This defect of consistency, which is grave in literature, would be ruinous on the stage where action is so much quicker, and where the idiosyncrasies of each personage are so visible to the audience; and such a fault is the more vexatious because it shows that the author was never really absorbed in his own creations, was never so possessed with them that they dominated him and made him do what they chose, as Bulwer Lytton has said that the characters of every true novelist must do, because a character once conceived is like a child, being once begotten, it becomeswhat it must, we cannot control the subsequent shape it takes.
Another defect of Mr Crawford's works is usually that their interest flags towards the close, that this close is too abrupt, and that it gives the reader the impression of the narrative being brought to an untimely end because the writer no longer cared about narrating it. This defect may be noticed in nearly all his stories, beginning withMr Isaacs, in which it is conspicuous; and is startlingly and irritatingly visible in one of his latest,Adam Johnstone's Son; indeed, in the last-named story the conclusion is obviously totally different from what it was intended to be in the opening chapters. Now, a well-constructed novel may please you or not, may be attractive or offensive, but it will always be accurately conceived and harmoniously balanced; and nothing animate or intimate will be introduced into it which has not some bearing direct or indirect upon the plot. Nothing can be more incorrect than to excite the expectations of the reader by indications which result in nothing, sign-posts on a road which do but lead to a blank wall.
A grave violation of this rule is frequently to be found in the Crawford stories, no worse one than that in this story of Adam Johnstone's son, where a long chapter is occupied by an incident with a brutal Neapolitan carter on the Sorrento road. The man is knocked down by the hero, and endeavours in return to stab him; carabineers arrive and arrest the carter and not the Englishman (as in real life they unquestionably would have done). The whole incident, related with much spirit, is obviously only in its place, only pardonableas an episode, if the carter be destined to appear again and sate his thirst for vengeance on the hero. But he disappears from the scene for ever as the carabineers handcuff him. We neither see nor hear any more of him, nor does the Englishman hear any more of the matter, which in actual life certainly would have caused him much annoyance at the local tribunal. The appetite of the reader should not be tempted by dishes, which become a mere Barmecide's feast, in this manner. Some intention must have been in the author's mind when he created this scene. Why did he not carry out his intention?
In this manner many combinations and situations of the most interesting and uncommon kind are deliberately thrown away unused. He frequently introduces personages about whom he excites our liveliest interest, and whom he then forsakes or dismisses with an indifference which the reader does not share. It is as though a painter painted into his canvas numerous figures which he has never finished, though he sends out his picture as a finished work. The only novels of his which are entirely free from this defect are theCigarette Maker, theThree Fates, andMarzio's Crucifix, and here I cannot resist (though it is not within the scope of this article, since its venue is America) pointing out how delicate, subtle, and clever is that story entitled theThree Fates. There is little movement in it, no incident of any note, its interest lies entirely in the development of character and in the evolution of feeling, but these are so treated that they suffice to hold the reader's charmed attention, and the study of the man whose hesitations andtergiversations make the subject of it is one which may be caviare to the general, but which may be read again and again with sympathy and curiosity by those who can appreciate psychological problems. The persons in it are such as we may have known to-day or may know to-morrow; and the working of their minds and inclinations is traced with a masterly skill, and is as correct as a physiologist's diagram of the nervous system.
What to me is especially attractive in Mr Crawford's novels is the atmosphere of good breeding which one breathes in them. One feels in the company of a well-bred man. Their philosophy, their experiences, their views, are all those of a man of the world; and there is in them a tolerance and a total absence of prejudice (except in religious and political matters) which are refreshing, and which are a fair approach to, if not an actual attainment of, unbiassed liberality. There is in them no enthusiasm for anything, no altruism, no deep emotion. They are unfortunately entirely lacking in any perception of those myriads of other lives not human, but as sentient as the human, such as vibrates in every line of Pierre Loti's works. We have never in his novels any profound tenderness like that with which the Frères Rosny speak of the semi-humanity of inanimate things, or show us the dog gambolling on the wayside turf in all the simple joy of its youth and its pleasure in existence. To Mr Crawford as to Peter Bell, a primrose by the river's side is a primrose, and it is nothing more, and the thrush or the linnet which sings in the hawthorn above the primrose roots for him has no existence.He has the American's indifference to all created things which are not human. There are no animals in his books except two poor terriers (who have their necks broken by the odious lover inTo Leeward), and the unhappy cat, introduced only to be poisoned inTaquisara. There is nothing which indicates that he cares for nature in any of its phases, and he calls the cicala a locust.
In Italy he lives only for the people around him as he would live in Pall Mall, or Broadway, or the Champs Elysées. That passion with which Italy has inspired Shelley, Byron, George Sand, De Musset, Owen Meredith, even the calm analytic mind of Taine, has never touched him. He has never felt the ecstasy which is embodied in that single phrase of Taine's, 'On nage dans la lumière.' One would say that the moonlight shining on the waters of Tiber, under the bridge of St Angelo, is no more to him than a flash-light illumining a grain-elevator on the Hudson. All which is still Italy, of colour, of perfume, of light, of legend, of rapture, of emotion, has wholly escaped him; he has never felt itshysterica passio; he has never known its eternal youth, he has never seen its lost gods rise and walk through its blossoming grass as the star rays shine in the white cups of the narcissus of its fields. But of the people who pass him in the Corso and on the Chiaja, who shake hands with him at Montecitorio and on the Lung' Arno, who lounge and talk with him at the cafés, and the legations, and the public gardens, he is an admirable student, and an admirable photographer.
One of the most admirable of his portraits is that ofthe young Don Orsino, the hero of the novel of that name. Sant' Ilario, like his gallant old father, might be a North German, a Hungarian, or a Scottish noble, his temperament is, indeed, much more northern than southern; but Don Orsino,[5]his son, is exactly that which he is represented to be, a youthful Italian of high rank, who has been educated at an English public school, and has all the vanity, and egotism, andsècheresse de cœurof modern youth in him. The type of the modern youngster of rank was never so well drawn as in this story of hisdébutin speculation and his failure in it. His character is one very difficult to draw, that coldness, that self-reliance, that self-sufficiency, which are something at once harder and less contemptible than conceit, the qualities which will make him successful later on but will never make him lovable or tender; the instincts of race which hold him back from meanness but are not strong enough to raise him to nobility, attenuated as they have been by modern education, all these are rendered with the utmost skill till the boy, in his sterile and self-satisfied modernity, lives before us, and vain and selfish though he be, we are loth to part from him, and curious to know what his future will become. In his history that one supreme charm of Mr Crawford's, of which I have previously spoken, his naturalness, is conspicuous; nothing can be more natural than the relations of Don Orsino with his mother and father and those who surround him, andthe craftyaffaristiwho get him into their meshes of speculation.
