Mauri when I was making a little study of ballet
music with Vazquez at the Opera. She lived up four
flights, just by the rear entrance of the Opera. An
enraged rat terrier, with a deafening bark, always met
me at the door. I would be shown into the bluish re-
ception room where two fauteuils, facing each other
as if in a conversational mood, stood before a closed
grate. Or I would be ushered into the Louis XV
salon where the chairs and sofas were dressed in white
frocks. Sometimes the Mauri would come in abun-

299



300 French Essays and Profiles

dantly wrapped in a white shawl or a nubia in the at-
tempt to discourage the attack of a violent cold. In
such an amiable plight, her rectangular face alone
would be visible among her encircling draperies.

She was ever in a hurry and always sat on the edge
of her chair. But she chatted most frankly and freely
of her art, and gave voice to decided opinions about
the decadence of the ballet, the lack of male profes-
sors of the dance, and so on. If you were to ask her
what is to be the ballet of the future, she would per-
haps imitate the humorous Auber by replying, "That
which is danced the longest."

She appeared, on an average, twice a month at the
Grand Opera. She received an annual salary of forty-
five thousand francs with a month's leave of absence
in July or August. Her vacation was usually passed
at her country-place near Salis-de-Bearn between Ba-
yonne and Pau, or at some watering place where bac-
cara is played. It may be said, though, that while she
loved the complications of baccara, she never was able
to comprehend the pooling arrangements under which
French horse races are run.

Still, withal, she seemed economical and thrifty.
She lived in Paris in a modest noiseless fashion. She
wrote to you on inexpensive note paper, and, follow-
ing the example of Fanny Elssler and other great bal-
lerines, she fell into casual and charming misunder-
standings with French orthography.

She spoke French with a strong accent, for she was
Spanish, having been born near Barcelona. Her father
was a master of ballet. She had just the form for a



Roslta Mauri 301

famous danseuse — ample legs and a light body. Her
black hair was worn short and frizzed, and was sille at
the left side. On the nights of her "premieres" she
drank, seven or eight cups of black coffee. A senti-
mental Parisian chronicler once augured that she
would fly from earth at the setting of the sun on a
summer's day.

The Mauri offered three emphatic traits of char-
acter. There was her energy. She was indefatigable
In rehearsing her roles, and invariably exhausted her
professor and colleagues by the numberless repetitions
of her pas. Then, she had a temper of her own, and
was said to rule the hosts at the Opera. When her
displeasure was aroused during a rehearsal, she ap-
peared to be transformed into a kind of gale, and
swept through the flies and across the stage like one
of her native solanos. At the same time she had the
reputation of being charitable with her purse, and she
always spoke well of her companions. As a result,
one never heard an ill or a jealous word of her.



xiii. Frederic Mistral



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Frederic Mistral died in 1914 at the age of 84. He passed
his life in his native south of France and was the leader of the
Provencal revival. He aided in founding the Society of Felibres
in 1854. They became, in 1876, an extended organization with
him as chief. His most widely known production was "Mireio"
(1859) from which was taken the libretto for Gounod's opera
"Mireille" (1864). Mistral was the author of an immense dic-
tionary of Provencal tongues, reviving the idiom of the thirteenth
century. The Nobel prize for poetry came to him in 1904.



FREDERIC MISTRAL

ON Sabbath afternoons in the simple village of
Maillane, where Frederic Mistral was born,
lived and died, there were wont to promenade
up and down the public thoroughfare two columns of
people. The one on the left wore deep blue cravats
and represented those daring modern fellows who
were the radicals and free-thinkers. The other column,
on the right, comprised those adhering to the ancient
ideas of the throne and the altar. They wore cravats
of light blue.

Mistral was to be found among those wearing the
light blue. He was thus true to his wonderful thir-
teenth century when the Troubadours reigned with
their graces and weaknesses, their romances and super-
stitions, their perennial youth and early decay. In
fact Mistral and his followers set up a real kingdom
of letters, sanctified by rites, glorified by festivals, and
crowned with toasts of beflowered rhetoric and rimes
in praise of that lovely dead Provengal past of which
they were the direct inheritors. Theirs was a knightly
round table out in plein air, graced with roses and love,
embellished with sunshine and wine, with gay laughter
and simple faith, in a realm where elderly men exu-
berantly married young wives.

