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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Eline Vere, a novel by Louis Couperus, intricately portrays the life of a young woman caught in the throes of societal expectation and personal desire in late 19th-century Dutch society. Utilizing a lyrical and impressionistic prose style, Couperus delves into the psychological intricacies of his protagonist, Eline, as she navigates the confines of bourgeois norms and her own burgeoning individualism. The novel, steeped in the decadent literary movement, evokes a rich tapestry of emotions and thematic depth, exploring the tension between inner aspirations and societal limitations while challenging conventional narratives about femininity and autonomy. Louis Couperus, an esteemed figure in Dutch literature, was influenced by his rich cultural heritage and an upbringing that valued artistic expression. His experiences living in varied cultural settings and a fascination with the complexities of human nature inspired him to create deeply psychological characters. Eline Vere, written during a time when European literature was profoundly exploring psychological realism, reflects Couperus's dedication to character-driven narratives that scrutinize the intersections of identity, desire, and societal constraint. Eline Vere is a compelling read for those interested in the evolution of the modern novel and the nuanced representation of women in literature. Scholars and casual readers alike will find a profound resonance in Eline's journey, making this work an essential addition to the canon of European literature and a vital study of the human condition amidst societal pressures. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Eline Vere
Table of Contents
Introduction
A portrait of a sensitive spirit at war with the demands of society, Eline Vere explores how inner susceptibility collides with the pressures of outward convention.
Written by the Dutch author Louis Couperus, Eline Vere is a work of psychological realism set in The Hague and first published in the late 1880s. It is widely regarded as a classic of Dutch literature, notable for its refined observation of character and milieu. The novel reached English-language readers through an early translation by J. T. Grein, which helped introduce Couperus’s voice beyond the Netherlands. Readers encountering the book today find a sophisticated study of fin-de-siècle bourgeois life, measuring the interplay between personal temperament and the codes that regulate family, friendship, and social standing.
At its core, the novel follows a young woman moving through the salons and drawing rooms of The Hague, where attentions, expectations, and intimacies concentrate and constrain. The premise is simple and potent: a perceptive, impressionable protagonist contends with the rules and rhythms of a close-knit elite, while trying to define herself amid shifting affections and obligations. Couperus shapes this struggle with a measured, elegant cadence—lingering over glances, gestures, and silences—so that the tension builds not from outward spectacle but from the gradual unveiling of inward states.
The reading experience is immersive and contemplative. Couperus’s narrator surveys interiors, seasons, and the semiotics of polite conversation with unhurried precision, revealing how mood arises from place and routine. Social scenes unfold with clarity yet retain ambiguity, encouraging readers to interpret small changes of tone or posture. The style remains accessible while carrying the subtle textures of fin-de-siècle sensibility: aesthetic poise, psychological nuance, and a carefully modulated distance that keeps judgment in check and empathy close.
Themes emerge organically from the protagonist’s hesitations and longings. The novel considers fate and self-determination, the burdens of choice, and the porous boundary between sensibility and frailty. It tracks how family expectations, rumor, and ritual can shape destiny as surely as passion does. Beauty—of interiors, music, and fashion—offers solace, yet it also sharpens the awareness of transience. Without resorting to melodrama, the book studies how an individual may be undone or remade by the social weather in which she must live.
Eline Vere retains particular relevance for contemporary readers interested in mental health, autonomy, and gender roles. It portrays the strain of constant social performance, the anxiety that accrues under scrutiny, and the difficulty of translating self-knowledge into action. Rather than diagnosing, Couperus presents a textured map of feeling: agitation, listlessness, exhilaration, and doubt. This restraint invites reflection on how language and culture frame vulnerability, and how communities either shelter or imperil those who are most attuned to their surroundings.
Approached as a quiet, atmospheric novel of manners and mind, Eline Vere rewards patience with cumulative power. It offers the pleasures of polished prose, exact social observation, and a compassionate, unsentimental gaze. The English translation by J. T. Grein opened a path for readers to experience Couperus’s artistry, and the work still speaks with clarity about the costs of conformity and the risks of self-possession. For those drawn to psychological depth and finely grained realism, it provides an enduring, thought-provoking companion.
Synopsis
In late nineteenth-century The Hague, Eline Vere, a beautiful and impressionable young woman from a prosperous family, moves among drawing rooms, seaside promenades, and concert halls. Living with her married sister and brother-in-law, she is admired for her grace yet confounds acquaintances with sudden shifts of mood. A glittering evening gathering introduces the principal circle of relatives, friends, and would-be suitors, and hints at the conventions that structure their lives. From the outset, the narrative juxtaposes the polished surface of society with Eline's interior uncertainty, establishing a pattern of attraction and retreat that will determine her choices as she is drawn into courtship and expectations.
Within the household, contrasts sharpen Eline's dilemmas. Her practical, socially ambitious sister manages invitations and reputations; her easygoing brother-in-law favors spontaneity and warmth, complicating loyalties in subtle ways. Eline, inclined to reverie and impulsive enthusiasms, finds herself admired by a steady, conscientious suitor whose constancy promises calm. Friends and cousins provide diversions in music, theatricals, and seaside excursions, while gossip turns private uncertainties into public pressure. The narrative follows Eline's hesitant steps toward commitment, tracking small frictions, misunderstandings, and moments of tenderness that suggest compatibility, even as her imagination magnifies trifles into obstacles. The tempo of visits and dances quickens her indecision.
An understanding ripens into an engagement, celebrated by relatives who see in it the resolution of Eline's wavering nature. Almost immediately, small doubts return. She scrutinizes gestures, sentences, and silences for hidden meanings, then reproaches herself for oversensitivity. A worldly friend counsels lightheartedness; a devout acquaintance advises seriousness; both perspectives unsettle rather than guide her. Domestic frictions increase as her sister's management tightens and the household's easy intimacy becomes strained by pride and jealousy. The suitor remains patient and courteous, but difference of temperament emerges in conversations about duty, pleasure, and ambition. The city watches, and Eline becomes painfully self-conscious.
Beyond the immediate circle, a charming, capricious acquaintance exerts an unpredictable pull, offering witty diversion and flattering attention that contrasts with her fiance's steadiness. This presence, real or imagined, complicates Eline's sense of loyalty, feeding a fantasy of a life shaped by rapture rather than routine. Meanwhile, her sister's marriage shows hairline cracks: social rivalry, financial strain, and domestic pique unsettle the home. Eline's closeness to her brother-in-law, innocent yet conspicuous, becomes fodder for gossip and stokes resentment. Caught between admiration and reproach, she experiments with social roles—coquette, dutiful fiancee, independent spirit—without settling on one, deepening the tension around her.
