A BOOK OF THE MOMENT THE PORTRAIT OF ZgLIDE

(COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE

New York Times.] MR. GEOFFREY Scow, in entering the field of psychological and emotional biography has broken new ground. His masterly apologia for " the Barroco " in his Architecture of Humanism at once distinguished him as a new voice in critical literature. He gave us in that book the extreme characteristic impression of the thing he was writing about. He opened the eyes of many people who before had been blind to those triumphs of the building arts scattered over Europe under Italian influences throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ruskin, a potent enchanter in his own way, bade men look upon " Barroco " as a shrivelled old hag, often malignant and at the best a creature vapid and pretentious. Mr. Geoffrey Scott lifted, the enchantment and made us see, not a witch, but .a presence noble and humane.

One of the most notable things about the way in which Mr. Geoffrey Scott did his work was his use of what the poverty of literary nomenclature obliges . me to call his style. If one uses that word about him without distinction and explana- tion, the resultis- bound to be misleading. We too often think of style as if it meant nothing but ornament, rhetoric, or the sensory magic of words. But when we talk about the " style " of writers such as Mr. Scott or Mr. Lytton Strachey the word has a wholly different significance. Style in the new age is coming to mean, not the resounding clang and clash of Latinate - trisyllables, not the Nordic strokes of Thor's hammer, not even the melody of Spcnserian vowels that elope with ease." The word " style," we are beginning to see, should be reserved for the wider, deeper, subtler, and

therefore the, m re ore valuable artifices of presentation. To he a master of style is to be possessed of the power of showing us men and things not darkly and dimly through grammar and syntax, or the syllogism, but through suggestion and an appeal to the hidden emotions. By these means our faculties are 'enlightened and extended till we see behind the veil.

In his The Portrait of &tide, Mr. Scott interprets for us the mind, nature, and way of life of a Dutch lady of noble birth who drew mankind as with a magnet in the second half of the eighteenth century. I feel when I study her features what I feel when I read the extracts from her letters. To have spent an afternoon with her would have been delightful. A day might have yielded pleasure till the last two hours. A week would have been torment. A month must for the normal man have meant suicide. And this, not because of her vices or her faults, but mainly because of her virtues and her essential nobility of character.

The tragedy of Zelide was the tragedy of talk.

It was not that she talked too much, or talked ill. She talked supremely well, but she thought, alas ! that life could be run on the rails of dialectic. Dialectic, pushed too far, means naked, inexorable reason. Those who trust reason alone in the guidance and conduct of existence, soon find that they are going to reach the eternal destination of death, not by the exciting and stimulating path up the valley by the waterfall over the glacier and so across the mountain, but by the dull and tedious road between walls, which winds round the base of the hills. What I mean was said to Zelide in a moment of inspiration by M. de Charriere as early as 1766. It was in his first letter to the adored one:—

" Mademoiselle, vous etas inconcerable ! Why do you recall to me memories which you have forbidden ine to retain ? How can you say that you are my friend, when you trouble my happiness by making me see how much happier I should be if you were something more ? Your sentence on the subject of prudery transported me in thought. to your room ; it was midnight, silence reigned in the house, and we two, alone together, were talking. You, Mademoiselle, like a physician at his experiments, gave to your heart and mine now a greater and now a less degree of heat ; you observed ; you reflected ; and our feelings wore, for you, no more than so many phenomena . . . . Mademoiselle, I shall come baeli•to Utrecht ; in God's name. do not sit up with me again ! Do not show me agan so much goodness, if you have decided not to show me still more ! "

In the end Zelide married M. de Charriere, though he was one of the people who went to the sacrificial altar of matrimony with trembling limbs. The truth is Zelide was as entirely

unfitted for marriage as for the single life. It was her misfor- tune to live in an age so amorous as that of the latter half of the eighteenth century. But I am speaking clumsily when I

merely say " amorous," unless I make it clear that I mean " amorous " with a well marked difference. That was an age in which many men and women were getting "too dainty

for their uses," or rather too sophistical. They had not found out what Bacon had seen long before—that the Stage,

and he might have added Literature, is " more beholden to Love than Life." From 1750 to 1790 they made too

much of what they called love, and so upset the balance of life. This did not matter to the men of action—to the busy people ; but it mattered terribly to those who had nothing to do but to loaf and invite, not their souls, but their emotions. Poor M. de Charriere, Hymen's unwilling victim, though he could not cut and run, yet diagnosed the situation exactly in a letter which he wrote to his future wife in one of those uncanny moments of inspiration which come with extreme fear as with extreme hate or extreme pleasure. Wide tells us that when the idea of marriage was mooted

between them he declared that " it was the very worst project in the world ! "

