BOOK: Florence Farr, "The Dancing Faun"

Florence Farr: The Dancing Faun. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894. vi + 149 pp.

I first heard of this short novel because it was mentioned in passing in Nina Antonia's The Greenwood Faun, which I read recently (see my post about it). Nor had I heard of the author, Florence Farr, before, but judging by her biography on the wikipedia she must have been quite an interesting person; an actress and activist very much at the heart of the British fin de siècle, she later took an interest in occultism and published a number of books and papers on that subject.

In principle, you could hardly imagine a more 1890s book than the present volume: it was published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane of the Bodley Head in their famous Keynotes series, with a cover design by Aubrey Beardsley, and when I had a look at the first couple of pages of the novel on archive.org I saw that it opens with the sort of epigram-laden conversation that would not look out of place in a work by Oscar Wilde. Unsurprisingly, I decided to read it without delay :)

On the one hand, it was a pleasant read, and short enough to be read at one sitting (about 150 pages, and not too much text per page); on the other hand, it wasn't really quite the sort of decadent novel that I had imagined. There was entirely too much of people talking about their feelings, especially love, in much too conventional a manner. Nothing particularly decadent is actually done at any point. There weren't any fauns in the novel either. In short, I was something of a victim of my own misplaced expectations, expectations which I shouldn't have formed as I had had no real basis for forming them. Ultimately, I enjoyed the book, and probably anyone else who is keen on the 1890s will enjoy it as least as much as I did.

<spoiler warning>

Lord Kirkdale, a young aristocrat, has recently become friends with George Travers, a charming, witty and cynical man of no very clear provenance. Kirkdale's mother, the widowed Lady Kirkdale, has some doubts about Travers, so she invites him for a visit to to meet the rest of the family (and so they can size him up). At the start of the book we find Travers in conversation with Kirkdale's youngest sister Geraldine, effortlessly spewing Wildesque epigrams of the sort that certainly look very clever, but on closer look make you wonder if they really mean anything much at all. Travers invites Kirkdale, Geraldine and their mother to visit him at the house he is renting in the country.

As we learn soon afterwards, George Travers isn't quite what he appears. The son of a noted actor who died early, he was raised in comfortable circumstances by an adoptive father, who then also died and left Travers with nothing. Trying to remain in high society without having the money for it, Travers resorted to cheating at cards, but was discovered and had to flee to America. Now, years later, he has returned, hoping his old scandal has been forgotten; and he is scheming to become rich again and get back into society. He lives in a tiny garret with his young wife Grace, a former actress; the country house has been let to him temporarily by a friend he made while in America.

To the Kirkdales, Travers pretends that he is not married, and gets his wife to pretend that she is just a relative of the owner of the house. Soon, Geraldine falls in love with Travers, and Kirkdale with Grace. Grace is of two minds; the honest and straightforward Kirkdale appears to her as a prospect of comfortable domesticity, and forms a big contrast with her mysterious, scheming husband. For now her feelings of romance for Travers still prevail,but she dislikes the fact that he is preventing her from returning to acting.

Soon Kirkdale finds out about Travers's past, and confers with an older and more experienced family friend, Mr. Clausen. They agree that Grace could become a great actress, and want to get her away from Travers's influence so she can return to the stage.

Travers gets caught cheating at cards again; but to Grace he makes the excuse that he was framed. Seeing that he does not trust her with the truth, Grace no longer loves him, and insists on returning to the stage. Her old theatre in London would be happy to have her back, but Travers proposes to promote her as an actress in America instead, presumably because he sees her potential and figures he could make some money off her that way.

Meanwhile Geraldine is madly in love with Travers, and even the reports of his card-sharping and his being married do not change her mind. She exchanges several letters with him, and offers to help him in his “money difficulties”. Eventually they meet and consider their options; they could elope abroad, and live very miserably on Geraldine's £800 a year. [Very miserably by the standards of the super rich, of course; otherwise it would actually be quite comfortable.] Travers asserts that he could make more than that by touring America with Grace; he no longer loves her, but genuinely wants to mentor her as an actress. He did, however, vaguely hope to get some money out of Geraldine anyway, as the initial capital for his American venture.