Seeking clarity, Eline turns inward. She takes lessons, immerses herself in music and reading, and follows a doctor's advice to cultivate habit and rest. A short change of scene, with visits to family beyond The Hague and time by the sea, promises renewal. Through letters and restrained conversations, the couple measure their expectations, testing whether affection can outlast anxiety. The household, eager for stability, organises routines and invitations intended to calm her nerves. For a time, composure seems within reach: Eline discovers pleasure in small offices of daily life and imagines a future paced by moderation rather than sudden passion.
The calm proves fragile. An unforeseen incident—trivial to outsiders, momentous to Eline—reopens uncertainty. A careless remark, a perceived slight, or an ambiguous attentiveness from another rekindles doubts about sincerity and compatibility. Conversations harden; silences lengthen. The understanding that bound the couple is tested, and its terms are reconsidered under the pressure of pride, fear, and public scrutiny. Family members advise with partial knowledge, amplifying missteps. A temporary separation, practical and polite, follows, ostensibly to allow reflection. In its wake, Eline confronts herself with new severity, oscillating between remorse and relief while the city's social calendar continues without her.
Left to her thoughts, Eline's sensitivity intensifies into a cycle of restlessness and fatigue. She seeks remedies fashionable and practical alike: stricter routines, new pursuits, careful diets, invigorating walks, even consultations that promise moral or spiritual readjustment. Some friends urge distraction; others propose charitable work as purpose. Occasionally she finds equilibrium, then loses it to a sudden wave of foreboding. The novel traces these fluctuations with patient detail, linking them to rooms, seasons, and sounds that sharpen or soothe her nerves. Meanwhile, acquaintances marry, relocate, or reconcile, and the pattern of society reknits itself, gently isolating Eline at its margins.
As the seasons turn, circumstances offer Eline a path toward renewal: a change of address, altered arrangements in the family, and the possibility of beginning on different terms. She weighs prospects of travel, independence, or reconciliation, mindful of the judgments that have shadowed her. Social engagements resume cautiously, and Eline participates with a composed politeness that suggests adult poise without extinguishing her tendency to dream. The narrative tightens around a series of quiet decisions and chance encounters that seem to promise a fresh equilibrium. Each possibility requires abandoning another, and Eline hesitates at the threshold where intention must become action.
Eline Vere presents a precise, compassionate portrait of a temperament at odds with its milieu. Without imposing judgments, the novel observes how taste, fashion, family expectation, and inner appetite can pull a life in conflicting directions, until choice itself feels paralyzing. It respects the scale of everyday events, showing how small pressures accumulate into decisive turns. The Hague's salons and streets frame a study of modern nervousness and the longing for authenticity. In Grein's English rendering, Couperus's subtle shifts of mood, irony, and tenderness remain clear. The book's enduring message is the difficulty—and necessity—of aligning feeling, duty, and desire.
Historical Context
Set in The Hague during the late 1880s, the novel unfolds amid a courtly city whose rhythms were regulated by salons, promenades on the Lange Voorhout, and seaside retreats to Scheveningen. Gaslight, horse trams (running since 1864 between the city and the shore), and expanding telegraph networks marked the modernity that coexisted with entrenched social hierarchies. The Kurhaus at Scheveningen, opened in 1886, symbolized elite leisure and cosmopolitan taste. Government ministries and the royal residences at Noordeinde and Huis ten Bosch anchored a milieu of civil servants, rentiers, and aristocratic families. This precise urban and social geography frames Eline’s world of formal visits, musicales, and carefully policed reputations.
The Hague’s identity as a court city was shaped by the Dutch monarchy under King William III (r. 1849–1890), followed by Queen Emma’s regency (1890–1898) for Wilhelmina, inaugurated in 1898. Court etiquette and proximity to royal institutions created a culture of deference and distinction, visible in balls, charitable committees, and the patronage networks surrounding ministries. Political modernization after the 1848 Thorbecke Constitution coexisted with lingering aristocratic prestige. In Eline Vere, this nexus of courtly decorum and bourgeois aspiration informs characters’ conduct, marriage prospects, and fear of scandal. The novel’s drawing rooms echo the city’s political-ceremonial character, where appearances weigh heavily on personal choices and intimate freedoms.
The Long Depression (1873–1896) reshaped Dutch society, deflating prices and unsettling trade, agriculture, and shipbuilding, even as The Hague’s administrative economy insulated many elites. Falling grain prices due to American imports pressured rural livelihoods, prompting migration to cities. Yet in the capital-by-function, civil-service salaries, colonial pensions, and investment income stabilized an idle or semi-idle class. Speculative anxieties and cautious respectability permeated social life. The novel reflects this environment: characters live from inheritances or sinecures, plan concerts and engagements rather than professions, and experience the era’s economic drift as existential lassitude. Eline’s dependency and indecision mirror a class sustained by income streams it scarcely understands or controls.
The Dutch colonial empire, especially the East Indies, was central to late nineteenth-century prosperity. After the Agrarian Law of 1870 opened Java and Sumatra to private enterprise, plantation profits from sugar, coffee, and Deli tobacco grew, even as the Aceh (Atjeh) War raged from 1873 to 1904, costing tens of thousands of Indonesian lives and thousands of KNIL soldiers. The Ministry of Colonies in The Hague administered these affairs, and returned Indische Nederlanders brought capital and stories into elite circles. Louis Couperus’s own youth included years in Batavia through his father’s colonial judicial post in the 1870s, deepening his knowledge of imperial milieus. The novel’s luxurious interiors and casual references to overseas wealth quietly register this imperial underpinning of metropolitan ease.
Women’s rights debates intensified in the 1880s–1890s. Aletta Jacobs (1854–1929) became the first female physician in the Netherlands and campaigned for suffrage and reproductive health; the Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrecht was founded in 1894. Under the Civil Code, married women remained under marital authority, limiting legal capacity until the mid-twentieth century. Middle- and upper-class women were steered toward marriage, music, and charity, with paid work largely confined to teaching or governess posts. Eline Vere dramatizes these constraints: Eline’s oscillation between engagement, family expectations, and the faint lure of self-determination exposes how genteel women’s lives were structured by law and custom, making hesitation and dependency not only personal traits but historically conditioned outcomes.
