Places and Persons

...British duchesses of the nineties w6re as shocked by the Latin Quarter scenes as modern ones are unmoved by the elaborate perversions of D. H. Lawrence or the careful frivolities of the late Ronald Firbank...

...For both the "remembrance of things past" was the substantial life, the real one, compared to which the present was a shadow, and a sorry one at that...

...The sweet aspect from the bridge, on either side and beyond, filled me with the old enchantment...

...It was only when mesmerized by a sinister impresario named Svengali that she emitted the grand trills and dazzling cadenzas that aroused all Europe...

...One would wish to write as Du Maurier drew...

...Thus musing sadly, I reached St Cloud, and that at least had not very perceptibly altered, and looked as though I had only left it a week ago...

...At that point the name of the heroine passed into current vulgarism, and presently the book was all but forgotten...

...Dear, sweet-tempered, mid-Victorian Du Maurier, who thought In Memoriam great poetry, and the profound art of Watts and Sir John Millais superior to his own, was surely never one to sigh for the moon...

...Cloud when, after ten years' absence in hostile Albion, he comes back to the region of his happy childhood, expecting to find all unchanged...

...No lover of the best of Du Maurier's books will forget the hero's first Sunday afternoon in old Passy, the Bois and St...

...The admirer of Daumier, the contemporary of Tenniel and John Leech, was far better able to create the atmosphere of the divine town by means of a few strokes in pure black-and-white than through the genial and often touching journalese by which he travestied the language of Wordsworth and De Quincey...

...This is all I know: the longer and more completely one lives one's life on earth the better for all...

...Gross industries then mingled in the triumph, and there was an eruption of Trilby face-creams and Trilby boots...

...Had these signs of an all-beneficent progress not been manifested, his best book would probably never have been written...

...The test has never been better formulated than by Arthur Machen in a little book called Hieroglyphics...

...I make you a present of that plot," concluded the narrator as the spire of Harrow Church came in sight...

...It is not on record with what courtly sighs and gestures of elaborate renunciation the great James declined the responsibility, but the long and short of it was that Du Maurier dropped his talented pencil for a quill that was much too big for him, and the result was Trilby...

...Deeping and Wilder to know that, judged by a certain test, their devotion to their providers is far more illfounded than that of the readers of Trilby and its successor, Peter Ibbetson...

...But it is pleasant to know that a passion for Paris led him eventually to a belief in some sort of immortality...

...To be sure he had a superstitious weakness, very common in "ages of reason," for strange histories based on impossible happenings, couched in a sham-scientific, semievolutionary jargon that is occasionally irritating...

...Surely, surely, I cried to myself, we ought to find some means of possessing the past more fully and completely than we do...

...A doctor in attendance was consulted...

...It is easy to smile at this literary event during the palmy days, to find it charmingly illiterate and touching...

...Du Maurier loved Paris as one loves a person...

...while Du Maurier, through his intense, inarticulate love for a definite time, a definite place, was forced to formulate a conception of spiritual resurrection, of immortality which is very close to the Christian hope...

...Possibly it would astonish the devotees of Messrs...

...Actually he wrote better than he reasoned, and he wrote best in a state of "emotion recollected in tranquility," under the spell of the City of the Seine which was one of his two obsessions throughout his amiable and successful life...

...Nevertheless, the emotional raison d'etre of the two writers was almost identical...

...One quotation from Peter Ibbetson may serve to give his manner which, despite the natural simplicity, the often slipshod English, is, I am convinced, a good manner, replete with pathos and grace...

...The odd vitality and value of Peter Ibbetson have their roots in two obsessions which at bottom are one and the same—the adored Paris of the writer's childhood and his memory of that childhood itself...

...Memory is but a poor, rudimentary thing that we had better be without, if it can only lead us to the verge of consummation like this, and madden us with a desire it cannot slake...

...Though if men could guess what is in store for them when they die, without also knowing that, they would have the patience to live, for who would fardels bear...

...Bishops employed it as a text in rural cathedrals...

...The genial and unpretentious illustrator for Punch was entertaining his illustrious companion with the story of a fictitious diva who, in her proper state of consciousness, could not sing a note...

...No doubt his own illustrations account for a good deal of the quality in the two books mentioned above...

...As things were, Du Maurier did not die before he had seen the wild park of his youth swallowed up by a railway-tunnel topped by coquettish villas, and the wooded reaches around the lonely pond in the Bois occupied by a race-track...

...Judged by this test, Les Miserables, which has no style, whose plot is mere melodrama, is good literature...

...Only, in the case of Proust, that profound gift of memory which for the Englishman was "but a poor, rudimentary thing" led him, through all the intricacies and perversities of a painfully elaborated and pessimistic art, to one of the greatest written achievements of our era...

...I can think of no writer, however, French or English, good or bad, who has better succeeded in transmitting the vision, the sentiment of Paris to the romantic reader...

...Line was the true language of his emotions, whether of love or hatred...

