Eline Vere (73 page)

For whatever else can it be that holds these two men together, so that they are in constant communication when apart, and are prepared to travel together for many months without significant interruptions? The one is an American ‘chevalier d'industrie' – which may be a polite way of saying he is a successful businessmen not above a sharp piratical manoeuvre or two – the other a drifter with ideas of himself way above his actual accomplishments. St Clare thinks of Vincent as a brother, he says, yet his Vincent is not the man we ourselves have come to know. He tells Eline:

‘Most people have the wrong idea about Vincent. They think him lazy, capricious, egotistic, and refuse to see that he is simply ill. I can't think of anybody else who would be capable, despite suffering from such ill health, of sharing so much of his talent and intelligence with the rest of mankind.'

She had always had great sympathy for Vincent, but had never seen him in this light.

‘Yes, I believe you are right!' she said.

What a contrast to how Otto van Erlevoort sees Vincent!

Vincent Vere has told St Clare so much already about his cousin (combining the complimentary with the compassionate) that already, before their actual meeting-up in Brussels, the latter has thought of her as an ‘unknown sister'. Hence his intense solicitude on her behalf, his unique ability to elicit from her truths about her deepest feelings (including her great grief for her friend Jeanne Ferelijn), his insistence, which she accepts, that she keep apart from the dubious crew with whom her uncle and aunt socialise, and his proposal of marriage, which, though moved, she refuses. What kind of marriage can St Clare be offering Eline? Primarily, we feel, one of concerned companionship such as Louis Couperus and Elisabeth Baud enjoyed, though the sincerity of not just his feelings but of his regard for her is not in doubt. Watching Eline improve in Brussels, largely because of his own caring converse with her, he has begun to feel

a great longing to dedicate myself entirely to you, because I thought, if I can do that, she might be able to shake off her gloomy view of life and be happy again. My darling Elly, you're still so young and you think it's too late for things to change. Don't think like that any more: put your trust in me, then we can set out together to discover whether life really is as dismal as you believe.

Perhaps there is too much of the crusader, of the benevolent pedagogue and too little of the lover in this declaration, though we cannot but respect the man for making it – just as Eline does, though it also makes her weep. But she has to decline, continually tormented as she is by her memories of her failed engagement to Otto (broken off by herself, after all, for intimate, never wholly articulated reasons). Perhaps in her refusal Eline is acknowledging that, outside Ouidaesque fantasies, the whole domain of the carnal is not congenial to her, just as it apparently was not to her creator. In Couperus's mind sexuality results in misery as much as it does in children, and even the latter (from whom he so recoiled) rarely quite vanquish the former. It is an essential but terrible part
of humankind's lot that it has not yet arrived at an ability to cope adequately and painlessly with its sexual instinct, evolution being as yet incomplete in this respect. And evolution is the key word here.

For Couperus was of the post-Darwin generation, quite unable to accept the explanations and consolations of orthodox religion, and obsessed, as though by a fresh discovery, by the distress, the mutual destructiveness inherent in existence itself, an awareness memorably expressed in the anguished personal writings of Darwin himself occasioned by his observation of the cruelty rampant throughout the animal world. It is the duty of the honest writer, according to this view, to face up to the bleakness, the terror, to the fact that what laws one can detect operating in life take no consideration of the feelings of those they control. Everywhere there is appalling waste, and waste is represented here by the sterile careers of Vincent and St Clare, by such an un-partnered woman as Emilie de Woude van Bergh, who deals with her plight by adopting a hearty, jolly persona, and, supremely, by Eline herself. That fine novelist of the American South, ten years Couperus's junior, Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945), had a similar weltanschauung both compounded and aided by a not dissimilar refined sensibility. In her novel
Virginia
(1913) Glasgow writes of a young man destined never to become the writer he dreams of being:

But at the age of twenty-two . . . he was pathetically ignorant of his own place in the extravagance of Nature. With the rest of us, he would have been astounded at the suggestion that he might have been born to be wasted. Other things were wasted, he knew, since those who called Nature an economist had grossly flattered her. Types and races and revolutions were squandered with royal prodigality – but that he himself should be so was clearly unthinkable.

Against this waste humankind has created art, and Couperus belonged to the generation who, even while seeing them as a sport of Nature, peculiarly valued artists, as able to provide invaluable bulwarks against the ultimate emptiness of existence. Much taken
with, and in his turn admired by, members of the Aesthetic Movement, including Oscar Wilde himself, Couperus made his own great contribution to the art of literature, not so much through his own aestheticism – shown in his dandyism, his epicurean pleasures, his tendency to lushness of prose – as in those deeply serious novels of which
Eline Vere
is the first in which, with scrupulous honesty, artistry of design and intense care for minutiae he faces up to life's complexity.

His masterpiece,
Van oude mensen de dingen die voorbijgaan
(
Old People and the Things That Pass
, 1906) deals with two old people who, when younger and living in the East Indies as members of its colonial service, committed a horrendous crime – just how horrendous comes as a shock even to readers long anticipating its revelation, so savage, treacherous and pitiless was it. Undiscovered and therefore unpunished, for decades, the murder has nonetheless worked a long-enduring, baleful power on the intertwined ramified families of the culprits in The Hague (of the same milieu as the protagonists of
Eline Vere
). A novel of deceptions, ignorance, half-understandings, reluctant or nervous uncoverings, it imports into a restricted Dutch circle that disruptive ‘hidden force' so ineluctably bound up with passion and with a culture not founded on reason, showing how it lurks behind even the most conventional or formal interchanges. Intricate in form though it is, with its all-important glimpses of the lurid pasts of an extremely aged man and woman, it describes a trajectory as relentless and seemingly swift of movement as some well-aimed deadly arrow. The Tolstoyan openness of
Eline Vere
, with its many scenes of the hustle and bustle of the unremarkable social life of mostly unremarkable individuals, must not detract from our realising that it also is closely worked and forms a devastating trajectory. Again, the book is less close to
War and Peace
than to
Anna Karenina
, from the structure of which it surely learned valuable lessons. The novel opens with an exchange between Paul and Frédérique, who, like Beatrice and Benedict, are to continue to spar throughout the novel, the girl perpetually showing up the shortcomings of the young man while revealing her deep affection for, even her belief in, him, and showing up too – with continual shrewdness, if with limited charity – the faults in Eline that will lead
to her decline and demise. Paul and Frédérique's is to be the union of those approved of by Nature and so, fittingly, it is with a window into their young married life, and with Otto and Marie determined to emulate it, that the novel concludes.

Between the opening and the final episode of Paul and Frédérique's love lie, as if between bookmarks, the stories of other couples, and, too, of those Nature has marginalised. Of these Eline herself is not merely a representative but at times a passionate spokesperson, too often foolish and futile, but in her sensibility rightly judged worthy of having named after her one of the richest, most satisfying novels of the late nineteenth century.

Couperus wrote as a summary of himself:

ZOO IK IETS BEN, BEN IK EEN HAGENAAR

 

Whatever else I am, I am a man of The Hague.

His love of his native city pervades his first novel, so that to visit The Hague, and nearby Scheveningen, is to live again the experiences it recounts. But
Eline Vere
reveals also that, through being so faithfully and feelingly a man of The Hague, Couperus could speak to, and for, the whole human world.

 

 

 

 

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