Confessional politics and the school struggle (Schoolstrijd) shaped public life. Abraham Kuyper’s Anti-Revolutionary Party (founded 1879) advanced equal funding for religious schools; liberals defended the primacy of public education. The confessional coalition under Prime Minister Aeneas Mackay (1888–1891) passed a key primary education law in 1889 expanding support for denominational schools; the Pacification of 1917 later settled the issue. This conflict fostered pillarization, whereby Protestants, Catholics, socialists, and liberals built parallel institutions. The Hague’s social calendar thus operated within subtle sectarian lines. In the novel, the careful curation of acquaintances, charities, and marriage prospects reflects this compartmentalized civic sphere, where propriety and faith communities quietly delimit intimate association and reputation.
Late nineteenth-century medicine popularized diagnoses of nervous exhaustion and hysteria. American neurologist George M. Beard coined neurasthenia in 1869; in Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot’s demonstrations at the Salpêtrière in the 1870s–1890s publicized nervous disorders. In the Netherlands, asylum and outpatient care expanded (e.g., Meerenberg, founded 1849), while urban elites sought rest cures, seaside air, bromides, and sedatives. The Kurhaus and seaside promenades figured in therapeutic routines as much as leisure. Eline Vere’s portrayal of fragile nerves, insomnia, and a retreat into passivity echoes contemporary medical discourse, translating a clinical vocabulary of modern fatigue into domestic tragedy. The book mirrors a society that pathologized tension while preserving the social scripts that produced it.
As social and political critique, the book exposes how a court-centered bourgeoisie—buoyed by colonial wealth, shielded by etiquette, and stratified by confessional boundaries—sacrificed individual autonomy to appearances. It indicts the marital economy that converted women’s lives into reputational transactions, and the medicalization that labeled distress without altering its causes. By anchoring private collapse in concrete structures—monarchical pomp, colonial incomes, and sectarian civility—the narrative reveals systemic complacency and class insulation. When J. T. Grein’s 1892 English translation carried the work into London’s debates on respectability and censorship, contemporaries recognized its relevance: a quiet anatomy of privilege that illuminated the moral contradictions of Europe’s fin-de-siècle elites.
Eline Vere
INTRODUCTION.
THE DUTCH SENSITIVISTS.
In the intellectual history of all countries we find the same phenomenon incessantly recurring. New writers, new artists, new composers arise in revolt against what has delighted their grandfathers and satisfied their fathers. These young men, pressed together at first, by external opposition, into a serried phalanx, gradually win their way, become themselves the delight and then the satisfaction of their contemporaries, and, falling apart as success is secured to them, come to seem lax, effete, and obsolete to a new race of youths, who effect a fresh æsthetic revolution. In small communities, these movements are often to be observed more precisely than in larger ones. But they are very tardily perceived by foreigners, the established authorities in art and literature retaining their exclusive place in dictionaries and handbooks long after the claim of their juniors to be observed with attention has been practically conceded at home.
For this reason, partly, and partly also because the mental life of Holland receives little attention in this country, no account has yet been taken of the revolution in Dutch taste which has occupied the last six or seven [iv]years. I believe that the present occasion is the first on which it has been brought to the notice of any English-speaking public. There exists, however, in Holland, at this moment, a group of young writers, most of them between thirty-five and twenty-five years of age, who exhibit a violent zeal for literature, passing often into extravagance, who repudiate, sometimes with ferocity, the rather sleepy Dutch authorship of the last forty years, and who are held together, or crushed together, by the weight of antiquated taste and indifference to executive merit which they experience around them. Certain facts seem to be undeniable: first, that every young man of letters in Holland, whose work is really promising, has joined the camp; and secondly, that, with all the ferment and crudity inseparable from prose and verse composed in direct opposition to existing canons of taste, the poems and the stories of these young Dutchmen are often full of beauty and delicacy. They have read much in their boyhood; they have imitated Rossetti and Keats; they have been fascinated by certain Frenchmen, by Flaubert, by Goncourt, particularly by Huysmans, who is a far-away kinsman of their own; they have studied the disquieting stories of Edgar Poe. But these influences are passing away, and those who know something of current Dutch belles-lettres can realize best how imperatively a ploughing up of the phlegmatic tradition of Dutch thought was required before a new crop of imagination could spring up.
Rejecting the conventional aspects of contemporary Dutch literature, I will now attempt to give some sketch of the present situation as it appears to a foreign critic observing the field without prejudice. The latest novelist of great importance was Madame Gertrude Bosboom-Toussaint, who was born in 1821. After having written a long series of historical romances for nearly forty years, [v]this intelligent woman and careful writer broke with her own assured public, and took up the discussion of psychological questions. She treated the problem of Socialism in Raymond de Schrijnwerker and the status of woman in Majoor Frans. Madame Bosboom-Toussaint died in 1886, just too early to welcome the new school of writers, with whom she would probably have had more sympathy than any of her contemporaries. Her place in popular esteem was taken for a short time by Miss Opzomer (A.S.C. Wallis), whose long novels have been translated into English, In dagen van strijd (“In Troubled Times”) and Vorstengunst (“Royal Favor”). She had genuine talent, but her style was heavy and tedious. After the new wind began to blow, although she was still young, she married, went to Hungary, and gave up writing novels.
Three authors of importance, each, by a curious coincidence, born in the year 1826, fill up the interval between the old and new generation. These are Dekker, Busken-Huët, and Vosmaer. Edward Douwes Dekker, whose novel of Max Havelaar dates from 1858, was a man of exceptional genius. Bred in the interior of Java, he observed the social conditions of life in the Dutch Indies as no one else had done, but his one great book remained a solitary one. He died in 1887 without having justified the very high hopes awakened by that extraordinary and revolutionary work. The career of Konrad Busken-Huët was very different. The principal literary critic of Holland in his generation, he aimed at being the Sainte-Beuve of the Dutch, and in his early days, as the dreaded “Thrasybulus” of journalism, he did much to awaken thought. His volumes of criticism are extremely numerous, and exercised a wholesome influence during his own time. He died in Paris in April, 1886. These two writers have had a strong effect on the prose style of the younger school of [vi]essayists and novelists. They lived long enough to observe the dawn of the new literature, and their relations with the latest writers were cordial if somewhat reserved.