What is not natural in this story is the character of Madame d'Aranjuez. She comes before us instinct with all which goes to make up an unscrupulous adventuress. She is that, or she is nothing. She does her uttermost to fascinate and capture the son of Saracinesca. She succeeds; and lo! with one of thosevolte-faceswhich are so frequent and so irritating in Mr Crawford's works, she gives up the game when she has won it, does nothing that we expect her to do, and marries the speculator who has beggared Don Orsino on condition that this gentleman shall restore to Don Orsino all he has lost. Nothing more improbable or inconsistent, given the character of the woman, could possibly be conceived; nor is it more probable that the haughty and irascible young man would endure to be served by her mediation, however it might be veiled. Everything surrounding this lady promises us passion, intrigue, perhaps tragedy, certainly peril, but we are balked of them all. The mysteries concerning her turn out to be very tame ones indeed, she appears a wholly innocent and harmless person, and even a very large paper-knife shaped like a dagger, which we are told always lies beside her and which has noraison d'être, unless it is to be ultimately used in killing or defending somebody, does nothing whatever and disappears from the story, leaving us in tantalising ignorance of why we were ever introduced to it.
Now no French writer of any degree would have created that remarkable paper-knife, and kept it lying beside the heroine, and laid stress on its unusual sizeand splendour, unless he intended to turn it to account as adeus ex machina. To draw the reader's attention to a conspicuous object, and then to cheat the expectations raised concerning it, is a great fault in art; but it is one of which English and American writers are continually guilty. It is true we are told casually, towards the end, that her husband had hit her with this paper-knife, and that for this blow the famous fencer Spicca had killed him; but this is mentioned incidentally, and does not sufficiently account for the interest we have been excited to take in this weapon. Spicca is, on the contrary, admirably drawn, and the regard we feel for the merciless old duellist is roused in us with true art. We have that sense of Spicca having really lived, and really been that which he is described, which can only be aroused in a reader by life-like accurate and sympathetic portraiture.
There are many pathetic touches in this portrait of Spicca, and little incidents entirely true to the life of an Italian gentleman of aristocratic race and straitened means, as when in his distress of mind his servant persuades him to eat 'a little mixed fry' with a fresh salad, 'the salad is very good to-day'; and Spicca, touched and refreshed, examines his meagre purse and takes out a ten-franc note which he gives to the man, remarking that it will buy him a pair of boots, and this ten-franc note is, when his purse lies on the table at night, slipped back into it by the servant, who knows that his master 'never counts.'
I think the most exquisitely drawn of all Mr Crawford's many characters is this Count Spicca; because the character of a noted duellist who invariablykills, and kills how and in what way he chooses, with profound indifference and unerring accuracy, is one very hard to make sympathetic to the general reader, and especially to the English reader, by whom duelling is abhorred. But Spicca is so perfect a gentleman, so sad and simple and calm, so natural and unassuming despite his deadly power, that no one can regard him without interest and even affection, and see him without sorrow ill-treated by a woman so extremely unpleasant as Consuelo Aranjuez, for whom he has done and suffered so much.
The fencing of Mr Crawford is always very accurate, and we hold our breath when Leone Saracinesca acts as his son's second. All this is quite true to life in Italy, where duels with the sabre or rapier are still of daily occurrence, and are resorted to after any insult, and after a mere difference of opinion or trivial impoliteness.
It is wonderful that these stories have not been appropriated for the stage by those unscrupulous thieves the London dramatists, for they are full of dramatic situations and of duologues in which the give and take is brilliant. Some have indeed the dramatic effect of inconsistency of which I have spoken, but all are full of fine suggestions for the theatre.Saracinesca, orSant' Ilario, for instance, would be transferable to the stage with scarcely any alteration. It is full of incidents which would be most effective on the stage; and the strong emotions and sensational scenes which it offers would most certainly thrill and charm an audience.
One wonders also that their author himself does notwrite for the stage, for his command of incident and of intricacies of circumstance would raise him high above many playwrights of the London theatre. There are scenes in nearly all his works which might be put upon the boards with scarcely any alteration, such as the duel between Don Giovanni and Del Ferice inSaracinesca, and the death scene of the librarian Meschini inSant' Ilario, while the whole story ofThe Children of the Kingwould furnish matter for a romantic drama were the causes for the crime in it made more credible.
Here let me note a small but irritating fault in these works,i.e., the childish habit (common to writers of the last century) of naming characters after their calling, or after some moral characteristic. Meschini is the plural of the Italian adjective mean, cowardly, or contemptible, and is given to a man with these defects; while a very interesting person, a French artist famous in portraiture, is unfortunately burdened with the ridiculous and impossible name of Gouache. Mr Crawford is indeed frequently infelicitous in names. InCasa Braccio, the American lover of Gloria, a stagey sort of person, but one whom we are invited to regard with admiration and sympathy, is weighted with the shocking name of Griggs. Mr Crawford does not see that were Othello or Hamlet called Griggs, either would try to move the souls of men in vain. If a name does not matter to a rose, it does matter immensely to a character in a book; and there are so many euphonious names in use in the world that it is wholly unpardonable to select a ludicrous or ugly one. The poor little natural child of Gloria in this same novel is also burdened at itsbirth by the name of Walter Crowdie, which, for a baby, has such a comical effect that the very pathetic position of this poor infant is rendered ridiculous by it. It is perhaps under the idea of being realistic that these droll names are selected to jar on tragic circumstances, but then Mr Crawford's stories are not realistic, and cannot be made so by this one expedient.
