Book: Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance

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It was the brilliant surface with which the untried world confronted
him. Touch it where you might, you felt the resistant force of the
solid matter of human experience--of human experience, in its strange
mixture of beauty and evil, its sorrow, its ill-assorted fates, its
pathetic acquiescence; above all, in its overpowering certainty, over
against his own world of echoes and shadows, which perhaps only
seemed to be so much as echoes or shadows. A nature with the
capacity of worship, he was straightway challenged, as by a rival new
religion claiming to supersede the religion he knew, to identify
himself conclusively with this so tangible world, its suppositions,
its issues, its risks. Here was a world, certainly, which did not
halt in meditation, but prompted one to make actual trial of it, with
a liberty of heart which might likely enough traverse this or that
precept (if it were not rather a mere scruple) of his earlier
conscience. These its children, at all events, were, as he felt, in
instinctive sympathy with its motions; had shrewd divinations of the
things men really valued, and waited on them with unquestioning
docility. Two worlds, two antagonistic ideals, were in evidence
before him. Could a third condition supervene, to mend their
discord, or [39] only vex him perhaps, from time to time, with
efforts towards an impossible adjustment?

At a later date, Monseigneur Charles Guillard, then Bishop of
Chartres, became something like a Huguenot, and ceased, with the
concurrence of ecclesiastical authority, from his high functions.
Even now he was but a protégé of King Charles in his relations to a
more than suspicious Pope; and a rumour of the fact, reaching somehow
these brisk young ears, had already set Gaston's mind in action,
tremblingly, as to those small degrees, scarcely realisable perhaps
one by one, though so immeasurable in their joint result, by which
one might part from the "living vine"; and at times he started back,
as if he saw his own benighted footsteps pacing lightly towards an
awful precipice. At present, indeed, the assumption that there was
sanctity in everything the kindly prelate touched, was part of the
well-maintained etiquette of the little ecclesiastical court. But,
as you meet in the street faces that are like a sacrament, so there
are faces, looks, tones of voice, among dignified priests as among
other people, to hear or look upon which is to feel the hypothesis of
an unseen world impossible. As he smiled amiably out of the midst of
his pontifical array on Gaston's scrupulous devotion, it was as if
the old Roman augur smiled not only to his fellow augur but to the
entire assistant world. In after years Gaston seemed to understand,
and, as a consequence of [40] understanding, to judge his old patron
equitably: the religious sense too, had its various species. The
nephew of his predecessor in the see, with a real sense of the divine
world but as something immeasurably distant, Monseigneur Guillard had
been brought by maladroit worldly good-fortune a little too close to
its immediate and visible embodiments. From afar, you might trace
the divine agency on its way. But to touch, to handle it, with these
fleshly hands:--well! for Monseigneur, that was by no means to
believe because the thing was "incredible, or absurd." He had
smiled, not certainly from irreverence, nor (a prelate for half his
life) in conscious incredulity, but only in mute surprise, at an
administration of divine graces--this administration in which he was
a high priest--in itself, to his quite honest thinking, so unfitting,
so improbable. And was it that Gaston too was a less independent
ruler of his own mental world than he had fancied, that he derived
his impressions of things not directly from them, but mediately from
other people's impressions about them, and he needed the pledge of
their assents to ratify his own? Only, could that, after all, be a
real sun, at which other people's faces were not irradiated? And
sometimes it seemed, with a riotous swelling of the heart, as if his
own wondrous appetite in these matters had been deadened by surfeit,
and there would be a pleasant sense of liberty, of escape out-of-
doors, [41] could he be as little touched as almost all other people
by Our Lady's Church, and old associations, and all those relics, and
those dark, close, fragrant aisles.

