i had rooms at the embassy, a bedroom above the chancery, and a little sitting-room on the same floor as the chancery. the ambassador was sir edmund monson; the councillor, michael herbert; the head of the chancery, reggie lister. both of these had rooms to themselves where they worked. the other secretaries worked in the chancery.
in the morning, the bag used to arrive from the foreign office. it used to be fetched from calais every night, and twice a week a king’s messenger would bring it. the business of the day began by the bag being opened, and the contents were entered in a register and then sent to the ambassador. the dispatches were then sent back to the chancery in red boxes to be dealt with, and were finally folded up and put away in a cupboard. later on in the day, a box used to come down from the ambassador with draft dispatches, which were written out by us on typewriters, if we could, or with a pen.
work at the embassy meant writing out dispatches on a typewriter, registering dispatches and putting them away, or ciphering and deciphering telegrams. that was the important part of the work. it was for that one had to hang about in case it might happen, and it was liable to happen at any moment of the day, or the night.
besides this, there was a perpetual stream of minor occurrences which came into the day’s work. people of all nationalities used to call at the embassy and have to be interviewed by someone. a lady would arrive and say she would like to paint a miniature of queen victoria; a soldier would arrive from india who thought he had been bitten by a mad dog, and ask to see pasteur; a man would call who was the only legitimate[182] king of france, henry v., with his title and dynasty printed on his visiting card, and ask for the intervention of the british government; or someone would come to say that he had found the real solution of the irish problem, or the eastern question; or a way of introducing conscription into england without incurring any expense and without english people being aware of it. besides this, british subjects of every kind would come and ask for facilities to see museums, to write books, to learn how to cure snake bites, to paddle in canoes on the oise or the loire, to take their pet dogs back to england without muzzles (this was always refused), or to take a book from the bibliothèque nationale, or a missal from some remote museum. all these people had to be interviewed and their requests, if reasonable, had to be forwarded to the french government, for which there were special stereotyped formul?. drafts had to be written for notes to the french government, and there was a large correspondence with the various consulates.
in the morning, the head of the chancery used to interview the ambassador and report to the chancery on the state of his temper; sometimes he would go and see a french minister and come back laden with news and gossip; various secretaries, the naval and military attachés, or the king’s messenger, would stroll into the chancery, and discuss the latest news, and sometimes other visitors from england would waste our time.
the ambassador never appeared in person in the chancery, and his displeasure with the staff, when it was incurred, used to be conveyed to them in memoranda, written in red ink, which were sent to them in a red leather dispatch box.
sir edmund monson had the pen of a ready dispatch-writer, and he would write very long and beautifully expressed dispatches.
we used to have luncheon generally at the same restaurant, and be free in the afternoons, although we had to come back towards tea-time to see if there was anything to do and often remain in the chancery till nearly eight o’clock; one resident clerk had to live in the house in case there were telegrams at night. if there was a lot of telegraphing, the work would be heavy.
the chancery hours were always gay. one day one of the[183] third secretaries and myself had an argument, and i threw the contents of the inkpot at him. he threw the contents of another inkpot back at me. the interchange of ink then became intensive, and went as far as red ink. all the inkpots of the chancery were emptied, and the other secretaries ducked their heads while the grenades of ink whizzed past their heads. the fight went on till all the ink in the chancery was used up. my sitting-room was then drawn on, and the fight went on down the chancery stairs, into the street, and i had a final shot from my sitting-room window, the ink pouring down the walls.
we were drenched with ink, red and black, but still more so was the chancery carpet, the staircase, and the walls of the rue faubourg st. honoré. reggie lister was told what had happened, and said: “really, those boys are too tiresome.”
we were alarmed at the state of the carpet, a handsome red densely thick pile. we bought some chemicals from the chemist and tried to wash it out, spending hours in the effort after dinner. the only result was that the corrosive acids burnt the carpet away, which made the damage much worse.
the next morning herbert arrived at the embassy and noticed that the chancery staircase was splashed with black stains. he asked the reason and was told. we were sent for. in quiet, acid, biting tones he told us we were nothing better than dirty little schoolboys, and we went away with our tails between our legs. but all that was nothing; reggie’s plaintive remonstration and herbert’s biting censure left us calm; what we were really frightened of was the ambassador—would he find it out?
the next three days were days of dark apprehension, overclouded with the shadow of a possible ink-row; especially as the stain caused by the acids on the chancery carpet had turned it grey and white, and left a dreadful cavity in the middle of the stain. we ordered a new carpet and prayed that the ambassador might not be led by an evil mischance to visit the chancery. he did not, and the episode passed off unnoticed by him.
our relations with france at this time were not of the best. the fashoda incident was just over; the boer war was going[184] on, which the french said was: “une guerre d’affaires”; a speech had been made recently by sir e. monson at the banquet of the chamber of commerce which had made a great sensation. the majority of the french cabinet were in favour of asking that the british government be asked to recall sir e. monson, but m. delcassé was strongly opposed to this as he feared war. in spite of all this, the french were friendly to us personally. i was elected to the “cercle de l’union” and seconded by general galliffet.
the french were absorbed in the dreyfus case. nothing else was discussed from morning till night. wherever one went one heard echoes of this discussion, and in whatever circle or group you heard the problem discussed the disputants were generally divided in a proportion of five to three; three believing in the innocence of dreyfus, and five believing in his guilt.
one night i dined with edouard rod and brewster. the burning topic engrossed us to such an extent, we discussed it so long and so keenly that i still remember the only other subjects we mentioned; they stood out, isolated and rare, like oases in the vast dreyfus desert. i remember rod saying he didn’t care for verlaine’s poetry, because it wasn’t banal enough. brewster and i quoted some lines; but rod thought them all too subtle and not direct enough. finally i quoted:
“triste, triste était mon ame,
a cause, à cause d’une femme.”
this he passed.
we discussed plays for a brief moment. rod said he liked bad plays played by good actors—for instance, duse in la dame aux camélias; brewster said he liked good plays done by bad actors—musset played by refined amateurs; i said i liked good plays acted by good actors. then we talked of dreyfus once more, and rod said plaintively: “de quoi est-ce-qu’on parlera lorsque l’affaire sera finie?”