He has also another fault which is visible in nearly all his works, and is a grave one. He forgets at times the attributes which he has given to his chief characters. Thus Giovanni Saracinesca is described as a man of strong, noble, and reticent nature, and of intellect so superior that his wife tells him he will be very great some day; and he resembles, indeed, precisely, one of those men who become great leaders of other men. But in the sequel (where he is called Sant' Ilario) all this changes, and he behaves like an idiot, and of his great qualities we hear no more and certainly see nothing. And where we still farther follow his fortunes in the subsequent sequel ofDon Orsino, he has sunk into complete self-effacement, so complete that he allows his son to be the associate and the debtor of that very Del Ferice whose utter baseness and vileness he knows so well, and who tried in the famous duel to murder him by foul play. Sequels are always ill-advised trials of the author's consistency and the reader's memory, and it would have been unquestionably better to have made Don Orsino stand alone in his history and not figure as the son of Giovanni Saracinesca and of Corona d'Astrardente. When a reader has followed with interest and sympathy the fortune of an impassioned lover it is trying to see himstanding in St Peter's 'a middle-aged man,' talking to a son taller than himself. Great art is required to make a character 'grow' quite consistently. The continuation of histories, thus, greatly pleased Anthony Trollope and Thackeray, but I cannot consider it a desirable thing in fiction.
Mr Crawford misses many opportunities of developing the capacity for analysis and deduction which he undoubtedly possesses. He is very observant but he is content to note a fact, he does not trouble himself to seek its origin or the influences which have made it the fact it is. When the two young people who wish to marry inMarzio's Crucifixdiscuss what their house shall be like, and what colour the walls and furniture, their biographer adds, 'Italians have lost all sense of colour.' This is true, but it is one of the most amazing, grievous, and extraordinary truths that exist; it is one for which I search in vain and in perplexity for an explanation. But Mr Crawford does not seek for any explanation. He states the fact and passes to another subject.
Again, in this sentence he begins well: 'It is of no use to deny the enormous influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the present day. Something might be gained indeed if we could trace the causes which have made gambling especially the vice of our generation. But I do not believe this is possible.' That is to say, he does not care to be at the trouble of such an investigation, even though he adds the acute sentence that most of the men and women of the world of pleasure in our times exhibit 'the peculiar and unmistakable signs of physical exhaustion, chief of which is cerebral anæmia. They are overtrained andoverworked, in the language of training they are "stale."'
He says in another place, 'Italians have no imagination.' This is but partially true; I am not sure that it is true at all. Their modern poetry is beautiful, more beautiful than that of any other nation. Their popular songs are poetic and impassioned as those of no other nation are, and one may hear among their peasantry expressions of singular beauty of sentiment and phrase. A woman of middle age, a contadina, said to me once, 'So long as one's mother lives, one's youth is never quite gone, for there is always somebody for whom one is young.' A rough, rude man, a day labourer, who knew not a letter, and spent all his life bent over his spade or plough, said to me once, one lovely night in spring, as he looked up at the full moon, 'How beautiful she is! But she has no heart. She sees us toiling and groaning and suffering down here, and she is always fair and calm, and never weeps!' Another said once, when a tree was hard to fell, 'He is sorry to come away, it has been his field so long.' And when a flock of solan geese flew over our lands, going from the Marches to the mountains on their homeward way, and descended to rest, the peasants did not touch them: 'They are tired, poor souls,' said one of the women; 'one must not grudge them the soil for their lodging.' Surely such ideas as these in people wholly uneducated indicate imagination in the speakers?
And what can he possibly mean by no poets, which he says in another place? Has he never read a line of Carducci? Much as we may mourn and resent Carducci's turncoat and reactionarypolitics, no one can deny that he is a poet of the purest kind. Has he never heard the ringing stanzas of Cavallotti which sound like a clarion through the land? Has he never studied the exquisite if too erotic odes of D'Annunzio, or the touching verse of Stecchetti? There are others besides these who are true and fine poets also; and even in the ordinary verses written for newspapers (which in other countries are so poor and tawdry) there is frequently in Italy a true and delicate feeling and an adorable lyrical harmony which make one mourn to see things so fair wasted on so ephemeral a life.
It is through their imagination still more than by their vanity that Italians are led by unscrupulous political flattery and cajoled into disastrous political enterprises. They will believe anything if it be sufficiently captivating to their self-admiration and their fancy, and will dance blindfold on the brink of a bottomless pit. It is only an imaginative people who love so wildly, and kill themselves so madly for affection's sake, as the Italian people do. The other day, because a young soldier was sent to Africa, his brother killed himself in despair, and the father of the two youths then killed himself also. It is an inflammable imagination which makes the nation so easily led away by the promises and the phantasmagoria of glory with which unscrupulous statesmen have enticed it to the brink of ruin. It was its imagination which made it so credulous that when told by its victors that the disgraceful surrender of Makale was a victory, it believed and rejoiced, illuminated and hungout flags, and never saw what a dupe it was being made until cruelly awakened from its delusions by thedérouteof Abbu Carima.
Mr Crawford has lived chiefly in cities, and in the cities, even in Rome, the Italian is much debased by contact with foreigners; the influence of foreigners on Italians is excessively bad, especially American and English influence; and in the cities also the preponderance of Jews is great. Innumerable persons who call themselves by Italian names and speak of Italy as their country are Jews and nothing else. A Finnish Jew known to me buys an Italian estate, and with the estate a title, which, by the payment of a large sum to a complaisant Government, he is allowed to adopt; he is decorated by the king for his munificent 'charities' in the land of his adoption; he marries an English woman, and their children masquerade as Italian nobility with not a single drop of Italian blood in their veins. Such 'Italian nobles' are numerous, unhappily, in modern Italy, and do immeasurable discredit to the nationality which they assume. In a generation or two their origin will be forgotten, and they will be taken by society in general to be what they pretend to be. Thus, unhappily, are great nations caricatured, old titles prostituted, and Italy accredited with sons not her own, with pretended offspring who are not even her bastards; persons who impudently affect her name and boast of her blood, when not one single hair of their head or fibre of their flesh has any affiliation to her.
What stifles Italian imagination, and kills the Italiansoul, is the passion for money; pure acquisitiveness or avarice, for the desire is to get, little or no pleasure is taken in spending. It is often alleged that this passion is due to their poverty; but poverty is not necessarily accompanied by avarice; the Irish people are very poor, but they are extremely generous; the Spanish people are so also. A comical instance of this stinginess occurred the other day at Milan: a rich tradesman had built himself a fine set of new premises, and opened his new establishment with much feasting; he sent fifteen francs to the municipality to be divided among the poor, and everyone applauded his liberality! This love of money, acquisitiveness, niggardliness, or whatever we call it, is too general not to be injurious to the Italian character; and it enters into all daily life and personal acts, and is frequently the chief motor power of marriage, of career, of education. And then added to this injurious power there is another which is more deleterious still, which weakens, debases, and falsifies the character from infancy: it is the direful influence of the Church. But to treat of this matter would occupy too much space, and would lead too far away from the stories of Mr Crawford, in which there is an unfortunate tendency towards approval of what he calls hierarchical government, although a tendency not strongly enough insisted on by him for it to demand minute examination. The powers of Mr Crawford, however, are limited by the narrowness of what is called religion, and the inability to see the higher side of these subversive opinions which he dreads, and which he has done his best to turn intoridicule by putting them into the mouth of the half-mad artist Marzio.
