The New Carthage

Front matter

THE NEW CARTHAGE

THE NEW CARTHAGE

(La Nouvelle Carthage)

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

I

Georges Eekhoud was born in Antwerp in 1854. His mother came of German and Dutch parentage; his father, who came of Flemish stock, died in the boy's eleventh year. The boy received his schooling in Switzerland and upon his return to Belgium was destined for the profession of engineering by his uncle and guardian, but the plan failed dismally and Eekhoud was sent to military school, from which, after some months, he ran away. He was then cast off by his family, and as the income of his fathers estate was insufficient for his needs, he turned to journalism as a means of earning a livelihood. After a time his grandmother, a woman of some wealth, took him into her home; here he enjoyed a period of leisure and study. Upon her death he inherited a comfortable fortune, which he invested in an estate at Capellen, to the north of Antwerp. His subsequent experience as a gentleman-farmer, although it was an economic failure, provided him with the opportunity of acquiring that familiarity with the psychology, the life and the customs of the peasantry which became the essential foundation of so much of his art. In 1881 he once more had recourse to journalism, this time in Brussels, where he became literary and musical critic of L'Etoile Belge. During the period which elapsed between his arrival in Brussels and the foundation of La Jeune Belgique, Eekhoud became acquainted with the group of men who were striving to give Belgium a contemporary national literature. Chief among them were Camille Lemonnier, Théodore Hannon, Max Waller (Maurice Warlomont), the founder of La Jeune Belgique, and the group of contributors to that magazine who have since achieved world-wide recognition: Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, George Rodenbach and Charles Van Lerberghe.

Before 1880 the literary revolt instituted by the younger men centered at the University of Louvain, where the future writers, painters and musicians—among the latter Jan Blockx, the Flemish composer, and Van Dyck, the Wagnerian tenor—were supposed to be studying law, but were, in reality, far more exercised over the future of the arts in Belgium. The movement was a healthy and normal expression of youthful vigor accompanied by the publication of many manifestos, a good deal of unconventional thinking, writing and talking, some humorous escapades which thoroughly shocked the University authorities, and an atmosphere of rousing collegiate life.

From Louvain the headquarters of the movement were transferred to Brussels. La Jeune Belgique, which under the editorial direction of Max Waller had brought the work of Verhaeren, Maeterlinck, Rodenbach, Van Lerberghe and Eekhoud to the attention of the public, was charged with decadence by L'Art Moderne, the organ of the lawyer, Edmond Picard. To Waller's doctrine of "Art for art's sake," Picard opposed the ideals of an art embodying a social content, and preeminently reflecting the Flemish race consciousness as in an earlier day it had been reflected in the paintings of the Flemish masters. The conflict over the form and content of Belgian literature and the attitude of the Belgian writer produced a schism in the movement, the writers of nationalistic tendencies rallying to Picard's magazine, while the Parnassians, as they came to be called, found a haven in La Jeune Belgique. In this schism Eekhoud, with Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, gave his allegiance to the revolutionary and nationalist program. And that part of the contemporary literature of Belgium which is best known to the world outside its native land has been produced neither by the few inheritors of the Parnassian tradition who, although living in Belgium, have written as Frenchmen, nor by the writers of the Walloon, nor by the writers of the Flemish school who have written in the Flemish language, but by those writers who have created a body of literature which, in the quality of its spiritual content as a record of racial experience, is purely Flemish, though written in French.

II

Unlike many of the other contributors to the Belgian literary renascence, Georges Eekhoud combines with a passionate love of his native land a broadly cosmopolitan culture. His contact with English literature has been especially significant as an influence upon his art. Of the Victorians, Dickens and De Quincey have profoundly impressed him; Dickens because of his humanitarian motive, De Quincey because of his hatred of the middle class and his sympathy with the criminal and the downtrodden. But Eekhoud's most effective service to English literature has been done as an interpreter and translator of Elizabethan writers. His "Au Siècle le Shakespeare," a striking volume of criticism, has done much to make popular in Belgium the writings of the Elizabethan masters. In addition to this book he has published translations into French of Beaumont and Fletcher's "Philaster" and Marlowe's "Edward II." His single original play, "Perkin Warbeck," is a tragedy founded upon the career of the Flemish pretender to the throne of England; and when the Great War beat down upon Belgium he was preparing for the press a volume of "Etudes Élisabéthi ." As a critic he has chosen to interpret that period in English literature which gave expression to a life closely akin to that of which his own art is a record.