i made acquaintance of anatole france and attended some of his sunday morning levées at the villa said in the bois de boulogne.
when i first went there, i never heard any topic except l’affaire mentioned, and indeed the only people present at these meetings were fanatical partisans of dreyfus who did not[185] wish to talk of anything else. in other houses i met equally fanatical believers in dreyfus’ guilt. while one was sitting at a quiet tea, an excited academician would rush in and say: “savez-vous ce qu’ils ont fait? savez-vous ce qu’ils osent dire?” i find this entry in my notebook dated 5th july 1899, from boswell:
“talking of a court-martial that was sitting upon a very momentous public occasion, he (dr. johnson) expressed much doubt of an enlightened decision; and said that perhaps there was not a member of it who in the whole course of his life had ever spent an hour by himself in balancing probabilities.”
on the other hand, i remember someone saying at the time that although the decisions of court-martials were nearly always wrong, technically, in their form, they were nearly always right in substance.
most english people whom i saw during this period believed in dreyfus’ innocence, but not all. among the fervent believers in his guilt was arthur strong, then librarian in the house of lords.
i had made arthur strong’s acquaintance at edmund gosse’s house, and he was from that moment kind to me. in appearance he was like pictures of erasmus (not that i have ever seen one!)—the perfect incarnation of a scholar. he knew and understood everything, but forgave little. and the smoke from the flame of his learning and his intellect sometimes got into people’s eyes. i frequently saw him in london, and once he came to see me in paris. i remember his looking at the bookshelf and the pictures on my walls, photographs of pictures by giorgione and titian.
he approved of dyce’s shakespeare; dyce’s, he said, was a good edition. he disapproved of stevenson; stevenson, he said, had fancy but no imagination. giorgione, he said, was to titian what marcello was to gluck. talking of the dreyfus case, he said if english people would only understand that the dreyfusards are the same as pro-boers in england they would talk differently. he said the french were supreme critics of verse. they were like the persians, they stood no nonsense about poetry. to them it was either good or bad verse. he used to say that there had never been since johnson’s lives of the poets a critical review of english literature as[186] big and as broad. we might find fault with some of dr. johnson’s judgments, but there had been nothing to replace it.
he admired byron as much as my father did, and in the same way. he thought him a towering genius. shelley likewise, but not wordsworth. wordsworth, he said, was like taine and wagner. they were all three just on the wrong lines, each one of them on a tremendous scale, but wrong nevertheless.
we used to have fierce arguments about wagner. wagner’s work, he used to say, was not dramatic but scenic. he invented a vastly effective situation but left it at that; neither the action nor the music moved on. he thought mozart was infinitely more dramatic. he said that wagner could not write a melody, and that if he did, with the exception of the preislied in the meistersinger, it was commonplace and vulgar. the “leit-motivs” were not complete melodies.
i was at that time a fervent wagnerite, and used to contest his points hotly. curiously enough, six years later, his ideas on wagner found an echo in a letter which i received from vernon lee, after she had been to bayreuth. this is what she wrote:
“about bayreuth. although i expected little enjoyment, i have been miserably disappointed. it is so much less out of the common than i expected. just a theatre like any other, save for the light being turned out entirely instead of half-cock only, and the only beautiful things an opera ever offers to the eye, namely the fiddles, great and small, and the enchanting kettle-drums, being stuffed out of sight. the mise en scène is more grotesquely bad than almost any other opera get-up. what is insufferable to me is the atrocious way in which wagner takes himself seriously: the self-complacent (if i may coin an absurd expression) auto-religion implied in his hateful unbridled long-windedness and reiteration; the element of degenerate priesthood in it all, like english people contemplating their hat linings in church, their prudery about the name of god… surely all great art of every sort has a certain coyness which makes it give itself always less than wanted: look at mozart, he will give you a whole act of varying dramatic expression (think of the first act of don giovanni) of deepest, briefest pathos and swift humour, a dozen perfect songs or concerted pieces, in the time it takes for that old poseur, amfortas, to squirm over his grail, or kundry to break the ice with parsifal.[187] even tristan, so incomparably finer than wagner’s other things, is indecent through its dragging out of situations, its bellowing out of confessions which the natural human being dreads to profane by showing or expressing. with all this goes what to me is the chief psychological explanation of wagner (and of his hypnotic power over some persons), his extreme slowness of vital tempo. listening to him is like finding oneself in a planet where the time’s unit is bigger than ours: one is on the stretch, devitalised as by the contemplation of a slug. do you know who has the same peculiarity? d’annunzio. and it is this which makes his literature, like wagner’s music, so undramatic, so sensual, so inhuman, turn everything into a process of gloating. i had the good fortune (like nietzsche) of hearing carmen just after the ring. the humanity of it, and the modesty also, are due very much to the incomparable briskness of the rhythm and phrasing; the mind is made to work quickly, the life of the hearer to brace itself to action.”
i think arthur strong would have agreed with every word of this.
i had not been at paris long before one evening after dinner the telephone bell rang; i went to answer it and was told that president faure was dead. the staff of the embassy walked in the funeral procession to notre dame, in uniform. it was a radiant day. the mourning decorations—a veil of crape flung negligently across the fa?ade of the chamber of deputies—the banners, the wreaths, the draperies, were a fine example of the french discretion and artistic instinct in decoration. on the balcony of the théatre sarah bernhardt, sarah bernhardt was sitting wrapped in furs; with us were the corps diplomatique, some officials from the french ministry of foreign affairs; one a composer of dance tunes, sourires d’avril, etc., once celebrated all over europe, now more forgotten than the songs of nineveh or tyre. we laughed, we chattered, we ate chocolate, we enjoyed the sunshine and the exercise, we gave no thought to the man in the gorgeous coffin who had taken so much trouble to ape and observe the forms of majesty, and who had been rewarded with such merciless ridicule.