What Douwes Dekker and Busken-Huët did in prose, was effected in poetry by Carel Vosmaer. This estimable man, who died in 1888, was well known throughout Europe as an art-critic and an authority on Rembrandt. In Holland he was pre-eminent as the soul of a literary newspaper, the Nederlandsche Spectator, which took an independent line in literary criticism, and affected to lead public taste in directions less provincial and old-fashioned than the rest of the Dutch press. Vosmaer wrote also several volumes of more or less fantastic poetry, a translation of Homer into alexandrines, and an antiquarian novel, Amazone, 1881. But Vosmaer’s position was, above all, that of a precursor. He, and he alone, saw that a new thing must be made in Dutch poetical literature. He, and he alone, was not satisfied with the stereotyped Batavian tradition. At the same time Vosmaer was not, it may be admitted, strong enough himself to found a new school; perhaps even, in his later days, the Olympian calm which he affected, and a certain elegant indolence which overcame him, may have made him unsympathetic to the ardent and the juvenile. At all events, this singular phenomenon has occurred. He who of all living Dutchmen was, ten or fifteen years ago, fretting under the poverty of thought and imagination in his fatherland and longing for the new era to arrive, is at this moment the one man of the last generation who is most exposed to that unseemly ferocité des jeunes which is the ugliest feature of these æsthetic revolutions. I have just been reading, with real pain, the violent attack on Vosmaer and his influence which has been published by that very clever young poet, Mr. Willem Kloos (De Nieuwe Gids, December, [vii]1890). All that cheers me is to know that the whirligig of time will not forget its revenges, and that, if Mr. Kloos only lives long enough, he will find somebody, now unborn, to call him a “bloodless puppet.”
Of one other representative of the transitional period, Marcellus Emants, I need say little. He wrote a poem, Lilith, and several short stories. Much was expected of him, but I know not what has been the result.
The inaugurator of the new school was Jacques Perk[1], a young poet of indubitable genius, who was influenced to some degree by Shelley, and by the Florence of the Dutch Browning, Potgieter. He wrote in 1880 a Mathilde, for which he could find no publisher, presently died, and began to be famous on the posthumous issue of his poems, edited by Vosmaer and Kloos, in 1883.
The sonnets of Perk, like those of Bowles with us a hundred years ago, were the heralds of a whole new poetic literature. The resistance made to the young writers who now began to express themselves, and their experience that all the doors of periodical publication in Holland were closed to them, led to the foundation in 1885 of De Nieuwe Gids, a rival to the old Dutch quarterly, De Gids. In this new review, which has steadily maintained and improved its position, most of the principal productions of the new school have appeared. The first three numbers contained De Kleine Johannes (“Little Johnny”), of Dr. Frederik van Eeden, the first considerable prose-work of the younger generation. This is a charming romance, fantastic and refined, half symbolical, half realistic, which deserves to be known to English readers. It has been highly appreciated in Holland. To this followed two powerful books by L. van Deyssel, Een Liefde (“A Love”) and De Kleine Republiek (“The Little Republic”). Van Deyssel has written with great force, but he has hitherto been the [viii]enfant terrible of the school, the one who has claimed with most insolence to say precisely what has occurred to him to say. He has been influenced, more than the rest, by the latest French literature.
While speaking of the new school, it is difficult to restrain from mentioning others of those whose work in De Nieuwe Gids and elsewhere has raised hopes of high performance in the future. Jacques van Looy, a painter by profession, has published, among other things, an exquisitely finished volume of Proza (“Prose Essays”). Frans Netscher, who deliberately marches in step with the French realists, is the George Moore of Holland; he has published a variety of small sketches and one or two novels. Ary Prins, under the pseudonym of Coopland, has written some very good studies of life. Among the poets are Willem Kloos, Albert Verwey, and Herman Gorter, each of whom deserves a far more careful critical consideration than can here be given to him.
Willem Kloos, indeed, may be considered as the leader of the school since the death of Perk. It was to Kloos that, in the period from 1880 to 1885, each of the new writers went in secret for encouragement, criticism, and sympathy. He appears to be a man of very remarkable character. Violent and passionate in his public utterances, he is adored by his own colleagues and disciples, and one of the most gifted of them has told me that “Kloos has never made a serious mistake in his estimate of the force of a man or of a book.” His writings, however, are very few, and his tone in controversy is acrid and uncompromising, as I have already indicated. He remains the least known and the least liked, though the most powerful, of the band. The member of the new generation whose verse and prose alike have won most acceptance is, certainly, Frederik van Eeden. His cycle of lyrical verse, [ix]Ellen, 1891, is doubtless the most exquisite product of recent Dutch literature.
For the peculiar quality which unites in one movement the varied elements of the school which I have attempted thus briefly to describe, the name Sensitivism has been invented by one of themselves, by Van Deyssel. It is a development of impressionism, grafted upon naturalism, as a frail and exotic bud may be set in the rough basis of a thorn. It preserves the delicacy of sensation of the one and strengthens it by the exactitude and conscientiousness of the other, yet without giving way to the vagaries of impressionism or to the brutality of mere realism. It selects and refines, it re-embraces Fancy, that maiden so rudely turned out of house and home by the naturalists; it aims, in fact, at retaining the best, and nothing but the best, of the experiments of the French during the last quarter of a century.
Van Deyssel greets L’Argent with elaborate courtesy, with the respect due to a fallen divinity. He calls his friends in Holland to attend the gorgeous funeral of naturalism, which is dead; but urges them not to sacrifice their own living Sensitivism to the imitation of what is absolutely a matter of past history. It will be seen that Dutch Sensitivism is not by any means unlike French Symbolism, and we might expect prose like Mallarmé’s and verse like Moréas’s! As a matter of fact, however, the Dutch seem, in their general attitude of reserve, to leave their mother-tongue unassailed, and to be as intelligible as their inspiration allows them to be.
To one of these writers, however, and to one of the youngest, it is time that I should turn. The first member of the new Dutch school to be presented, in the following pages, to English readers, is Louis Marie Anne Couperus. Of him, as the author of this book, I must give a fuller [x]biography, although he is still too young to occupy much space by the record of his achievements. Louis Couperus was born on the 10th of June, 1863, at the Hague, where he spent the first ten years of his life. He was then taken in company with his family to Java, and resided five years in Batavia. Returning to the Hague, where he completed his education, he began to make teaching his profession, but gradually drifted into devoting himself entirely to literature. He published a little volume of verses in 1884, and another, of more importance, called Orchideeën (“Orchids”), in 1887, Oriental and luscious. But he has succeeded, as every one allows, much better in prose. His long novel of modern life in the Hague, called Eline Vere, is an admirable performance. Of Noodlot (literally to be translated “Fate” or “Destiny”) our readers will judge for themselves at a later date. Such is the brief chronicle of a writer from whom much is expected by the best critics of his own country.