To adequately understand the reaction to experience of which Eekhoud's novels and tales—"Kees Doorik," "Kermesses," "Nouvelles Kermesses," "Cycle Patibulaire," "Mes Communions," "Escal-Vigor," "La Faneuse d'Amour," "La Nouvelle Carthage," and its sequel, "L'Autre Vue"—are the expression, we must recall the character of the Flemish mind as it has found expression in literature. The Walloons, whose culture is purely Gallic, are logical, primarily intellectual, musical and scientific. They have, in letters, the French respect for clearness of conception, for lucidity and precision of expression, for purity of style and for intelligent discrimination. The genius of the Flemings, however, is emotional rather than intellectual, and among its characteristics have been the conflicting tendencies of religious mysticism and an almost pagan love of the sensual aspects of life. They think profoundly about life less than they feel strongly about it. They are steeped in the tradition of their glorious past, and they are keenly aware of an immediate and insistent present.

Until the middle of the last century the Flemish genius had achieved its fullest expression in painting, perhaps because even until three years ago Flanders was an essentially picturesque country. When the movement toward the creation of a national literature began to assert itself, the younger writers derived the method of their art not from a literary tradition, but quite consciously from the tradition of Flemish painting. For their inspiration they sought in the life about them, but they sought with eyes that had been taught to see by Rembrandt, Rubens, Teniers, Jan Steen, Ruysdael and Van Ostade. The qualities of mysticism, sensuality, love of nature and of life, and emotional enthusiasm were the first to be registered in the art of the Flemish writers, and to the service of literature they brought the sensitive feeling for form and color and the robust love of the material world which had always been characteristic of the art of their great masters. Almost as compelling was the influence of the various French schools of literature; realism, especially psychological realism, and subsequently symbolism, captivated the minds of the younger Flemish writers. Consequently the method of realism, which they soon began to apply to the life of the spirit, produced a literature that is mystic and symbolic in essential direction, but which finds its symbols in the life about it, a life in which there is a fusion of the romantic, enigmatic past and the industrial present to which the character inherited from the past is seeking to adjust itself. The most important tendency in the recent literature of Belgium is, however, the transfer of the method of painting to the subject matter of literature; the vision of the Belgian writers is the vision of their painters, taking delight in color and form, wooing the four other senses through its vivid appeal to the eye, founded upon accurate observation and delicate perception.

Georges Eekhoud found in the life of the peasantry the subject-matter for his art. He is a regional writer, and the region which he describes is the country to the north of Antwerp; the polders of the Scheldt and the wastes of the Campine. The polders of the Scheldt are rich plains, thickly inhabited by a vigorous and sturdy race of small farmers. The Campine is a far-reaching and sandy waste that stretches over a great part of the provinces of Antwerp and Limburg. Its little towns are scattered and have infrequent communication with the outside world; it is a wasted, dreary, forbidding country of cold, stagnant pools, dull marshes, russet heather and tenacious furze, and a sky that is by turns leaden and coppery. The peasants manage only with hardship to wreak a living from the sandy soil; they are brutally sensual, ignorant, superstitious, fatalistic and almost savage. It is with the life and the customs of this region that Eekhoud's art is chiefly concerned, and his preoccupation finds its analogue in recent English literature in the novels and tales of Thomas Hardy.

III

In "The New Carthage" Eekhoud turned his attention to the life of Antwerp. And in order that his fundamental intention in writing the book may be immediately apparent, I quote the following paragraph from the body of the novel:

"To paint Antwerp, its life, its harbor, its river, its sailors, its dockers, its luxuriant women, its rosy and chubby children whom Rubens, in other days, had thought sufficiently plastic and appetizing to populate his heavens and Olympuses; to paint this human mob in its own ways, its costume and surroundings, with the most cherishing care for its special customs and morals, without neglecting the correlations which accentuate and characterize it; to interpret the very soul of the city of Rubens with a sympathy bordering upon assimilation—what a program and what an objective!"