during the first fortnight i spent in the diplomatic service there was a plethora of funerals which we had to attend; one at the greek church; one at the madeleine. attending funerals, and going to the station to meet royalties were both important factors in diplomatic life. indeed, at a small post[188] one seemed to spend half one’s life at the railway station. some of the secretaries were keen race-goers, and when, as sometimes happened, they were not allowed to go because of possible work, and they would point out that there was not likely to be any work to do, reggie lister used wisely to remark that we were not paid for the amount of work we did, but for hanging about in case there should be any work. in spite of this, he used generally to arrange things in such a manner that anyone who wanted to go to the races could go.
reggie lister was an artist in life and the organisation of life. he built his arrangements and those of others with a light scaffolding that could be taken down at a moment’s notice and rearranged if necessary in a different manner to suit a change of circumstance. he was radiantly sensible. he had a horror of the trashy and the affected, and his gaiety was buoyant, boyish, and infectious. if he was really amused himself, his face used to crinkle and his body shake like a jelly, “comme un gros bébé,” as a frenchman once said. his intuition was like second-sight and his tact always at work but never obtrusive, like the works of a delicate watch. i never saw anyone either before or after who could make such a difference to his surroundings and to the company he was with. he made everything effervesce. you could not say how he did it. it was not because of any exceptional brilliance or any unusual wit, or arresting ideas; but over and over again i have seen him do what people more brilliant than himself could not do to save their lives, that is, transfigure a dull company and change a grey atmosphere into a golden one. it was not only that he could never bore anyone himself, but that nobody was ever bored when he was there. you laughed with him, not at him. he took his enjoyment with him wherever he went and he made others share it.
his taste was fastidious, but catholic, and above all things sensible. he was acutely appreciative of external things: a walk down the champs elysées on a fine spring morning; good cooking; dancing and skating, and he danced like mad; he was never tired of telling one of his summer travels in greece; his first disappointment and his subsequent delight in constantinople—and nobody in the world could tell such things as well. it was difficult to be more intelligent; but his intelligence (and after a minute’s conversation[189] with him you could not but be aware of its acuteness), his love and knowledge of artistic things, his shrewdness, his humour, and rollicking fun, although taken all together, are still not enough to account for the fascination that his personality exercised over so many different people—over, i believe, almost anyone he pleased, if he took the trouble. if his diplomatic duties called for trouble of this kind, there was none he would not take; if only his own private social life was concerned he sometimes permitted himself the luxury of indifference; but he never indulged in “le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire”; although the company of celebrities tried him almost beyond endurance, leaving a peevish aftermath for his friends to put up with.
one instance is better than pages of explanation and analysis.
one day reggie lister and myself each received a letter from a friend in england asking us to be civil to a young french couple who were newly married, and were just setting up house in paris. reggie left cards on them, and they asked us both to luncheon.
we found them in a small but extremely clean apartment on the other side of the river, and as we went into the drawing-room it seemed to be crowded with relations in black—mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and aunts. all of them in deep mourning. it reminded me of the opening scene of a one-act play, which used to be popular many years ago, called la joie fait peur. in that play, the curtain rises on a bereaved family who are all of them steeped in inspissated gloom.
we went into the little dining-room and sat down to a shiny mahogany table. an old servant tottered and pottered about the room with a bunch of keys and a bottle of wine covered with cobwebs. a rather grim mother-in-law sat at the head of the table. the young, newly married couple were shy. there was an atmosphere of stern, rigid propriety and inflexible tradition over the whole proceeding. formal phrases were bandied, and all the time the mother-in-law, the aunts, and the sisters-in-law, all of them dressed in crape with neat white frills, never ceased to throw on the bashful young couple the full searchlight of their critical observation. but we had not been at the table many minutes before reggie had captivated the company, and at the end of five minutes they[190] were all screaming with laughter and talking at the top of their voices. they were not laughing at him. they were laughing with him.
this is just what reggie lister could do, and what i have never seen anybody else succeed in doing, to that extent and in such difficult circumstances. he had something which made you, whoever was in the room, wish to listen to him, and made you wish him to listen to you. he had also the gift of making the witty wittier, the singer, the talker, the musician, the reciter, do better than his best, of drawing out the best of other people by his instantly responsive appreciation.
the french of all classes appreciated and loved him, and when he died they felt as if an essential part of paris had been taken away, and a part that nothing could replace. to be with him at the same embassy, as i was for a year and a half, was an education in all that makes life worth living. but what was life to me was, i am afraid, sometimes death to him, as i tried him at times highly.
the ambassador, sir edmund monson, was academic with a large swaying presence and an inexhaustible supply of polished periods. a fine scholar and a master of precise and well-expressed english and an undiminishing store of vivid reminiscence; in the matter of penmanship he was passion’s slave. possibly my opinion is biased from having had to write out so many of his dispatches on a typewriter, and so often some of them twice, owing to the mistakes. typewriting, it is well known, is an art in which improvement is rarely achieved by the amateur; one reaches a certain degree of speed and inaccuracy, and after that, no amount of practice makes one any better. if there were too many mistakes in a dispatch it would have to be written out again. there never seemed to be any reason why sir edmund’s dispatches should ever end, and they were just as remarkable for quantity as for length. he was exceedingly kind and always amiable, to talk to or rather to listen to; he was the same in his dispatches; one had the sensation of coasting pleasantly downhill on a bicycle that had no break, and save for an accident was not likely to stop.
michael herbert, the councillor, was a complete contrast to sir edmund in many ways. with him one felt not only the[191] presence of a brake, but of steel-like grasp on that brake—a steel-like grasp concealed by the suavest of gloves and a high, refined courtesy and the appearance of a cavalier strayed by mistake into the modern world. never was there an appearance more deceptive in some ways; in so far, that is to say, as it seemed to indicate apathy or indifference or lack of fibre. he had a will of iron and a fearless and instant readiness to shoulder any responsibility, however grave or perplexing. he was a man of action, and an ideal diplomat. at one of his posts they called him “the butcher.” at that time the men who enjoyed the highest reputation in the diplomatic service, and who seemed to be the most promising, were perhaps charles eliot, cecil spring-rice, and arthur hardinge; and in every one of these cases the promise was fulfilled; but as a diplomat, i think anyone would agree, that herbert excelled them all and easily, although the others might be in one case more intellectual or more brilliant, in another more erudite. herbert had a steely strength of purpose, a quick eye, and the power of making up his mind at once, as well as a shrewd understanding of the world and especially of the foreign world, and a quiet far-sightedness. moreover, he had the charm that arises from natural and native distinction, and a subtle flavour which came from his being intensely english, and at the same time a citizen of the world, without any admixture of artificial cosmopolitanism. he would have been at home in any period of english history; whether at the black prince’s court at bordeaux, at the field of the cloth of gold, at kenilworth, at whitehall, or at the congress of vienna.