Edmund Gosse.[1]
ELINE VERE.
CHAPTER I.
They were close to each other in the dining-room, which had been turned into a dressing-room. In front of a mirror stood Frédérique van Erlevoort, with her hair hanging loose, looking very pale under a thin layer of powder, her eyebrows blackened with a single stroke of the pencil.
“Do hurry up, Paul! We shall never get ready,” she said, a little impatiently, glancing at the clock.
Paul van Raat was kneeling at her feet, and his fingers draped a long thin veil of crimson and gold in folds from her waist. The gauze hung like a cloud over the pinkness of her skirt; her neck and arms, white as snow with the powder, were left free, and sparkled with the glitter of the chains and necklaces strung across one another.
“Whew, what a draught! Do keep the door shut, Dien!” Paul shouted to an old servant who was leaving the room with her arms full of dresses. Through the open door one could see the guests—men in evening dress, ladies in light costumes: they passed along the azaleas and palms in the corridor into the large drawing-room; they smiled at the sight of the old servant, and threw surreptitious glances into the dining-room.
They all laughed at this look behind the scenes. Frédérique alone remained serious, realizing that she had the dignity of a princess of antiquity to keep up.
“Do make haste, Paul!” she pleaded. “It’s past half-past eight already!” [2]
“Yes, yes, Freddie, don’t get nervous; you’re finished,” he answered, and adroitly pinned a few jewels among the gauze folds of her draperies.
“Ready?” asked Marie and Lili Verstraeten, coming out of the room where the stage had been fixed up, a mysterious elevation almost effaced in semi-darkness.
“Ready,” answered Paul. “And now calmly, please,” he continued, raising his voice and looking round with an air of command.
The warning was well needed. The three boys and the five girls who did duty as ladies’-maids, were rushing about the room laughing, shouting, creating the greatest disorder. In vain Lili tried to save a gilt cardboard lyre from the hands of the son of the house, a boy twelve years old, while their two rascally cousins were just on the point of climbing up a great white cross, which stood in a corner, and was already yielding under their onslaughts.
“Get away from that cross, Jan and Karel! Give up that lyre, you other!” roared Paul. “Do look after them, Marie. And now, Bet and Dien, come here; Bet with the lamp, Dien at the door; all the rest out of the road! There’s no more room; look on from the garden through the window of the big drawing-room; you’ll see everything beautifully, at a distance. Come along, Freddie, carefully, here’s your train.”
“You’ve forgotten my crown.”
“I’ll put it on when you’re posed. Come on.”
The three girls hurried to get away, the boys squatted in a corner of the room, where they could not be seen, and Paul helped Freddie to climb on to the stage.
Marie, who, like Lili, was not yet draped, talked through the closed window with the fireman, who was waiting, muffled up, in the snowy garden, to let off the Bengal light. A great reflector stared through the window like a pale, lustreless sun.
“First white, then green, then red,” Marie called out, and the fireman nodded.
The now deserted dressing-room was dark, barely lit by the lamp which Bet held in her hand, while Dien stood at the door.
“Carefully, Freddie, carefully,” said Paul.
Frédérique sank down gently into the cushions of the couch; Paul arranged her draperies, her chains, her hair, her diadem, and placed a flower here and there. [3]
“Will that do?” she asked with tremulous voice, taking up the pose she had studied beforehand.
“You’re delicious; beautiful! Now then, Marie, Lili, come here.”
Lili threw herself on the floor, Marie leaned against the couch with her head at Frédérique’s feet. Paul draped both girls quickly in coloured shawls and veils, and twisted strings of gems round their arms and in their hair.
“Marie and Lili, look as if you were in despair. Wring your hands more than that, Lili! More despair, much more despair! Freddie, more languishing, turn your eyes up, set your mouth in a sadder expression.”
“Like that?”
Marie screamed.
“Yes, that will do! That’s better; now be quiet, Marie. Is everything ready?”
“Ready!” said Marie.
Paul arranged one or two more things, a crease, a flower, doubtful whether everything was right.
“Come, let’s start,” said Lili, who was in a very uncomfortable position.
“Bet, take away the lamps; Dien, shut that door, and then come here, both of you, one on each side of the folding doors of the big room.”
They were all in the dark, with beating hearts, while Paul tapped at the window, and joined the boys in the corner.
Slowly and doubtfully the Bengal light flamed up against the reflector, the folding doors opened solemnly, a clear white glow lit up the tableau.
Smiling and bowing, while the conversation suddenly changed into a muffled murmur, the guests pressed forward into the large drawing-room and the conservatory, blinded by a burst of light and colour. Men got out of the way of a couple of laughing girls. In the background boys climbed on the chairs.
“The death of Cleopatra[2]!” Betsy van Raat read out to Mrs. Van Erlevoort, who had handed her the programme.
“Splendid! magnificent!” one heard on every side.
Ancient Egypt seemed to have come alive again in the white glow of the light. Between luxurious draperies something like an [4]oasis could be perceived, a blue sky, two pyramids, some palms. On her couch, supported by sphinxes, lay Cleopatra, at the point of death, an adder curling round her arm. Two slaves were prostrate in despair at her feet. The parti-coloured vision of oriental magnificence lasted a few seconds; the poetry of antiquity revived under the eyes of a modern audience.
“That’s Freddie,” said Betsy. “How lovely!” and she pointed out the dying queen to Mrs. Van Erlevoort, who was dazzled by all this luxury. Now, however, the mother recognized her daughter in the beautiful motionless statue lying before her.
“And that’s Marie, and the other—oh, that’s Lili—irrecognizable! What beautiful costumes! how elaborate! You see that dress of Lili’s, violet and silver? I lent her that.”
“How well they do it,” murmured the old lady.
The white glow of the light began to flicker, the doors were closed.
“Splendid, auntie, splendid!” Betsy cried, as Mrs. Verstraeten, the hostess, passed her.
Twice the tableau was recalled, first in a flood of sea-green, then in fiery red. Freddie, with her adder, lay immovable, and only Lili quivered in her forced attitude. Paul looked out from his corner with a beaming face; everything was going well.
“How quiet Freddie lies! And everything is so rich, and yet not overdone. Something like a picture of Makart’s,” said Betsy, opening her feather fan.
“Your daughter is tired of life very early, madam,” lisped young de Woude van Bergh, bowing towards Mrs. van Erlevoort, Freddie’s mother.