It is to this conception that Eekhoud adhered in writing "The New Carthage," and the novel is essentially a record of the life of the whole city. Its protagonist is Antwerp itself, or, more definitely, the proletariat of Antwerp as its life is experienced by Laurent Paridael. The novel is largely autobiographi

Laurent, like Eekhoud himself, is left an orphan at the age of eleven and committed to the care of a wealthy uncle, who, like Eekhoud's uncle, the Mayor of Borgerhout, is a manufacturer of candles. But this identification of Laurent with Eekhoud, beyond offering us an assurance that the novel is written out of an experience which the author has lived, is scarcely of major interest.

The fundamental content of the novel lies in its social feeling. Being a Fleming, Eekhoud reasons about life less than he feels it. He has a profound sympathy with the poor, the weak and the downtrodden. He denounces with bitter contempt the hypocrisy of the capitalistic organization of industrial society and the complacent philosophy of the bourgeoisie. Spiritually, morally and philosophically, Eekhoud is an anarchist. He distrusts all organization as setting an arbitrary limit upon life, as imposing its special utilitarian categories upon the mass of humanity. He challenges the cruelty of our contemporary industrial civilization, and sternly bids us face the facts of reality, however unlovely they may be. His own reaction to life's unloveliness seems, at first sight, supremely discouraging. If there were no organization, he tells us, there would be no evil, since evil is but a term applied to certain actions by an artificial society. Moreover, since atavism is the most potent force in nature, civilization begins and ends in savagery. This, however, is but one half of his doctrine. The other is contained in the following passage:

"And then, too, Antwerp will undergo a moral regeneration also. She will be restored again to her true children. You will see it, Paridael; the oppressed masses are becoming insubordinate. I tell you that a new order will soon come into being! A breath of emancipation and youth has blown across the mob; there is something better here than a rich and proud city; there is a people no less interesting who are commencing to revolt against the representatives who serve them badly and compromise them."

Eekhoud, like Whitman, puts his faith in humanity and in an essentially spiritual democracy. If he seems to advocate anarchy, we must remember that this anarchy is but a logical extension of the democratic principle. His vision of the future is a social order in which the masses will have achieved self-expression. Like that other great Belgian artist, Constantin Meunier, he celebrates the modern beauty of labor and of the crowd. With Meunier and with Verhaeren, Eekhoud has made his art a vehicle for the wider social feeling and the plea for social justice which, in these days, is our chief concern.

IV

I have endeavored, in this translation of "La Nouvelle Carthage," to enable the reader to obtain something of the effect which is produced by the original French. But Eekhoud, although a great writer, is in no sense a stylist. He is controlled by his emotion and by his conception, and his prose is exuberant and often rhapsodic; in his work we have a clear case of content creating its own form.

It has been necessary to delete one paragraph from the chapter entitled "The Runners," and several passages from the chapter dealing with "The Riet-Dijk." These passages are purely descriptive, and to French readers their frankness would have its warrant in the tradition of literary realism; in this matter Anglo-Saxon and Gallic taste are at variance.

Lloyd R. Morris.

Part I, Chapter I

THE NEW CARTHAGE

PART I

REGINA

I

THE GARDEN

Monsieur William Dobouziez arranged the funeral of Jacques Paridael in a manner deserving the approbation of his set, and the admiration of modest folk. That he was doing things handsomely could not help but be the opinion of the crowd. He would not have done better for himself. A second class service, but, with the exception of the undertaker's assistants, who was sufficiently experienced to distinguish the slight shading of difference between the first class and the second? A plain chant mass, but no general absolution, for he felt it useless to prolong a ceremony so trying for those concerned and so tedious to the indifferent. So and so many yards of black mourning crape bordered with white, so and so many pounds of yellow wax candles. During his life the late Paridael, poor devil, had never hoped for such obsequies as these.