Without much further ado, Geraldine pulls out a gun and shoots Travers dead! She makes some half-hearted efforts to make it look like Travers broke into the Kirkdales' house, stole a gun and later committed suicide with it. Fortunately for her, Clausen, who after some preliminary investigation quickly realizes that Geraldine murdered Travers, helps her cover up her tracks a little better, and Travers's death is pronounced to have been suicide. The novel ends with a conversation between Geraldine and Grace, both of whom are relieved that Travers is dead and that they are free of his contaminating influence.

</spoiler warning>

I have to say, to the author's credit, that Geraldine's killing of Travers came as a total surprise to me — I wasn't expecting it in the least. (The book had been all talk until then, so how could you not be surprised to finally see some action?) I can't say that I approve of that murder; Travers doesn't seem to have done, or planned to do, anything nearly heinous enough to deserve to get murdered over it. Geraldine herself admits that she did it “just to gratify my mad injured pride” (p. 143), and I can sympathize with that — murder out of passion, fair enough — but I can't sympathize when she then tries to justify the murder lamely: “he would have sneaked and lied and shivered through life [. . .] it is a good deed done, and I am glad I did it.” (P. 143.) Gosh, talk about high standards. If everyone who indulges in a bit of light conmanship was going to be shot like a dog, the world would be a *very* different place. I wouldn't want to see Geraldine hanged or even imprisoned over the murder, but I'm not glad that she got off completely scot-free and isn't even sorry for killing him. I guess if there's any real element of decadence in this novel, it's this — that Geraldine and Grace should be so happy and relieved after Travers was murdered over such a small matter.

The author should have done more to present Travers as really villainous if she wants us to sympathize with Geraldine's point of view — but perhaps she doesn't want that.* After all, we see that Mr. Clausen, the most sober-minded and well-balanced character in the story, does not understand Geraldine's perspective, even though he helped hide the evidence of her guilt (p. 143); and Geraldine herself seems to feel that she is in some significant sense worse than most people: “I am my father's daughter. People like him and me belong to a race apart; we are only mortal clay, while you and mamma, and Maisy and all the rest of you have immortal souls.” (P. 144. We don't actually know anything much about her father, except for a passing mention from page 4: Geraldine's mother “had the experience of life only given to those ladies whose husbands are thoroughly and brutally immoral”.)

[*There is in fact also a scene which seems to have no other purpose but to make us view Travers as less villainous, namely when he plays with Pierre, the little son of his housekeeper (pp. 41–4).]

Incidentally, another way in which Geraldine is unconventional is her support for the ‘New Woman’ ideas: “it is only within the last few years that women have dared show their womanhood. At last they are permitted to possess a small quota of human nature; they may be something more than waxen masks of doll-like acquiescence” (pp. 59–60).

I wish we were told a little more clearly what exactly Travers's nefarious plan was in the first place. I guess he hoped to seduce Geraldine, or he hoped that Kirkdale would fall in love with Grace — or both — but what next? The fact that Travers and Grace are married would surely stand in the way. Is he just hoping to get more blackmail material, seeing as that seems to be his mode of operation, though he doesn't like to call it by such a blunt term (pp. 26–7, 82–3)? Did he deliberately marry Grace in the hope of using her as bait in some scheme like that? (Because otherwise, it isn't obvious why marrying a talented but so far penniless actress would do his plans any good; then we would have to conclude that he must have married her for love.)

Admittedly there is also one detail which speaks against Travers. On p. 25, when Grace asks him to let her start acting again to earn some money, he says: “what would five pounds a week be to a man like me?” But on p. 128, talking to Geraldine, he says that Grace and he would easily make “one hundred pounds a week between us”. He is either lying or he's wildly optimistic about Grace's earning potential.