After the third repetition of the tableau Mrs. Verstraeten went to the dressing-room. She found Frédérique and Lili laughing while they got out of their Egyptian attire, looking for endless pins in every fold. Paul and Marie stood on the steps, and, lighted by two of the servants, pulled Cleopatra’s dress to pieces. Dien fussed about, picking up the dropped draperies and the fallen chains. The three boys rolled over one another on a mattress.
“Was it pretty, mamma?” cried Lili.
“Was it pretty, madam?” cried Frédérique, at the same time.
“Beautiful! They would have liked to see it again.”
“What again! I’m nearly dead already,” cried Lili; and she [5]tumbled into an arm-chair, throwing a great bundle off it upon the floor. Dien gave way to despair; at that rate she would never get done.
“Lili, rest yourself,” cried Paul, from the top of his steps in the other room; “you’ll get tired in that attitude. Aunt Verstraeten, tell Lili to rest herself,” and he threw some coloured carpets off the cords on which they had been hanging. Dien went on folding up.
“Dien, white sheets and white tulle this way, quick,” cried Marie. Dien misunderstood her, and came back with the wrong article.
Then all began to talk at once, and every one asked for something else, and there arose a very Babel of confusion. At the top of the staircase Paul made a gesture of despair, but no one took any notice.
“I am utterly worn out!” said he, crouching down in impotent rage. “No one does anything. It all falls to my lot!”
Madame Verstraeten, having in her turn begged Lili to rest herself, had gone to tell the servants not to forget the youthful artistes. As a result, the men soon came in, carrying big trays laden with glasses of wine and lemonade, pastry and sandwiches. The confusion only increased. The three boys were served with various good things on their mattress, over which one of the servants spilt a stream of lemonade. Up flew Marie, in a torrent of rage, and with Dien’s assistance quickly pulled the mattress away from under the boys, into the next room.
“Frédérique, do give a hand there,” cried Paul, in a voice shrill with irritation. As for keeping any further sort of control over the three lads, that he had given up as hopeless. Ere long, however, the noisy young customers were driven, loudly shrieking and stumbling one over another, out of the room by Dien.
Then there was a little more quietness, but everybody was doing something, except Lili.
“There’s a muddle!” she muttered to herself. Then she sat down and brushed her hair, wavy and blond cendré, and that done, she took up her powder-puff, and sprinkled a snowy layer over her arms.
Dien returned, very much out of breath, shaking her head, and with a kindly smile on her face.
“Dien, white sheets and tulle quickly,” Freddie, Marie, and Paul [6]all cried together. Paul came down from his place on the stairs, placed the big cross, the weight of which nearly crushed him, on the platform, and at the foot he laid the mattress and a snug arrangement of pillows.
“Dien, white sheets and tulle; all the tulle and muslin you can find.”
And Dien and the other servants brought it, one soft mass of white.
Madame Verstraeten sat down beside her niece, Betsy van Raat. She was married to Paul’s elder brother.
“What a pity Eline is not here! I had so depended on her to fill up the long intervals with a little music. She sings so nicely.”
“She was really not feeling well, aunt. She is very sorry, you may be sure, that she can’t be here, in honour of uncle’s birthday.”
“What is the matter with her?”
“I don’t quite know. Nerves, I think.”
“She really ought not to give herself up to these fits. With a little energy she could easily get over that nervousness.”
“Well, you see, aunt, this nervousness is the modern bane of young women[1q], it is the fin de siècle[3] epidemic,” said Betsy, with a faint smile.
Madame Verstraeten sighed and nodded.
“By the bye,” said she, “I suppose the girls will be too tired to-morrow evening to go to the opera. Would you care to have our box?”
Betsy reflected for a moment.
“I have a little dinner to-morrow, aunt; but still I should like the box. It is only the Ferelyns and Emilie and Georges who are coming, but the Ferelyns are going early because little Dora is not well, so I could easily go with Emilie and Georges, and be in time to see an act.”
“Well, that is settled then. I shall send you the tickets,” said Madame Verstraeten rising.
Betsy rose too. George de Woude van Bergh was just about to speak to her, but she took no notice. She thought him a terrible bore that evening; he had spoken to her twice, and each time said the same thing, something about the tableaux. No; there was no conversation in him at all. And to-morrow night too she would have to meet him again; what an enjoyable prospect! Aunt’s box [7]was quite a godsend. There stood her husband, in the conservatory, together with some gentlemen, Mr. Verstraeten, Mr. Hovel, Otto and Etienne van Erlevoort, they talking and he listening, his heavy body crushing the leaves of a palm, a somewhat stupid smile playing about his expressionless, good-humoured face. Oh, how he bored her! She thought him insufferable. And what a figure he cut in a dress coat! In his great-coat at all events he had a manly appearance.
Walking towards him she said, “Do say something to somebody, Henk. You look like a fixture in that corner there. Can’t you move? you do appear to enjoy yourself. Your necktie is all on one side.”
He muttered something and fumbled about his neck. She turned away and was soon at her ease in the midst of a noisy little group. Even melancholy Madame van Ryssel, Freddie’s sister, formed one of them. Emilie de Woude was unmarried and bore her thirty-eight years with an enviable grace: her pleasant, animate features charmed all who met her. She was much like her younger brother George, but about her there was something genial—a great contrast to his studied ceremoniousness.
Attracted by her amusing anecdotes, Emilie sat, the central figure in a joyous little group. She was just telling them of her recent fall on a patch of frozen snow, at the feet of a gentleman who had remained motionless, staring at her, instead of helping her to her feet.
“Just fancy my muff on the left, my hat on the right, myself in the centre, and right in front of me a man staring at me with open-mouthed amazement.”
There was the tinkling of a bell; Emilie broke off her story and ran away from her audience. The folding doors were opened, and there was a general rush to the front.
“I can’t see at all,” said Emilie, rising on tiptoe.
“Come here on my chair, miss,” cried a young girl behind her.
“You are a little dear, Toos, really. Will you allow me to pass by, Madame van der Stoor? your daughter has come to my aid.”
Madame van der Stoor, who, under a pseudonym, dabbled much in poetry, moved a step back, with an acrid smile about her lips. She felt a little disgusted at Emilie’s sans-gêne; she herself never [8]made an attempt to get a better view, it was not the thing to show an unfashionable interest in the entertainment.
Emilie and Cateau van der Stoor were soon standing on one chair, holding each other’s waists.
