Cousin Bette (32 page)

To think, to dream, to conceive fine works, is a delightful occupation. It is dreaming cigar-smoke dreams, or living a courtesan's self-indulgent life. The work of art to be created
is envisaged in the exhilaration of conception, with its infant grace, and the scented colour of its flower and the bursting juices of its fruit. These are the pleasures in the imagination of a work of art's conception.

The man who can formulate his design in words is held to be out of the common run of men. This faculty all artists and writers possess; but execution needs more than this. It means creating, bringing to birth, laboriously rearing the child, putting it to bed every evening gorged with milk, kissing it every morning with a mother's never spent affection, licking it clean, clothing it over and over again in the prettiest garments, which it spoils again and again. It means never being disheartened by the upheavals of a frenetic life, but making of the growing work of art a living masterpiece, which in sculpture speaks to all eyes, in literature to all minds, in painting to all memories, in music to every heart. This is the travail of execution. The hand must constantly progress, in constant obedience to the mind. And the ability to create is no more to be commanded at will than love is: both powers are intermittent.

The habit of creation, the unwearying cherishing love which makes a mother (that masterpiece of nature so well apprehended by Raphael!), the intellectual maternal power, in short, which is so difficult to acquire, is exceedingly easily lost. Inspiration is the opportunity that genius may seize; and is not even balanced on a razor's edge, but instantly in the air and flying off with the quick alarm of crows. Inspiration has no scarf by which the poet may grasp her. Her hair is a flame. She is gone like those rose-coloured and white beautiful flamingos that are the despair of sportsmen. And work is a fatiguing struggle, dreaded as well as passionately loved by the fine and powerful natures that are often broken by it. A great poet of our own times, speaking of this appalling toil, has said, ‘I begin it with despair, and leave it with grief'.

Let the ignorant take note! If the artist does not throw himself into his work like Curtius into the gulf, like a soldier against a fortress, without counting the cost; and if, once within the breach, he does not labour like a miner buried under a fallen roof; if, in short, he contemplates the difficulties
instead of conquering them, one by one, like those lovers in the fairy-tales who, to win their princesses, fought ever-renewed enchantments; then the work remains unfinished, it perishes, is lost within the workshop, where production becomes impossible, and the artist is a looker-on at his talent's suicide. Rossini, Raphael's brother genius, is a striking example to artists in the battle fought from indigent youth to the success of his maturity. It is for these reasons that the same laurel wreath is bestowed on great poets and great generals: a similar reward is accorded to a similar triumph.

Wenceslas, a dreamer by nature, had spent so much energy in producing work, in teaching himself, and working under Lisbeth's despotic rule, that love and happiness brought a reaction. His true character reasserted itself. Indolence and lethargy, the yielding softness of the Slav, returned to find the ready haven in his soul from which the school-mistress's rod had driven them. The artist, during the first months, was in love with his wife. Hortense and Wenceslas gave themselves up to the charming youthful pleasures of unlimited, happy, married, passion. Hortense was the first, at this time, to excuse Wenceslas from all work, proud of being able to triumph over her rival – his sculpture. A woman's caresses make the muse languid, and melt the fierce, the brutal, resolution of the worker. Six or seven months went by. The sculptor's fingers forgot how to hold the chisel. When it became urgently necessary to work, when Prince de Wissem-bourg, president of the committee representing the subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas gave the idler's usual answer, ‘I'm just starting work on it!' And he deluded his dear Hortense with self-deceiving words, with the splendid creations an artist can make from tobacco smoke.

Hortense was twice as deeply in love with her poet. She pictured a sublime statue of Marshal Montcornet. Mont-cornet was to be valiance personified, the type of the cavalry officer, courage itself, in Murat's style. This statue would make it easy to understand how the Emperor had won all his victories! And how finely it would be executed! The facile pencil was accommodating: it confirmed the artist's words.

The only statue produced was a ravishing little Wenceslas.

