An Iceland Fisherman

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AN ICELAND FISHERMAN

By Pierre Loti


Translated by M. Jules Cambon




PIERRE LOTI

The first appearance of Pierre Loti's works, twenty years ago, caused
a sensation throughout those circles wherein the creations of intellect
and imagination are felt, studied, and discussed. The author was one
who, with a power which no one had wielded before him, carried off his
readers into exotic lands, and whose art, in appearance most simple,
proved a genuine enchantment for the imagination. It was the time when
M. Zola and his school stood at the head of the literary movement. There
breathed forth from Loti's writings an all-penetrating fragrance
of poesy, which liberated French literary ideals from the heavy
and oppressive yoke of the Naturalistic school. Truth now soared on
unhampered pinions, and the reading world was completely won by the
unsurpassed intensity and faithful accuracy with which he depicted the
alluring charms of far-off scenes, and painted the naive soul of the
races that seem to endure in the isles of the Pacific as surviving
representatives of the world's infancy.

It was then learned that this independent writer was named in real life
Louis Marie Julien Viaud, and that he was a naval officer. This very
fact, that he was not a writer by profession, added indeed to his
success. He actually had seen that which he was describing, he had lived
that which he was relating. What in any other man would have seemed
but research and oddity, remained natural in the case of a sailor who
returned each year with a manuscript in his hand. Africa, Asia, the
isles of the Pacific, were the usual scenes of his dramas. Finally
from France itself, and from the oldest provinces of France, he drew
subject-matter for two of his novels, _An Iceland Fisherman_ and
_Ramuntcho_. This proved a surprise. Our Breton sailors and our Basque
mountaineers were not less foreign to the Parisian drawing-room than
was Aziyade or the little Rahahu. One claimed to have a knowledge
of Brittany, or of the Pyrenees, because one had visited Dinard or
Biarritz; while in reality neither Tahiti nor the Isle of Paques could
have remained more completely unknown to us.

The developments of human industry have brought the extremities of the
world nearer together; but the soul of each race continues to cloak
itself in its own individuality and to remain a mystery to the rest of
the world. One trait alone is common to all: the infinite sadness of
human destiny. This it was that Loti impressed so vividly on the reading
world.

His success was great. Though a young man as yet, Loti saw his work
crowned with what in France may be considered the supreme sanction: he
was elected to membership in the French Academy. His name became coupled
with those of Bernardin de St. Pierre and of Chateaubriand. With the
sole exception of the author of _Paul and Virginia_ and of the writer of
_Atala_, he seemed to be one without predecessor and without a master.
It may be well here to inquire how much reason there is for this
assertion, and what novel features are presented in his work.



It has become a trite saying that French genius lacks the sense of
Nature, that the French tongue is colourless, and therefore wants the
most striking feature of poetry. If we abandoned for one moment the
domain of letters and took a comprehensive view of the field of art, we
might be permitted to express astonishment at the passing of so summary
a judgment on the genius of a nation which has, in the real sense of the
term, produced two such painters of Nature as Claude Lorrain and Corot.
But even in the realm of letters it is easily seen that this mode of
thinking is due largely to insufficient knowledge of the language's
resources, and to a study of French literature which does not extend
beyond the seventeenth century. Without going back to the Duke of
Orleans and to Villon, one need only read a few of the poets of the
sixteenth century to be struck by the prominence given to Nature in
their writings. Nothing is more delightful than Ronsard's word-paintings
of his sweet country of Vendome. Until the day of Malherbe, the didactic
Regnier and the Calvinistic Marot are the only two who could be said to
give colour to the preconceived and prevalent notion as to the dryness
of French poetry. And even after Malherbe, in the seventeenth century,
we find that La Fontaine, the most truly French of French writers, was
a passionate lover of Nature. He who can see nothing in the latter's
fables beyond the little dramas which they unfold and the ordinary moral
which the poet draws therefrom, must confess that he fails to understand
him. His landscapes possess precision, accuracy, and life, while such is
the fragrance of his speech that it seems laden with the fresh perfume
of the fields and furrows.

