which is a compromise, but in spite of this they have a great deal of the Balzac tone. Madame de Maisonrouge belongs to one of the oldest and proudest families in France, but has had reverses which have compelled her to open an establishment in which a limited number of travellers, who are weary of the beaten track, who shun the great caravanseries, who cherish the tradition of the old French sociability—she explains it herself, she expresses it so well—in short to open a “select” boarding-house. I don’t see why I shouldn’t after all use that expression, for it’s the correlative of the term pension bourgeoise, employed by Balzac in Le Père Goriot. Do you remember the pension bourgeoise of Madame Vauquer née de Conflans? But this establishment isn’t at all like that, and indeed isn’t bourgeois at all; I don’t quite know how the machinery of selection operates, but we unmistakably feel we’re select. The Pension Vauquer was dark, brown, sordid, graisseuse; but this is in quite a different tone, with high clear lightly-draped windows and several rather good Louis Seize pieces—family heirlooms, Madame de Maisonrouge explains. She recalls to me Madame Hulot—do you remember “la belle Madame Hulot”?—in Les Parents Pauvres. She has a great charm—though a little artificial, a little jaded and faded, with a suggestion of hidden things in her life. But I’ve always been sensitive to the seduction of an ambiguous fatigue.
I’m rather disappointed, I confess, in the society I find here; it isn’t so richly native, of so indigenous a note, as I could have desired. Indeed, to tell the truth, it’s not native at all; though on the other hand it is furiously cosmopolite, and that speaks to me too at my hours. We’re French and we’re English; we’re American and we’re German; I believe too there are some Spaniards and some Hungarians expected. I’m much interested in the study of racial types; in comparing, contrasting, seizing the strong points, the weak points, in identifying, however muffled by social hypocrisy, the sharp keynote of each. It’s interesting to shift one’s point of view, to despoil one’s self of one’s idiotic prejudices, to enter into strange exotic ways of looking at life.
The American types don’t, I much regret to say, make a strong or rich affirmation, and, excepting my own (and what is my own, dear Harvard, I ask you?), are wholly negative and feminine. We’re thin—that I should have to say it! we’re pale, we’re poor, we’re flat. There’s something meagre about us; our line is wanting in roundness, our composition in richness. We lack temperament; we don’t know how to live; nous ne savons pas vivre, as they say here. The American temperament is represented—putting myself aside, and I often think that my temperament isn’t at all American—by a young girl and her mother and by another young girl without her mother, without either parent or any attendant or appendage whatever. These inevitable creatures are more or less in the picture; they have a certain interest, they have a certain stamp, but they’re disappointing too: they don’t go far; they don’t keep all they promise; they don’t satisfy the imagination. They are cold slim sexless; the physique’s not generous, not abundant; it’s only the drapery, the skirts and furbelows—that is, I mean in the young lady who has her mother—that are abundant. They’re rather different—we have our little differences, thank God: one of them all elegance, all “paid bills” and extra-fresh gants de Suède, from New York; the other a plain pure clear-eyed narrow-chested straight-stepping maiden from the heart of New England. And yet they’re very much alike too—more alike than they would care to think themselves; for they face each other with scarcely disguised opposition and disavowal. They’re both specimens of the practical positive passionless young thing as we let her loose on the world—and yet with a certain fineness and knowing, as you please, either too much or too little. With all of which, as I say, they have their spontaneity and even their oddity; though no more mystery, either of them, than the printed circular thrust into your hand on the street-corner.
The little New Yorker’s sometimes very amusing; she asks me if every one in Boston talks like me—if every one’s as “intellectual” as your poor correspondent. She’s for ever throwing Boston up at me; I can’t get rid of poor dear little Boston. The other one rubs it into me too, but in a different way; she seems to feel about it as a good Mahommedan feels toward Mecca, and regards it as a focus of light for the whole human race. Yes, poor little Boston, what nonsense is talked in thy name! But this New England maiden is in her way a rare white flower; she’s travelling all over Europe alone—“to see it,” she says, “for herself.” For herself! What can that strangely serene self of hers do with such sights, such depths! She looks at everything, goes everywhere, passes her way with her clear quiet eyes wide open; skirting the edge of obscene abysses without suspecting them; pushing through brambles without tearing her robe; exciting, without knowing it, the most injurious suspicions; and always holding her course—without a stain, without a sense, without a fear, without a charm!
Then by way of contrast there’s a lovely English girl with eyes as shy as violets and a voice as sweet!—the difference between the printed, the distributed, the gratuitous hand-bill and the shy scrap of a billet-doux dropped where you may pick it up. She has a sweet Gainsborough head and a great Gainsborough hat with a mighty plume in front of it that makes a shadow over her quiet English eyes. Then she has a sage-green robe, “mystic wonderful,” all embroidered with subtle devices and flowers, with birds and beasts of tender tint; very straight and tight in front and adorned behind, along the spine, with large strange iridescent buttons. The revival of taste, of the sense of beauty, in England, interests me deeply; what is there in a simple row of spinal buttons to make one dream—to donner à rêver, as they say here? I believe a grand esthetic renascence to be at hand and that a great light will be kindled in England for all the world to see. There are spirits there I should like to commune with; I think they’d understand me.
This gracious English maiden, with her clinging robes, her amulets and girdles, with something quaint and angular in her step, her carriage, something medieval and Gothic in the details of her person and dress, this lovely Evelyn Vane (isn’t it a beautiful name?) exhales association and implication. She’s so much a woman—elle est bien femme, as they say here; simpler softer rounder richer than the easy products I spoke of just now. Not much talk—a great sweet silence. Then the violet eye—the very eye itself seems to blush; the great shadowy hat making the brow so quiet; the strange clinging clutched pictured raiment! As I say, it’s a very gracious tender type. She has her brother with her, who’s a beautiful fair-haired grey-eyed young Englishman. He’s purely objective, but he too is very plastic.
V
FROM MIRANDA HOPE TO HER MOTHER
September 26.