We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

He belongs to it in the actual sense of the word and also on account of his Norman descent. There is nothing of the Gaul in him either in his moral judgment, in his views of life, or in his sympathies and antipathies. He is a landscape painter, which no truly French writer has ever been, he is a lover of solitude in remote country districts, a lover of nature on the lonely seashore. He is not a townsman and he escapes as often as he can from Paris, the centre which is looked upon by every successful Frenchman as the only beautiful, honourable, interesting and pleasurable place in which to dwell. He has no frivolity, he does not care for pleasure, but on the contrary he has a grandiose mood and an iron grasp of the situations which he describes. He seeks the more veiled sides of human nature, but there is a modesty in his descriptions known only to Northerners, and not to Italians and Gauls. He is the fellow-countryman of Flaubert and Maupassant, but he has none of the plebeian exclusiveness of the first or the Rabelais Gallicism of the second. He is of pure race to an extent that is unheard of and inconceivable—a Scandinavian Norman without any of the ponderous blood of the Anglo-Saxon, so often found in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but which the course of centuries has served to dissipate until it has completely vanished.

When we look at his portrait we are unconsciously reminded of certain pictures by the younger Holbein in the Windsor Gallery and in the collection at Bâle; there is the same peculiar combination of refinement and strength scarcely ever met with among his contemporaries, the same sharp, subtle moulding of the features which is only produced in a race of long standing. His head recalls to our memory another, the head of one who is not long dead, more massive perhaps, less developed, more thoughtful, but with an equally calm expression; a head belonging to the same racial type, with the same proud, princely features, the same prominent nose with the large eyes of a discoverer—the head of a Normandy peasant, of Millet, his fellow-countryman, the creator of a new feeling for nature and a new aspect of nature in art.

The one feature that separates Millet from all other artists, in his drawings far more than in his heavy, dull-coloured paintings, is that he saw his people as one with nature. Where is the difference in Millet’s picture between the flock of ravens alighting on the autumnal field in the midst of the grey eternity of a damp day, and the man and woman who, with rake and spade stuck in the ground beside them, stand praying at the sound of the Angelus in a position which is of itself a silent devotion at the approach of darkness? Just as the forms of the flying ravens break the great self-sufficiency of the landscape and thereby attract attention to it, so the powerful simple outlines of the man and woman are only a more emphatic expression of the solemn silence which the evening casts over the land. Just as Millet places his people in the landscape, as an inseparable part of nature, one with her, so Barbey D’Aurevilly places his characters on the great, lonely sea-coast, on the yellow sands and the long, flat, green meadows of storm-bound Normandy. The outlines here are the same as there, standing out great and simple in their solemnity, silent and weird as fate against the great, simple, peaceful landscape. In the same way that Millet’s women stand firm and immoveable as a mountain against the everlasting heavens, so Barbey D’Aurevilly’s defiant yet submissive women stand in relief against the eternal landscape of their native country, with the same powerful simplicity of Millet’s pictures, inflexible as regards strange and transitory laws, but submissive to the laws that appeal to them from the depths of their own natures.

Just as Millet’s peasant woman strides across the melancholy field, weak yet unhesitating, individualistic, yet ever the same woman who yesterday was, to-day is, and to-morrow will be, so L’Ensorcelée, the large-proportioned, plain-thinking daughter of an ancient and aristocratic house, wanders home from church across the fields in spring, with the glow of an eternal flame in her honest face—the glow of a passion conceived in church when in the pulpit she descried the man whom she is proud to own as her master at the first glance. This woman is the childless wife of a rich plebeian at the time of the French Revolution; and the man—is he any different from that peasant of Millet’s who draws on his coat, standing alone on the broad plains after a hard day’s work? The mantle of an emperor in the picture of a coronation is not more imposing than this raised arm, standing in relief against the grey heavens, and commanding respect as though it were engaged in the performance of a fearful and holy action, instead of being merely the outline of a strong, rough, tired figure in a lonely field. And what is it but the peasant strength and peasant greatness of this former Chouan, now a priest of Barbey’s, that attracts the nobleman’s daughter, wife of the parvenu, when she sees him in church during the procession and catches sight of his face hidden beneath the cowl,—a face that has been unrecognisably lacerated in battle against the soldiers of the French Revolution,—at the sight of which she is consumed with a mad, wild, passionate love. She was a woman in whom her own sub-conscious strength called for the strongest man, and felt with a shudder of injured pride: This one is the strongest! And he is the strongest, for this inflexible conspirator will not allow himself to be led astray by any woman, and L’Ensorcelée, conscious of the destruction of her womanhood, conscious also of the ignominy of having married beneath her, drowns herself.

This is one of Barbey’s women who perished, a woman with the nature of a mighty ancestress whose pride in her race and family was long suppressed by a marriage repugnant to her inmost instincts, till at last, in a moment of fearful agitation, she revolted. The same primal instinct accompanied by the same horrible, unrelenting spirit, where the conscience is dead during the perpetration of a crime, appears in that unparalleled story, called Le Bonheur dans le Crime. A proud, pure girl poisons the wife of the man whom she loves, and poisons her with as much ease as a lover might have done in the days of the early Italian Renaissance—(one of those incomprehensible women with the passionate lips, as Botticelli paints them)—she poisons the wife under his very eyes, with his silent consent, and then, in the same house, with the same furniture, surrounded by the same solitary sequestered nature, these two celebrate their honeymoon, which lasts without interruption for weeks, months, years, scores of years, and they are true to one another and happy for a whole life-time; not only do they feel no remorse, but they are able to live without giving a single thought to the past. This would not suit Protestant standards, yet these are people such as Shakespeare depicted, figures such as Millet in his pictures placed against the horizon, beings of whom Burkhardt writes in his work on the Italian Renaissance. Conventional characters they are not, but conventional characters are frequently incomplete natures, whereas an individual character is a complete being, a being who is fully developed and who possesses a standard of his own.