Indeed, his bigotry on religious subjects is very droll to see in these days; and he speaks of 'unbelievers' in a tone worthy of Puritans in the days of theMayflowerpilgrims. It does not agree with the tone of his books, which is invariably the tone of a man of the world; as such he should possess that liberality of thought which is the chief, perhaps the only, virtue of his generation; and if he had possessed it he would undoubtedly have reached a much higher level, a much finer ideal, than he has actually done. It would seem as if he distrusted and checked the larger intelligence in him, as an over-cautious rider distrusts and checks a horse which only asks to be given a free rein to go at speed over a wide pasture; it would seem as if some extraneous 'influence' were always at his elbow to keep his reason cribbed, cabined and confined.
His religious prejudices have contributed to arrest his intellectual development, for they are puritanical and antiquated in a singular and lamentable degree. He speaks ofliberi pensatorias the Church elders of Maine or Massachusetts might have done in the days of witch-torturing and atheist-burning. He thinks that the future great war will be between what he calls believers and unbelievers; and he looks forward with joy to the coming conflict when men shall again fly at each other's throat for the glory of God. This kind of mental cecity has its inevitable results: it makes him step lamely where he would otherwise walk with manly alacrity, and it makes him afraid to face the light of facts which his truer instincts tellhim are existing and incontrovertible. Is this the result of early education, of hereditary inclinations, of female or ecclesiastical influence? I do not know; but come whence it may, this taint of bigotry obscures his intelligence and stops his progress, and is matter of profound regret to those who see what he would have been without it.
Many passages in his works show that he has perceived and grasped the universal dominance of that corruption which so fatally exists in all Italian life, and one could wish that he would make a more complete exposure of it. Take this account of how the banker, Del Ferice, obtained the decoration for a syndic who was one of his political supporters:—
'Del Ferice, left to himself, returned to the question of the mayor's decoration. If he failed to get the man what he wanted, the fellow would doubtless apply to someone of the opposite party, would receive the coveted honour, and would take the whole voting population with him at the next general election, to the total discomfiture of Del Ferice.It was necessary to find some valid reason for proposing him for the distinction. He could not decide what to do just then, but he ultimately hit upon a successful plan. He advised his correspondent to write a pamphlet upon the rapid improvement of agricultural interests in his district under the existing Ministry, and he even went so far as to compose and send some notes on the subject. These notes proved to be so voluminous and complete, that when the mayor had copied them he could not find a pretextfor adding a single word or correction. They were printed upon excellent paper with ornamental margins under the title ofOnward, Parthenope!The mayor got his decoration and Del Ferice was re-elected, but no one has ever inquired into the truth of the statements contained in the pamphlet.'
'Del Ferice, left to himself, returned to the question of the mayor's decoration. If he failed to get the man what he wanted, the fellow would doubtless apply to someone of the opposite party, would receive the coveted honour, and would take the whole voting population with him at the next general election, to the total discomfiture of Del Ferice.
It was necessary to find some valid reason for proposing him for the distinction. He could not decide what to do just then, but he ultimately hit upon a successful plan. He advised his correspondent to write a pamphlet upon the rapid improvement of agricultural interests in his district under the existing Ministry, and he even went so far as to compose and send some notes on the subject. These notes proved to be so voluminous and complete, that when the mayor had copied them he could not find a pretextfor adding a single word or correction. They were printed upon excellent paper with ornamental margins under the title ofOnward, Parthenope!The mayor got his decoration and Del Ferice was re-elected, but no one has ever inquired into the truth of the statements contained in the pamphlet.'
These passages and others similar give one the conviction that Mr Crawford, if he had 'let himself go,' might have been a satirist of no slight force. He has preferred to write charming stories, ingenious in construction, but slight in development, to amuse his generation; yet there is, I think, abundant evidence that he might have done stronger things, perhaps may do them still. He has preferred to lead a seagull's life, skimming the surface of the deep and shunning its storms. But he might have led the petrel's. Probably all the influences of an agreeable social existence have tended to make him indolent and unwilling to raise tempests in it. Few resist the pressure of a social atmosphere. His book calledWith the Immortals, marred as it is by the incongruity and impossibility of its setting, shows that he can reflect if he likes, and can express his reflections. If this work had been cast in such a form as Mr Mallock'sNew Republic, or Sir Arthur Helps'Friends in Council, or Christopher North'sNoctes Ambrosianæit would have been remarkable for the arguments and dialogues contained in it. But the ghost-element, the supernatural scenic effects, kill its excellence. Dr Johnson, Heine, Pascal, Bayard, François de Valois and Cæsar are too ill-assorted for us to accept themin each other's company, and the idea of these dead men being all able to converse in English, and all doomed to wear through ages the clothes they wore in life, is so comical that it destroys all interest and illusion which their conversation otherwise might excite. There is a regrettable inability in Mr Crawford to perceive the ridiculous. He lacks humour, and the perception of the incongruous is not alive in him; nor is there either any poetic feeling in his way of regarding life. He is essentially a citizen of the world as the world exists in this last quarter of the fast-fading century, and the Sirens sing not for him, though he dwells upon their shores.
Let him, therefore, appreciate more thoroughly his own very admirable powers, and confine himself to painting the men and women of his time and class, with all that cosmopolitan knowledge of them which he possesses. I should like to see from him an Italian novel of modern political life. He has, I make no doubt, had ample opportunities of studying its machinery and its intrigues. He can dissect with so much subtlety and correctness the brain and the temper of such a man as Del Ferice, that there can be no doubt a political novel from him, placed in Rome, would have alike accuracy and interest and irony. But he must clear his mind of some of its cobwebs, and he must realise that the 'unbelievers' and revolutionists, who at present horrify him, constitute the keenest intellectual element in Italy, indeed, the only healthy one, and contain the only hope there is, if this be but a feeble one, of any attainment by the nation in the future to any true liberty and cleanliness in political aims.