Whenever Wenceslas was about to go to the studio at Gros-Caillou to complete the clay model, the Prince's clock was likely to require his presence at the studio of Florent and Chanor, where the figures were being finished; or the sky would be overcast and grey. On one occasion there might be business to attend to, and a family dinner on the day after. Then there were the days, hardly worth mentioning, when the artist was not in the mood, or did not feel well; besides those spent in dalliance with an adored wife. Marshal Prince de Wissembourg had actually to show anger, and say that he would go back on his decision to give the commission to Wenceslas, before he could succeed in seeing the model. It was only after innumerable complaints and many heated words that the subscribers' committee were allowed to see the plaster cast. Steinbock came home visibly fatigued at the end of each day he spent at work, complaining of having to labour like a mason, and of his own lack of robustness.

During the first year this household was comfortably off. Countess Steinbock, madly in love with her husband, in the flush of requited passion, inveighed against the War Minister. She went to see him, and told him that great works could not be manufactured like cannon, and that the state should take orders from genius, as Louis XIV, Francis I, and Pope Leo X had done. Poor Hortense believed that she held a Phidias in her arms, and treated her Wenceslas with fond weakness, like an idolized son.

‘Don't hurry,' she told her husband. ‘Our whole future is in this statue. Take your time. Create a masterpiece.'

She used to go to the studio. Steinbock, in love, would waste five hours out of seven with his wife, describing his statue to her instead of working on it. And so he took eighteen months to complete this work, of such cardinal importance for him.

When the plaster was cast, and the model was actually in existence, poor Hortense thought the piece admirable. She had witnessed the tremendous effort her husband had made, and seen his health suffer from the extreme fatigue to which the muscles, arms, and hands of sculptors are subject. Her father, who knew nothing about sculpture, and the Baroness,
equally ignorant, acclaimed it as a masterpiece. The War Minister then came, brought by them to admire it, and, infected by their enthusiasm, he was pleased with this model, placed by itself before a green cloth, shown in the best light and to the best possible advantage.

Alas! at the 1841 Exhibition, unanimous condemnation in the mouths of people antagonized by the speed with which Steinbock had become an idol raised upon a pedestal degenerated into shouts of mockery and derision. Stidmann tried to tell his friend the truth; he was accused of jealousy. The newspaper articles, to Hortense, were so many shrieks of envy. Stidmann, a loyal friend, had articles written, challenging the critics, and pointing out that sculptors modify their works greatly in transposing them from the plaster model to the finished marble, and that it was the marble they were judged by. ‘Between the plaster and the marble a masterpiece may be ruined, or a great work created from a poor model,' so wrote Claude Vignon. ‘The plaster is the manuscript; the marble is the book.'

In two and a half years Steinbock produced a statue and a child. The child was of exquisite beauty; the statue execrable.

The Prince's clock and the statue paid the young couple's debts. Steinbock had by that time formed the habit of going into society, to the theatre, to the Italian Opera. He could talk admirably about art. He maintained his reputation as a great artist, in the eyes of the social world, by his conversation, his critical disquisitions. There are talented men in Paris who spend their lives
talking
their life-work, and are satisfied with a kind of drawing-room fame. Steinbock, following the usual course of such charming eunuchs, developed an aversion to work that grew from day to day. In the very moment of feeling the impulse to begin his work, he became conscious of all the difficulties of the task, and was so discouraged that his will to tackle them collapsed. Inspiration, the frenzy that leads to intellectual procreation, took flight with a flip of her wings at sight of this sick lover.

Sculpture is like Drama; at once more difficult and easier than all the other arts. One can copy a model and the work is done; but to impart a soul to it, in the representing of a man
or woman to create a type, is to snatch fire from heaven like Prometheus. Sculptors who have succeeded in this are rare and glorious landmarks in human history, like poets. Michelangelo, Michel Colomb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polyclitus, Puget, Canova, Albrecht Dürer, are brothers of Milton, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Molière. Their work is so impressive that one statue is enough to make a man immortal, just as it took only Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut to immortalize Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbé Prévost.