“Oh, how pretty!” cried Emilie, and then remained silent in rapt attention. From out of the billows of a foaming sea arose a rough-hewn cross of marble whiteness, round the base of which a fragile fair woman clung in mortal agony, whilst a heaving wave of tulle covered her feet; and with the fierceness of despair her slender fingers grasped the Rock of Ages.
“It is Lili,” was heard here and there.
“How graceful she is, that Lili!” whispered Emilie to Cateau. “But how can she hang there like that? How can she bear it so long?”
“She is surrounded with pillows; but still it must be very tiring,” said Toos. “Of course you can’t see anything of the pillows, miss.”
“Of course not. But it is very nice; I have never seen anything so poetic before.… Say, Toos, I thought you were going to take part?”
“So I am, but only in the last tableau, with Etienne van Erlevoort. I shall have to be going soon to dress.”
Quickly she got down from her chair. The light grew dim, the folding doors were closed. Applause rang throughout the room. But ere long the white vision of surging foam was repeated, and an angel hovered over the cross, and held out her hand to the swooning woman.
Stronger and stronger grew the applause.
“Of course Marie cannot keep a serious face again,” said Emilie, shaking her head. “She will burst out laughing in a moment.”
And really something like a smile seemed to be trembling about the little mouth of the angel, the nervous twitching of the eyebrows contrasting very oddly with the pathetic expression of her features.
Although it was evident enough that the artistes were tired, not one of them being able to remain perfectly motionless, the last tableau was received with enthusiastic cheers. It was encored again and again. The tableau consisted of an allegorical representation of the Five Senses, the parts being taken by the four young girls, attired in rich dresses—cloth of gold, brocade ermine[9]—and by Etienne, Frédérique’s youngest brother, who, in the garb of a minstrel, represented the sense of Hearing.
The tableaux were concluded.
It was now two o’clock, and Mr. and Madame Verstraeten received the thanks of their guests as they left them.
“Do you remain to supper with Cateau?” said Madame Verstraeten to Madame van der Stoor; “quite sans cérémonie, you know.”
Madame van der Stoor, however, feared it was too late; she would just wait for her daughter.
The artistes who had doffed their costumes entered the room and were overwhelmed with the thanks of those guests still remaining, while Emilie played a march on the piano. As an intimate friend she stayed to supper with van Raat and Betsy.
“You are coming to-morrow, are you not, Toos? the photographer is coming at two,” said Marie.
“Yes,” said Cateau, “I shall be here.”
Utterly worn out, the artistes flung themselves down in the comfortable chairs in the conservatory, where a dainty little supper was served.
“What was prettiest? What was prettiest?” all cried together
Then there was a general expression of opinion, to the accompaniment of clattering plates and forks, and the jingling of glasses.
CHAPTER II.
It was half-past two when the van Raats returned from the supper to the Nassauplein. At their house all was in darkness. While Henk drew the bolt across the door Betsy thought she would take a look at her sleeping boy, snugly ensconced in his little white cot up-stairs. She took up her candle and went up-stairs, whilst he, laden with papers, walked into the breakfast-room, where the gas was still burning.
Arrived in her dressing-room, she removed her cloak from her shoulders. In the small grate the flame curled upward like the fiery tongue of a dragon. There was something indefinably soothing [10]in the atmosphere of the room, something like a warm vapour, mingled with the sweet faint odour of violets. After giving a glance at her child, she sat down with a sigh of fatigue, in an arm-chair. Then the door opened, and Eline, in a dressing-gown of white flannel, her hair falling in thick waves down her back, entered.
“What, Elly, not in bed yet?”
“No, I—have been reading. Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Oh yes, it was very nice. I only wish that Henk had not been such an awful bore. He never said a word, and with his stupid face he sat there fumbling at his watch-chain until he could go and take his hand at whist.”
Then with a somewhat angry movement Betsy kicked her dainty little shoes from her feet.
Eline sighed languidly.
“Did you tell Madame Verstraeten that I was not well?”
“Yes; but you know when I come home at night I like to go to bed. We can talk to-morrow, eh?”
Eline knew that her sister when she returned home at night was always more or less irritable. Still she was tempted to give her a sharp answer, but she felt too unnerved for it. With her lips she lightly touched Betsy’s cheek, and quite unconsciously laid her head on her sister’s shoulder, in a sudden and irresistible longing for tenderness.
“Are you really ill, eh, or——?”
“No. Only a little—lazy. Good-night.”
“Pleasant dreams!”
Eline retired with languid steps. Betsy proceeded to undress.
Arrived in the hall, Eline experienced the uncomfortable feeling of having been an unwelcome visitor to her sister. All the evening, giving herself up entirely to a fit of indolence, she had been in solitude, and now she longed for company. For a moment she stood undecided in the dark corridor, and then carefully feeling her way she descended the stairs and entered the breakfast-room.
Henk, divested of his coat, stood by the mantelpiece in his shirt-sleeves, preparing his grog[4], by way of night-cap, and the hot fumes of the liquor filled the room.
“Hallo, girl, is that you?” he said, in a jovial tone, whilst in his sleepy blue-gray eyes and about his heavily fair-bearded mouth [11]there played a good-humoured smile. “Did you not feel terribly bored, left to yourself all the evening?”
“Yes; just a little. Perhaps you did even more?” she asked with a pleasant smile.
“I? Not at all. The tableaux were very pretty.”
Then with his back leaning against the mantelpiece he began sipping his grog.
“Has the youngster been good?”
“Yes; he has been asleep. Are you not going to bed?”
“I just want to look at the papers. But why are you still up?”
“Oh—just because——” With a languid, graceful movement she stretched her arms, and then twisted her heavy locks into a glossy brown coil. She felt the need to speak to him without constraint, but the words would not come, and not the faintest thought could she conjure up to take shape within her dreamy mind. Gladly would she have burst into tears, not because of any poignant sorrow, but for the mere longing of hearing his deep solacing tones in comforting her. But she could find no words to give expression to her feelings, and again she stretched forth her arms in languid grace.
“Is anything wrong, eh, old girl? Come, tell me what it is.”
With a vacant stare she shook her head. No, there was nothing to tell.
“Come, you can tell me all about it, you know that.”
“Oh—I feel a little miserable.”
“What about?”
Then with a pretty little pout, “Oh—I don’t know. I have been a little nervous all day.”
He laughed—his usual soft, sonorous laugh.
“You and your nerves! Come, sis, cheer up. You are such good company when you are not so melancholy; you must not give yourself over to these fits.” He felt conscious that his eloquence would not hold out to argue the matter further, so with a laugh he concluded, “Will you have a drop of grog, sis?”
