The Little Review, March 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 1) :: Ethel Sidgwick's "Succession"

Ethel Sidgwick's "Succession"

Margaret C. Anderson

Succession: A Comedy of the Generations, by Ethel Sidgwick. (Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.)

Ethel Sidgwick is the world’s next great woman novelist. Though I confess eagerly that I enjoy her novels more than any novels I’ve ever read—I mean it literally—it isn’t on so personal a basis that I offer the judgment. But I’m confident that within ten years the critical perspective will show her on this pinnacle. Since George Eliot and the BrontËs, I can think of no woman who has focused art and life so intensely into novel writing—though even as I say this Ethan Frome looms up and leaves me a little uncomfortable. But the important thing is that Ethel Sidgwick is going to count—enormously.

People who aren’t yet aware of her (and there seem to be a lot of them) can be easily explained as that body of the public that neglects a masterpiece until it has become the fashion to acclaim it. But Ethel Sidgwick has written a novel that’s more important than any number of our traditional masterpieces. For instance, it’s a much more important story than Vanity Fair; just as Jean Christophe is more valuable than Ivanhoe. The novel of manners has its delightful place, and so has the historical romance; but the novel that chronicles with subtlety the intellectual or artistic temper of an age is as much more important than these as Greek drama is than the moving picture show.

I know there are people who’ll read Succession and continue to prefer Thackeray’s geniality to Miss Sidgwick’s brilliant seriousness and her humor that’s not at all genial—but rapid, sophisticated, impatient of comedy in the accepted sense. Ethel Sidgwick might write a radiant tragedy, or a wistful satire, or a sad comedy; I can never imagine her being anything so obvious as merely comic—or genial! She doesn’t laugh; she couldn’t chuckle; she has just the flash of a smile, and then she hurries on dazzlingly, as though things were too important to be anything but passionate about. She doesn’t “warm the cockles of your heart”—or whatever that silly phrase is; and she doesn’t do crude, raw things to show you that she “knows life.” She goes down into the darkness rose-crowned, in Rupert Brooke’s gorgeous phrase; when she goes into the sunlight it is always with something of remembered agony. That’s the fine quality of her vitalism. She’s too strong to be hard, too steel-like to be robust. She’s like fire and keen air—to borrow another poet’s phrase. She reflects life through the mirror of a vivid personality—which is one way of being an important artist. She assumes that you’re also vivid, and quick, and subtle, and this gives her writing the most beautiful quality of nervousness—the kind you mean when you’re not talking about nerves. In short, Ethel Sidgwick is the most definitely magnetic personality I’ve ever felt through a book’s pages.

Succession, though complete in itself, is really a sequel to Promise, published a year ago. The sub-title presents the idea, and can be concretely expanded in a sentence: Antoine, child-wonder violinist, and the youngest of the celebrated Lemaures, revolts against the musical ideas of his grandfather. Here it is again—the battle of youth and age, made particularly interesting because it’s a purely intellectual warfare, and particularly charming because its participants are such delightful people.

The first glimpse of Antoine is irresistible. After a series of concerts in England, he is being taken by his uncle to their home in France. M. Lucien Lemaure has chosen the long route because his nephew has an odd habit of sleeping better on the water than in any house or hotel on shore; and while he doesn’t understand this nephew, he has vital reasons for considering him: for upon Antoine’s delicate shoulders rests the musical honor of the family.

“Sleep well, mon petit,” he said, in the tiny cabin. “We are going home.”

Antoine, who had no immediate intention of sleeping, was staring out of the dim porthole of a fascinating space of the unknown. “That is home to you?” he asked vaguely.

“To be sure. My first youth was passed there, like thine.”

After an interval passed spent in a vain effort to imagine his uncle with no hair on his face, Antoine gave it up and recurred to the window. “I wish I lived on the sea,” he murmured.

In the train, flying toward Paris, Lucien refers to the last London recital, when Antoine had made both his uncle’s and his conductor’s lives a burden by his indifferent rehearsal of his grandfather’s latest composition. Antoine’s outburst had outraged Lucien, to whom faith in his father’s character and genius had, all his life, amounted to a religion.

“What will you tell him then?” said Antoine, turning his dark eyes without deranging his languid attitude along the seat. “Just that I said some ‘sottises,’ the same as always?”

“He is not a child,” thought Lucien instantly. “He is clever, maddening. Of course, my action will have to be explained. I shall say,” he said aloud, with deliberation, “that we differed about the concerto. That you were difficult and headstrong over that, which is certainly true. You have admitted since that it was too much for you, eh?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “It is an awful thing, but I played it. I had to have something real that night.”