I cannot conclude these few remarks upon his Italian stories without a word of thanks to him for the pleasant hours he has often given me, and the gallery of interesting portraits with which he has enriched the memory of all those who read his novels.
At the opening ceremony of a new free library at Lambeth in London, not many weeks ago, Sir John Lubbock is reported to have made the following remarks regarding fiction:—
'Sir J. Lubbock, in moving a vote of thanks to the Prince of Wales and the Princess Louise, remarked that the free libraries of London now contained more than 250,000 books, whilst last year over 100,000 people borrowed volumes, and on more than 2,500,000 occasions books were used in the libraries themselves. It was a fallacy to suppose that public libraries were only used by novel readers. The proportion of works of fiction used in the Camberwell libraries was only 65 per cent., and, of course, in this percentage were included nearly all the books used by children. It must also be borne in mind that it took a great deal longer to read a history or a work of science than it did to run through a story. Under these circumstances he thought it might fairly be said that the people of London exercised a very good choice in the books they read. He himself should be very sorry toundervalue novels. Even nonsense was extremely refreshing, and he thought the English people had learnt more of their history from novels and from Shakespeare's plays than from books of history.'
'Sir J. Lubbock, in moving a vote of thanks to the Prince of Wales and the Princess Louise, remarked that the free libraries of London now contained more than 250,000 books, whilst last year over 100,000 people borrowed volumes, and on more than 2,500,000 occasions books were used in the libraries themselves. It was a fallacy to suppose that public libraries were only used by novel readers. The proportion of works of fiction used in the Camberwell libraries was only 65 per cent., and, of course, in this percentage were included nearly all the books used by children. It must also be borne in mind that it took a great deal longer to read a history or a work of science than it did to run through a story. Under these circumstances he thought it might fairly be said that the people of London exercised a very good choice in the books they read. He himself should be very sorry toundervalue novels. Even nonsense was extremely refreshing, and he thought the English people had learnt more of their history from novels and from Shakespeare's plays than from books of history.'
In these few sentences there are embraced the views entertained in general by the English nation with regard to the art of fiction. By the English nation it is, and probably always will be, regarded as on a par with chromo-lithography, the use of the kodak, and tight-rope dancing.
'Even nonsense is refreshing,' says this kind defender of romance. He might have added that this depends very much on the character of the nonsense; there is dull nonsense, strained nonsense, self-conscious nonsense, vulgar nonsense, which is duller than a dull sermon and heavier than heavy bread; the nonsense which dilates and delights the heart of the coarse and common fool, is as a stagnant and stinking pond to the cultured mind; and true nonsense,i.e.,jeux d'esprit, caricatures, parodies, 'exquisite fooling,' does not come under the head of novels at all.
Someone had apparently been objecting to the creation of free libraries on the score that they were chiefly used by readers of fiction, and in support of such libraries Sir John Lubbock (not venturing to make so heterodox an assertion as that the perusal of fictionper seis valuable and desirable) pleads that only sixty-five per cent. of the books borrowed were novels, and refers to the rapidity with which a novel can be 'run through,' as he phrases it, and proceeds,as an excuse for the perusal of fiction, to state that the English public chiefly derives its knowledge of history from novels and from Shakespeare's plays. This declaration, which is enough to make Mr Freeman turn in his grave, and Mr Froude writhe in his professorial chair, is, I believe, based on an exact truth, but it never appears to occur to the speaker that while the history to be learned from fiction and the drama is not of the purest kind, the fine art of an admirable book, as of an admirable play, contains many another lesson more valuable than even those of correct history to the reader who is capable of assimilating and appreciating it.
Sir John Lubbock kindly adds that he should be 'very sorry to undervalue novels.' Sweet and gracious condescension! He would be sorry to 'undervalue' Boccaccio, Cervantes, Guerrazzi, Théophile Gautier, Merimée, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, Walter Scott, Fielding, Octave Feuillet, Georges Sand, and Bulwer Lytton! Admirable benevolence! A treatise on the ways of ants or bees must, of course, rank as an infinitely higher work than a mere study of the manners, characters, and passions of mankind. To peruse the former work is education; to read the latter work is recreation, not absolutely injurious, perhaps, but scarcely beneficial. Sir John Lubbock on an ant-hill has the sublimity of the scientist: Alphonse Daudet on human nature is a mere trumpery trifler.
It does not appear even to occur to Sir John Lubbock that a fine novel contains intellectual qualities of the highest kind, and combines in itselfthe widest effects and the most delicate minutiæ of creative art. A fine novel should be no more 'run through' than the sculptures of the Vatican or the pictures of the Uffizi should be run through in ignorance and haste: common readers, like common tourists, may do so, but to do so is as gross and unpardonable an insult to the book as it is to the sculptures and the paintings.
Reflect but a moment upon all the divers and numerous qualities which are of necessity existent in the creator of a fine novel before it can be produced; not only imagination but wit, not only wit but scholarship, not only scholarship but fancy, not only fancy but discrimination, observation, knowledge of the passions, sympathy with the most opposite temperaments, the power to call up character from the void, as the sculptor creates figures from the clay, and, for amalgamating, condensing, and vivifying all these talents, the mastery of an exquisite subtlety, force, and eloquence in language. All these various gifts must be united in one writer before a fine novel can be produced; and when it is produced it requires (to be duly estimated) as cultured and as respectful a study of it as an educated traveller would take to the Vatican or to the Uffizi.
I have derived month by month, as it has appeared in theRévue des Deux Mondes, the most delicate and acute pleasure from the perusal ofLe Secret du Précepteur, yet it is a pleasure which can only be obtained from it by a serene, leisurely, artistic enjoyment of its exquisite literary qualities. It is like a wine of which the bouquet can only be appreciated byeducated palates. There is but little movement in it; the incident is slight, the situations derive their fascination for the reader not from their violence or their singularity, but from their perfect probability, and from their psychological interests; and the whole tone of it is kept carefully throughout to the smooth bantering semi-gouailleurtone of the opening recital. Ah, that style!—clear as water, delicate, full of grace, limpid, harmonious, exquisite! It has all the polished charm of the man of the world, and all the eloquence and brilliancy of the artist. I have heard a great ambassador in a beautiful tapestried chamber play the music of Schumann and Chopin and Bach with admirable and sympatheticmaestria; the style of Cherbuliez reminds me of thatdiplomât-virtuose. We hear incessantly of the magical style of Paul Bourget; but beside the style of Cherbuliez that of Bourget is strained, tortuous, affected, artificial. The supreme excellence of that of Cherbuliez is its consummate ease, like the ease of a perfect manner in society. To employ all the resources of such a style is as great a delight to the master of it as the use of the rapier to the master of fencing, as the handling of the plastic clay to the sculptor. To relate a narrative in such a style is as warm and full a pleasure to the possessor of it as it is to the painter to create a winter's night or summer's day, youth or age, dawn or moonlight, a dance of nymphs, or a frolic of fauns, out of a few ground earths, a little oil, and a square of canvas. But to appreciate it the reader of it must bring with him some qualities on his own behalf.