Racine himself, the most penetrating and the most psychological of
poets, is too well versed in the human soul not to have felt its
intimate union with Nature. His magnificent verse in Phedre,

"Ah, que ne suis-je assise a l'ombre des forets!"

is but the cry of despair, the appeal, filled with anguish, of a heart
that is troubled and which oft has sought peace and alleviation amid the
cold indifference of inanimate things. The small place given to Nature
in the French literature of the seventeenth century is not to be
ascribed to the language nor explained by a lack of sensibility on the
part of the race. The true cause is to be found in the spirit of that
period; for investigation will disclose that the very same condition
then characterized the literatures of England, of Spain, and of Italy.

We must bear in mind that, owing to an almost unique combination of
circumstances, there never has been a period when man was more convinced
of the nobility and, I dare say it, of the sovereignty of man, or was
more inclined to look upon the latter as a being independent of the
external world. He did not suspect the intimately close bonds which
unite the creature to the medium in which it lives. A man of the world
in the seventeenth century was utterly without a notion of those truths
which in their ensemble constitute the natural sciences. He crossed
the threshold of life possessed of a deep classical instruction, and
all-imbued with stoical ideas of virtue. At the same time, he had
received the mould of a strong but narrow Christian education, in which
nothing figured save his relations with God. This twofold training
elevated his soul and fortified his will, but wrenched him violently
from all communion with Nature. This is the standpoint from which
we must view the heroes of Corneille, if we would understand those
extraordinary souls which, always at the highest degree of tension, deny
themselves, as a weakness, everything that resembles tenderness or pity.
Again, thus and thus alone can we explain how Descartes, and with him
all the philosophers of his century, ran counter to all common sense,
and refused to recognise that animals might possess a soul-like
principle which, however remotely, might link them to the human being.

When, in the eighteenth century, minds became emancipated from the
narrow restrictions of religious discipline, and when method was
introduced into the study of scientific problems, Nature took her
revenge as well in literature as in all other fields of human thought.
Rousseau it was who inaugurated the movement in France, and the whole of
Europe followed in the wake of France. It may even be declared that the
reaction against the seventeenth century was in many respects excessive,
for the eighteenth century gave itself up to a species of sentimental
debauch. It is none the less a fact that the author of _La Nouvelle
Heloise_ was the first to blend the moral life of man with his exterior
surroundings. He felt the savage beauty and grandeur of the mountains
of Switzerland, the grace of the Savoy horizons, and the more familiar
elegance of the Parisian suburbs. We may say that he opened the eye
of humanity to the spectacle which the world offered it. In Germany,
Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling have proclaimed him their master;
while even in England, Byron, and George Eliot herself, have recognised
all that they owed to him.

The first of Rosseau's disciples in France was Bernardin de St. Pierre,
whose name has frequently been recalled in connection with Loti. Indeed,
the charming masterpiece of _Paul and Virginia_ was the first example
of exoticism in literature; and thereby it excited the curiosity of
our fathers at the same time that it dazzled them by the wealth and
brilliancy of its descriptions.

Then came Chateaubriand; but Nature with him was not a mere background.
He sought from it an accompaniment, in the musical sense of the term, to
the movements of his soul; and being somewhat prone to melancholy, his
taste seems to have favoured sombre landscapes, stormy and tragical. The
entire romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand,
Theophile Gautier who draws from the French tongue resources unequalled
in wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after
all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, since
it would be difficult to discover in him any characteristic that did not
exist, as a germ at least, in Balzac.

I have just said that Chateaubriand sought in Nature an accompaniment to
the movements of his soul: this was the case with all the romanticists.
We do not find Rene, Manfred, Indiana, living in the midst of a tranquil
and monotonous Nature. The storms of heaven must respond to the storms
of their soul; and it is a fact that all these great writers, Byron as
well as Victor Hugo, have not so much contemplated and seen Nature as
they have interpreted it through the medium of their own passions;
and it is in this sense that the keen Amiel could justly remark that a
landscape is a condition or a state of the soul.



M. Loti does not merely interpret a landscape; though perhaps, to begin
with, he is unconscious of doing more. With him, the human being is a
part of Nature, one of its very expressions, like animals and plants,
mountain forms and sky tints. His characters are what they are only
because they issue forth from the medium in which they live. They are
truly creatures, and not gods inhabiting the earth. Hence their profound
and striking reality.