had he dressed himself up in the shimmering and sombre satins and the waving plumes of the vandyk period they would have seemed to be his natural, his everyday clothes.
i could imagine him putting his inflexible determination, expressed in thin, metallic tones of deferential and courteous deprecation, lit up by gleams of a sharp and shy humour, against the perhaps equally obstinate, but unfortunately less wise and less constant, wishes of charles i. i can imagine him, with his pale face and slight stoop, listening with quiet appreciation to the jokes of falstaff, at the first performance of henry iv.; or signing, without a flicker of hesitation, a dispatch to drake or raleigh that would mean war with spain; or shutting his snuff-box with a sharp snap, as he saw through[192] some subtle wile of talleyrand; or listening, civil but quite unabashed, to a storm of invective from napoleon.
one day someone in the chancery remarked on the peculiarly nauseous odour of the food that is given to foxhounds. “i like it,” he said. “i used to eat it as a child.”
i have always thought the most crucial test to which a new piece of verse or a modern picture can be put is to imagine what effect the verse would produce in an anthology of another epoch or the picture in a gallery of old masters. herbert as a personality and as a diplomatist could have stood any test of this kind, and placed next to any of the old masters or the old masterpieces, in character and statesmanship, without suffering from the comparison; indeed, so far from suffering any eclipse, his personality would only have emerged more signally and more distinctly, with the melancholy suavity of its form and the unyielding resilience of its substance.
in april 1899, the second centenary of the death of racine was celebrated in paris by a performance of racine’s bérénice at the théatre fran?ais. this performance was one of the landmarks in my literary adventures. bartet played bérénice, and i do not suppose that racine’s verse can ever have been more sensitively rendered and more delicately differentiated. between the acts, m. du lau, a fine connoisseur of life and art, took me behind the scenes and introduced me to bartet. they talked of the play. around us hovered an admiring crowd, and whispered homages were flung to the artist, like flowers. it was like a scene in a henry james novel, a page from the tragic muse. they agreed that racine’s loveliest verses were in this play: “des vers si nuancés,” as du lau said. bartet wore a lilac cloak over white draperies, and a high ivory diadem, and when we said good-bye du lau kissed her hand and said: “bon soir, charmante bérénice.”
if anyone is inclined to think racine is a tedious author they cannot do better than read bérénice. it is the model of what a tragedy should be. the drama is simple and arises naturally and inevitably from the facts of the case, which are all contained in one sentence of suetonius: “titus reginam berenicen, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.” that is to say, titus loved bérénice and, it was believed, had promised her marriage. he[193] sent her away from rome, against his own will as well as against hers, as soon as he came to the throne.
it is the eternal conflict between public duty and personal inclination.
“with all my will, but much against my heart,
we two now part,
my very dear,
our solace is the sad road lies so clear;
go thou to east,
i west.”
coventry patmore’s ode sums up the whole tragedy. the sentiments the characters express are what any characters would have said in such a situation now or a thousand years ago, and would be just as appropriate and true if the protagonists of the drama belonged to belgravia or to the mile end road. the verse is exquisite.
antiochus, who loved bérénice in vain, says to her as he leaves her:
“que vous dirai-je enfin? je fuis des yeux distraits,
qui me voyant toujours ne me voyaient jamais.”
the tragedy is full of musical lines, sad and suggestive and softly reverberating, with muted endings such as:
“dans l’orient désert quel devint mon ennui?
je demeurai longtemps errant dans césarée,
lieux charmants, où mon c?ur vous avait adorée,”
and some of the most poignant words of farewell ever uttered:
“pour jamais! ah seigneur! songez-vous en vous-même
combien ce mot cruel est affreux quand on aime?
dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons nous,
seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous?
que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse,
sans que jamais titus puisse voir bérénice.”
the prince of wales passed through paris and stayed there a night that winter and dined at the embassy, and we had to wear special coats and be careful they had the right number of buttons on them.
i got to know a good many french people, and some of those who had been famous in the days of the second empire: madame de galliffet and madame de pourtalès. madame de pourtalès had grey hair, but time, which had taken away much from her[194] and stamped her with his pitiless seal, had not taken, and was destined never to take, away the undefinable authority that alone great beauty possesses, and never loses, nor her radiant smile, which would suddenly make her look young.
once at a party at paris many years after this, at the jaucourts’ house, i again saw madame de pourtalès. it was not long before she died. her hair was, or seemed to be, quite white, and that evening the room was rather dim and lit from the ceiling; her face was powdered and she appeared quite transfigured; the whiteness of her hair and the effect of the light made her face look quite young. you were conscious only of dazzling shoulders, a peerless skin, soft shining eyes, and a magical smile. she put out everyone else in a room. she looked like the photographs of herself taken when she was a young woman. one saw what she must have been, and everybody who was there agreed that here was an instance of the undefinable, undying persistence of great beauty that just when you think it is dead, suddenly blooms afresh and gives you a glimpse of its own past.
reggie lister told me that he had once asked madame de pourtalès what was the greatest compliment that had ever been paid her. she said it was this. once in summer she had been going out to dinner in paris. it was rather late in the summer, and a breathless evening, she was sitting in her open carriage, dressed for dinner, waiting for someone in the clear daylight. it was so hot she had only a tulle veil round her shoulders. while she was waiting a workman passed the carriage, and when he saw her he stood and gaped in silence; at last he said: “christi! que tu es belle!”