Successive Queens of the Felibres also reigned —

30s



3o6 French Essays and Profiles

women so good to look upon that they appear always
to be chosen for their pulchritude — lustrous midnights
in their hair, unfathomable depths in their soft black
eyes. And the first of them was Mistral's young wife,
to whom he was married at forty-six.

His appearance brought to mind some Southern
colonel. He had the emotionalism and lounging ways
of our own warm South. His soft hat tossed on
across his right ear, his martial mustache, his lordly
goatee, his skin tanned by a thousand suns, his hospit-
able enthusiasm, suggested a grandee of royal girth
and spacious manners, ready to burst forth in expan-
sive mirth or quickly to shed a confiding and sympa-
thetic tear.

Much has been written to show his hilarity and frol-
icsomeness, especially at the time when Daudet visited
their adored Provence. They and their fellows,
bearded, loose-limbed, with the jaunty swagger of their
warm clime, carried on "high jinks" amid the home
folk up and down the river valley. They played
pranks, shouted and laughed, absorbed much wine,
and reveled in the tales and jests of their boasted local-
ity.

Some conceive of Mistral as a literary aristocrat and
Overlord, dwelling in a home rich and beautiful with
art objects suggesting the romantic days of Aucassin
and Nicolette. They picture him as a luxurious esthete
and master dilettant able to linger for months over
an archaic rime and toy for years over the memories
of a decayed language and literature that had appeared
dancing in a few light-hearted pages of history.



Frederic Mistral 307

Others are led to think of Mistral as a rustic true to
his peasant mother, and living in a cottage containing
two rooms, one above the other, and companioned by
that poor man's friend — a dog.

Though he was king of the southern half of France
— the most famous and beloved man there — he pre-
tended in fact to be a sort of clodhopper. In his vil-
lage, not far from the medieval Avignon, of royal and
papal memories, he was contented for a long lifetime
to receive the homages of the world. No well-edu-
cated person thought a visit to that province complete
without having paid his very welcome respects to the
Chief of the Felibres. Citizens of distant America
even were numbered in his circle of personal interests.
He dedicated a poem to President Roosevelt, and in-
cluded Richard Watson Gilder among the acknowl-
edged friends of his Society. On Mistral's tomb, built
at Aries in 1907, the face of Roosevelt is one of the
faces carved in the marble.

Modest in his life of provincial triumphs. Mistral
seemed to have been born under a lucky star. His
evenly modeled hands were spoken of as indicating his
tranquil life. Good of heart, manly, he had the full
leisure to love all that was noble and beautiful. Hav-
ing fallen heir to sufficient means from his farmer
father, he was always free from economic pressure and
could thus slowly do a worthy work that would have
been impossible to those of the pen who see the prowl-
ing wolf whenever they peek out of doors.

To labor twenty years, eight hours a day, on a
production as little salable as a Provengal dictionary,



3o8 French Essays and Profiles

though unique and valued as it is, required an assured
ease of purse. This toil of love, picking up fragments
of one's ancient native idiom from fisher folk, and old
housewives at their daily tasks, demanded an occupied,
gossiping idleness such as belonged only to a loquacious
Felibre. With a dallying beauty and simpleness could
he write: "If joy comes not to-day, assuredly it will
come to-morrow. And as soon as the violet breathes
her perfume, the butterfly will flutter to her; then will
the maiden, like a ripening fruit, come to her lover;
and the crystal dewdrop will be as radiant as a dia-
mond."

The crowning of his literary fame was precisely his
early poem "Mireio" (1859), from which came forth
the libretto for Gounod's famous opera of "Mireille."
One may well say that it is the most popular opera
comique in France save "Carmen" and "Mignon."
One of the toasts drunk by the Society of Felibres was:
"I drink to Mireille, the most beautiful mirror in
which Provence looks at herself."

Only a few times did the king of the Provencals
leave his white, sun-baked roads and the vineyard
shores of his gallant river Rhone. A trip to Switzer-
land, one to Italy, a few rare journeys to Paris as
an uncrowned rustic ruler in that great republic of
letters — these sojourns but attested to the loyal de-
votion and local pride with which he insisted on dwell-
ing firmly at home. Logical in his pride of provincial
attitude, he declined to become one of the Immortal
Forty on principle. All that was too far away — in
Paris.