Hence also one of the peculiar characteristics of Loti's workers. He
loves to paint simple souls, hearts close to Nature, whose primitive
passions are singularly similar to those of animals. He is happy in the
isles of the Pacific or on the borders of Senegal; and when he shifts
his scenes into old Europe it is never with men and women of the world
that he entertains us.

What we call a man of the world is the same everywhere; he is moulded
by the society of men, but Nature and the universe have no place in
his life and thought. M. Paul Bourget's heroes might live without
distinction in Newport or in Monte Carlo; they take root nowhere, but
live in the large cities, in winter resorts and in drawing-rooms as
transient visitors in temporary abiding-places.

Loti seeks his heroes and his heroines among those antique races of
Europe which have survived all conquests, and which have preserved,
with their native tongue, the individuality of their character. He met
Ramuntcho in the Basque country, but dearer than all to him is Brittany:
here it was that he met his Iceland fishermen.

The Breton soul bears an imprint of Armorica's primitive soil: it is
melancholy and noble. There is an undefinable charm about those arid
lands and those sod-flanked hills of granite, whose sole horizon is the
far-stretching sea. Europe ends here, and beyond remains only the broad
expanse of the ocean. The poor people who dwell here are silent and
tenacious: their heart is full of tenderness and of dreams. Yann, the
Iceland fisherman, and his sweetheart, Gaud of Paimpol, can only live
here, in the small houses of Brittany, where people huddle together in
a stand against the storms which come howling from the depths of the
Atlantic.

Loti's novels are never complicated with a mass of incidents. The
characters are of humble station and their life is as simple as their
soul. _Aziyade_, _The Romance of a Spahi_, _An Iceland Fisherman_,
_Ramuntcho_, all present the story of a love and a separation. A
departure, or death itself, intervenes to put an end to the romance.
But the cause matters little; the separation is the same; the hearts are
broken; Nature survives; it covers over and absorbs the miserable ruins
which we leave behind us. No one better than Loti has ever brought out
the frailty of all things pertaining to us, for no one better than he
has made us realize the persistency of life and the indifference of
Nature.

This circumstance imparts to the reading of M. Loti's works a character
of peculiar sadness. The trend of his novels is not one that incites
curiosity; his heroes are simple, and the atmosphere in which they
live is foreign to us. What saddens us is not their history, but the
undefinable impression that our pleasures are nothing and that we are
but an accident. This is a thought common to the degree of triteness
among moralists and theologians; but as they present it, it fails to
move us. It troubles us as presented by M. Loti, because he has known
how to give it all the force of a sensation.

How has he accomplished this?

He writes with extreme simplicity, and is not averse to the use of
vague and indefinite expressions. And yet the wealth and precision of
Gautier's and Hugo's language fail to endow their landscapes with the
striking charm and intense life which are to be found in those of Loti.
I can find no other reason for this than that which I have suggested
above: the landscape, in Hugo's and in Gautier's scenes, is a background
and nothing more; while Loti makes it the predominating figure of his
drama. Our sensibilities are necessarily aroused before this apparition
of Nature, blind, inaccessible, and all-powerful as the Fates of old.



It may prove interesting to inquire how Loti contrived to sound such a
new note in art.

He boasted, on the day of his reception into the French Academy, that
he had never read. Many protested, some smiled, and a large number of
persons refused to believe the assertion. Yet the statement was actually
quite credible, for the foundation and basis of M. Loti rest on a naive
simplicity which makes him very sensitive to the things of the outside
world, and gives him a perfect comprehension of simple souls. He is not
a reader, for he is not imbued with book notions of things; his ideas
of them are direct, and everything with him is not memory, but reflected
sensation.

On the other hand, that sailor-life which had enabled him to see the
world, must have confirmed in him this mental attitude. The deck officer
who watches the vessel's course may do nothing which could distract his
attention; but while ever ready to act and always unoccupied, he thinks,
he dreams, he listens to the voices of the sea; and everything about him
is of interest to him, the shape of the clouds, the aspect of skies and
waters. He knows that a mere board's thickness is all that separates him
and defends him from death. Such is the habitual state of mind which M.
Loti has brought to the colouring of his books.