i had already written some short parodies of four french authors which i wished to get published. a friend of mine sent them to henri de régnier and asked his advice. his opinion was extremely favourable. he said, and i quote his words, so that he may bear the responsibility for my publishing such a thing in paris: “j’ai lu les amusants pastiches de m. baring. bourget, renan, loti ou france pourraient avoir écrit chacun des pages qui soient moins eux.” “il faut pour avoir fait cela une science bien délicate de la langue fran?aise. conseillez donc à monsieur baring de faire imprimer une petite plaquette. elle representerait à elle seule de gros livres, ce qui sera délicieux.” i sent the parodies to lemerre and he accepted[195] them, and they were published in paris by his firm. the pamphlet was called hildesheim, and the small edition was soon sold out. the little book was well received by the french, and i got a good deal of fun out of it.
another literary adventure i had at this time was a correspondence i started in the saturday review. max beerbohm, in an article on a french translation of hamlet, said something about the french language being lacking in suggestiveness and mystery. i wrote a letter saying that the french language was as suggestive to a frenchman as the english language was to an englishman, upon which a professor wrote to say that the french language was only a bastard language, and that when a frenchman wrote of a girl as being beaucoup belle he was talking pidgin-latin. many people then wrote to point out that the professor was talking pidgin-french, and a certain h. b. joined in the fray, quoting the “chanson de roland,” and saying that an englishman who used the phrase beaucoup belle in france would be treated with the courtesy due to strangers, but a frenchman would be preparing for himself an unhappy manhood and a friendless old age. it was a terrible comment, he added, on the modern system of primary education. the controversy then, as nearly always happens, wandered into the channel of a side-issue, where it went on merrily bubbling for several weeks.
english people used to stream through paris all the year round. one was constantly asked out to dinner, both by them and by the french. one night i dined with admiral maxse, and the other guest was m. clemenceau. m. clemenceau was in those days conducting a violent campaign for dreyfus in the press, and was a thorn in the flesh of the government. i was severely reproved for dining with him the next day. i knew a few frenchmen of letters: m. henri de régnier, melchior de vogüé, andré chevrillon, edouard rod, madame darmesteter.
i remember at one of anatole france’s receptions (i only attended very few, as in those days a foreigner felt uncomfortable in circles where the dreyfus case was being discussed—it was too much of a family affair) anatole france talked of ?schylus. he said the texts we possess of ?schylus are shortened, abbreviated forms of the plays, almost, speaking with exaggeration, like the libretto of an opera founded on a well-known drama, almost as if we only possessed an operatic[196] libretto of hamlet or faust, but he added: “pourtant ceux qui ont admiré aschyle ne sont point des imbéciles.”
but literature was rarely discussed anywhere in those days, as l’affaire dominated everything and excluded all other topics.
in august came the rennes trial, and the excitement reached its climax. galliffet was minister of war, and i heard him make his first speech in the chamber. “assassin!” shouted the left. “c’est moi, messieurs,” said galliffet, and waited till they had finished. during the month of august, he used to dine every night at the “cercle de l’union.” the club was quite deserted. i used often to sit at his table.
he told me that many people in the club would probably not speak to him when they returned, for his having accepted the portfolio at such a time. “they will turn their backs on me probably,” he said. “mais,” he added, with a chuckle, “ils ne se permetteront pas une impertinence.” he used to tell me many interesting things. he said the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life was georgiana, lady dudley, at one of the early paris exhibitions, and after her, madame de castiglione. i never knew whether he had believed in the guilt or innocence of dreyfus, but i knew he was determined the case should end somehow and by a verdict which should bring about an apaisement.
the general was a picturesque and striking figure, not tall nor imposing, but carved, as it were, in some enduring granite-like substance, with steely eyes, a quick, rather hoarse, jerky utterance, and a very direct manner, a little alarming to a newcomer, owing to its abrupt frankness, and his way of saying what he thought in the most pointed, gallic manner. his illustrations, too, and his confessions were sometimes startling.
in conversation he leapt over all conventions, with the same gaiety and gallantry that had made him say at sedan: “tant que vous voudrez, mon général.” in the early days of the case he had been strongly in favour of revision.
when the verdict of the court of rennes was announced, and dreyfus subsequently pardoned, a curious thing happened. although the topic had been raging daily for years to the exclusion of everything else, exciting everywhere the fiercest passions, and dividing every family in france, estranging friendships, and breaking careers, the very moment the decision[197] was made known, the topic dropped from the minds of men instantly and finally, as though it had never existed.
my own point of view, which i sometimes found was shared by others, was that i believed dreyfus to be innocent, but i loathed the dreyfusards. commenting on this, andrew lang wrote to me: “people like us, who hate vivisection and anti-vivisectionists, who believe dreyfus was innocent and loathe dreyfusards (though anti-dreyfusards were really worse), have no business on this foolish planet.”
i often went to the play, and the chief enjoyment i derived was from what sarah bernhardt did in those days, about most of which i shall deal with separately. she must have a chapter to herself. of the rest i remember but little except a revival of la belle hélène with its enchanting tunes, and some funny songs at montmartre; réjane in zaza and la robe rouge, and a terrifying play at the théatre antoine called en paix, about a man who is shut up in a lunatic asylum, when he is sane, and who ends by going mad. this play was said not only to have been founded on fact, but to have been written by a man whose brother had been shut up in a private lunatic asylum by some conspiring greedy relations.
the man whose brother was thus treated went to law, but without avail, so as a last resource he wrote a play in which he exposed the facts, which were briefly these: a greedy family wish to get one of their members out of the way. they say he is mad and get him sequestered in a mad-house. he has a just brother who tries to get him released, but the brother finds himself faced with the obstinacy of professionalism when he declares the sequestered man is not mad; the lunatic experts say he does not understand the intricacies of the disease, and when he loses his temper, the doctors say: “you, too, are showing signs of the family madness.” the man who is shut up is quick tempered; a sojourn with lunatics sharpens his temper, and the play ends by his being dragged out by sinister-looking warders, crying out: “a la douche!” i could not sleep after seeing this spectacle, which lost nothing in the realistic interpretation of actors such as antoine and gémier.
in september, i went for a short time on leave, and stayed at lynton, north devon, with the cornishes in a delightful little house called the chough’s nest. it was a warm, soft[198] windy devonshire september. hubert and i bathed in the great breakers. we had wonderful teas in the valley, and followed the staghounds on exmoor. we talked of all the books under the sun, and i wrote a poem in blank verse which was afterwards published in the anglo-saxon review.
later in the autumn, i stayed a few days at a chateau near fontainebleau, and saw the forest in all the glory of its autumn foliage, with the tall trees ablaze, like funeral torches for the dying year; and the gardens of the chateau, and the splendid rooms seemed more melancholy than ever, as though the ghosts of the kings and queens of france were there unseen; and, looking at the gorgeous raiment of the fading forest, i thought of mary stuart putting on her most splendid robes on the morning of her execution, and mounting the scaffold in flaming satin.