“Thank you—yes, just a sip out of your glass.”
She turned to him, and laughing in his fair beard, he raised the steaming glass to her lips. Through the half-closed eyelids he saw a tear glistening, but she kept it back. All at once, with sudden determination, he set down his glass and grasped her hands.
“Come, girl, tell me; there is something—something has occurred [12]with Betsy, or—come now, you generally trust me.” And he gave her a reproachful glance with his sleepy, kindly, stupid eyes, like those of a faithful sheep-dog.
Then in a voice broken with sobs, she burst forth in a stream of lamentations, though without apparent cause. It was her heart’s inmost cry for a little tenderness and sympathy. What was her life to her? to whom could she be of the slightest use? Wringing her hands, she walked up and down the room sobbing and lamenting. What would she care did she die within the hour? it was all the same to her—only that aimless, useless existence, without anything to which she could devote her whole soul; that alone was no longer bearable.
Henk contradicted her, feeling certainly somewhat abashed at the scene, which for the rest was but a repetition of so many previous ones. To give a new turn to her thoughts he began to talk about Betsy, and Ben their boy, about himself—he was even about to allude to a future home of her own, but he could not bring it so far. She on her part shook her head like a sulking child, which, not getting what it wants, refuses to take anything else, and with a passionate movement she all at once threw her head on his shoulder, and with an arm round his bull-dog neck, she burst into a fresh torrent of sobs. Thus she went on lamenting in wild and incoherent words, her nerves overstrained by the evening’s solitude and the hours of brooding in her over-heated room. Over and over again she reverted to her aimless life, which she dragged along like a wretched burden, and in her voice there was something like a reproach to him, her brother-in-law. He, confused and deeply touched by the warmth of her embrace, which he certainly could scarcely return with such tenderness, could find nothing to stem that wild torrent of incoherent sentences but a few common-places.
Slowly, softly, like rose-leaves falling gently on the limpid bosom of a summer stream, she let her melancholy broodings glide away on the full low tones of his deep voice.
At length she stopped and heaved a sigh, but her head still rested on his shoulder. Now that she was somewhat calmer, he thought it right to show a little anger at her behaviour. What a folly it was, to be sure! What stupidity! What a fuss to get into about nothing! [13]
“No, Henk, really——” she began, and lifted her tear-stained face to his.
“My dear girl, what rubbish you talk about your aimless life, and all that sort of thing. What puts those things into your head? We are all fond of you——” and remembering his unspoken thought of before, he proceeded, “A young girl like you—talking about an aimless——Sis, you are mad!”
Then, as though tickled at the thought, and besides, thinking that the philosophic condition had lasted long enough, he suddenly gave her arm a sharp twist, and pinched her about the pouting lips. Laughingly she resisted; his movement had somewhat restored to her her broken equilibrium.
When a few moments later both went up-stairs together, she could scarcely restrain herself from bursting out in laughter, as he suddenly lifted her up in his arms to carry her, while she, fearing he would stumble, in a voice half beseeching, half commanding, said—
“Come, Henk, let me go; do you hear? Don’t be so foolish! Henk, let go!”
CHAPTER III.
Eline Vere was the younger of the two sisters, darker of hair and eyes, slenderer, with a figure less maturely developed. Her deeply-shaded dark brown eyes, and the ivory pallor of her complexion, together with the languor of some of her movements, gave her somewhat of the dreamy nature of an odalisk[5] of the harem. The beauty with which she had been endowed, she prized like a precious jewel, and indeed she was at times half intoxicated with the glamour of her own fascinations. For several moments at a time she could stand looking at her own image in the glass, her rosy-tipped fingers gently stroking the delicate arch of the eyebrow or the long silken lashes, or arranging the wealth of brown hair about her head, in the wild luxuriance of a gay gitana. Her toilet afforded her endless employment, continuous and earnest meditation, in testing the effects, harmonious or otherwise, of the softened tints of satins, and the warmer colourings of plush, and [14]the halo of tulle and gauze, muslin and lace, that surrounded it all. In short, everything about her, from the faint clinging odour of violets, to the shimmer of soft draperies, was full of refined, charming suggestion.
Somewhat dreamy and romantic by nature, there were times when, in a fit of languor, she thought with a certain lingering regret of her childhood, recalling to mind all sorts of memories of those days, and treasuring them up like so many precious relics. It was then that consciously or unconsciously she imparted a fresh colour of sentiment to those faded recollections of days gone by. In this way, the most trivial episode of her childhood became idealized and suffused with a charm of poetry. Betsy, with her practical turn of mind, never missed an opportunity rightly or wrongly to discount anything that bore but the faintest resemblance to idealism; and Eline, in her transient state of half happiness, half melancholy, usually succeeded, after her sister’s practical demonstrations, in distinguishing the actual state of things from the luxuriant fantasies conjured up by her own imagination.
At times her memory went back to her father, a painter, of refined and artistic temperament, elegant, but without the strength of a creative faculty, married whilst but a youth to a woman many years his senior, and by far his superior in strength of will and individuality. To her master hand, his pliant nature readily yielded, for his was a fine-strung temperament which, like the chords of a precious instrument, would have trembled under her rude touch, just as that of Eline sometimes trembled under the touch of her sister. She recalled to mind that father, with his complexion of yellow ivory, and his bloodless transparent fingers, lying down in listless languor, his active brain thinking out some great creation, only to be cast aside after the first few touches of the brush. Her he had often made his confidante, and the trust he placed in her caused her childish nature to regard him with a mixture of affectionate devotion and worshipful reverence, so that in her eyes he assumed the appearance of a poetical, dreamy-eyed, long-haired Rafael. Her mother, on the other hand, had always inspired her with a certain amount of fear, and the remembrance of the disillusionizing trivialities of daily life, with which the figure of her mother became inseparably interwoven, rendered it impossible for Eline to idealize her in her thoughts. [15]
She remembered, after the death of her father, at a still early age, but still after many years of half-hearted effort and dismal failures, and after the demise of her mother, felled by a sudden attack of heart disease, spending the days of her early girlhood under the guardianship of a widowed aunt. Old-fashioned, reserved and prim, with saddened regular features, the ruins of a once beautiful woman, she well remembered those two bony hands in perpetual motion over four bright glistening knitting-needles. There she lived, in that big room, in nerveless ease and placid luxury, in a paradise of cosy comfort, amid a wealth of soft draperies and carpets, and all that was pleasing and soothing to the senses.