At such times, to recall the winged visitant, gentle, yet withal
sensitive to offence, which had settled on his youth with so deep a
sense of assurance, he would climb the tower of Jean de Beauce, then
fresh in all its array of airy staircase and pierced traceries, and
great uncovered timbers, like some gigantic birdnest amid the stones,
whence the large, quiet, country spaces became his own again, and the
curious eye, at least, went home. He was become well aware of the
power of those familiar influences in restoring equanimity, as he
might have used a medicine or a wine. At each ascending storey, as
the flight of the birds, the scent of the fields, swept past him,
till he stood at last amid the unimpeded light and air of the watch-
chamber above the great bells, some coil of perplexity, of
unassimilable thought or fact, fell away from him. He saw the
distant paths, and seemed to hear the breeze piping suddenly upon
them under the cloudless sky, on its unseen, capricious way through
those vast reaches of atmosphere. At this height, the low ring of
blue hills was visible, with suggestions of that south-west country
of peach-blossom and wine which had sometimes decoyed his thoughts
towards the sea, and beyond it to "that new world of the Indies,"
[42] which was held to explain a certain softness in the air from
that quarter, even in the most vehement weather. Amid those vagrant
shadows and shafts of light must be Deux-manoirs, the deserted rooms,
the gardens, the graves. In mid-distance, even then a funeral
procession was on its way humbly to one of the village churchyards.
He seemed almost to hear the words across the stillness.

They identified themselves, as with his own earliest prepossessions,
so also with what was apt to present itself as being the common human
prepossession--a certain finally authoritative common sense upon the
quiet experience of things--the oldest, the most authentic, of all
voices, audible always, if one stepped aside for a moment and got
one's ears into what might after all be their normal condition. It
might be heard, it would seem, in proportion as men were in touch
with the Earth itself, in country life, in manual work upon it, above
all by the open grave, as if, reminiscent of some older, deeper, more
permanent ground of fact, it whispered then oracularly a certain
secret to those who came into such close contact with it. Persistent
after-thought! Would it always survive, amid the indifference of
others, amid the verdicts of the world, amid a thousand doubts? It
seemed to have found, and filled to overflowing, the soul of one
amiable little child who had a kind of genius for tranquillity, and
on his first coming hither had led Gaston to what he held to be the
[43] choicest, pleasantest places, as being impregnable by noise. In
his small stock of knowledge, he knew, like all around him, that he
was going to die, and took kindly to the thought of a small grave in
the little green close, as to a natural sleeping-place, in which he
would be at home beforehand. Descending from the tower, Gaston knew
he should find the child seated alone, enjoying the perfect quiet of
the warm afternoon, for all the world was absent--gone forth to
receive or gaze at a company of distinguished pilgrims.

Coming, sometimes with immense prelude and preparation, as when King
Charles himself arrived to replace an image disfigured by profane
Huguenots, sometimes with the secrecy and suddenness of an apparition
vanished before the public was aware, the pilgrims to "Our Lady under
the Earth" were the standing resource of those (such there were at
Chartres as everywhere else) who must needs depend for the interest
of their existence on the doings of their neighbours. A motley host,
only needing their Chaucer to figure as a looking-glass of life, type
against type, they brought with them, on the one hand, the very
presence and perfume of Paris, the centre of courtly propriety and
fashion; on the other hand, with faces which seemed to belong to
another age, curiosities of existence from remote provinces of
France, or Europe, from distant, half-fabulous lands, remoter still.
Jules Damville, who would have liked best to be a sailor, [44] to
command, not in any spiritual ark, but in the French fleet--should
half-ruined France ever come to have one--led his companions one
evening to inspect a strange maritime personage, stout and square,
returned, contrary to all expectation, after ten years' captivity
among the savages of Florida, kneeling among the lights at the
shrine, with the frankness of a good child, his hair like a mat, his
hands tattooed, his mahogany face seamed with a thousand weather-
wrinklings, his outlandish offerings lying displayed around him.

Looking, listening, as they served them in the episcopal guest-
chamber, those young clerks made wonderful leaps, from time to time,
in manly knowledge. With what eager shrewdness they noted,
discussed, reproduced, the manners and attire of their pilgrim
guests, sporting what was to their liking therein in the streets of
Chartres. The more cynical or supercilious pilgrim would sometimes
present himself--a personage oftenest of high ecclesiastical station,
like the eminent translator of Plutarch, Amyot, afterwards Bishop of
Auxerre, who seemed to care little for shrine or relic, but lingered
long over certain dim manuscripts in the canonical library, where our
scholarly Gaston was of service, helping him directly to what he
desired to see. And one morning early, visible at a distance to all
the world, risen betimes to gaze, the Queen-mother and her three sons
were [45] kneeling there--yearning, greedy, as ever, for a hundred
diverse, perhaps incompatible, things. It was at the beginning of
that winter of the great siege of Chartres, the morning on which the
child Guy Debreschescourt died in his sleep. His tiny body--the
placid, massive, baby head still one broad smile, the rest of him
wrapped round together like a chrysalis--was put to rest finally, in
a fold of the winding-sheet of a very aged person, deceased at the
same hour.