There are in it none of those Anglicisms so irritatingin the works of Bourget and others, such as Henry for Henri, Francis for François, 'window' for 'fenêtre,' 'le cab stoppait' for 'le fiacre s'arrêtait,' and so many similar disfigurements of the most polished and elegant language of the world. The temptation to use a foreign language is great when its expressions are such as no other language can equally well render. But who can think that 'cab' is better than 'fiacre,' or 'window' than 'fenêtre'? The French of Cherbuliez is the French of an elegant writer, of a man of the world, and is, beside that of 'les jeunes,' as a pure and limpid river beside a crooked and choked-up stream. Without their professorial jargon of psychology or their strained analysis, which so greatly fatigues the reader and resembles nothing so much as the efforts of a cyclist to run smoothly on a stony road,Le Secret du Précepteuris full of delicate and interesting studies of the human mind and character. Its especial triumph is to excite and retain the interest of the reader in a character which in the hands of most writers would have been either insignificant or absurd.
The teller of the story is the preceptor himself, who, unlovely in face and form, filling a subordinate and somewhat absurd position, frankly confessing his own follies and errors, is yet the most lovable and the most dignified of men; the intellectual grace of the scholar and the philosopher wholly atoning for and effacing the inferiority of place and the deformity of features. He tells us of his own extreme ugliness, so that we are not deluded into thinking it abelle laideur, but accept it as what he calls it, an ugliness which, coupled with poverty, would scare all womenaway from him all the years of his life; but, despite of it, we feel the irresistible charm of his personality, we admire his tact, we adore his unselfishness, we are as delighted by his self-restraint as by his courage and his will, and we take leave of him with the regret which we feel when we part for an indefinite period from a companion of the finest culture and the warmest sympathies. We regret also that, like most unselfish persons, he is forced to be content with the crumbs of happiness instead of its bread. It is strictly true to life that he should receive no more; it proves the author a true artist that he has been able to resist the temptation of giving so attractive a character a happy and unnatural fate, and we who know how the awards of life are proportioned, know that it is entirely in keeping both with art and truth that thebon chienshould receive no more than the good dog usually gets in recompense for his fidelity. We know that it could not be otherwise; yet we regret the necessity for leaving the good dog with his dry broken crusts.
I regard the extreme interest and attachment with which this character inspires us as one of the greatest triumphs of fiction, because its attraction is stripped of all the adventitious aids to interest which accompany beauty, rank, or position. We have a plain, poor man, in a paltry and invidious situation, who conquers all which is against him as a hero of romance, and arrives at the highest place in the reader's esteem and affection by mere force of natural dignity, excellence of heart, and the irresistible superiority of wit and intellect. He is throughout all his actions, moreover, entirely natural. It is difficult, in reading hisaccount of them, to believe that he is a fictitious character; all that he does and says is so real, so human. No one who readsTerre PromiseorCœur de Femmeis ever for an instant tempted to think that the characters ever did live or ever could have lived; they arecartonnages, lay figures, draped in clothes from the costume maker's, and moving in obedience to the hand of their manipulator. But as Maupassant's Pierre et Jean are living, as Loti's Gaud and Fatougay live, as Rod's Michael Teissier lives, as the delicious Yette lives, so, and with even more vitality than they, the tutor Tristan lives in this admirable novel. And all the people around him live in this country house near Epernay, which is the scene of nearly all his joys and sufferings. We wish, indeed, that this scene never changed; so well does its landscape accord with the narrative, that one wishes the unities could have been preserved to the end. One regrets the change of venue when the story is carried to Paris. It is perhaps probable that the end is not what was originally intended by Cherbuliez.
It is a story which it is very difficult to end artistically. In point of fact it is not ended at all; it is only broken off at a certain crisis, and leaves the reader in the persuasion that Monique will have many adventures, and her 'bon chien' and her husband many anxieties. The fault in it, if fault there is, seems to me to be that, if this crisis had been contemplated from the beginning, the character of Louis Moufrin, extremely natural as far as it goes, should have been rendered a little more heroic, so that more interest would have attached to his transformationunder the stings of jealousy. If this were not done thecoup de pistoletshould have been given, not by him, but by the preceptor; indeed, since Tristan tells us early in his story that he is a very fine pistol-shot, we are always expecting him to prove his skill on someone, and one could wish that he had exercised it as he desired to do on the odious coxcomb, Triguères. The impression is irresistibly made on the reader's mind that this was thedénouementoriginally contemplated by the author, and it would have been one stronger and more satisfactory. But perhaps he renounced it from the feeling that tragedy as a climax would have jarred on the harmony of a book which is throughout kept to the good-humoured and jesting tone of cultured society.
It would take many pages to do justice to the other persons of the novel; all are admirably drawn; there is only some exaggeration in that of Madame Moufrin,mère. But the cheery and generous merchant Brogues, the high-bred, high-borndévotewho is his wife, the charming priest Verlet, the shy, silent, tender-hearted and timid Moufrin, the inimitable portrait of the learned, excellent and insufferable Sidonie, and lastly, the entirely uncommon conception of the captious and provokingpetite Japonaise, who rules her faithful two-legged dog with a rod of iron; all these are admirably pourtrayed, even if they yield in importance to the central figure of the preceptor himself. The finest and most complicated study of them all is that of Madame Brogues, with her piety, her sensuality, her instinctive patrician revolt against the monotony of a bourgeois interior, her complex and scornfulnature, her mingled indifference and tenderness for her daughters, the union of touching maternal sadness and devotion to the superior claims ofchiffons, which traits are so admirably depicted in her last meeting with her younger daughter Monique.