Very acute islfr. Geoffrey Scott's comment on the situation ;-

" Matters were at this temperature when Mademoiselle de Tuyll returned from Ainerongen. Her state of mind at this crisis in her life is extremely perplexing and perplexed. She was twenty- eight : an age, which, in the eighteenth century, might well fill a maiden heart with dismay. Her last hopes of the Marquis had vanished ; what was to take their place ? A marriage of reason, or of inclination ? She had thought about it so much that, in her own phrase, she no longer knew what a good marriage meant. She was weary and disillusioned, the prey of conflicting moods ; and the morbid activity of her mind entangled each mood in a chain of arguments. She had at different times reasoned herself into love withBellegarde and out of love with Hermenehes ; she could reason herself in or out of anything or anybody. What process should she adopt towards Monsieur do Charriere ? The dull routine of the great house at Zuylen gave her the vapours. She relinquished algebra and mechanics and applied herself list- lessly to painting. But nothing availed to lighten her neurastheniii. The sudden death of her mother threw her into even profounder desolation. ' No words,' she writes to Hermenches, can depict the horror in which we are plunged. I can neither read nor write : these few lines have cost me infinite difficulty. I work when I am alone, or I go and cry with my mother's old maid.' In this mood the idea of love became ' a crime.' The melancholy which had always lain beneath the surface of Belle's exuberant life darkened all her thoughts. If we had Carmelites in this country,' she exclaimed, I would become a nun.' Should she remain single ? Ah, Mademoiselle, rester COMM vows Res ' Prince Henry of Prussia had exclaimed at the close of a courtly flirtation. Alas ! the single state was not her calling. Had she not admitted that, to her mind, Virgin-Martyr' was a tautological expres- sion ? "

It must not be supposed from all this that Wide was in the very least a husband hunter or that it has ever crossed Mr. Geoffrey Scott's mind that she was. She was nothing of the kind. She was merely a very acute arguer and analyzer of the emotions, who unfortunately found herself in an environment in which marriage and sex were, I will not say the chief, but almost the only potent ingredients. In another age she might have had Politics, or Theology, or Science to distract her mind ; but, as it was, the only premises left for women in her epoch were the relations of men and women, and not the natural relations, but something which was agreed upon in their place.

These relations, in various shapes and forms, were the only bricks out of which she could build her syllogisms. Without syllogisms and their conclusions, her strangely con- ditioned mind would have starved to death. The effect of all this " argufying " on the male mind was shattering. Potential husbands fled her like enchanted ground.

Take the case of poor Lord Wemyss, who had been exiled in 1745 and was rather a devil of a fellow. Zelide nearly clutched him. By a sort of extraordinary accident he became a candidate for Zelide's hand, and, as Mr. Scott says with his usual discernment, in the absence of Carmelite nuns Zelide proposed to accept his offer. It was pointed out to her that Lord Wemyss was violent, despotic and notoriously

dissolute. Those would have been excellent arguments to use to most women, but to a creature of ratiocination such as was Zelide it was a positive attraction. "No matter," she replied, " a being such as I am at present deserves, at the very most, a Lord Wemyss. I should be too ill a gift to make to another.", On another occasion, when another husband was pro--

posed, she declared that he was too " good and kindly ; why should he be dragged into my destiny ? Lord Wemyss, I think, deserves nothing better." Happily Lord Wemyss proved a bit of a prig, and also a sordid prig, and once again the automatic husband trap closed upon the empty air.

Then recourse was had to M. de Charriere, the ex-tutor. He, too, was seized with panic as the prospect of marrying

this really fascinating creature, never a virago and never a bore, drew near. He trembled, he begged for time—just a few months more. " What are a few months, what is a year, at the price of a whole life ? " Here again the situation receives

a most admirable comment from Mr. Scott :-

" No wonder that Monsieur de Charri4re repaatacl with an almost wounding insistence : Remember that I Will respect your liberty to the last hour : up to the last moment of the last ceremony you are free ! ' No wonder that Mademoiselle de Tuyll found herself saying, He loves me without illusion and without enthu- Qiasm ; he is just and sincere to a painful degree. Yet how can I live without him ? ' For here was the point of pathos in this tragic comedy : their justice, their honesty revealed to the two lovers, who knew themselves so well, their perilous unfitness ; yet she loved his justice,' he loved her ' honesty of heart.' And so Fate's balance was weighted, and wavered, and fell."

I have brought Zelide and poor M. de Charriere to the altar steps, and there I shall leave them with this one message to my readers. If I have not proved a good drummer in front of the stage, at the great Book Fair, I would implore them to put the fault down to me, and not to Mr. Scott. Let them read the book and see the play out. I am con- vinced that if they do, those who were doubters, till they judged on first-hand evidence, will say : " What a good thing we did not decide on a critic's hearsay."

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.