He has related to us how, when still a little child, he first beheld
the sea. He had escaped from the parental home, allured by the brisk and
pungent air and by the "peculiar noise, at once feeble and great," which
could be heard beyond little hills of sand to which led a certain path.
He recognised the sea; "before me something appeared, something sombre
and noisy, which had loomed up from all sides at once, and which seemed
to have no end; a moving expanse which struck me with mortal vertigo;
. . . above was stretched out full a sky all of one piece, of a dark gray
colour like a heavy mantle; very, very far away, in unmeasurable depths
of horizon, could be seen a break, an opening between sea and sky,
a long empty crack, of a light pale yellow." He felt a sadness
unspeakable, a sense of desolate solitude, of abandonment, of exile. He
ran back in haste to unburden his soul upon his mother's bosom, and,
as he says, "to seek consolation with her for a thousand anticipated,
indescribable pangs, which had wrung my heart at the sight of that vast
green, deep expanse."

A poet of the sea had been born, and his genius still bears a trace of
the shudder of fear experienced that evening by Pierre Loti the little
child.

Loti was born not far from the ocean, in Saintonge, of an old Huguenot
family which had numbered many sailors among its members. While yet
a mere child he thumbed the old Bible which formerly, in the days of
persecution, had been read only with cautious secrecy; and he perused
the vessel's ancient records wherein mariners long since gone had noted,
almost a century before, that "the weather was good," that "the wind
was favourable," and that "doradoes or gilt-heads were passing near the
ship."

He was passionately fond of music. He had few comrades, and his
imagination was of the exalted kind. His first ambition was to be a
minister, then a missionary; and finally he decided to become a sailor.
He wanted to see the world, he had the curiosity of things; he was
inclined to search for the strange and the unknown; he must seek that
sensation, delightful and fascinating to complex souls, of betaking
himself off, of withdrawing from his own world, of breaking with his own
mode of life, and of creating for himself voluntary regrets.

He felt in the presence of Nature a species of disquietude, and
experienced therefrom sensations which might almost be expressed in
colours: his head, he himself states, "might be compared to a camera,
filled with sensitive plates." This power of vision permitted him to
apprehend only the appearance of things, not their reality; he was
conscious of the nothingness of nothing, of the dust of dust. The
remnants of his religious education intensified still more this distaste
for the external world.

He was wont to spend his summer vacation in the south of France, and he
preserved its warm sunny impressions. It was only later that he became
acquainted with Brittany. She inspired him at first with a feeling of
oppression and of sadness, and it was long before he learned to love
her.

Thus was formed and developed, far from literary circles and from
Parisian coteries, one of the most original writers that had appeared
for a long time. He noted his impressions while touring the world; one
fine morning he published them, and from the very first the reading
public was won. He related his adventures and his own romance. The
question could then be raised whether his skill and art would prove as
consummate if he should deviate from his own personality to write what
might be termed impersonal poems; and it is precisely in this last
direction that he subsequently produced what are now considered his
masterpieces.

A strange writer assuredly is this, at once logical and illusive, who
makes us feel at the same time the sensation of things and that of their
nothingness. Amid so many works wherein the luxuries of the Orient, the
quasi animal life of the Pacific, the burning passions of Africa, are
painted with a vigour of imagination never witnessed before his advent,
_An Iceland Fisherman_ shines forth with incomparable brilliancy.
Something of the pure soul of Brittany is to be found in these
melancholy pages, which, so long as the French tongue endures, must
evoke the admiration of artists, and must arouse the pity and stir the
emotions of men.

JULES CAMBON.



