Eline Vere

AFTER WORD BY PAUL BINDING

Almost halfway through Eline Vere we find its eponymous heroine in a state of conscious happiness. Eline, whose life has hitherto centred round the entertainments of high society in The Hague, is staying at De Horze in Gelderland, the country property of the family into which she has agreed to marry. The more she sees of her betrothed, Otto van Erlevoort, the more she appreciates his kindly, virtuous character. Herself highly strung and only too frequently dissatisfied, she has found deep contentment in surrendering to the slow rhythms of the rural summer. These have enabled her to get on with members of the large Van Erlevoort family so well that they are now obviously fond of her — even Otto’s sister Frédérique, who has never much cared for her. Eline is quite aware that she has significantly changed:

During moments of solitary reflection on her new selfhood, tears welled up in her eyes in gratitude for all the goodness that she had received, and her only wish was that time would not fly, but stand still instead, so that the present would last for ever. Beyond that she desired nothing, and a sense of infinite rest and blissful, blue tranquility emanated from her being.

Yet the God to whom she prays for this stasis does not answer her prayer, for time by its very nature cannot stand still. And moving and even sympathetic though we may find Eline’s thoughts here, we can also detect in them signs of the pernicious weakness that will destroy her. Her hopes are unrealistic, and fear plays too great a part in them; indeed, they amount to a desperate desire to have subtracted from existence anything demanding or painful. They are also self-centred; in this respect Eline’s ‘new selfhood’ differs little, if at all, from her former one. Does her fiancé have his rightful part in these wishes of hers for the future to be cancelled?

When Eline returns from De Horze to her sister and brother-in-law’s house in The Hague, she finds that her older cousin, Vincent, is in temporary residence. Vincent has led a rackety life, which has taken its toll on him both physically and financially (he endlessly cadges money). Eline’s sister Betsy — practical, conventional, insensitive — loathes him, but on Eline he exerts a curious fascination, particularly as the Gelderland days recede, and the all-too-familiar tedium of her life in The Hague engulfs her anew. Vincent reminds Eline of the father she so loved and revered, a failed artist who could never find the energy to complete one of his ambitious canvases. Indeed, for all his dabbling in doubtful commercial enterprises, Vincent, with his collection of bric-a-brac, could himself be called a failed artist, and this is how he sees himself. A man more unlike Otto van Erlevoort than this seedy, yet somehow magnetic, individual could scarcely be imagined, and in fact we readers know that Otto, unlike the other more impressionable young men in his social circle, actually despises him: ‘But Otto, with unselfconscious confidence in his own health and strength, looked down on Vincent for the poisonous charm he emanated to gullible associates.’ But Eline, much to her sister’s irritation, takes to having long, lazy, philosophical conversations with him:

‘So you believe that everything is preordained, and that when I think I am doing something out of my own free will I am really only doing it because. .?’

‘You only think it’s your free will, but your will is nothing other than the outcome of hundreds and thousands of previous so-called occurrences. Yes indeed, that is what I believe.’

[. .]

‘You believe, for instance, that if I marry Otto all I’m doing is following a preordained path?’

But only seconds after she asks him this, Vincent, in poor condition anyway, faints. The effect on Eline of both his remarks and his swoon is astonishing, and yet, on reflection — for this is a novel of great subtlety in its psychological and social observation — perhaps we should not be so very astonished. Eline now begins to wonder that ‘her love for Otto might not be enough after all’; for an instant she has seen behind her imaginings of her married life-to-come an alarming ‘ghost’. Vincent’s faint draws her, emotionally, romantically, towards him — though there is no evidence of any deeper feeling for her on his part than cousinly affection and gratitude. (Indeed, perhaps if there had been, she would not be so drawn.) Couperus, born in 1863, was twelve years the senior of Carl-Gustav Jung (1875–1961) yet Eline Vere (1889) strikingly anticipates key Jungian ideas, present also in his subsequent fiction. Vincent, sick, seedy, idle, is the shadow to Otto in Eline’s psyche, and indeed embodies important features of her own self. Hence her fleeting but frightening vision of the ‘ghost’, which is this shadow’s projection. Eline’s consequent casting-off of the Otto she still loves — causing her genuine anguish in which, for all her egotism, concern for the rejected young man is a strong component — is, in truth, an unconsciously motivated attempt to assert her personality in all its complexity on behalf of its unending quest, its driving need for wholeness. It may also be seen, of course, as a revolt against that very pre-ordination — societal and/or circumstantial — that her cousin was proclaiming before he passed out.

