Besides,to them,he is often most amiably courteous;he seems to take pleasure in making them forget his personal singularities,and thus obtains a victory over antipathies which flatters either his vanity,his self-love,or his pride.
"Why do you present yourself like that?"said the Marquise de Vandenesse one day.
"Pearls live in oyster-shells,"he answered,conceitedly.
To another who asked him somewhat the same question,he replied,--"If I were charming to all the world,how could I seem better still to the one woman I wish to please?"Raoul Nathan imports this same natural disorder (which he uses as a banner)into his intellectual life;and the attribute is not misleading.his talent is very much that of the poor girls who go about in bourgeois families to work by the day.He was first a critic,and a great critic;but he felt himself cheated in that vocation.His articles were equal to books,he said.The profits of theatrical work then allured him;but,incapable of the slow and steady application required for stage arrangement,he was forced to associate with himself a vaudevillist,du Bruel,who took his ideas,worked them over,and reduced them into those productive little pieces,full of wit,which are written expressly for actors and actresses.Between them,they had invented Florine,an actress now in vogue.
Humiliated by this association,which was that of the Siamese twins,Nathan had produced alone,at the Theatre-Francais,a serious drama,which fell with all the honors of war amid salvos of thundering articles.In his youth he had once before appeared at the great and noble Theatre-Francais in a splendid romantic play of the style of "Pinto,"--a period when the classic reigned supreme.The Odeon was so violently agitated for three nights that the play was forbidden by the censor.This second piece was considered by many a masterpiece,and won him more real reputation than all his productive little pieces done with collaborators,--but only among a class to whom little attention is paid,that of connoisseurs and persons of true taste.
"Make another failure like that,"said Emile Blondet,"and you'll be immortal."But instead of continuing in that difficult path,Nathan had fallen,out of sheer necessity,into the powder and patches of eighteenth-century vaudeville,costume plays,and the reproduction,scenically,of successful novels.
Nevertheless,he passed for a great mind which had not said its last word.He had,moreover,attempted permanent literature,having published three novels,not to speak of several others which he kept in press like fish in a tank.One of these three books,the first (like that of many writers who can only make one real trip into literature),had obtained a very brilliant success.This work,imprudently placed in the front rank,this really artistic work he was never weary of calling the finest book of the period,the novel of the century.
Raoul complained bitterly of the exigencies of art.He was one of those who contributed most to bring all created work,pictures,statues,books,building under the single standard of Art.He had begun his career by committing a volume of verse,which won him a place in the pleiades of living poets;among these verses was a nebulous poem that was greatly admired.Forced by want of means to keep on producing,he went from the theatre to the press,and from the press to the theatre,dissipating and scattering his talent,but believing always in his vein.His fame was therefore not unpublished like that of so many great minds in extremity,who sustain themselves only by the thought of work to be done.
Nathan resembled a man of genius;and had he marched to the scaffold,as he sometimes wished he could have done,he might have struck his brow with the famous action of Andre Chenier.Seized with political ambition on seeing the rise to power of a dozen authors,professors,metaphysicians,and historians,who encrusted themselves,so to speak,upon the machine during the turmoils of 1830and 1833,he regretted that he had not spent his time on political instead of literary articles.He thought himself superior to all those parvenus,whose success inspired him with consuming jealousy.He belonged to the class of minds ambitious of everything,capable of all things,from whom success is,as it were,stolen;who go their way dashing at a hundred luminous points,and settling upon none,exhausting at last the good-will of others.
At this particular time he was going from Saint-Simonism into republicanism,to return,very likely,to ministerialism.He looked for a bone to gnaw in all corners,searching for a safe place where he could bark secure from kicks and make himself feared.But he had the mortification of finding he was held to be of no account by de Marsay,then at the head of the government,who had no consideration whatever for authors,among whom he did not find what Richelieu called a consecutive mind,or more correctly,continuity of ideas;he counted as any minister would have done on the constant embarrassment of Raoul's business affairs.Sooner or later,necessity would bring him to accept conditions instead of imposing them.