Tarr had Anastasya in solitary promenade two days after this. He had worked the first stage consummately. He swam with ease beside his big hysterical black swan, seeming to guide her with a golden halter. They were swimming with august undulations of thought across the Luxembourg Gardens on this sunny and tasteful evening about four o’clock. The Latins and Scandinavians who strolled on the Latin terrace were each one a microscopic hero, but better turned out than the big doubtful heroes of 1840.

The inviolate, constantly sprinkled and shining lawns by the Lycée Henri Trois were thickly fringed with a sort of seaside humanity, who sat facing them and their coolness as though it had been the sea. Leaving these upland expanses to the sedentary swarms of Mammas and Papas, Tarr and Anastasya[224] crossed over beneath the trees past the children’s carousels grinding out their antediluvian lullabies.

This place represented the richness of four wasted years. Four incredibly gushing, thick years; what had happened to this delightful muck? All this profusion had accomplished for him was to dye the avenues of a Park with personal colour for the rest of his existence.

No one, he was quite convinced, had squandered so much stuff in the neighbourhood of these terraces, ponds, and lawns. So this was more nearly his Park than it was anybody else’s. He should never walk through it without bitter and soothing recognition from it. Well: that was what the Man of Action accomplished. In four idle years he had been, when most inactive, trying the man of action’s job. He had captured a Park!—Well! he had spent himself into the Earth. The trees had his sap in them.

He remembered a day when he had brought a book to the bench there, his mind tearing at it in advance, almost writing it in its energy. He had been full of such unusual faith. The streets around these gardens, in which he had lodged alternately, were so many confluents and tributaries of memory, charging it on all sides with defunct puissant tides. The places, he reflected, where childhood has been spent, or where, later, dreams of energy have been flung away, year after year, are obviously the healthiest spots for a person. But perhaps, although he possessed the Luxembourg Gardens so completely, they were completely possessed by thousands of other people! So many men had begun their childhood of ambition in this neighbourhood. His hopes, too, no doubt, had grown there more softly because of the depth and richness of the bed. A sentimental miasma made artificially in Paris a similar good atmosphere where the mind could healthily exist as was found by artists in brilliant complete and solid times. Paris was like a patent food.

“Elle dit le mot, Anastase, né pour d’éternels[225] parchemins.” He could not, however, get interested. Was it the obstinate Eighteenth Century animal vision? When you plunge into these beings, must they be all quivering with unconsciousness, like life with a cat or a serpent?—But her sex would throw clouds over her eyes. She was a woman. It was no good. Again he must confess Anastasya could only offer him something too serious. He could not play with that. Sex-loyalty to his most habitual lips interfered.

He had the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own power have for those not equals with whom they have been associated. He would have given to Bertha the authority of his own spirit, to prime her with himself that she might meet on equal terms and vanquish any rival. He experienced a slight hostility to Anastasya like a part of Bertha left in himself protesting and jealous. It was chiefly vanity at the thought of this superior woman’s contempt could she see his latest female effort.

“I suppose she knows all about Bertha,” he thought. Kreisler-like, he looked towards the Lipmann women. “Homme sensuel! Homme égo?ste!”

She seemed rather shy with him.

“How do you like Paris?” he asked her.

“I don’t know yet. Do you like it?” She had a flatness in speaking English because of her education in the United States.

“I don’t like to be quite so near the centre of the world. You can see all the machinery working. It makes you a natural sceptic. But here I am. I find it difficult to live in London.”

“I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the machinery did not obtrude?”

“I don’t feel that. I think that a place like this exists for the rest of the world. It works that the other countries may live and create. That is the r?le France has chosen. The French spirit seems to me rather spare and impoverished at present.”

“You regard it as a mother-drudge?”

“More of a drudge than a mother. We don’t get much really from France, except tidiness.”

[226]

“I expect you are ungrateful.”

“Perhaps so. But I cannot get over a dislike for Latin facilities. Suarès finds a northern rhetoric of ideas in Ibsen, for instance, exactly similar to the word-rhetoric of the South. But in Latin countries you have a democracy of vitality, the best things of the earth are in everybody’s mouth and nerves. The artist has to go and find them in the crowd. You can’t have ‘freedom’ both ways. I prefer the artist to be free, and the crowd not to be ‘artists.’ What does all English and German gush or sentiment, about the wonderful, the artistic French nation, etc., amount to? They gush because they find thirty-five million little Bésnards, little Botrels, little Bouchers, or little Bougereaus living together and prettifying their towns and themselves. Imagine England an immense garden city, on Letchworth lines (that is the name of a model Fabian township near London), or Germany (it almost has become that) a huge nouveau-art, reform-dressed, bestatued State. Practically every individual Frenchman of course has the filthiest taste imaginable. You are more astonished when you come across a sound, lonely, and severe artist in France than elsewhere. His vitality is hypnotically beset by an ocean of artistry. His best instinct is to become rather aggressively harsh and simple. The reason that a great artist like Rodin or the Cubists to-day arouse more fury in France than in England, for instance, is not because the French are more interested in Art! They are less interested in art, if anything. It is because they are all ‘artistic’ and all artists in the sense that a cheap illustrator or Mr. Brangwyn, R.A., or Mr. Waterhouse, R.A., are. They are scandalized at good art; the English are inquisitive about and tickled by it, like gaping children. Their social instincts are not so developed and logical.”

“But what difference does the attitude of the crowd make to the artist?”

“Well, we were talking about Paris, which is the creation of the crow............