But there is more still to be discovered in Eline’s action. Her moods, her nervousness, her preposterous fantasies which spiral away from those who have inspired them, her bouts of illness (or indefinable un-wellness) may exasperate us readers almost as much as they do her elder sister, Betsy. But when we stand back and view them collectively, do they not reveal her unwitting, instinctive recognition of what is dead or dull in her society, of what may be pleasing, even admirable on the agreeable, convention-hallowed surface but which never addresses what runs deeper? In hoping for a suspension of time’s movement, Eline at twenty-three may have been entertaining the dreams of a silly adolescent, but is she not, in the very fervour of her wishes, also fighting herself and her own frightening powers of understanding? Hasn’t she all along had an appreciation of life’s darker side — whereas the less complicated Otto, at any rate up to this point, has not? Eline’s problems derive from her not knowing how to cope with her troubling appreciation, receiving no guidance here from the largely stultifying codes by which her more adjusted friends and relations live.

Eline’s rejection of Otto constitutes the heart, both structural and moral, of the novel. As the above adumbrates, her action is a far from simple matter. Lionel Trilling wrote about Jane Austen’s novel Emma (in Beyond Culture, 1975): ‘We never know where to have it. If we finish it at night and think we know what it is up to, we wake the next morning to believe it is up to something quite else; it has become a different book.’ This holds true for Eline Vere too. And in both cases the book’s ability to change itself in our minds is inextricable from the delineation of the woman who gives it its title.

. .

Louis Couperus was only twenty-six when Eline Vere came out, and had previously published only unsatisfactory and derivative poems (in 1883 and 1884). Though it is a literary artefact of precocious sophistication and accomplishment, the novel is also palpably the creation of a young man whose years were a great advantage to him in its composition. For Couperus is still very much of the milieu he is re-creating, aware though he is of its limitations and faults, and he clearly was intimately familiar, as a member himself of youthful Hague society, of the very pleasures, expectations and hopes he ascribes to his large cast of characters, almost all of them his contemporaries. Their gossip and banter, their flirtations, their little tiffs and misunderstandings and reconciliations, their plans for and doubts about the nature of their future adult lives convince us (and never more so than in Ina Rilke’s spirited and linguistically sensitive English) because they are done essentially from the inside. A young man like Etienne van Erlevoort, lazy and industrious, facetious and affectionate by turns, springs to life off the pages — on which he performs no absolutely essential dramatic act — as though a relation of the author’s own, slyly observed over many years, were being presented to us.

Youth surely accounts also for the infectious physicality of the work. We disport ourselves with its characters at the beaches and by the dunes of Scheveningen, and deep in the woods of Gelderland too; we are present at amiable wrestling matches, ending with one boy leap-frogging over his partner, and are right there on the little boat as it is steered down a country stream past thick pads of waterlilies. These are all triumphs of the writer’s kinaesthetic powers, and stand in contrast to, and perhaps at variance with, his other less healthy and wholesome aesthetic abilities, when he draws us near that sombre and threatening shadow-land which those such as Vincent Vere know only too well.