Cherbuliez has, it is plain to see, been much struck with the large place whichchiffonsoccupy in the lives of women of the world, and with the power of consolation which the interests of the toilette possess for them. The mother and daughter are both extremely touched by their accidental meeting (the first since the elopement of the former and the marriage of the latter); but this meeting takes place in the Exhibition building in Paris, and their emotions do not prevent them from studying, discussing, and purchasing beautiful fabrics. It is exactly the union of conflicting feelings which is really to be observed in life: the mingling of deep sentiment and sincere regret with interests of a totally different kind which appear trivial but are really absorbing distractions, perhaps frivolous, but entirely natural, arising from those cares and pleasures of personal appearance which are indestructible in theéléganteby anything short of death.
There is also another passage which equally illustrates the ability and insight of the author in his perception and representation of that dual motive, that twin yet conflicting sentiment, which so frequently moves us and so especially characterises the modern mind, which is frequently complex and artificial, trivial and analytic, and thereby incapable of a single, or of a simple, emotion. Sidonie, a very proud, chaste, and implacable maiden, is stung to the core by herdiscovery of her mother's flight; the thought of what the neighbours and the servants will think is torture to her, and a generous and genuine grief for the blow to her father moves her to the first tears which she has ever shed. But still the idea, the knowledge that since she means never to marry, she is now and will be for ever supreme mistress of her father's house is a source of irresistible pleasure and consolation, and as she goes upstairs she cannot resist, even on this terrible night, exercising her first despotic and unshared power. Her mother, who loved softness and shadow, had always insisted on the electric lamp at the foot of the staircase being shaded and softened by folds of rose-coloured stuff, Sidonie had the rose-coloured stuff taken away, and even on this first evening of her reign the undimmed and intense radiance of the unveiled light proclaims the change of domestic government, and the absolute authority of the new ruler. This is one of the many exquisite finenesses of touch which reveal the delicacy of observation in the writer throughout this novel, and can be only appreciated by a reader who brings to it that attention and capacity which Sir John Lubbock and his audience would think it only worth while to devote to a treatise on the stalk-eyed crustacea or a monograph upon the household flea.
M. Jules Lemaitre, in his story ofLes Rois, says with a sneer that one of his personages was 'née pour gouter Auber, Cabanel, et les romans de laRévue des Deux Mondes.' Now in his own volume, entitledLes Rois, published this season, and received with great curiosity in Paris, M. Jules Lemaitre has merely mixed up the tragedy of Meyerling, the mystery ofJohann Orth, and recent well-known card and debt scandals concerning living princes; and, having reproduced with these the individuality of Louise Michel, the life of Kropotkine, and the career of a well-known financier, he has introduced some essays on social and political problems into his reproductions of these personages, dated the whole 1900, and called it a novel. But it is not a novel, for the imagination does not enter into it. It is a photograph, or a travesty, whatever the reader may please to call it, of actual recent modern events, thinly disguised, but unjustly exaggerated, and an almost impudent imitation in many ways of Daudet'sRois en Exil. There is some brilliant writing in it, and some fine thoughts and expressions, which is, of course, always the case when the writer is so intelligent a man as Lemaitre, but a novel it is not; it is a series of scenes, almost all borrowed or imitated from well-known events; it is a patchwork with little harmony in its arrangement, and it has the supreme fault of introducing long descriptions of anterior events, and bringing in new characters, at the close of the action. There is also one suggestion, if not more, concerning a royal person, so horrible that it seems unfair and even cruel to make it of one who cannot resent it or defend herself. The date of the story may be called 1900, but the events on which it is built have already been lived through by conspicuous characters.
It is not becoming, therefore, in so immature a story-teller as M. Lemaitre proves himself to be, and one who is obliged to go for his incidents to the scandals of courts, to sneer at the novels of theRévuedes Deux Mondes, in which, to go no further back than last year, such admirable works asLa Vie Privét de Michael TeissierandLe Secret du Précepteurhave first seen the light. To be a critic of it is much easier than to be a creator of fine fiction; to pull to pieces requires lesser qualities than to construct.
In the past twenty months there have been some very fine novels in French literature.A l'Abîme, by Paul Vassili, is a masterpiece of originality, and the character of the great egoist, who is its hero, is matchless in its intuition, its philosophy, and its realism; it is a narrative of intense interest without its having any other source for its interest than that which lies in following the evolution of a type wholly new in literature, and the crystallisation of a naturally generous nature into a complete philosophic selfishness through circumstances which lead to its moral isolation amidst the full success of a triumphant career.AmantsandLa Force des Choses, of Paul Margueritte, are beautiful novels, remarkable for originality of conception, correctness of observation, and the talent of interesting the reader in perfectly natural events. The former in especial is full of truth, poetic feeling, and novelty of situation and of character; it is entirely a story of love, but it is love pourtrayed with equal sympathy and comprehension, and embracing scenes entirely dramatic whilst entirely natural. If Sir John Lubbock will read these three books and end withLe Secret du Précepteur, he will, I think, feel bound to admit that such works require for their due appreciation quite as much attentive respect in their perusal, and quite as many intellectual and perceptivequalities in their reader, as the analysis, however interesting, of a wasp's social habits, and the diary, however delightful, of a caged bluebottle's appetite. The study of earthworms demands, no doubt, the exercise of much higher faculties than are necessary for the study of human nature. Still it is difficult to believe that the earthworm can afford such varied and complicated interest as man, and nowhere are the portraiture and analysis of man so ably depicted as in a fine novel.[6]
A French critic has ranked the Frères Rosny amongst the 'authors of to-morrow,' and in a certain sense they, no doubt, belong to the class calledles jeunes, often wrongly, since amongst thesejeunesthere are men of middle age.Les jeunesis an expression which is rather intended to indicate new methods and new views than to describe the actual age of the writers. In a sense everyone belongs toles jeuneswho is emancipated from conventional tradition; but too much stress, too much importance, has been attached to this name; true art is always natural, and this new school is seldom natural; there is more eccentricity of manner in it than there is genuine originality of thought; there is too great an effort, too perpetual a strain in its productions; frequently, as in the case of Maurice Barrés, subtlety of language is employed to conceal absolute poverty of idea; or, as in the case of Georges Ohnet, to clothe mere wooden puppets with a semblance of life byskill in depicting incident; or, as in the case of Paul Bourget, to eke out a slender modicum of incident and idiosyncrasy with charm of style and an imposing psychology, and disarm criticism by euphuism.
