Familiar Studies of Men Books | Page 7

Second, it appears, and the point is capital, that Thoreau was once fairly
and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too much aping of the angel,
relinquished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother were
like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the woman.
But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the "rarefied and
freezing air" in which I complained that he had taught himself to
breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his professions in
good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking to make a
dupe of himself, wresting philosophy to the needs of his own sorrow.
But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so cold, are
seen to be alive with feeling. What appeared to be a lack of interest in
the philosopher turns out to have been a touching insincerity of the man
to his own heart; and that fine-spun airy theory of friendship, so devoid,
as I complained, of any quality of flesh and blood, a mere anodyne to
lull his pains. The most temperate of living critics once marked a
passage of my own with a cross ar d the words, "This seems nonsense."
It not only seemed; it was so. It was a private bravado of my own,
which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits, that I had grown at
last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting it down as a
contribution to the theory of life. So with the more icy parts of this
philosophy of Thoreau's. He was affecting the Spartanism he had not;
and the old sentimental wound still bled afresh, while he deceived
himself with reasons.
Thoreau's theory, in short, was one thing and himself another: of the
first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful statement
and a fairly just criticism in the study; of the second he will find but a
contorted shadow. So much of the man as fitted nicely with his

doctrines, in the photographer's phrase, came out. But that large part
which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or sought no
formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance, is
wanting in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed. In some
ways a less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true Thoreau
still remains to be depicted.
VILLON. - I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this subject, not
merely because the paper strikes me as too picturesque by half, but
because I regarded Villon as a bad fellow. Others still think well of him,
and can find beautiful and human traits where I saw nothing but artistic
evil; and by the principle of the art, those should have written of the
man, and not I. Where you see no good, silence is the best. Though this
penitence comes too late, it may be well, at least, to give it expression.
The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of France. Fat Peg is
oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the
infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still surpasses
them in native power. The old author, breaking with an ECLAT DE
VOIX, out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his
own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking impression
of reality. Even if that were not worth doing at all, it would be worth
doing as well as he has done it; for the pleasure we take in the author's
skill repays us, or at least reconciles us to the baseness of his attitude.
Fat Peg (LA GROSSE MARGOT) is typical of much; it is a piece of
experience that has nowhere else been rendered into literature; and a
kind of gratitude for the author's plainness mingles, as we read, with the
nausea proper to the business. I shall quote here a verse of an old
students' song, worth laying side by side with Villon's startling ballade.
This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he did not choose to
share the wages of dishonour; and it is thus, with both wit and pathos,
that he laments her fall:-
Nunc plango florem AEtatis tenerae Nitidiorem Veneris sidere: Tunc
columbinam Mentis dulcedinem, Nunc serpentinam Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes Removes ostio, Munera dantes Foves cubiculo, Illos
abire praecipis A quibus nihil accipis, Caecos claudosque recipis, Viros
illustres decipis Cum melle venenosa. (1)
(1) GAUDEAMUS: CARMINA VAGORUM SELECTA. Leipsic.
Trubner. 1879.

But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to deceive; it
was the flight of beauty alone, not that of