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The real name of PIERRE LOTI is LOUIS MARIE JULIEN VIAUD. He was born
of Protestant parents, in the old city of Rochefort, on the 14th of
January, 1850. In one of his pleasant volumes of autobiography,
"Le Roman d'un Enfant," he has given a very pleasing account of his
childhood, which was most tenderly cared for and surrounded with
indulgences. At a very early age he began to develop that extreme
sensitiveness to external influences which has distinguished him ever
since. He was first taught at a school in Rochefort, but at the age
of seventeen, being destined for the navy, he entered the great French
naval school, Le Borda, and has gradually risen in his profession.
His pseudonym is said to have had reference to his extreme shyness and
reserve in early life, which made his comrades call him after "le Loti,"
an Indian flower which loves to blush unseen. He was never given to
books or study (when he was received at the French Academy, he had
the courage to say, "Loti ne sait pas lire"), and it was not until his
thirtieth year that he was persuaded to write down and publish certain
curious experiences at Constantinople, in "Aziyade," a book which,
like so many of Loti's, seems half a romance, half an autobiography.
He proceeded to the South Seas, and, on leaving Tahiti, published the
Polynesian idyl, originally called "Raharu," which was reprinted as "Le
Mariage de Loti" (1880), and which first introduced to the wider public
an author of remarkable originality and charm. Loti now became extremely
prolific, and in a succession of volumes chronicled old exotic memories
or manipulated the journal of new travels. "Le Roman d'un Spahi," a
record of the melancholy adventures of a soldier in Senegambia, belongs
to 1881. In 1882 Loti issued a collection of short studies under the
general title of "Fleurs d'Ennui." In 1883 he achieved the widest
celebrity, for not only did he publish "Mon Frere Yves," a novel
describing the life of a French bluejacket in all parts of the
world--perhaps, on the whole, to this day his most characteristic
production--but he was involved in a public discussion in a manner
which did him great credit. While taking part as a naval officer in
the Tonquin war, Loti had exposed in a Parisian newspaper a series of
scandals which succeeded on the capture of Hue, and, being recalled, he
was now suspended from the service for more than a year. He continued
for some time nearly silent, but in 1886, he published a novel of life
among the Breton fisher-folk, entitled "Pecheurs d'Islande"; this has
been the most popular of all his writings. In 1887 he brought out a
volume of extraordinary merit, which has never received the attention it
deserves; this is "Propos d'Exil," a series of short studies of exotic
places, in Loti's peculiar semi-autobiographic style. The fantastic
romance of Japanese manners, "Madame Chrysantheme," belongs to the same
year. Passing over one or two slighter productions, we come to 1890,
to "Au Maroc," the record of a journey to Fez in company with a
French embassy. A collection of strangely confidential and sentimental
reminiscences, called "Le Livre de la Pitie et de la Mort," belongs to
1891. Loti was on board his ship at the port of Algiers when news was
brought to him of his election, on the 21st of May, 1891, to the French
Academy. Since he has become an Immortal the literary activity of Pierre
Loti has somewhat declined. In 1892 he published "Fantome d'Orient,"
another dreamy study of life in Constantinople, a sort of continuation
of "Aziyade." He has described a visit to the Holy Land in three
volumes, "Le Desert," "Jerusalem," "La Galilee" (1895-96), and he has
written one novel, "Ramentcho" (1897), a story of manners in the Basque
province, which is quite on a level with his best work. In 1898 he
collected his later essays as "Figures et Choses qui passaient." In
1899-1900 Loti visited British India, and in the autumn of the latter
year China; and he has described what he saw there, after the seige, in
a charming volume, "Derniers Jours de Pekin," 1902.

E. G.





AN ICELAND FISHERMAN

by Pierre Loti




PART 1 -- ON THE ICY SEA



CHAPTER I--THE FISHERMEN

There they were, five huge, square-built seamen, drinking away together
in the dismal cabin, which reeked of fish-pickle and bilge-water. The
overhead beams came down too low for their tall statures, and rounded
off at one end so as to resemble a gull's breast, seen from within.
The whole rolled gently with a monotonous wail, inclining one slowly to
drowsiness.

Outside, beyond doubt, lay the sea and the night; but one could not be
quite sure of that, for a single opening in the deck was closed by
its weather-hatch, and the only light came from an old hanging-lamp,
swinging to and fro. A fire shone in the stove, at which their saturated
clothes were drying, and giving out steam that mingled with the smoke
from their clay pipes.

Their massive table, fitted exactly to its shape, occupied the whole
space; and there was just enough room for moving around and sitting upon
the narrow lockers fastened to the sides. Thick beams ran above them,
very nearly touching their heads, and behind them yawned the berths,
apparently hollowed out of the solid timbers, like recesses of a vault
wherein to place the dead. All the wainscoting was rough and worn,
impregnated with damp and salt, defaced and polished by the continual
rubbings of their hands.