Ultimately, the main reason for my sympathies for Travers is this: he is trying to get rich by unfair means; but other characters in this novel are already rich, and there is no way to be rich except by unfair means. So they have no basis to complain against him, as far as I'm concerned; they are no better than him, only luckier because their money is already made. For instance, where is Geraldine's £800 a year coming from? Either farmers paying rents for land that Geraldine owns, or companies paying dividends on stocks that she owns, or interest on bonds that she owns. That's money that, of right, ought to belong to those farmers and to the workers of those companies — there's no sane reason under the sun why any of that money should end up in Geraldine's pockets, except that the sheer lunacy of our legal and economical system happens to be on her side. We hear that Travers “had discovered the art of living upon other people” (p. 40); yet what is Geraldine's £800 a year, if not her living upon other people? Without lifting a finger, she robs people of £800 every year, yet she is regarded as a decent and normal person; but when someone like Travers tries to get some money out of people, everyone calls him a villain. And yet they are both doing the same thing, it's just that those holding power in our society have arbitrarily decided that some forms of theft are acceptable (and they get to be called by other terms, like ‘rents’ and ‘profits’ and the like) while others aren't (and they get to be called ‘card-sharping’ and ‘blackmail’ and the like). In fact Travers's way is less objectionable, because he was trying to extract money from the rich, while Geraldine's way extracts it from the poor.

By the way, I wonder what to make of the title of the book, The Dancing Faun. Apparently there is a famous statue of that name at Pompeii. There are only two mentions of the Dancing Faun in the book; one is on p. 58, in a passage that explains why Grace prefers Travers over Kirkdale: Kirkdale “was an extremely well made young man [. . .] but to a woman who had taken it into her head to adore the type of man represented by the Dancing Faun, no Hercules, however laboriously devoted, need apply.” And on p. 100 Geraldine herself uses the term when explaining why she prefers Travers over other men: “If I think of other people, it is only to think of the difference between him and them. He is so graceful, they are so proper. He always has something charming to say, they always say the things one has heard over and over again. He is like the Dancing Faun, they are like a tailor's block.” So the Dancing Faun is a metaphor for the type of person that Travers is; charming though not classically beautiful; characterized by a certain nimbleness, both mental and physical; and perhaps a little wild and unpredictable.

*

A few passages that I particularly liked:

Lady Kirkdale on Geraldine's singing lessons: “I insisted on her singing at Sautussi's reception, just the same as the other pupils. I think it is the greatest mistake to make distinctions of rank in matters of art. In art all are equal.” :)) (P. 3.)

On Travers's parasitical ways: “He had discovered the art of living upon other people with as much grace as if he belonged to the highest circles; none of the bourgeois arrogance of the parvenu or the middleman was perceptible; he took other people's money, their property, and their affections, with equal grace and admirable cordiality.” (P. 40.)

I liked the contrast between conversation and chatter here: “Here the rest of the party came up, conversation ceased, and chatter reigned in its stead.” (P. 122.)

On Geraldine: “Mediocrity was her bugbear, just as it has been the bugbear of thousands of other mediocre people, and she was ready to take the most desperate measures to escape from it.” (P. 123.) Hey, I resemble that remark! :P

Speaking of mediocrity, here is Grace about her late husband: “Almost the last time I talked to him, I remember feeling as if it would be a glorious thing to be a great criminal, and that if you could not rule by fair means, you should rule by foul. George [i.e. Travers] had such a horror of mediocrity.” (P. 148.)

The obligatory fin-de-siècle trope of artists being apart from the world: “In real life you get an emotion which masters you; in art, in acting, in all works of genius, I suppose, you master an emotion. That is why artists are set apart from the rest of the world; they cannot enjoy the common emotion long, they demand too much from it.” (Grace on p. 146. The author, Florence Farr, was herself a prominent actress, so I guess she speaks from experience here.)