Frederic Mistral 309

While it is to be recorded that he succeeded in a
highly enviable measure, he at the same time failed
in part. Though his literary labors were of undeniable
profit and permanence, his career did not swerve the
great main modern course of French literature. In-
stead of dipping back toward Provencal forms and
fashions as Mistral might have wished, it showed de-
cided signs of a contrary bent, leaning rather to the
contemporary kingdom of slang and tramp philosophy,
as witness Richepin's "la Chanson des gueux." The
Troubadours were royal tramps, but the latter-day
Weary Willies are the hobos of a democracy concern-
ing which Mistral had small understanding and sym-
pathy. With all his exuberant tendencies that belong
to his "boiling South," he had a grave and phlegmatic
side, and could expatiate at length on the sadness and
shame of present times. His unfriendliness to mo-
dernity was shown by his favoring the use of the guillo-
tine and disfavoring the modern ascendancy of femi-
nism which appeared to mean to him the descent to-
ward effeminacy.

Mistral — last of the veritable Troubadours — was
truly gifted in that he was an erudite philologist who
possessed a rare creative sense of poetic form. His
name had become greater than any direct appeal of the
output of his pen; for only to the learned few does
the bent of his labors mean anything. It was to the
credit of this not ungrateful or ungenerous age that he
reaped all the rewards of fame from a public which
understood practically nothing of his work. While he
humbly pushed away scholastic honors from himself,



310 French Essays and Profiles

they only crowded the more thickly about his brow.
The very nature of his undertaking disarmed criticism.
There was none of his compatriots who really cared
to say him nay, though he persisted in not using the
national language except in translating his own books.
He fairly earned his share of the Nobel prize in
1904, with the proceeds of which he founded a Pro-
vencal museum at Aries. A few months before his
death he appropriately wrote: "The days that grow
chill and the swelling sea — all things tell me that the
winter of my life has come, and that I must without
delay gather my olives and offer the virgin oil on the
altar of God."



xiv. Georges Pellissier



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Georges Pellissier was born in 1852 and died during the war
period. He was a valuable literary critic whose life was hidden
in his analytical volumes. He violently attacked Shakespeare's
reputation as a playwright.



GEORGES PELLISSIER

WHEN chatting with Alphonse Daudet one
morning, the name of Pellissier was men-
tioned. Daudet, noticing that I appeared
to be acquainted with PeUissier, said:

"Let me tell you what I guess about him, for I do
not know him and I know no one who does. I merely
judge from his article on 'la Petite Paroisse,' but I'm
pretty sure I am right. He is a Protestant or, at least,
of a Protestant family — his father may be, or may
have been, a pastor. You see there was a certain taste
of stringent morality biting that article. I don't mean
that I think M. Pellissier is orthodox: I mean an en-
franchised, liberal Protestant. I fancy he lives alone,
works alone, mixes little with the world, that he tries
to escape personal influences, prejudices, and entangle-
ments in order to be perfectly just as a literary appre-
ciator amid the silence of books instead of the noise
of the public.

"He is not after favors and is prodigal of none.
He expects severe consideration, and does not wish
to be chary of encouragement. Honesty, rationalism,
humaneness — those are about his guiding words. And
another thing — he is not chauvinistic. In general, our
French literary censors are not familiar with other
modern countries and literatures, and consciously or

313



314 French Essays and Profiles

unconsciously look down on them. Not so, M. Pellls-
sler. Some influence or circumstance in his life — I
don't know what — has opened him up to a sort of
cosmopolitan forbearance — to an international clem-
ency of view. Now — how near right am I?"

Daudet guessed correctly in outline. Pellissier's
father was a venerable Protestant pastor on the left
bank of the Seine. The family was deistically re-
ligious and strongly Republican. Consequently the son
was reared abreast of the best commanding influences
(not essentially Catholic) which have slowly shaped
the destinies of France to-day under the Third Re-
public. He was of that excellent class of Parisian
people who read the "Temps" and the "Journal des
Debats" and applaud the plays of Augier. He mar-
ried a Prussian lady who was educated in Paris. Ger-
man as well as French was used currently by his chil-
dren, although Pellissier only spoke his native tongue.
In this way his cosmopolitanism, which Daudet re-
marked, may be accounted for.