Couperus was helped in his chosen task of bringing his own society to life by two important features of the contemporary literary scene. He called Eline Vere ‘A Novel of The Hague’, partly because there actually flourished at the time a popular genre known simply as ‘The Hague novel’. This dealt with the city’s social life, in something of the manner of those English ‘silver-fork’ novels of the period 1825–1850, or of such now-forgotten but once widely-read English novelists of the 1880s as Rhoda Broughton and W. E. Norris. Its principal readers were female, drawn largely from a lower social class than its books’ protagonists; it therefore appealed to their eagerness to hear what was going on in such elegant streets of the Dutch administrative capital as the Nassauplein where Eline lives with Henk and Betsy van Raat, in a house which Couperus himself had inhabited. We can see how Eline Vere, which was hugely successful from the very first, partakes of this category and could meet the wishes of its enthusiasts. From its opening description of the gleeful preparations for a Society tableau vivant to its closing evocation of the ‘quite splendid’ villa furnished ‘with considerable luxury’ in which the recently wed Paul and Frédérique are now living (admittedly not in The Hague but in Heibeek), the novel leaves us in no doubt whatever that we are moving among the well-off and well-connected, whom the author knows at first hand. And a good measure of both the charm and the interest of these people with whom we are concerned does indeed derive from their favoured station: their easy manners and articulate conversation, the pleasantness of the innumerable dinner-parties and expeditions which amply set off their developing personalities, their ability, if they so wish, to yield to impulse and pursue some hobby or passing enthusiasm (Paul van Raat’s excursions into singing and painting conspicuously come to mind), or even to take their time over their studies and thus over deciding what they should be doing in life (Etienne is a good, and a happy, example). And some of them, of course, never do make any satisfactory decision here, and yet do not seem to us much the worse for it; in truth the very leisureliness of their lives gives them enviable scope for exercising fundamentally amiable qualities. The superbly realised Henk van Raat, with his two devoted Ulmer hounds, himself several times likened to a Newfoundland dog, is perhaps the best instance of this. The important plot lines of Paul’s relationship with Frédérique van Erlevoort, Georges de Woude van Bergh’s with Lili Verstraeten, Marie’s with Otto would not at all be out of place in a run-of-the-mill ‘Hague novel’, and, like that genre’s intended readers, we are ceaselessly stirred to read on by asking ourselves (even on re-readings, such are Couperus’s narrative gifts): ‘Will they. . or won’t they? Will she. . or won’t she?’, such questions and their answers providing the story’s dynamics.

What stands apart from the usual interests of such a novel is, obviously, the portrait of Eline herself — disturbing, multifaceted, unforgettable — which transcends, or, if you like, subverts, the genre in which it commandingly stands, lifting the individual work into another species of literary endeavour entirely.

But a second feature of the literary climate is even more important in considering the production of this twenty-six-year-old author: the enormous reputation then, throughout the reading world, of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). In one of the later chapters we find elderly Madame van Raat reading French and Russian novels, and War and Peace (published 1865–69) is specifically cited.

Tolstoy builds up his great novel from innumerable small episodes of ordinary life, familial, domestic, social and sometimes seemingly trivial (and, we should add here, it is our ease of reception of these and our belief in their complete authenticity that enable us to identify with those they feature when ‘history’ overtakes them in the form of Napoleon and his invasion of Russia). Just as Jane Austen said that ‘three or four families in a country village is just the thing to work on’, Tolstoy spoke of his fiction as deriving from the affairs of the deux cents familles to which he himself belonged. Couperus, in his first novel, was similarly drawn to writing about people of his own class (the only ones probably with whom he feels thoroughly at home), and profited by Tolstoy’s example. Indeed, as we follow the doings of the Van Erlevoorts, Verstraetens, Van Raats, and De Woude van Berghs, we can easily envisage them as friends of Tolstoy’s Rostovs. They would all have been perfectly at home at Natasha’s first ball. (And yet, for all their breeding, with the Van Erlevoorts prominent here, and their money, with the Van Raats the richest, Couperus’s people are far nearer in their values and mores to ourselves than are Tolstoy’s; both their pastimes and their more serious aspirations belong to a modern capitalist society based on commerce rather than to the semi-feudal one we encounter in the great Russian.)

But I suspect that the young Couperus was even more influenced by the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina (published 1875–78). Whereas the cumulative episodes of War and Peace unite into an epic of a people during a significant segment of historical time, those out of which Anna Karenina is constructed are shot through with our intensifying awareness of its central figure, and the predicament she apparently wills onto herself and, involuntarily, onto those close to her. This, unlike its predecessor, is above all a novel of moral and psychological investigation and dissection. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I shall repay’ is the motto Tolstoy chose for it, and in retrospect we can see how it informs every scene, no matter what sense of the humdrum, of the randomness of existence it may also offer. Eline Vere works on us in this manner too. We can see this in the very way Couperus has decided to introduce us to Eline.

From the merry preparations of the young people in the very first chapter she is conspicuously absent. ‘Such a shame Eline is not here!’ her aunt-through-marriage exclaims. ‘She is not feeling very well,’ Madame Verstraeten is told; it is a question of ‘nerves’ apparently, ‘the affliction of the younger generation’.