“You imply my father’s composition is not real?”

“Oh, do not,” said the boy, under his breath. “I have remembered he is your father now.”

“To be sure,” said M. Lucien, with stateliness. “And have you no duty to him as well?”

“I shall see him soon. I shall remember then.” Antoine diverted his eyes, to his uncle’s private relief. “Do you think I do not want to remember, after that?”

“I should think you would be ashamed,” said Lucien, by way of the last word in argument, and retired to his paper.

“You like me to be ashamed,” said Antoine, snatching the last word from him, though still with a manner of extreme languor. “Good, then, I have been. It is not”—he watched the trees of Normandy sleepily—“a very nice feeling.”

“I am glad you know what it is like, at least,” growled his uncle into the paper.

“Don’t you?” said his nephew. “What it is like, is to make you feel rather sick—all the time—especially while you are playing it.”

“What?”

“The thing you are ashamed of.”

How I wanted to hug him!

“Antoine,” said Lucien, rising and discarding the paper, “do not be absurd. Here, look at me. You suffered that night at the concert, eh? You excited yourself so much, little imbecile. Are you tired now?”

“No, thank you—this is France,” replied Antoine. “That is a French cow,” he murmured, “not so fat. That is a French tree, not so thick. The sky is different, and the sun. The concerts will be easier, I expect.”

But the first glimpse of M. Lemaure, the grandfather, is reassuring. In fact, he’s almost as irresistible as Antoine, making you realize immediately that the battle is going to be a subtle one, and that it may be difficult to know which side to take, after all.

The old musician asks about the last recital.

“I was not at the last orchestral,” Lucien answers. “I left him in Wurst’s charge, and went to the country, ... I should not easily desert my post, as you know; but the boy made it clear enough he had no use for me. He clung to that sacrÉ concerto of Tschedin, which he knows you detest, and which I never thought in a condition to perform. He mocked himself of my objections, contradicted me, eluded me, and twisted Wurst round his finger at rehearsals.”

“And Wurst?”

“Wurst found him charming. He has Russian blood himself, and had known the composer. He has encouraged Antoine’s revolutionary tendencies from the first. The pair of them took the last concert so completely out of my hands that it seemed fruitless to remain.”

“BÉbÉ forgot himself,” pronounced M. Lemaure, still quite at ease. Indeed the situation so reminded him of Antoine’s childhood that he longed to laugh. “What did he say, and when?”

“We will not revive it,” said Lucien. “When he came to his senses, he apologized sufficiently. Perhaps he was not well ... when is the first engagement—Sunday?”

“Let him be for a time. There is no harm.”

Lucien grunted. “I shall not disturb him while he is seasick, if that is what you mean. It would do him no harm to play scales all the week.”

“Scales—as you will, but not persons. Not Dmitri Tschedin, I mean, nor even me. It is intrusive personality, always, that disturbs the current of Antoine’s philosophy.”

“Father! How absurd.”

“But I have long remarked it. His own individuality fights the alien matter, and it is not till he has either rejected it or absorbed that he is steady again. Wurst and his Russians have excited him—nothing more natural. For me,” said M. Lemaure, plunging into memory, as he stood by his son’s side at the window, “at his age, the realm of music did not hold such petulant passions, any more than it held flat heresy, like that of Sorbier and DuchÂtel.”

“Antoine adores DuchÂtel,” remarked Lucien. “There is no fighting there.”

“Bon!” The old man laughed. “Heresy on the hearth then, if it must be so. So long as he does not play the stuff in my hearing.”

There are over six hundred pages in the story, and they cover just a year and a half of Antoine’s life. This appears to be an impossible literary feat; any orthodox novelist will tell you that you can’t hold a reader through six hundred pages with the story of a fourteen-year-old boy. But Miss Sidgwick’s holding power is—well, I read Succession during a brief trip to Boston, and much as I longed to absorb Concord and all its charms, I found I only had half my capacity with me; the rest was with Antoine, and it stayed there till in desperation I shut myself up in a hotel room and saw him safely off to America with his nice, wholesome, inartistic father. Then came the awful realization that I’d have to wait a whole year for the next volume—for surely Miss Sidgwick intends to make a trilogy.

The explanation of this absorption is simply that Antoine is so interesting. His professional life is dramatic; but even in the commonest experiences of every day his world is as vivid as it can only be to a dramatic nature. For instance, in this little scene with his brother:

“There was a little thing on legs,” he announced, “that went under the carpet just now. It was rather horrible, and I have not looked for it.”