How else are we to describe that daughter of the bourgeoisie who comes home from the convent where she was educated, to be watched by her parents with a severity that is now unknown? She steals away night after night with bared feet along the stone passages, passes through the bedroom where her parents are and goes to the young officer who is quartered in their house, and one night she dies in his arms, dies so silently and suddenly that she is dead before he has recovered his self-possession. What men are able to transport women into such an ungovernable passion of love? Woman does not create her own passion like man; she is what man makes her. He either binds her instincts or loosens them, he makes her good or bad, cold or passionate, according to the manner in which his temperament affects hers, and according to how great or how small a degree he himself is the man. Barbey’s men are a race peculiar to themselves; they in their various characters, ages, and persons are always himself—natures without lead and sand in their veins, with the fire, the tension, the nervous energy of a full-blooded race.

It is not the Frenchwoman whom Barbey describes, and no Frenchman either could or would describe her as he has done. He is no more of a Gaul than Millet, any more than the Italians of the early Renaissance were real Romans. Like the author Tolstoy, in whom the Mongolian blood is more clearly manifested as he grows older, so with Barbey and Millet, the two great Normans, the Teutonic element appears on the surface, the same element that we recognise in the pictures of the Pre-Raphaelites, and which was afterwards set aside by the intrusion of the Spaniards and the Classics. Millet’s landscapes represent the Teutonic aspect of nature; while Barbey’s writings are the essence of the Teutonic style, with its characteristic expansion, its abrupt pauses, its utter indifference with regard to the main point, its dislike of concluding the story as soon as the climax is reached. It is here that we find the Teutonic sense for the infinite—a feeling that is the peculiar property of a people who dwell near the sea—a kind of absorption into nature, whither men vanish like black spots. Both are equally possessed of that feeling for the real which has not existed anywhere in the same degree since the days of the early Italian Renaissance. Millet shews it in the reality of his drawing, Barbey in the reality of individualism in the sexes. It is in this that Barbey stands alone and unequalled by any of the authors of the present day or of the past, and it is this that reminds us that three hundred years of physical and spiritual refinement of human feeling and comprehension lie between him and the age of Shakespeare.

His first youthful work, Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas is broad as a novel by Bulwer and as full of feeling as a poem by Lamartine; already here he strikes the key in which woman’s inmost soul vibrates, resounds and awakens to a sense of its most intimate and complicated delight in man. Ce Qui Ne Meurt Pas is woman’s eternal affection, which eternally manifests itself, even when the woman is no longer young; she is the beloved mother whom the man, especially when he is quite young, loves more ardently than he could possibly love a young girl, and through him she becomes a mother—a matron already in her soul. Both in his aphorisms and in the most popular of his novels, Vieille Maîtresse, Barbey continually returns to this deepest of all man’s passions for the woman whom he sees growing old beside him, and who for him grows young again; the woman to whom he is bound by a thousand inextricable memories, memories of his childhood when his own mother was young, memories of youthful happiness and of his own youthful manhood spent with this same woman, whom he still loves. A refined man expects a great deal from woman, and in her who binds him with the cords of love, he will always love the whole woman—the girl, the wife, the mother.

Woman is for Barbey the tragic, by reason of her inevitable destiny. Woman’s age is more sharply defined than man’s; her youth is more limited. She is unconscious of her own being, and when she realises it, she also realises her destiny. She stands so strong and fearless beneath the pressure of nature, that man cannot think of it without a shudder of intense compassion like that which inspired the deepest of Barbey’s stories, called by him Une Histoire Sans Nom. The subject of this extraordinary story is a woman who becomes a mother without wishing, without even knowing it. Kleist has described a case somewhat similar in one of his novels, only there the woman is experienced and understands what has happened. Kleist shows little sympathy in his development of the plot, which he describes from the man’s point of view, and the novel ends happily; Barbey, on the contrary, lays a peculiar stress on the tragic element, on the woman’s passiveness,—the reason of her eternal subjection to man—which renders her unable to do anything towards the furtherance or the hindrance of her inevitable destiny. An innocent young girl of sixteen lives alone in the old family mansion with her mother, by whom she is sternly watched, and where no one is admitted save a missionary preacher of the strictest order who is going his round from church to church. This unsuspecting child has begun to wander in her sleep without attracting the notice either of her mother or the maid, and one night, while she is in a somnambulant condition, the monk meets her on the doorstep and through him she becomes a mother. The following day he goes off on his mission, and both mother and daughter congratulate themselves that the melancholy man has departed. Time passes, until there is no longer any doubt, and the mother begins to torture the daughter, determined to discover how and through whom this can have occurred; the miserable child is terrified and can explain nothing. In this dreadful condition, under circumstances which woman only of all creatures of the earth has to endure, the poor girl’s mind undergoes a terrible trial which results in idiotcy.