For a hard winter, like that famous winter of 1567, the hardest that
had been known for fifty years, makes an end of the weak--the aged,
the very young. To the robust, how pleasant had the preparation for
it seemed--the scent of the first wood-fire upon the keen October
air; the earth turning from grey to black under the plough; the great
stacks of fuel, come down lazily from the woods of Le Perche, along
the winding Eure; its wholesome perfume; the long, soothing nights,
and early twilight. The mind of Gaston, for one, was touched by the
sense of some remote and delicate beauty in these things, like
magicians' work, like an effect of magic as being extorted from
unsuspected sources.

What winter really brought however, was the danger and vexation of a
great siege. The householders of catholic Chartres had watched the
forces of their Huguenot enemies gathering from this side and that;
and at last the dreaded circle was complete. They were prisoners
like [46] the rest, Gaston and the grandparents, shut up in their
little hotel; and Gaston, face to face with it, understood at last
what war really means. After all, it took them by surprise. It was
early in the day. A crowd of worshippers filled the church of
Sainte-Foy, built partly upon the ramparts; and at the conclusion of
the mass, the Sacrament was to be carried to a sick person. Touched
by unusual devotion at this perilous time, the whole assembly rose to
escort the procession on its way, passing out slowly, group after
group, as if by mechanical instinct, the more reluctant led on by the
general consent. Gaston, the last lingerer, halting to let others
proceed quietly before him, turned himself about to gaze upon the
deserted church, half tempted to remain, ere he too stepped forth
lightly and leisurely, when under a shower of massy stones from the
coulevrines or great cannon of the besiegers, the entire roof of the
place sank into the empty space behind him. But it was otherwise in
a neighbouring church, crushed, in a similar way, with all its good
people, not long afterwards.

And in the midst of the siege, with all its tumult about her, the old
grandmother died, to the undissembled sorrow of Gaston, bereft,
unexpectedly as it seemed, of the gentle creature, to whom he had
always turned for an affection, that had been as no other in its
absolute incapacity of offence. A tear upon the cheek, like [47] the
bark of a tree, testified to some unfulfilled hope, something wished
for but not to be, which left resignation, by nature or grace, still
imperfect, and made death at fourscore years and ten seem, after all,
like a premature summons in the midst of one's days. For a few
hours, the peace which followed brought back to the face a protesting
gleam of youth, far antecedent to anything Gaston could possibly have
remembered there, moving him to a pity, a peculiar sense of pleading
helplessness, which to the end of his life was apt to revive at the
sight (it might be in an animal) of what must perforce remember that
it had been young but was old.

That broken link with life seemed to end some other things for him.
As one puts away the toys of childhood, so now he seemed to discard
what had been the central influence of his earlier youth, what more
than anything else had stirred imagination and brought the
consciousness of his own life warm and full. Gazing now upon the
"holy and beautiful place," as he had gazed on the dead face, for a
moment he seemed to anticipate the indifference of age. And when not
long after the rude hands of catholics themselves, at their wits' end
for the maintenance of the "religious war," spoiled it of the
accumulated treasure of centuries, leaving Notre-Dame de Chartres in
the bareness with which we see it to-day, he had no keen sense of
personal loss.



III. MODERNITY

[48] The besieging armies disappeared like the snow, leaving city and
suburb in all the hardened soilure of war and winter, which only the
torrents of spring would carry away. And the spring came suddenly:
it was pleasant, after that long confinement, to walk afar securely
through its early fervours. Gaston too went forth on his way home,
not alone. Three chosen companions went with him, pledged to the old
manor for months to come; its lonely ancient master welcoming readily
the tread of youth about him.

"The Triumvirate":--so their comrades had been pleased to call the
three; that term (delightful touch of classic colour on one's own
trite but withal pedantic age) being then familiar, as the
designation of three conspicuous agents on the political scene of the
generation just departing. Only, these young Latinists went back for
the associations of the word to its Roman original, to the three
gallants of the distant time, rather than to those native French [49]
heroes--Montmorenci, Saint-André, Guise--too close to them to seem
really heroic. Mark Antony, knight of Venus, of Cleopatra; shifty
Lepidus; bloody, yellow-haired Augustus, so worldly and so fine; you
might find their mimic semblance, more easily than any suggestion of
that threadbare triad of French adventurers, in the unfolding manhood
of Jasmin, Amadée, and Camille.