...Henry James through the grassy reaches of his beloved Hampstead Heath...

...All will be well for us all, and of such a kind that those who do not sigh for the moon will be well content...

...Bel Ami and The Mill on the Floss are not...

...Beautiful, hideous, whatever you please, they seemed to revel in their eternal stability, their stony scorn of time and wind and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of man...

...But the singing manner of writing which he perhaps learned from Thackeray saved him in his worst moments from a half-baked affection for Darwin and Professor Huxley...

...What counts in a great book is that peculiar, indefinable magic to which, for lack of a better term we attach the foolish literary label of "atmosphere" ; what counts, to vary the figure, are those mysterious overtones communicated like a kind of soundless music from the printed page to the heart of the reader...

...But she has been dead half an hour," he replied...

...We feel certain, in any case, that his conception of the better life bore the visual imprint of ancient gates leading to an eternal wood, and the river climbing the horizon by the beautiful, unforgettable fountains...

...It is not a bad thing to have first seen the necklace of bridges on the Seine with the eyes of Little Billie, and the solitudes of the Bois with the eyes of Gogo Pasquier, later called Peter Ibbetson...

...Both men sought back, through the long, fretful vistas of time, all clouded over with the miasmas of mere living, to that dark, happy house of infancy, embosomed in sunshot greenery...

...Somewhere in Peter Ibbetson, for example, there are two little drawings, about three inches square, of the London scene...

...and the greatest of these is love...

...His brief career as a novelist seems to have been the result of an accidental stroll with Mr...

...Stevenson understood something of this principle when he said that there were certain scenes or landscapes— this lonely shore or that still more lonely street—which veritably cried out for their stories, the story being secondary to the wordless emotion which summoned it...

...An affair with Whistler, who found himself caricatured in its pages and made a great fuss, increased the publicity and raised the value of the first edition ioo percent...

...I hastened through the gilded gates, and up the broad walk to the grand cascade...

...For this mentality, part pagan, part Darwinian, half-consciously Christian, youth was divine because passed in the French capital, and the old city was the nearest thing to heaven because it was the setting of his youth...

...It was good to pat them on the back once more, and cling to them for a little while, after all the dust and drift and ruin I had been tramping through all day...

...Both demanded of themselves with an intense longing why the past had been so exquisite, what ineffable secret of childhood had been theirs and was now lost...

...And both, being authentic artists, were compelled to externalize their obsession through the medium with which they were (though in very different degrees) endowed...

...To put it simply, in vital romance there are story and character and the love which is in the heart of the writer...

...But on her own death-bed, a few years later, she abruptly began to warble an aria which brought the old ecstasy to the listeners, and a moment later she murmured the name of Svengali...

...Actually it is a synthesis...

...Unexpectedly the impresario died and of course the lady sang no more...

...I have not the volume by me but, if I recall correctly its thesis, it was that in really vital romance, such things as plot, style, character analysis, and the rest of them were quite accidental, and actually unimportant...

...There, among the lovely wreathed urns and jars of geranium, still reclined and gesticulated the old, unalterable gods...

...It is the foundation of everything...

...All great literature, and especially the sort called "realistic," must carry a little of this emotional burden, this poetry, or it is condemnable as secondary...

...Few novels have had so singular a fortune...

...Not only did it make the complete financial security of the author, but it broke all previous records of sale in the United Kingdom and the States...

...there squatted the grimly genial monsters in granite and marble and bronze, still spouting their endless gallons for the delectation of hot Parisian eyes...

...one is called "Pentonville," the other "Sunday in Pentonville...

...The latter is one of the most illustrious of modern French writers while Du Maurier was a caricaturist who became a novelist by accident, and is now the subject of indulgent smiles on the part of people who began to read about 1890...

...just as there are certain people, especially children, whose faces, whose personalities, demand to be actualized in painting or music, or in the sorry medium of prose...

...Life is not worth living if a want so desperate and so natural can never be satisfied...

...Perhaps it seems grotesque to couple his name with that of Marcel Proust...

...That instantaneous impression of uniform brick fronts, rusty areas, the solitary lamp-post, the thin black streams of dismal people climbing to the desolating Georgian conventicle at the far end, all the dull emptiness of the City of Dreadful Afternoon, are admirably conveyed in a few strokes of the pencil...

...Let us add in conclusion that few writers have expressed more poignantly the Wordsworthian sense that we grow up and out of the past, "trailing clouds of glory," progressively stained and tarnished by maturity than this English illustrator who "could not write...

...This observation is not of a profound originality...

...Nor did he write so badly, all things considered...

...no doubt it is repeated to satiety each summer by millions of tourists...

...The bell which sounds for the little hero of Proust in the opening paragraph, and which is faintly reiterated in the final pages of his gigantic work, may be compared as a symbol to the lonely forest-pool in Peter Ibbetson—"a very wilderness of delight, a heaven, a terror of tangled thickets...