“A blackbeetle, I presume,” said Philip.

“It was not black,” said Antoine. “It was pink—a not-clean pink, you understand. I found it”—a pause—“disagreeable.”

“How could you find it when you had not looked for it?” said Philip. Another pause, Antoine considering the point, which was an old one.

“You will catch it,” he suggested, shooting a soft glance at his brother.

“Why should I?” said Philip. “They’re perfectly harmless.”

“I shall dream of it,” said Antoine, shutting his eyes. “It was too long, do you see, and pink as well.” His brow contracted, and he finished with gentle conviction. “If it comes upon my bed in the night, I shall be sick.”

Of course, most interesting of all is his musical development, in which are involved several personalities of striking character: DuchÂtel, the revolutionary, more a son, after the French fashion, than a man or a musician; Savigny, the celebrated alienist, who treats the child hypnotically in his severe illnesses; Lemonski, a rival child wonder, who is like a pig, and vulgar—which it is silly to say, because he is a beautiful artist, according to Antoine; Reuss, the great German conductor, and the boy’s staunch friend, who hates “the cursed French training” of making life weigh so heavily on its youth; Jacques Charretteur, the vagabond violinist, “a man to play French music in France”; CÉcile, the aunt, who has the perception to understand the little genius with the dark eyes, whose “expression was so beautiful that she could hardly bear it”; and Ribiera, the famous Spanish pianist, who “warms” the piano, in Antoine’s words, and calls the boy an intelligent ape, by way of expressing his admiration. All these people are drawn with consummate skill.

I think one of the most poignant passages in the book, to me, is Antoine’s description of how he had ratÉ the solo at a London concert. It was at the end of the season, and he had been harassed by a thousand needless frictions:

“The first part had gone pretty well, though I did not like how the DuchÂtel sounded. I thought that was the violin, perhaps—and a new room. It was a bad room, pretty, but stupid for the sound. I heard much too much, so I was sure they were not hearing properly. They were extremely still, and made a little clapping at the end. I did not find it a good concert, but Wurst in the interval said it was very well, and I should not excite myself. So when I did not, then I was tired, and it seemed stupider than before. And at last that thing came, the Mirski ‘Caprice,’ which you know how detestable. The passages are hard in that thing, but I know them. Every morning I played them to Moricz, so now I do not trouble.... And then, in the middle of it, I heard Peter Axel playing wrong.... And I was frightened horribly.... And I made him an awful frown for forgetting it, and Peter was looking at me. His face was not happy like it generally is. It was like one of those worst dreams. And, of course, I stopped playing, because it cannot be like that. And Peter said ‘Go back,’ very quietly, making a lot of little passages and returning for me to find, do you see?”

“He gave you a chance to pick up, eh?” said Philip. “And you couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t! I would not. I was furious—awful.... I said a rude thing to Axel in passing, and went off the estrade. And they all clapped together down there, bah!—though they knew it was not finished. They were sorry I had stopped—because they were people who like a difficult Caprice, to be amused by it. But I was not amused. Nor Peter, very much.” He laughed sharply.

“Don’t, I say,” said Philip. “It’s all over now. It doesn’t matter, really. Everybody forgets, now and then” ...

“I do not,” said Antoine. “I do not know how it is to forget. I know that thing—I know all the little notes, long ago, before Moricz—since years. It is not possible to forget a little concert piece that you know....”

“Did you go on again?”

“Yes. After Wurst had finished talking, I had to. I should not have for my uncle, but I had to for him. He was violent, Wurst. He said it was indigne and lÔche if I stopped, and a lot of other words. He was like a little dog barking. A man like Wurst does not ‘rater.’ He does not know how that is done. His head has all the big scores inside.... He did not see how it was for me to stand up on the estrade again, with quantities of beautiful people looking kind. It would have been so better if they had siffli, like here in Paris.”

The book closes on an unexpected and suggestive note. Antoine, who had always realized that his grandfather couldn’t bear his being “different” in music, had taken quietly to composing the kind of things he loved. He “made” a quintet in which Ribiera was given a brilliant piano part, and which he thought beautiful—extremely. But when they played it for him, though he was moved to cry, he found its “ideas” not so good as he had thought. Whereupon he plans to produce better ones in his new overture.

Succession is a masterpiece of art, and Antoine is the most lovable and interesting character in new fiction.

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