They had detached themselves by an irresistible natural effectiveness
from the surface of that youthful scholastic world around the
episcopal throne of Chartres, carrying its various aptitudes as if to
a perfect triple flower; restless Amadée de l'Autrec, who was to be a
soldier, dazzled early into dangerous, rebellious paths by the iron
ideal of the soldiers of "the religion," and even now fitting his
blond prettiness to airs of Huguenot austerity; Camille Pontdormi,
who meant to be a lawyer in an age in which certain legists had
asserted an audacity of genius after a manner very captivating to
youth with any appetite for predominance over its fellows--already
winsomely starched a little, amid his courtly finery, of garb, and
manner, and phrase; Jasmin de Villebon, who hardly knew what he meant
to be, except perhaps a poet--himself, certainly, a poem for any
competent reader. Vain,--yes! a little; and mad, said his
companions, of course, with his clinging, exigent, lover's ways. It
was he who had led the others on this visit to Gaston de Latour.
Threads to [50] be cut short, one by one, before his eyes, the three
would cross and recross, gaily, pathetically, in the tapestry of
Gaston's years; and, divided far asunder afterwards, seemed at this
moment, moving there before him in the confidential talk he could not
always share, inseparably linked together, like some complicated
pictorial arabesque, under the common light, of their youth, and of
the morning, and of their sympathetic understanding of the visible
world.

So they made their way, under the rows of miraculous white thorn-
blossom, and through the green billows, at peace just then, though
the war still blazed or smouldered along the southern banks of the
Loire and far beyond, and it was with a delightful sense of peril, of
prowess attested in the facing of it, that they passed from time to
time half-ruined or deserted farm-buildings where the remnants of the
armies might yet be lingering. It was Jasmin, poetic Jasmin, who, in
giving Gaston the book he now carried ever ready to hand, had done
him perhaps the best of services, for it had proved the key to a new
world of seemingly boundless intellectual resources, and yet with a
special closeness to visible or sensuous things;--the scent and
colour of the field-flowers, the amorous business of the birds, the
flush and re-fledging of the black earth itself in that fervent
springtide, which was therefore unique in Gaston's memory. It was
his intellectual springtide; as people look back to [51] a physical
spring, which for once in ten or fifteen years, for once in a
lifetime, was all that spring could be.

The book was none other than Pierre de Ronsard's "Odes," with
"Mignonne! allons voir si la Rose," and "The Skylark" and the lines
to April--itself verily like nothing so much as a jonquil, in its
golden-green binding and yellow edges and perfume of the place where
it had lain--sweet, but with something of the sickliness of all
spring flowers since the days of Proserpine. Just eighteen years
old, and the work of the poet's own youth, it took possession of
Gaston with the ready intimacy of one's equal in age, fresh at every
point; and he experienced what it is the function of contemporary
poetry to effect anew for sensitive youth in each succeeding
generation. The truant and irregular poetry of his own nature, all
in solution there, found an external and authorised mouthpiece,
ranging itself rightfully, as the latest achievement of human soul in
this matter, along with the consecrated poetic voices of the past.

