MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WITH the death of Jaques-Emile Blanche and the defection of Andre Maurois we have lost the two men who were best able to interpret England to France. It may well be that Maurois, following the example of Pucheu, Peyrouton and DarIan, may now seek to explain away the things he said about us at the time of our misfortunes, and may contend that his criticisms were due to nothing more than the anxious solicitude of a devoted friend. I am prepared to believe that when in those dark months of 1940 he reached America (having escaped from both France and
• England) his main desire was to defend the reputation of his own country and army, even at the cost of other loyalties ; I admit that the things he then said and wrote do not appear, on subsequent examination, to have been as unfaithful as they seemed at first ; yet I regret that a man whose literary and academic repute was so largely based upon his appreciation of the British character should not have affirmed more stoutly his faith in us at the most glorious moment of our history. People like Eve Curie and Henri Bernstein were under no intellectual or spiritual obligations to Great Britain, yet they espoused or cause with ardent faith ; com- pared to the Vichy-hopital of Andre. Maurois their enthusiasm was as champagne I am sorry about Andre Maurois, since he was a man of ability and charm. But I am even more saddened by the recent death of Jaques-Emile Blanche. His understanding of us was wider, deeper and of far longer duration than that of Maurois ; he had known Victorian London, and possessed (as Maurois did not) a knowledge of our country life ; he had observed the transition from nineteenth-century to twentieth-century England, and had been intimate with such diverse figures as Wilde, Beardsley, Henry James, George Moore and Sickert ; and since he was equally intimate with three generations of French artists and writers, he formed a valuable hyphen between the two cultures. I am sorry indeed that he has died.
* * * *
In all material respects the life of Jaques-Emile Blanche was comfortable beyond compare. His .father was the greatest nerve
specialist of his day, and it was in his clinic at Passy, in what is now known as the Rue du Docteur Blanche, that the disordered geniuses of the age, such as Maupassant, sought refuge and refreshment. As a child Jaques-Emile was surrounded by French
nurses, English governesses, mufflers and mittens. He could re- call how driving one morning in the Bois with the family coachman and Miss Ellen, he was made to stand up in the carriage and salute the little Prince Imperial who jingled by. From an early age he manifested a marked aptitude for painting and a precocious admira- tion for the work of Manet. As a young man he displayed (and, in fact, retained throughout his long life) astonishing artistic promise. Some of his portraits (as the portrait of Aubrey Beaidsley and the portrait of Harry Melville), are, in fact, most intelligent ; the sketches of London and of Dieppe which he painted under the influence of Sickert are agreeable and gifted. In later life he embarked upon literature, published six volumes of the Cahiers d'un Artiste, wrote several novels (of which Aymeris is the most notable), composed a really brilliant guide-book to Dieppe, and recorded his recollections of the artistic and literary giants of his age in such admirable books as De David a Degas and Mes Modeles. His external life through all these years of pleasurable activity remained beautifully cushioned. He inherited his father's large house at Passy, with a garden attached. He acquired the little manor of Offranville, a few kilometres from Dieppe, where he would spend the summer months. As a child he had been pro- tected against the rude shocks of material life by a defensive screen of governesses and nurses ; as a man he was blessed by the care of a devoted wife, and the sympathy of his intelligent sister-in-law, Catherine Lemoinne. These admirable women convoyed him, like two grey torpedo-destroyers, through the perils of a hostile wdrld. Blanche was always fortunate in his immediate surroundings.
* * He was not a happy man. The nervous instability which as a child had caused such anxiety to his parents developed in later life into an acute sensitiveness to criticism, and a morbidly pessi- mistic conception of the future of the world, of Europe, of France, and of Jaques-Emile Blanche. He was -aware that neither in art nor literature had he fulfilled the promise of his earlier years, and it became for him a continual distress that those who most deeply admired either his painting or his books were not those whom he himself most deeply admired. He had no special craving for immortality, but it was constantly irksome for him to feel that in spite of his remarkable gifts, both as an artist and a writer, he was debarred from creating masterpieces either in painting or in literature. He possessed an enormous number of highly interest- ing acquaintances ; he had many French and English friends (Miss Trevelyan, Miss Sandys, the Saxton Nobles, Miss Hudson); and he was alWays at great pains to enter into touch with the younger • generation. Yet he lacked zest ; and his capacity for enjoyment was constantly marred by apprehension of the penalties which were bound to follow. Had he suffered a little more he might have become a great artist ; had he suffered a little less he could have
drunk to the full the nectar of the douceur de vivre. One always had a sense of disappointment that Blanche could not manage to be a happier man.
* *
In the summer of 1919 I went to Offranville on the occasion of the unveiling of the war memorial which he had painted for the village church. The sunshine glowed upon thz pink brick of his manor house, and the air was heavy with the scent of phlox. It was cool inside the house, and the rooms smelt of bees-wax and lilies and quince. The sun poured in through the windows, light- ing the parquet flooring, lighting the gay chintz, catching some corner of a Sickert or a Conder on the walls. The women of the house were busy around the dining room preparing the port wine and the biscuits which were to serve as a collation after the ceremony. Blanche in his tidy London clothes was fussy and apprehensive. He passed nervouriy between the dining room and the drawing room, now drawing my attention to a Beardsley drawing, now making suggestions about the +yin d'honneur. We walked in the thick dust of the village highway towards the church. There were gathered the mayor,. the cure and the local deputy, who, being anti-clerical in his opinions, smoked cigarettes among the grave- stones with a smile of condescending derision on his lips. And when it was all over, and the sun began to sink into the hidden sea, we were able to congratulate each other upon a successful cere- mony, upon how tactfully the cure had behaved to all concerned, upon the beauty of the memorial painting, and upon the peace which, but a few days before, had been signed with all the apparatus of triumph at Versailles. Blanche, as always, was dis- consolate: It might be true that we had defeated the Germans, and had imposed our will upon a vanquished Europe. Yet Russia remained. The spectre of Germany had been exorcised only to be succeeded by the even more horrid spectre of Communism. "We are lost," murmured Jaques-Emile Blanche. "It is the end of everything." His pale and anxious face glimmered in the lovely
dusk. * *•
It is curious that a man so receptive of disaster should three times in his life have had to endure invasion. As a child he had heard them shouting for the Republic in the streets of Dieppe, and had been hurried across to England before the Prussians arrived. In the last war he had walked the terrace at Offranville listening to the distant rumble of the Battle of the Somme. And what happened in this war? It seems that he died at Offranville a few days only after our, attack upon Dieppe. For nine dread hours the peace of Offranville must have been shattered by the rattle of machine-guns, the whirl of aeroplanes, the thunder of guns. But today the windows of the drawing room have ceased 1 their rattle, and the winter sun streams in, lighting now upon a strip of aubusson and now a bunch of chrysanthemums in a Wedg- wood vase. I regret that Blanche should not have lived to see the dawn of victory. Even to his disconsolate features it would have brought a gleam of hope.
Previous page