Forty-five years old, upright, but already becoming grey, nervous, dry and precise, the red ribbon in the buttonhole of his tightly fitting coat. Monsieur William Dobouziez walked behind little Laurent, his ward, the only child of the dead man, who was plunged in an acute and hysterical grief.

Since his father's death Laurent had not ceased crying. In church he was a pitiable sight. The doleful tolling of the great chimes and especially the abrupt jingling of the choir bell produced little convulsive tremors throughout his body. This obvious affliction exasperated his cousin William, a former officer in the army, thick skinned, an enemy to all exaggeration.

"Come, come, Laurent! For heaven's sake control yourself! Be sensible!… Stand up!… Sit down!… Come along, now!" he kept repeating in a whisper.

It was of no avail. Every minute the little boy compromised the irreproachable progress of the ceremony by his wailing and his trembling. And just when so great an honor was being paid his father!

Before the funeral procession began to leave the church Monsieur Dobouziez, being a man who thought of everything, gave his ward a twenty franc coin, one of five francs, and a twenty-sou piece. The first was for the collection plate, the other two for alms. But the child, decidedly as awkward as he looked, became confused in the division of his offerings and, contrary to custom, gave the gold piece to the representative of the poor, five francs to the churchwarden, and the twenty-sou piece to the priest.

At the cemetery he barely escaped falling into the grave when throwing the little clod of yellow, fetid earth which sank with so muffled and lugubrious a sound.

Finally, to the great relief of his guardian, he was put into the carriage, and the coach and two horses rapidly regained the home and factory of the Dobouziez', located in a suburb outside the fortifications.

At dinner the conversation was general, and the family, without lingering over the events of the morning, accorded only an awkward attention to Laurent, who was seated between his great-aunt and Monsieur Dobouziez. He addressed no word to Laurent excepting to exhort him to duty, good behaviour, and common sense, three words sufficiently abstract to a boy who had barely received his first communion.

His kindly great-aunt wished to sympathize more tenderly with the orphan's grief, but she feared being taxed with weakness by the master and mistress of the house, and doing him an ill turn with them. She even tried to staunch his tears through fear that his prolonged grief would seem ungrateful to the two people who, from that time forth, were to take the place of his father and mother. But, when one is but eleven years old, one lacks tact, and her whispered injunctions provoked only a recrudescence of tears.

Through the mist that veiled his eyes, Laurent, fearful and panting like a hunted bird, surreptitiously examined the group around the table.

Madame Dobouziez, his cousin Lydia, was enthroned directly across the table from her husband. A little woman, slightly bent, her skin was yellow, and shrivelled like that of a prune. Her hair was black and shiny and dressed in thick coils that hid her forehead and touched the thick, heavy eyebrows that shaded her eyes, black also, gelatinous and almost popping out of her head. Her face was singularly inexpressive in its masculine features, thin and colorless lips, and flattened nose beneath the nostrils of which a little down was perceptible. Her voice was harsh and guttural, bringing to mind the cry of a guinea hen. A heart cold and contracted rather than entirely absent; she had moments of kindness, but never of delicacy, and her soul was narrow and constricted.

William Dobouziez, brilliant captain of industry, had married her for her money. The dowry of this daughter of a retired Brussels hosier served, after he had resigned from the army, to build his factory and become the first stepping-stone toward a rapidly acquired fortune.

Laurent's eyes rested with more satisfaction and even with a certain pleasure upon Regina, or Gina, the only child of the Dobouziez', a few years older than himself, a slender, nervous brunette with expressive black eyes, a mass of curly hair, and a flawlessly oval face. The nostrils of her aquiline nose were sensitive, her mouth was roguish and wilful, her chin marked by a delicious dimple, and the soft rose of her coloring had the delicate, dull transparence of a cameo. Never before had Laurent seen so exquisite a little girl.

Nevertheless, he did not dare stare at her for very long, nor endure the fire of her malicious eyes. The turbulence of this spoiled and roguish child was tempered by a little of the solemnity and arrogance of cousin Dobouziez. And already something disdainful and inexpressibly bantering puckered her innocent lips and altered the tone of her candid laugh.