Pellissier used to be at home in the silent depths
of Passy just on the verge of the Bois de Boulogne.
He lived nearly opposite where Brunetiere lived before
the latter took his apartments in the rue de Rennes to
be near the "Revue des Deux Mondes" and the Sor-
bonne. Pellissier shunned society and companionship
save that of his family and his bicycle. He divorced
himself from his confreres, the theater, public galleries,
salons — Paris, in a word; for he believed that a liter-
ary critic needs to know books, not careers, personali-
ties, gossip. From analogous motives he never at-



Georges PelFissier 315

tempted verse, playmeking, fiction, or general, non-
literary subjects. Alone of all his contemporary
French reviewers, he was first and last a critic of let-
ters. He did not parade, courted no external ambi-
tions, hid his life, and tried to keep the lives of his
confreres hidden — even from himself. He had re-
fused a chair at the Sorbonne because he felt that
there was a certain "snobisme," as he expressed it
to me, in its atmosphere.

His maiden duties as a professor of rhetoric were
exercised at Fontenay-aux-Roses — that well-known
village south of Paris. Here he wrote his first book —
the standard one that gave him at once a high reputa-
tion: "Le Mouvement litteraire aux XIX. siecle."

I used to have the privilege of slipping to Passy on
the train and talking with Pellissier about books of
the day. He would sit in beslippered ease and smoke
cigarettes in a slightly nervous manner while formu-
lating literary judgments in the conversational French
style. He conversed, as he wrote, with a sober strict-
ness of expression, firm, direct and above all logical —
few figures of speech, little imagery and color. His
aim was the truth, rational, moral, piercing, contract-
ing truth, not rounding beauty, not expanding indul-
gences or insinuating entertainment. Trenchant was
he and lucid, strengthening and sincere. This is what
you do not ask of Parisian reviewers as a rule. He
preferred to be serious rather than conspicuous at the
risk of being frivolous or misleading.



XV. Edouard Rod



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Edouard Rod (pronounced rode) was born in Switzerland in
1857 and died in 1910. He lived latterly in Paris. He was an
editor, professor of comparative literature, novelist and critic. He
lectured in America in 1899. He took up early with Schopen-
hauer's pessimism and Wagner's music and published many
volumes. He was a serious contemplator and examiner of anxious
problems concerning the soul and human destiny.



EDOUARD ROD

EDOUARD ROD lived in company with ideas.
Life came to him second-handed. His exist-
ence was neutralized into his classroom, his
study, his indoctrinations. His personality was not
original, diversified nor piquant. It was sane, regular
and praiseworthy even to commonplaceness. There
were no pegs on which to hang one's human interest.

On the only occasion I ever met him he was afflicted
with a severe cold. He was bundled up, stuffed up,
blinked up. Letters and life seemed through his eyes
and feelings to be clogged up, barred off or at any rate
dammed. As often as I have thought of him since,
that impression has revived and I have always as-
sociated stuffiness and uncomfortableness with his liter-
ary legacy and outlook. This may illustrate the de-
fect or danger of Sainte-Beuve's medium of personality
in estimating the output of an author.

This trivial incident of Monsieur Rod's rheum,
however, chances to fit in, in a way, with his innate and
incurable pessimism. Yet his pessimism seemed rather
a sort of indigestion of the very good things of earth.
Success and prosperity were the plats from which he
partook at the banquet of life, and still he could not
but ask constantly. Why eat ? Why enjoy ? Why live ?

Far lighter and pleasanter than his quasi masters

319



320 French Essays and Profiles

Schopenhauer and Leopardi, he was of plainer, more
substantial stuff than the typical Parisian skeptics of
his day. One need not look to him for any discon-
solate force, intensity, isolated grandeur nor, on the
other hand, for any Pyrrhonic brilliancy and irony.
He was never an ironist, though he belonged to the
little circle of pungent jesters in the sanctum of the
"Journal des Debats." In truth he was a genuine pro-
fessor rather than a genuine literary man, and most
truly belonged with Brunetiere, Faguet and the others
in the gray, somber, doctrinal portals of the "Revue
des Deux Mondes."

Born and reared on the banks of the azure Leman
with his face toward both Germany and France, Mon-
sieur Rod finally decided to be French. In preferring
not to develop the exotic within him, and thus not to
add a distinctly new segment of horizon to the realm
of French letters, he may have missed his greatest op-
portunity. If he had held himself aloof from and
discussed Paris in his volumes as he held himself aloof
from and discussed his theses, he might have originated
a more valuable and entertaining work.