“and all in red as of a funeral flame,
and clothed as if with sunset.”
there are no sadder places in the world than versailles, fontainebleau, and compiègne; those empty, deserted shells where there was once so much glory and so much gaiety, so much bustle and so much drama, and which are now hollow museums laid bare to the scrutiny of every profane sight-seer.
during the autumn of 1899, in paris, i received a visit from reggie balfour, whom i had known at cambridge, although he went to cambridge after i had left. he was a brilliant scholar and had done great things at cambridge. he had been staying at angers to study french. we talked of books, of the dreyfus case, and he suddenly said that he felt a strong desire to become a catholic. i was extremely surprised and disconcerted. up till that moment i had only known two people who had become catholics: one was a relation, who had married a catholic, and the other was an undergraduate, who had never discussed the matter except to say he must have all or nothing. when reggie balfour told me this i was amazed. i remember saying to him that the christian religion was not so very old, and so small a strip in the illimitable series of the creeds of mankind; but that if he believed in the christian revelation, and in the sacraments of the anglican church, he would find it difficult to turn round and say those sacraments had been an illusion. i begged him to wait. i said there was nothing to prevent his worshipping in catholic churches without committing[199] himself intellectually to a step that must cramp his freedom. i advised him to live in the porch without entering the building. i said finally: “my trouble is i cannot believe in the first proposition, the source of all dogma. if i could do that, if i could tell the first lie, i quite see that all the rest would follow.”
he took me one morning to low mass at notre dame des victoires. i had never attended a low mass before in my life. it impressed me greatly. i had imagined catholic services were always long, complicated, and overlaid with ritual. a low mass, i found, was short, extremely simple, and somehow or other made me think of the catacombs and the meetings of the early christians. one felt one was looking on at something extremely ancient. the behaviour of the congregation, and the expression on their faces impressed me too. to them it was evidently real.
we worked together at some poems i had written, and reggie arranged to have a small pamphlet of them privately printed for me, at the cambridge university press, which was done that christmas.
when we got back to london, he sent me this epitaph, which is translated from the latin, and is to be found at rome in the church of st. john lateran, the date being about 1600:
“ci-g?t robert pechom, anglais, catholique, qui après la rupture de l’angleterre avec l’église, a quitté l’angleterre ne pouvant y vivre sans la foi et qui, venu à rome y est mort ne pouvant y vivre sans patrie.”
the next year saw the opening of the exhibition. on the 17th of march, i went with reggie lister to the first night of l’aiglon. it was a momentous first night. all the most notable people in the literary and social world of paris were there: anatole france, jules lema?tre, halévy, sardou, robert de montesquiou, albert vandal, henry houssaye, paul hervieu, coquelin, madame greffuhle. the excitement was tense. sarah had a tremendous reception. when she spoke the line, which occurs in the first scene, “je n’aime pas beaucoup que la france soit neutre,” there was a roar of applause, but this, one felt, was political rather than artistic enthusiasm. the first quiet dialogue between the duke and the courtiers held the audience, and we felt that sarah’s calm and biting irony portended great reserves held in store, and when the scene of the[200] history lesson followed, which sarah played with an increasing accelerando and crescendo, and when she came to the lines:
“il suit l’ennemi; sent qu’il l’a dans la main;
un soir il dit au camp: ‘demain!’ le lendemain,
il dit en galopant sur le front de bandière:
‘soldats, il faut finir par un coup de tonnerre!’
il va, tachant de gris l’état-major vermeil;
l’armée est une mer; il attend le soleil;
il le voit se lever du haut d’un promontoire;
et, d’un sourire, il met ce soleil dans l’histoire!”[8]
she carried them off with a pace and an intensity that went through the large theatre like an electric shock. people were crying everywhere in the audience, and i remember reggie lister saying to me in the entr’acte that what moved him at a play or in a book was hardly ever the pathetic, but when people did or said splendid things.
the rest of the play, from that moment until the end, was a triumphant progression of cunningly administered electric thrills which were deliriously received by a quivering audience.
when it was all over and people talked of it the next and the following days in drawing-rooms and in the press, the enthusiasm began to cool down.
the following extracts from an article which i wrote in the speaker about it, immediately after the performance, give an idea of the impression the play made at the time:
“monsieur rostand, thanks to his rapid and brilliant career, and the colossal success of cyrano de bergerac, is certainly the french author of the present day who attracts the greatest amount of public attention in france, whose talent is the most keenly debated, whose claims are supported and disputed with the greatest vehemence. his popularity in france is as great as that of mr. kipling in england; and in france, as is the case with mr. kipling in england, there are not wanting many and determined advocates of the devil. some deny to m. rostand the title of poet, while admitting that he is a clever playwright; some say that he has no poetical talent whatsoever. in the case of poetical plays the public is probably in the long run the only judge. never in the world’s history has it been seen that the really magnificent poetical play has proved a lasting failure,[201] or a really bad poetical play a perennial success. of course there have been plays which, like other works that have come before their season, the public have taken years to appreciate; while, on the other hand, the public have patronised plays of surprising mediocrity and vulgarity; these works, however, have never resisted the hand of time. but in the main the public has been right, and those who take the opposite view generally belong to a class alluded to by pope:
‘so much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng
by chance go right, they purposely go wrong.’