So we do not meet Eline until the second chapter, and when we do, we encounter her at nighttime, at half-past two in the morning. (To the British and American readers of today these members of Hague society keep astoundingly late hours, just as they all have a surprising amount to drink.) And we first see her ‘looking rather pale in a white flannel peignoir, with her hair loose and flowing,’ the last a favourite symbol in nineteenth-century paintings, from the Pre-Raphaelites through to Edvard Munch, of a girl’s rejection of the restraints of conventional respectability. ‘Languorous and graceful’, Eline has absented herself from the jollifications of her peers through a ‘whim of indolence and ennui’, and has been regretting it ever since, unable to relieve her melancholy even by reading. When her brother-in-law, Henk, chides her for yielding to yet another black mood — Henk, the first man she was ever seriously attracted to, and who, probably more than any other, still holds her heart — she breaks down in tears:

The urge to pour her heart out was too strong to resist. What was she living for? What use could she be to anyone? She wandered about the room, wringing her hands and lamenting without pause. She didn’t care if she died within the hour, she didn’t care about anything at all, it was just that existence was so futile, so useless, without anything she could wholeheartedly devote herself to, and it was all becoming too much to bear.

What is Eline’s malady, and what is its meaning when viewed in the context of her social world? Which is also to ask, what is its meaning for the novel as a whole? In Anna Karenina’s case the cause of her undoing is her trust in the truth of passion over other truths, other considerations. On account of this trust she undervalues the importance of society itself, which exacts retribution on her of both an outward and an inward kind. This is not to say that Tolstoy accepts society on its own (so often hypocritical or cynical) evaluation; far from it. But he does believe that it is only through principled unselfishness that a satisfactory life can be led, and that this entails taking society into account. We see in Anna Karenina how the erratic Levin, who, like War and Peace’s Pierre before him, has a normal man’s dissolute past, realizes that a reciprocally giving married life with Kitty will benefit not just himself but the larger world as well.

Such thinking is present also in Eline Vere. Paul van Raat is as silly and selfish as young men often are, indeed maybe more so than many because of the wealth and lofty social position into which he was born, the very thought of which makes him proud and a touch reckless. But he is also warm-hearted and observant of others, and through the love he feels for Frédérique and the marriage with her that he will sustain, he can not only repay his debts to society but make it a better place (this being fittingly emblemised in his becoming Mayor of a comparatively small provincial community). But Eline will make no contribution of this kind whatsoever. In common with Tolstoy’s Anna, what she will bequeath to the society that has produced and nurtured her is a death that at once distresses and disconcerts it. Why? What went wrong?

Eline’s flaw is not, like the Russian tragic heroine’s, related to intensity of sexual reaction. If anything Eline strikes us as deficient in normal erotic feelings. The baritone Fabrice, Otto for the greater part (she has to be cajoled into accepting him as fiancé), Vincent, the mysterious figure of Lawrence St Clare — there is no evidence that she is sexually aroused by any of them. Nor is there much evidence that men generally, while admiring her beauty and her social grace, respond to her physically, as — to take examples from literature — men, including her own husband, do to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, or those in Christiania’s élite do to Hedda Gabler in Ibsen’s virtually contemporaneous play (1890). What attractions Eline feels for the men in her life, what emotions they have brought out in her very quickly dissolve into day-dream. Fabrice — whose picture she will buy for her albums, like any starstruck shop-girl — scarcely has any reality for her off the boards of the stage on which he sings Gounod. Vincent’s secretive disposition, compounded by his insecurities of money and health, she soon distorts into a novelette invalid’s yearning for love, which she could somehow in a fantasy-world encounter. Even Otto, for whom she does know something not unlike love, becomes for her chiefly an embodiment of masculine good sense on which she will be able eternally to depend.