She dazzled Laurent, she impressed him as being a personage. And vaguely, he felt afraid of her. Especially since she had looked at him fixedly two or three times, accompanying her examination with a smile full of condescension and superiority.

Conscious herself of the favorable effect that she had produced upon him, she became even more restless and capricious than usual. She began to intrude upon the conversation, and toyed with her food, not knowing how to attract attention to herself. Her mother seemed unable to control her and, reluctant to scold her, since that would draw the minx's malice upon herself, she cast distressed glances at Dobouziez.

He resisted his wife's desperate appeal as long as he possibly could. Finally, he interfered. Gina yielded instantly, with an amusingly martyred air, to the kindly command of her father. In behalf of Gina the head of the family dispensed with his habitual rigidity. He controlled himself with a violent effort that he might not reply to the irritating sallies of his darling child; when he did finally call her to account, it was only in self-defence. And the unaccustomed sweetness of his tone and of his look recalled to Laurent the voice and the smile of Jacques Paridael. So much so that Lorki, for that was the name by which his dear absent father had called him, could hardly believe that the cousin Dobouziez who was remonstrating with his little Gina was the same rigid disciplinarian who, at the sad ceremony so shortly before, had commanded him to do this, and then that, to do so many things that he had not known which to do first. And in what a brief and peremptory tone those instructions had been uttered!

What matter; though his childish heart was breaking at the comparison, the Lorki of yesterday, the Laurent of to-day did not bear his little cousin a grudge for being the favorite. She was far too beautiful for that! But, had it been a question of some other child, a boy like himself, for example, the orphan would bitterly have resented this revelation of the extent of his loss; he would have experienced malice and hate as well as consternation and despair. It would have gone badly with the other child, for the injustice of his own lot would have made him rebellious.

But Gina seemed to him one of the radiant princesses or fairies of his nursery tales, and it seemed natural that God should be more clement toward beings of so superior an essence!

The little fairy could control herself no longer.

"Run along, children, and play," said her father, making a sign to Laurent to follow her.

Gina led him into the garden.

It was an enclosure as regularly laid out as a peasant's backyard, bounded by walls roughcast with lime upon which fruit trees were being trained. It was a kitchen-garden and orchard as well as a pleasure garden; as large as a park, it offered neither sloping lawns nor shady woods.

It boasted, however, a single curiosity, a turret built of red brick, its back to a little hill, at the foot of which stagnated a tiny sheet of water serving as an habitation for two pairs of ducks. Winding paths converged at the top of the hillock, from which one commanded a view of the pond and the garden. This bizarre structure was rather pompously known as "The Labyrinth."

Gina did the honors to Laurent. With the air of a busy guide she showed him everything of importance. She marched him along with her in a protecting manner.

"Lookout! Don't fall into the water …!"

"Mama doesn't allow anyone to pick the raspberries …!"

She laughed heartily at his awkwardness. When two or three hardly elegant phrases crept into their jargon, she reproved him. Laurent, who was little of a talker, became even more taciturn than usual. His timidity increased, and he felt disgusted with himself for appearing ridiculous to Gina.

That day Gina was wearing her school dress, grey trimmed with blue silk. She described to her companion, who never wearied of listening to her, all the peculiarities of the convent at Malines. She even regaled him with a few caricatures, imitating, with grimaces and gestures, several of the good sisters. The Reverend Mother squinted and Sister Veronica, who took care of the linens, spoke through her nose, and Sister Hubertine fell asleep and snored during the evening study hour.

The chapter of infirmities and defects of her teachers having put her in good humor, she took delight in embarrassing her companion.

"Is it true that your father was nothing but a clerk? Was there only one little door to your house? Why did you never come to see us? We are cousins, eh? Funny, isn't it? Paridael, that's a Flemish name, isn't it? You know Gaston and Anthanasius Saint-Fardier, the sons of my father's partner. Monsieur Saint-Fardier? They are two merry fellows. They ride horseback, and they don't wear caps. They're not at all like you. Papa told me you looked like a little peasant, with your red cheeks, your big teeth, and your hair pasted down flat. Who cut your hair that way? Yes, father is right, you look very much like the little peasants who assist the priest at the mass here!"