His hybrid nature partly explains that certain steril-
ity which nearly always marks his ideas, impulses and
productions. For instance, he neutralized the Calvin-
istic element within him by believing, like a royalist
Frenchman, that the Holy See is on the whole suffi-
ciently representative and reformative. If one had
objected in the presence of Monsieur Rod to the ef-
facement of the individual in the uniformity of Roman-
ism, he would have responded by objecting to the per-



Edouard Rod 321

sonal wranglings rife in the individualistic Protestant
parishes such as he was famihar with in his cherished
canton of Vaud.

His stories are to be distinguished from the usual
French novel by the fact that they are "clean"; yet,
highly alive to the moral demands of the Protestant
races, he was under the impression, as he told me, that
the "immorality" of his fiction was the reason why it
had not found a foothold in England and America.
As for his own attitude toward religion, he would
believe, but could not — like almost every psychologist
of the Renan group. He was a "Calvinist free
thinker."

His pronounced consciousness of mot, the source or
sign of his as well as of all pessimism, was neither exag-
gerated, eccentric nor ailing. It was intellectual dilet-
tantism. His debuts in literature were extremely
Naturalistic, but he soon revolted against Zola and
willingly classified himself with Bourget and Barres.
He was legitimately the truest son of Goethe to be
found in the family of contemporary French authors.
He characterized Goethe as the father of modern
dilettantism, and indicated himself when he defined
a goetheen as one who is "above all intelligent or . . .
comprehensive" because he embraces subjects rather
than penetrates them, interests himself in everything
for the purpose of enjoying all his faculties, yet gives
himself wholly to nothing; — who is, in brief, largely
tolerant and sympathetic because he is indifferent.

Thus Monsieur Rod's dilettanism — his rather ple-
thoric, after-dinner indolence and indifference — as-



322 French Essays and Profiles

sumed the guise of intellectual luxury. Now and then
he exclaimed against such a fate: "Ah, thrice cursed is
he who has touched the damned dilettantism!" But
the die was cast and nothing was left to him except to
make the most of it. And that he did with very good
grace, for that matter. After all, like his own Michel
Teissier, he loved his ailment.

Monsieur Rod was born in 1857, and studied at
Berne and Berlin and at the Sorbonne. His belletristic
career was divided between Paris and Geneva. He re-
sided for quite a time on the slopes of the Seine at
Auteuil where in his salon on Sunday afternoons one
could meet many of the literary celebrities of France.
He was a rather large man, fine looking, polished in
manner, companionable. His voice was very soft and
pleasant, and he had talents as a conferencier. He
never liked teaching and apparently cared little for the
title of erudite. He studied seriously many varied sub-
jects such as Wagner's estheticism, contemporary Ital-
ian literature, Pre-Raphaelitism; yet he did not per-
mit these exotic chiaroscuros and perspectives to en-
rich and beautify the grisaille pages of his fiction.



xvi. Rosny the Elder



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

RosNY THE Elder is the literary name of Joseph Henry
BoEX with whom his younger brother Justin collaborated under
the combined name of J.-H. Rosny. He is a Naturalistic novelist
who was bom in Brussels, lived in London, then settled in Paris.
He is a member of the Goncourt Academy. His fiction portrays
Socialism, the Salvation Army and kindred themes, dealing with
the life of the poor and the laboring classes. He opposed the
extreme Realism of Zola. Rosny is not given to detail. He is
interested mainly in effective but uncomplicated presentations of
characters and subjects.



ROSNY THE ELDER

TAKEN altogether Rosny is, in his manner, di-
dactic with tolerance, digressive while being
characteristically logical and lucid, concen-
trated and precise without closing to the future or the
possible any of the windows of his soul.

It was at a little soiree of M. Durand, the husband
of Henry Greville, that I met the elder Rosny. I had
taken him for a college professor as I noticed him
conversing, in an earnest, absorbed, strenuous way,
across the room. His black beard and hair contrasted
with the dead pallor of his skin; he had the erudite
stoop; he wore that unhealthy air which comes from a
congestion of study. In venturing to chat with him
later in the evening, I confirmed his instructing, persua-
sive manner in talking, and his care in being perfectly
clear. He uses English well, for he long lived in Lon-
don, and married an English lady.

When I went into the refreshment room at M.
Durand's, the fragmentary conversation was displaying