Unlike Emma Bovary or Hedda Gabler, however, Eline is not unintelligent or even notably unintellectual, nor — as Ibsen, in his preparatory notes on his play, says of Hedda — conventional. Couperus is insistent that Eline’s English is positively good, and her French is clearly proficient also: she reads as well as speaks both languages. She is interested in the arts, even if she does have an inordinate admiration for Ouida (!), is cognisant of cultures outside the Netherlands, and, if anything, is rather too much at ease among the bohemian, heterodox folk whom her uncle Daniel and his younger wife, Eliza, take up with. Her discussions with Vincent might not impress a professional philosopher any more than they please her irascible sister, Betsy, but they show her to have, for all her languor, a certain liveliness of mind, a wish to explore further than the bounds of the immediately perceptible. It is hard to imagine the other young members of her circle engaging in them. Furthermore she has the ability — often, admittedly, coming to the fore too late or with insufficient force — to stand back from her fantasies and even her behaviour. (Think of her sad, bemused awareness of how badly she can behave to kind old Madame van Raat.) Likewise, she has the ability to discern the sham even when it is she herself who, through her heightened theatrical tendencies, is doing the shamming. When, in her despair, she turns to church-going, she can see through her own religiosity — so akin to the swooning over opera which led her to idolise the sorry, shabby Fabrice — and also through the hypocrisies of her fellow worshippers.

No, Eline’s tragedy — for it is nothing less — is not the consequence of her having too much erotic passion in her or too little sharpened an intellect. It is that she has too abundant and fertile an imagination in a society which gravely undervalues this quality, indeed scarcely even pays lip-service to it. Imagination is not an attribute one could ascribe to any other character in the book — with the possible exception of Eline’s shadow-self, Vincent, and perhaps Frédérique, in her own frustrated way. Her milieu is one of fundamentally practical, pragmatic persons, sensible once they have put youthful idleness behind them, incurious, rarely looking beyond their own set, dabbling in the arts (as Paul van Raat does) while unaware that these have profounder purposes than amusement, worried about money in a household-expenditure kind of way, but never seriously discomposed by current affairs — and accordingly disinclined ever to challenge the status quo.

Eline surely emanates from that part of Couperus’s own experience which made him, in a vital respect, an outsider in the social world in which he was so accepted. The Couperus family had a long connection with the Dutch East Indies. Louis Couperus’s own father, John Ricus Couperus, was born there in 1816. In 1872, when Louis was only nine years old, Couperus senior took his family away from The Hague back to the Indies, where they had property, and they did not return to Holland until 1878, when the boy was fifteen. Couperus was therefore something of a stranger in those circles which were so open to him, and in which he was expected to have a role. And his kinship here with spoilt, orphaned Eline becomes the clearer when we realise what a pampered, luxurious life he knew as a child in Batavia (Java’s capital) as a child of its ruling class. What he also was aware of in the Javanese life all round him was its rich vein of inherited lore, its reliance on instinct rather than rational precepts, its attention to natural phenomena which the folk-mind read as emanations of mysterious powers, often dark, hostile and running contrary to humankind’s conscious intentions or will. Such knowledge he could not have gained remaining in The Hague.

In one of Couperus’s greatest subsequent novels De Stille Kracht (The Hidden Force, 1900) Couperus depicts Van Oudijck, a Dutchman who holds the eminent position of Resident of a Javanese province: kindly, conscientious, ready to be a paterfamilias with all the responsibilities and demonstrations of affection that entails, even prepared to face up to his own sensuality. But he is lacking in imagination, and vigorously suppresses any signs of that quality which tentatively surface. His failure here — demonstrated in his dealings with the mother of the Javanese Regent, or chief nobleman — has dire consequences for many, but before these have become fully apparent, he and those close to him experience hideous, terrifying manifestations of hostile occult spirits, whom the superstitious local folk can name but whom the educated Dutch refuse even to acknowledge until far too late. These are emanations from the shadow-land, the vast region of the collective unconscious which the colonialists have chosen first to despise and then to deliberately ignore.

Eline Vere is thus of the East Indies without being aware of this. The ‘ghost’ she sees behind her picture of life with Otto, the fantasies she embroiders round the decadent figure of Vincent, the terrifying cavalcade of images that haunt her on her last day of life — these relate intimately to what torments Van Oudijck and his wife in The Hidden Force.