certainly in m. rostand’s case, whatever may be the exact ‘place’ of his plays in the evolution of the world’s poetical drama, one thing is quite certain: his plays are triumphantly successful. this for a play is a merit in itself. after the triumph of cyrano it was difficult to believe that l’aiglon would attain the same level of merit and success, and never was a success more discounted beforehand. for weeks l’aiglon was the main topic of conversation in paris, and provided endless copy for the newspapers. another thing is certain: however the ?sthetic value of l’aiglon may be rated in the future, it constitutes for the present another gigantic success. never did a play come at a more opportune moment. at a time when the french are thinking that their country has for a long time been playing too insignificant a part in european politics, when the country is still convalescent and suffering from the vague discomfort subsequent on a feverish crisis, fretting and chafing under the colourless mediocrity of a régime that falls short of their flamboyant ideal, m. rostand comes skilfully leading a martial orchestra, and sets their pulses throbbing, their ears tingling, and their hearts beating to the inspiring tunes of imperial france.
“m. rostand’s play is certainly a forward step in his poetical career. it has the same colour and vitality as cyrano; the same incomparable instinct for stage effect, the same skill and dexterity in the manipulation of words which amounts to jugglery, the same fertility in poetical images and felicitous couplets that we find in his earlier works; but, besides this, it has something that they have not—a graver atmosphere, a larger outlook, a deeper note; the fabric, though the builder’s skill is the same, is less perfect as a whole, more irregular, but[202] in it we hear mysterious echoes, and the footfall of the epic muse, which compensates for the unevenness of the carpentry.
“in l’aiglon we breathe the atmosphere of the epic of napoleon. although the scenes which m. rostand presents to us deal only with the sunset of that period, the glories and vicissitudes of that epoch are suggested to us; we do not see the things themselves, but we are conscious of their spirit, their poetic existence and essence. m. rostand evokes them, not by means of palpable shapes, but, like a wizard, in the images of his phrases and the sound of his verse, and thus we see them more clearly than if they had been presented to us in the form of elaborate tableaux or spectacular battle-pieces.
“the existence of napoleon ii. was in itself a tragic fact. yet more tragic if, as metternich is reported to have said of him, he had ‘a head of iron and a body of glass.’ and a degree more tragic still is m. rostand’s creation of a prince whose frail tenement of clay is consumed by ambition and aspiration, and who is conscious, at times, of the vanity of his aspiration and the hopelessness of his ambition. thus tossed to and fro, from ecstasy to despair, he is another hamlet, born, not to avenge a crime against his father, but to atone for his father’s crimes. perhaps the most poetical moment of the play is when the prince realises, on the plain of wagram, that he himself is the atonement; that he is the white wafer of sacrifice offered as an expiation for so many oceans of blood. m. rostand has chosen this theme, pregnant with pathos, as his principal motif. it is needless to relate the play… the close of the fifth act is perhaps the finest thing in conception of the whole; in it we see napoleon, after the failure of an attempted escape to france, alone on the battlefield of wagram, pale in his white uniform on the great green moonlit plain, with the body of the faithful soldier of the old guard, who killed himself rather than be taken by the austrians, lying before him. gradually in the sighing winds napoleon imagines he hears the moans of the soldiers who once strewed the plain, until the fancy grows into hallucination, until he sees himself surrounded by regiments of ghosts, and hears the groans, the call, and the clamour of phantom armies growing louder and louder till they culminate in the cry of ‘vive l’empereur.’ he hears the tramping of men, the champing and neighing of chargers, and the music of the band; he thinks the ‘grande armée’ has come to life, and[203] rushes joyfully to meet it; the vision is then dispelled, and the irony of the reality is made plain, for it is the white uniforms of the austrian regiment (of which he is colonel) that appear in the plain. the scene is almost shakespearean in its effect of beauty and terror.
“finally, in the last act, we see the roi de rome dying in his gilded cage while he listens to the account of his baptism in paris, which is read out to him as he dies. he who as a child ‘eut pour hochet la couronne de rome’ is now an obscure and insignificant hapsburg princeling, dying forgotten by the world, without a friend, and under the eye of his imperturbable enemy.
“the play has already been accused of incoherence, lengthiness, and inequality; of too rapid transitions, of a clash in style between preciosity and brutality. it has been compared unfavourably with cyrano… fault is found now, as it was before, with the form of m. rostand’s verses; they are no doubt better heard on the stage than read in the study, and this surely shows that they fulfil their conditions. his verses are not those of racine, of alfred de vigny, or of lecomte de lisle … but they have a poetic quality and a value of their own; and while their clarion music is still ringing in my ears i should think it foolish to quarrel with them and to criticise them in a captious spirit; possibly on reading l’aiglon the impression may be different. for the present, still under the spell of the enthusiasm and shouts of applause which his couplets inspired on the memorable first night of the play, i can but thank the author who brought before my eyes, with the skilful and clamorous music of his harps and horns, his trumpets and fifes and drums, the vision of an heroic epoch and the shadows of homeric battles—the red sun and the cannon balls shivering the ice at austerlitz, the pope crowning another c?sar at notre dame, moscow in flames and the great army scattered on the plains of russia, and the lapping of the tideless sea round st. helena.”
many of those who had been most enthusiastic at the first night of l’aiglon lost no time in saying they had been mistaken, and that it was after all but a poor affair. someone said that rostand’s verse was made en caoutchouc. i heard someone ask robert de montesquieu his opinion soon after the play was produced. he said he thought the verse was in the best[204] victor hugo tradition; some of it, metternich’s monologue on napoleon’s hat, very fine. somebody mentioned the more sentimental verses on la petite source: “cela doit être,” said montesquiou, “de madame rostand.”
arthur strong, after he saw the play, told me it had carried him away, and the fact of sarah bernhardt being a woman, and not a young woman, had mattered to him no more than the footlights or the painted scenery; he had accepted it, he had been made to accept it gladly, by the fire of the play and the power of the interpretation.