Superficial minds (and there are to many of them among sculptors) have said that sculpture of the nude is the only viable sculpture, that the art died with the Greeks, and is made impossible by modern dress. But, for one thing, there were sublime statues fully draped in the ancient world, the
Polyhymnia
, the
Julia
, for example; and not more than one tenth of the sculpture of antiquity survives today to furnish examples. True lovers of art, besides, need only go to see Michelangelo's
Thinker
in Florence, and, in Mainz Cathedral, to see Albrecht Dürer's ebony
Virgin
, a living woman in her triple robes, with rippling hair as airy in texture and vital as ever maid combed. Let the ignorant go at once to see them, and they will all acknowledge that genius may inform drapery, armour, a gown, with thought and feeling about the substance of a body, just as convincingly as a man impresses his nature and the habits of his life upon his envelope. Sculpture is the constant creation of reality in a way that, in painting, was achieved once and uniquely by Raphael!

The solution of the sculptor's tremendous problem is only to be found in untiring unremitting labour, for the material difficulties must be so completely mastered, the hand must be so disciplined, so ready and obedient, as to enable the sculptor to struggle, in a combat of spirit with spirit, with that inapprehensible moral element that he must transfigure and embody. If Paganini, who made the strings of his violin tell his whole soul, had let three days pass without practising, he would have lost, together with his power of expression, what he called the
register
of his instrument, by which he meant the close union existing between the wood,
bow, strings, and himself. If this accord were broken, he would at once become no more than an ordinary violinist. Constant labour is the law of art as well as the law of life, for art is the creative activity of the mind. And so great artists, true poets, do not wait for either commissions or clients; they create today, tomorrow, ceaselessly. And there results a habit of toil, a perpetual consciousness of the difficulties, that keeps them in a state of marriage with the Muse, and her creative forces. Canova lived in his studio, and Voltaire in his study. Homer and Phidias must have so lived, too.

Wenceslas Steinbock had had his feet set on the hard road trodden by those great men, leading to the heights, when Lisbeth had kept him on the chain in his garret. Happiness, in the person of Hortense, had delivered the poet over to idleness, a state quite natural to all artists, for their kind of idleness is an occupation in itself. They enjoy the pleasure of the pasha in his seraglio: they toy with ideas, intoxicating themselves at the fountains of the mind. Certain gifted artists who, like Steinbock, have wasted themselves in reverie, have been rightly termed dreamers. Such opium-eaters all fall into penury, although if they had been driven by harsh necessity they would have risen to greatness. These demi-artists are, for the most part, charming people. The world delights in them, and turns their heads with adulation. They appear superior to real artists, who are taxed with aloofness, unsociability, rebellion against the conventions and civilized living; because great men belong to their creations. The entire detachment from all worldly concerns of true artists, and their devotion to their work, stamp them as egoists in the eyes of fools, who think that such men ought to go dressed like men about town performing the gyration that they call ‘their social duties'. People would like to see the lions of Atlas combed and scented like a marchioness's lapdogs. Such men, who have few peers and rarely meet them, grow accustomed to shutting out the world, in their habit of solitude. They become incomprehensible to the majority, which, as we know, is composed of blockheads, the envious, ignoramuses, and skaters upon the surface of life.

Do you now understand the part a wife must play in the life of these impressive exceptional beings? A wife must be what Lisbeth had been for five years, and in addition give love, a humble and tactful love, ever ready, ever smiling.

Hortense, her eyes opened by her sufferings as a mother, beset by dire necessity, realized too late the mistakes that she had made in her excessively indulgent love; but she was a true daughter of her mother, and the thought of nagging Wenceslas broke her heart. She loved her dear poet too much to be his scourge, though she saw the day approaching when she, her son, and her husband would be destitute.

‘Now, now, my dear,' said Bette, seeing tears gather in her cousin's beautiful eyes, ‘you mustn't give way to despair. A whole cupful of tears wouldn't pay for one plate of soup! How much do you need?'