The importance of the East Indies to Louis Couperus is evidenced in his marrying his cousin Elisabeth Baud, whose family had distinguished itself in Indies service, and in the couple’s living there from March 1899 to February 1900, returning again for four months during their long travels of October 1921–October 1922. Of the generous cast in Eline Vere the irrepressible Etienne van Erlevoort is tempted to join the colonial administration but in the end prefers to stay at home. But there is one very important character in the novel connected with Java — the ill and indigent Jeanne Ferelijn, whose husband is on poorly paid furlough and who pines in what she sees as the drabness of Holland for the richness of her Indies, whither she returns and where she dies. Significantly when Eline, in her hysterical passion, flees the Van Raats’ house at night, it is to Jeanne she goes, Jeanne with whom she was warmly friendly when they were both schoolgirls, and who now in her illness will console and sustain her. And when later Eline learns of Jeanne’s death, she is dreadfully upset; indeed we can see her reception of this news as the most authentic moment of her life. This then is Eline’s tragedy: to have been born with too large a supply of imagination in a society too focused on the cash nexus and on living comfortably. Her neighbours and kinsfolk in The Hague represent only too well the dominant culture of their times extending from Gilded Age America to Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in Britain to France on the eve of the Dreyfus affair.

. .

Tolstoy was not the only influence on the keen, probing mind of the young Couperus. And of Tolstoyanism itself, with its emphasis on the word of the Gospels and on the quietist faith of ordinary folk, I can see only mild manifestations. Mesdames van Erlevoort and van Raat are undogmatically pious, the lives of both women being dominated by a warm, compassionate, maternal feeling commendably inclusive of others outside their immediate family, and therefore exemplary. (See the treatment of Eline by both women.) Couperus tenderly evokes simple country church-going for us, indeed his whole portrayal of Gelderland life as more conducive to ethical health and spiritual contentment than the sophisticated urban round of The Hague could loosely be described as Tolstoyan. Similarly his preference for the good-hearted in all circumstances — whether represented by indolent Henk or hard-working Jeanne Ferelijn — relates to Tolstoy’s admiration for certain of his characters, Count Nicholas Rostov and Princess Mary in War and Peace for example. But all these can, and probably should, be seen mainly as expressions of temperamental priorities and preoccupations, as well as of the contemporary fear that the age, in its obsession with productivity and wealth, had brought about rather too radical a severance from the natural life. As discernible as that to Tolstoy is Couperus’s debt — one is tempted to call it ideological — to Émile Zola (1842–1902). By the time of Eline Vere’s appearance fifteen novels in Zola’s great twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart sequence had appeared, its ambition to show, through two interconnected families, both the laws of human heredity and the development (illustrating these laws) of France up to the fall of the Second Empire. Among these books were such influential and powerful works as L’Assommoir (1877), Germinal (1885) and La Terre (1887) — while a sixteenth came out the same year as Couperus’s first novel, Le Rêve (1888).

Heredity is most evidently a preoccupation of Eline Vere. Great emphasis is placed on the two sisters’ inheritance from their parents. Madame Vere was, we are told, an intimidating, unlovable woman, and from her come Betsy’s blunted sensibility and her bossiness. Eline, as she herself believes, inherits from her father, a refined, dreamy, weak-willed, indecisive person. So far so convincing, but, graduate of the school of Zola as he felt himself, Couperus wishes us to go further. Both Eline and nephew Vincent exhibit the late Mr Vere’s fatal lack of robustness, which appears also, modified, in his younger brother, Daniel, with his fondness for luxurious surroundings and for the company of bohemian riffraff, flâneurs and useless expatriates. Eline’s readiness to fall in with her uncle and aunt’s way of living is a manifestation of her own share of this regrettable, determining trait, clearly associated in Couperus’s mind — as in Zola’s and, later, Thomas Mann’s — with the make-up of the artist. Only a family, and by extension a society, in decline devotes itself to art, would seem the inference.

Take by way of contrast the case of Paul van Raat, a virile young man and lively, despite those bouts of laziness and dissipation ascribable to the phase of life he is passing through. Paul, at two important points in the novel, is much taken with being an artist. It isn’t, we realise, so much the case of his not having enough talent to become one (though that statement is true enough), as his having rather too healthy a physical inheritance. The Van Erlevoort clan into which he befittingly marries is clearly an excellent genetic pool; descriptions of the youngest generation abound in tributes to their vitality and physical attractiveness. This can be darkly counterpointed by the case of Paul’s own nephew. His brother Henk has a child, Ben, by a Vere, and neither Henk’s rude health nor Betsy’s maternally received energy can prevent the likeable, indeed the imaginative little boy from being a backward child — a predicament poignantly rendered. Is this then another reason why Eline feels she cannot, must not marry Otto? She could not give that splendid specimen of normality a satisfactory child who would one day himself continue a strong line.