the paris exhibition of 1900 was opened on the 14th of april, and the whole of the embassy staff attended that ceremony in uniform. i remember little of it. the features of the exhibition were the trottoir roulant, a moving platform, that took visitors all round the exhibition without their having to stir a foot; the pictures in the grand palais; the little city on the left bank of the seine, where every nation was represented by a house, and where, in the english house, there was a room copied from broughton castle, full of gainsboroughs; the petit palais, a gem in itself; and, besides these, there were the usual features of all exhibitions—side-shows, bales of chocolate, and galleries full of machinery and implements.
towards the end of april i was taken by m. castillon de saint victor for an expedition in a free balloon. i had been up twice in a captive balloon in the jardin d’acclimatation, and had not enjoyed the experience, especially once on a windy day. i was not at all sure i was not going to dislike the free balloon, and i felt a pang of fear whenever i thought of it beforehand; but when the moment of starting came, and the balloon was released, and rose as gently and as imperceptibly as a puff of smoke from saint denis, and soared higher and higher into the dazzling sky without noise, without our experiencing any effect of motion or breeze, i felt intoxicated with pleasure. we went up to three thousand feet. it was like reaching another planet, an olympic region of serenity and light, and one had no desire to leave it or to descend again to the earth.
we ate luncheon from a basket and drank a little rum, which was said to be the best beverage in a balloon, and we took photographs from the air. i little thought that i should one day have something to do with aircraft, air photographs, and all the many details of air navigation. we floated on[205] across paris in a south-easterly direction. we came down low over a chateau belonging to the rothschilds’ and over the forest of cre?y; later in the afternoon, we dropped a guide rope and floated over the country at a height of about two hundred feet, and as the evening came on, the balloon came down still lower and sailed along just over the tree-tops. finally we landed. the balloon hopped like a football, the basket car was overturned, and the gas was let out. we landed in a deserted piece of flat country, but no sooner was the balloon on the ground than, as always happens, a crowd sprang from nowhere and helped us. the balloon was put in a cart, and we walked to the town of provins, which was not far off, and there we took the train to paris. the next time i visited provins it was the general headquarters of the french army during the latter part of the european war.
i spent a week of that spring at fontainebleau and chantilly. there were a great many english people in paris. one night, at the opera, in a box, an english lady was sitting, a large emerald poised high on her hair; the audience looked at nothing else, and an old frenchman, who had been an ornament of the second empire, came up to me in the entr’acte and said: “il est impossible d’être plus jolie que cette femme.” shortly after this i travelled up to paris from fontainebleau with this same lady. the train was crowded, and we just managed to find room in the barest of provincial railway carriages. there were some private soldiers in the carriage, and some substantial women in sabots with large baskets. they gazed at her with childish delight, unmixed admiration, and surprised wonder, as she sat, making the boards of the third-class carriage look like a throne, in cool, diaphanous, lilac and white muslins and a large bunch of flowers, a vision of radiance and grace; it reminded me of the large masses of lilies of the valley and roses you suddenly meet with in a dark, narrow street corner on the first fine day of spring in florence.
we went to a shop in paris where she wanted to buy a pair of gloves. when she asked how much they were, the lady who was serving her said: “pour vous rien, madame, vous êtes trop jolie!”
i used to see a great deal of monsieur and madame de jaucourt, whom i could remember ever since the early days of my childhood. monsieur de jaucourt had the most delightful[206] way of expressing things. one day when madame de jaucourt was pressing myself and another of the secretaries to stay with them in the country, he said: “ma chère, les jeunes gens ont beaucoup mieux à faire que d’aller passer des heures à la campagne!” he was passionately fond of paris. “on me gate mon cher paris,” he used to say. after luncheon, he would interview the cook and discuss every detail of last night’s dinner, praising this and criticising that, with extraordinary nicety and precision; and when he gave a dance in his house for boys and girls, on the afternoon preceding it, he would have different samples of lemonade and orangeade sent up to taste and choose from, to see if they were sweet enough but not too sweet. the lemonade was for the juvenile buffet. women’s bets used to amuse him, and when they talked about racing, he would say: “les paris des femmes sont à crever de rire.” he was a connoisseur of artistic things, and enjoyed a fine house, and beautiful objets d’art. he insisted on my going to see the chateau of vaux, which he said was the finest house he knew. he said what distinguished it from other houses was that it was not crammed with valuable things for the sake of ostentation, show, or ornament, but where a piece of furniture was wanted, there it would be, and it would be a good one.
monsieur de jaucourt had a house not far from paris in the country, and i remember playing croquet one day there. his daughter, fran?oise, aimed carefully at the ball and missed the hoop, upon which m. de jaucourt said, with a sigh: “ma pauvre fille, tu as joué sans réfléchir.” i often used to dine at the “cercle de l’union.” there were about four or five old men who used to dine there every night; a few, a very few, younger men, but no quite young frenchmen.
one night someone arrived and asked for some cold soup. there was none. in a fury of passion this member asked for the book of complaints. when it was brought, he wrote in it: “n’ayant pas pu trouver un consommé froid j’ai d? diner hors du club.”
one night the new house, built by count boni de castellane in the bois de boulogne, was being discussed. someone said it was like trianon, and that it would be difficult to keep up. someone else who was there said: “mais boni est beaucoup plus riche que louis xiv.” m. du lau and general galliffet used often to dine there to discuss the days of their youth and talk[207] over the beauties and even the wines of the past; general galliffet told us one night how he won sums of money by playing with a piece of rope taken from a gibbet in his pocket, and that the best wine he had ever drunk in his life was in the rhine country. now they are all dead, and i suppose their place is taken by those who were the older young men in those days, but i have no doubt that they sit round in the same chairs and sometimes complain if there is no consommé froid to be had.
in the summer of 1900, i went on leave to london for a few weeks and attempted to pass an examination in international law after a few weeks’ preparation. i went up for the examination, and i don’t think i was able to answer a single question; my crammer told me i had not the legal mind. at the end of the summer, i was told that the foreign office wanted me to go to copenhagen, and at the beginning of august i started for denmark as third secretary to her majesty’s legation.