Poetry! Hitherto it had seemed hopelessly chained to the bookshelf,
like something in a dead language, "dead, and shut up in reliquaries
of books," or like those relics "one may only see through a little
pane of glass," as one of its recent "liberators" had said. Sure,
apparently, of its own "niche in the temple of Fame," the recognised
poetry of literature had had the [52] pretension to defy or
discredit, as depraved and irredeemably vulgar, the poetic motions in
the living genius of to-day. Yet the genius of to-day, extant and
forcible, the wakeful soul of present time consciously in possession,
would assert its poetic along with all its other rights; and in
regard to the curiosity, the intellectual interest, of Gaston, for
instance, it had of course the advantage of being close at hand, with
the effectiveness of a personal presence. Studious youth, indeed, on
its mettle about "scholarship," though actually of listless humour
among books that certainly stirred the past, makes a docile act of
faith regarding the witchery, the thaumaturgic powers, of Virgil, or
may we say of Shakespeare? Yet how faint and dim, after all, the
sorrows of Dido, of Juliet, the travail of Aeneas, beside quite
recent things felt or done--stories which, floating to us on the
light current of to-day's conversation, leave the soul in a flutter!
At best, poetry of the past could move one with no more directness
than the beautiful faces of antiquity which are not here for us to
see and unaffectedly love them. Gaston's demand (his youth only
conforming to pattern therein) was for a poetry, as veritable, as
intimately near, as corporeal, as the new faces of the hour, the
flowers of the actual season. The poetry of mere literature, like
the dead body, could not bleed, while there was a heart, a poetic
heart, in the living world, which beat, bled, spoke with irresistible
power. Elderly [53] people, Virgil in hand, might assert
professionally that the contemporary age, an age, of course, of
little people and things, deteriorate since the days of their own
youth, must necessarily be unfit for poetic uses. But then youth,
too, had its perpetual part to play, protesting that, after all said,
the sun in the air, and in its own veins, was still found to be hot,
still begetting, upon both alike, flowers and fruit; nay! visibly new
flowers, and fruit richer than ever. Privately, in fact, Gaston had
conceived of a poetry more thaumaturgic than could be anything of
earlier standing than himself. The age renews itself; and in
immediate derivation from it a novel poetry also grows superb and
large, to fill a certain mental situation made ready in advance.
Yes! the acknowledged, and, so to call it, legitimate, poetry of
literature was but a thing he might sip at, like some sophisticated
rarity in the way of wine, for example, pleasing the acquired taste.
It was another sort of poetry, unexpressed, perhaps inexpressible,
certainly not hitherto made known in books, that must drink up and
absorb him, like the joyful air--him, and the earth, with its deeds,
its blossoms, and faces.

In such condition of mind, how deeply, delightfully, must the poetry
of Ronsard and his fellows have moved him, when he became aware, as
from age to age inquisitive youth by good luck does become aware, of
the literature of his own day, confirming--more than confirming--
[54] anticipation! Here was a poetry which boldly assumed the dress,
the words, the habits, the very trick, of contemporary life, and
turned them into gold. It took possession of the lily in one's hand,
and projecting it into a visionary distance, shed upon the body of
the flower the soul of its beauty. Things were become at once more
deeply sensuous and more deeply ideal. As at the touch of a wizard,
something more came into the rose than its own natural blush.
Occupied so closely with the visible, this new poetry had so profound
an intuition of what can only be felt, and maintained that mood in
speaking of such objects as wine, fruit, the plume in the cap, the
ring on the finger. And still that was no dubious or generalised
form it gave to flower or bird, but the exact pressure of the Jay at
the window; you could count the petals,--of the exact natural number;
no expression could be too faithful to the precise texture of things;
words, too, must embroider, be twisted and spun, like silk or golden
hair. Here were real people, in their real, delightful attire, and
you understood how they moved; the visible was more visible than ever
before, just because soul had come to its surface. The juice in the
flowers, when Ronsard named them, was like wine or blood. It was
such a coloured thing; though the grey things also, the cool things,
all the fresher for the contrast--with a freshness, again, that
seemed to touch and cool the soul--found their account [55] there;
the clangorous passage of the birds at night foretokening rain, the
moan of the wind at the door, the wind's self made visible over the
yielding corn.

It was thus Gaston understood the poetry of Ronsard, generously
expanding it to the full measure of its intention. That poetry, too,
lost its thaumaturgic power in turn, and became mere literature in
exchange for life, partly in the natural revolution of poetic taste,
partly for its faults. Faults and all, however, Gaston loyally
accepted it; those faults--the lapse of grace into affectation, of
learning into pedantry, of exotic fineness into a trick--counting
with him as but the proof of faith to its own dominant positions.
They were but characteristics, needing no apology with the initiated,
or welcome even, as savouring of the master's peculiarities of
perfection. He listened, he looked round freely, but always now with
the ear, the eye, of his favourite poet. It had been a lesson, a
doctrine, the communication of an art,--the art of placing the
pleasantly aesthetic, the welcome, elements of life at an advantage,
in one's view of it, till they seemed to occupy the entire surface;
and he was sincerely grateful for an undeniable good service.

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