For me this aspect of Eline Vere is its least convincing, perhaps because it is not sufficiently thought out. Moreover — very unlike any production of Zola’s — the novel does not allocate to the figures in the foreground any convincing background connecting them to society in the wider sense of the term. The occupations of Paul and Otto, who do indeed become responsible public servants, are perfunctorily rendered; they interest us because they fit into the overall formal pattern, rather than because they have much validity in their own right. With regard to the specific instances in the novel of biological inheritance, Couperus has nothing like Zola’s command of detail, his intensity of interest in, and insight into, specific cases. Ben van Raat’s backwardness, like Eline’s concluding helpless capitulation to psychic and physical illness, smacks of literature — if aided by sincere human sympathy — rather than life studied scientifically by the author himself. But there is surely another factor at work here.

Though Couperus found in his wife Elisabeth a veritable model of companionship and unsparing support, their union is generally assumed to have been a marriage blanc. The very idea of procreation horrified Couperus whose erotic inclinations — and practise — were, by general agreement now among experts on the writer, homosexual. Thus Eline’s increasing non-progenitive detachment from her society can be seen as a correlative for Couperus’s homosexual position. And homosexuality must stand behind the novel’s most baffling couple, Vincent Vere and Lawrence St Clare.

For whatever else can it be that holds these two men together, so that they are in constant communication when apart, and are prepared to travel together for many months without significant interruptions? The one is an American ‘chevalier d’industrie’ — which may be a polite way of saying he is a successful businessmen not above a sharp piratical manoeuvre or two — the other a drifter with ideas of himself way above his actual accomplishments. St Clare thinks of Vincent as a brother, he says, yet his Vincent is not the man we ourselves have come to know. He tells Eline:

‘Most people have the wrong idea about Vincent. They think him lazy, capricious, egotistic, and refuse to see that he is simply ill. I can’t think of anybody else who would be capable, despite suffering from such ill health, of sharing so much of his talent and intelligence with the rest of mankind.’

She had always had great sympathy for Vincent, but had never seen him in this light.

‘Yes, I believe you are right!’ she said.

What a contrast to how Otto van Erlevoort sees Vincent!

Vincent Vere has told St Clare so much already about his cousin (combining the complimentary with the compassionate) that already, before their actual meeting-up in Brussels, the latter has thought of her as an ‘unknown sister’. Hence his intense solicitude on her behalf, his unique ability to elicit from her truths about her deepest feelings (including her great grief for her friend Jeanne Ferelijn), his insistence, which she accepts, that she keep apart from the dubious crew with whom her uncle and aunt socialise, and his proposal of marriage, which, though moved, she refuses. What kind of marriage can St Clare be offering Eline? Primarily, we feel, one of concerned companionship such as Louis Couperus and Elisabeth Baud enjoyed, though the sincerity of not just his feelings but of his regard for her is not in doubt. Watching Eline improve in Brussels, largely because of his own caring converse with her, he has begun to feel

a great longing to dedicate myself entirely to you, because I thought, if I can do that, she might be able to shake off her gloomy view of life and be happy again. My darling Elly, you’re still so young and you think it’s too late for things to change. Don’t think like that any more: put your trust in me, then we can set out together to discover whether life really is as dismal as you believe.

Perhaps there is too much of the crusader, of the benevolent pedagogue and too little of the lover in this declaration, though we cannot but respect the man for making it — just as Eline does, though it also makes her weep. But she has to decline, continually tormented as she is by her memories of her failed engagement to Otto (broken off by herself, after all, for intimate, never wholly articulated reasons). Perhaps in her refusal Eline is acknowledging that, outside Ouidaesque fantasies, the whole domain of the carnal is not congenial to her, just as it apparently was not to her creator. In Couperus’s mind sexuality results in misery as much as it does in children, and even the latter (from whom he so recoiled) rarely quite vanquish the former. It is an essential but terrible part of humankind’s lot that it has not yet arrived at an ability to cope adequately and painlessly with its sexual instinct, evolution being as yet incomplete in this respect. And evolution is the key word here.