She set upon Laurent with implacable malice. Every word went straight to his heart. Blushing more than ever, he forced himself to laugh as he had at the portraits of the good sisters, and found nothing to say in reply.

He would have liked to prove to the little tease that one may wear a blouse puffed out like a bag, a coat both too long and too wide, made to last for two years, that clung to one's legs and made one look knock-kneed, a starched collar from which emerged a face as childish and blank as that of John the Baptist after his decapitation, a cap with grotesque lace trimming badly concealed by a mourning band, buttons of jet and velvet, useless buckles and cumbersome tassels, that one may, in short, be dressed like a peasant's son and yet not be more silly and ungainly than a Gaston or Athanasius Saint-Fardier!

His good nurse Siska was not a model tailor, but at least she knew how to make the most of the material. And then, too, Jacques Paridael had liked these clothes so well upon his little Laurent. On the day of his first communion the dear man had repeated, as he embraced him, "You are as handsome as a prince, my Lorki!"

And even now he was wearing that same holiday suit, just as it had been then, with the exception of the crape wound about his cap and replacing, upon his right arm, the glorious band of moire trimmed with silver.

The tease was suddenly seized with a good impulse. While running through the flower beds she picked a China-aster with poppy colored petals and golden heart.

"Here, Peasant," she cried, "put this flower in your buttonhole!"

She might call him Peasant all she wanted! He forgave her freely. This flower stuck in his black blouse was the first smile that illumined his grief. Even less able to put into words his joy than he had been able to express his bitterness of heart, he would, had he dared, have fallen upon his knees before the little girl and kissed her hand, as he had seen the plumed knights do in an old volume of the "Family Magazine" that he had read on Sunday afternoons in Winter, munching roasted chestnuts as he turned the pages.

But Regina skipped to the other end of the garden without waiting for Laurent to put his gratitude into words.

He felt a pang of remorse at having allowed himself to be so quickly tamed, and sullenly tore the gay flower from his blouse. But instead of throwing it away, he put it tenderly into his pocket. And, giving himself up to his loneliness, he began to think of his home. It was empty now, and had been placed upon the market. His dog, good old Lion, had been willingly abandoned to a neighbor who consented to relieve the house of death of its presence. Siska, having been paid off, had also left. Where was she now? Would he ever see her again? Lorki had not said farewell to her in the morning. He saw her face as he had seen it in church, far at the farther end, as swollen with tears as his own.

In leaving, he had had to pass her, urged on by Cousin William, when he would so greatly have loved to throw his arms about her neck. In the carriage, he had timidly hazarded a single question.

"Where are we going now. Cousin William?"

"To the factory, of course! Where did you think?" So they were not going to return to the house! The little boy had not insisted; he had not even asked permission to say farewell to his nurse. It was not because he had already become hard and proud. He was only timid, and out of his element. Cousin William would have snubbed him had he mentioned so inconspicuous a person as Siska…!

Tired of calling him, Gina decided to return to the dreamer. She took his arm.

"You must be deaf… Come, I want you to see the nectarines. They are Mamma's special fruit, and Felicité counts them each morning. There are twelve of them. Don't touch any!"

She did not notice that Laurent had removed the flower. The little girl's indifference enlivened the Peasant, though he would have preferred her to ask what had become of her present.

He tried to forget his grief, and allowed himself to be led about by Gina. They played boys' games. To please her, he tumbled about, yelled like a little savage, rolled on the grass and in the paths, soiling his good clothes, mottling his cheeks, wet with perspiration, tears and mud.

"Oh! What a funny sight!" cried the little girl.

She dipped the corner of her handkerchief in the pond and tried to clean Laurent's face, but she laughed too much, and succeeded only in making it even more dirty.

During this operation there came the squeaking of a shrill voice.

"Madamoiselle, Monsieur would like you to come in. The guests are leaving… And you, come here! Tomorrow you go back to school! You have had enough vacation as it is!"