For Couperus was of the post-Darwin generation, quite unable to accept the explanations and consolations of orthodox religion, and obsessed, as though by a fresh discovery, by the distress, the mutual destructiveness inherent in existence itself, an awareness memorably expressed in the anguished personal writings of Darwin himself occasioned by his observation of the cruelty rampant throughout the animal world. It is the duty of the honest writer, according to this view, to face up to the bleakness, the terror, to the fact that what laws one can detect operating in life take no consideration of the feelings of those they control. Everywhere there is appalling waste, and waste is represented here by the sterile careers of Vincent and St Clare, by such an un-partnered woman as Emilie de Woude van Bergh, who deals with her plight by adopting a hearty, jolly persona, and, supremely, by Eline herself. That fine novelist of the American South, ten years Couperus’s junior, Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945), had a similar weltanschauung both compounded and aided by a not dissimilar refined sensibility. In her novel Virginia (1913) Glasgow writes of a young man destined never to become the writer he dreams of being:

But at the age of twenty-two. . he was pathetically ignorant of his own place in the extravagance of Nature. With the rest of us, he would have been astounded at the suggestion that he might have been born to be wasted. Other things were wasted, he knew, since those who called Nature an economist had grossly flattered her. Types and races and revolutions were squandered with royal prodigality — but that he himself should be so was clearly unthinkable.

Against this waste humankind has created art, and Couperus belonged to the generation who, even while seeing them as a sport of Nature, peculiarly valued artists, as able to provide invaluable bulwarks against the ultimate emptiness of existence. Much taken with, and in his turn admired by, members of the Aesthetic Movement, including Oscar Wilde himself, Couperus made his own great contribution to the art of literature, not so much through his own aestheticism — shown in his dandyism, his epicurean pleasures, his tendency to lushness of prose — as in those deeply serious novels of which Eline Vere is the first in which, with scrupulous honesty, artistry of design and intense care for minutiae he faces up to life’s complexity.

His masterpiece, Van oude mensen de dingen die voorbijgaan (Old People and the Things That Pass, 1906) deals with two old people who, when younger and living in the East Indies as members of its colonial service, committed a horrendous crime — just how horrendous comes as a shock even to readers long anticipating its revelation, so savage, treacherous and pitiless was it. Undiscovered and therefore unpunished, for decades, the murder has nonetheless worked a long-enduring, baleful power on the intertwined ramified families of the culprits in The Hague (of the same milieu as the protagonists of Eline Vere). A novel of deceptions, ignorance, half-understandings, reluctant or nervous uncoverings, it imports into a restricted Dutch circle that disruptive ‘hidden force’ so ineluctably bound up with passion and with a culture not founded on reason, showing how it lurks behind even the most conventional or formal interchanges. Intricate in form though it is, with its all-important glimpses of the lurid pasts of an extremely aged man and woman, it describes a trajectory as relentless and seemingly swift of movement as some well-aimed deadly arrow. The Tolstoyan openness of Eline Vere, with its many scenes of the hustle and bustle of the unremarkable social life of mostly unremarkable individuals, must not detract from our realising that it also is closely worked and forms a devastating trajectory. Again, the book is less close to War and Peace than to Anna Karenina, from the structure of which it surely learned valuable lessons. The novel opens with an exchange between Paul and Frédérique, who, like Beatrice and Benedict, are to continue to spar throughout the novel, the girl perpetually showing up the shortcomings of the young man while revealing her deep affection for, even her belief in, him, and showing up too — with continual shrewdness, if with limited charity — the faults in Eline that will lead to her decline and demise. Paul and Frédérique’s is to be the union of those approved of by Nature and so, fittingly, it is with a window into their young married life, and with Otto and Marie determined to emulate it, that the novel concludes.

Between the opening and the final episode of Paul and Frédérique’s love lie, as if between bookmarks, the stories of other couples, and, too, of those Nature has marginalised. Of these Eline herself is not merely a representative but at times a passionate spokesperson, too often foolish and futile, but in her sensibility rightly judged worthy of having named after her one of the richest, most satisfying novels of the late nineteenth century.

Couperus wrote as a summary of himself:

ZOO IK IETS BEN, BEN IK EEN HAGENAAR

Whatever else I am, I am a man of The Hague.

His love of his native city pervades his first novel, so that to visit The Hague, and nearby Scheveningen, is to live again the experiences it recounts. But Eline Vere reveals also that, through being so faithfully and feelingly a man of The Hague, Couperus could speak to, and for, the whole human world.