In the two Rosnys there are some of the affectations of these writers, but there is none of their poverty of idea. They are full of ideas; full of meditation, of observation, of sympathy, of experience; the narrow limits to which custom confines the novel are far too small for their abundant powers. In portions of their work there is that more artificial mode of treatment, that strain after recondite words and tortuous and archaic methods of expressions, which are the blemish ofles jeunes; but in many other portions their true insight, their deep feeling, and their artistic instincts raise them above this pedantry and enable them to produce certain passages which have few equals in any literature.L'Impérieuse Bontéis a very long book, but the reader would be dull indeed who did not wish it were longer, and who would not feel that the writers had been forced to renounce many scenes and many reflections and descriptions with which their minds were teeming. They convey to their reader their own attachment to their personages; willingly, we feel sure, they could have filled a hundred volumes with the story of their fate; the fountain of their sympathies is fed by an eternal spring. What is most admirable also in them is their remarkable equity; they can see the injustice done to the rich by the poor, as well as that done to the poor by the rich; and this quality of impartial sympathy is very rare. There is abundance in the world of that one-sided sympathy which springs from aparti pris, butthat which is many-sided and perfectly just is very unusual. The Rosnys are capable of it.
The language indeed is at times tortuous, inflated, archaic, after the manner of the modern school; but at other times it loses this mannerism and becomes the clear, limpid, polished French so dear to us. It is never clearer or simpler than in the passages concerning the Lamarques and other sufferers which touch the heart.
The first portion of the book is the finest; the scenes which treat of this family are the greatest as they are the simplest of the whole. Was there ever any passage more pathetic and more real than this description of the last drive in the poor hired vehicle of the dying man and his children?
'Lamarque drew a deep breath under the delicious weight of the freshened air. Strength and peace brushed his tired, sickly frame.'"Ah! I was sure that this would make me well."'A smile came around his diaphanous nostrils, his lips parted with childlike pleasure. Albert felt that heaven and earth were born again in endless life. His soul shone through his blue eyes; he began to laugh and jest with nature. But his mother and Georges only saw more plainly in the luminous light the deadly thinness of Lamarque, and could think of nothing except how they should be able to make up for the expense of the five francs for the cab. They had driven out towards a road which looked mysterious and poetic; limes, acacias, young elms, all kinds of shades of green, were lit by a descendingsun. There were flocks of slender trunks; a dainty philosophy of verdure; high above, pale foliage seemed to drink in the light; then depths where the sun-rays seemed to flow and stream like the nebulæ of comets, where they lay like vapour on which some fragile insect life floated like medusæ on the sea. Already dead leaves were on the ground like the tanned flesh, or the brown fur, of forest creatures. Spiders' webs had the colours of the rainbow; in these birdless trees butterflies lent an illusion of winged life and figured the flight of nestlings. Happiness seemed crystallised in the figure of a woman knitting; in the cry of a distant railway train; in the joy of two children munching pears with their crusts; in the sport of a dog who rolled on the grass with a youthful bark and the eyes of one in love with life. The red frock of a young girl passing by lent a note of force, of splendour, of intensity, to the golden afternoon.'"It is so nice here!" said Albert.'Georges, watching the silvery gossamer webs of the spiders, remembered all the visions he had ever had of liberty and space for kind animals and kind people.'"I am young again!" murmured Lamarque.'He was still pale, but his pallor was less corpse-like. Even the little François listened and enjoyed with a mute delight—mute because shut within himself—and loved his parents, his brothers, the driver, the trees, and the buzzing flies.'"Stop," said the sick man suddenly. It was before a high gate, through which was visible a spectacle of Eden, a large garden.'They could see a great pond, over which therecould float whole broods of delicate dreams; there were tall Lombardy poplars, and the grace of weeping willows. Drooping larches also hung over the water-lilies; there were the thick shade of Canadian poplars, and also the timid murmurs, the sensitive sighs, of aspens. Then there was the charm of woodland life reflected in the water; of the landscape repeated below, symmetrical, and sombre in an abyss of oxidised silver. Then came grassy walks and gentle slopes of turf; further off were clearings in which beautiful trees were half seen, half hidden in misty distance like a promise of abundance and of happiness. The felicity of the place entered into the souls of the poor family who looked on it; they had at once the anguish of feeling that nothing like this would ever be theirs, and the ecstasy of knowing that such beauty did exist.'Standing up in their sorry hired carriage, they gazed in rapture, saying but few words.'"One little corner of this garden would be wealth to us!" sighed the mother.'"That corner—there," said Lamarque.'"One could not eat one's garden," said Albert.'Georges, hypnotised, followed with his eyes the flight of an insect. Poised in the sunlight, the creature was motionless awhile; then descended, ascended, then, swift as a sped arrow, vanished in the shadows. One would wish for such an atom, taking so small a place in creation, the joys, the instincts, the intelligence of a great animal. At anyrate, it symbolises all the enjoyments of life, repose on a leaf, movement, ecstasy of travel through space and towards mystery.'"Ah!" thought Georges, in distress, "even to come and see this, one must have money!"'The hard and heavy thought was like a blow on the tender heart of the boy. Soon this bitterness entered into the souls of all, even of the youngest child.'
'Lamarque drew a deep breath under the delicious weight of the freshened air. Strength and peace brushed his tired, sickly frame.
'"Ah! I was sure that this would make me well."
'A smile came around his diaphanous nostrils, his lips parted with childlike pleasure. Albert felt that heaven and earth were born again in endless life. His soul shone through his blue eyes; he began to laugh and jest with nature. But his mother and Georges only saw more plainly in the luminous light the deadly thinness of Lamarque, and could think of nothing except how they should be able to make up for the expense of the five francs for the cab. They had driven out towards a road which looked mysterious and poetic; limes, acacias, young elms, all kinds of shades of green, were lit by a descendingsun. There were flocks of slender trunks; a dainty philosophy of verdure; high above, pale foliage seemed to drink in the light; then depths where the sun-rays seemed to flow and stream like the nebulæ of comets, where they lay like vapour on which some fragile insect life floated like medusæ on the sea. Already dead leaves were on the ground like the tanned flesh, or the brown fur, of forest creatures. Spiders' webs had the colours of the rainbow; in these birdless trees butterflies lent an illusion of winged life and figured the flight of nestlings. Happiness seemed crystallised in the figure of a woman knitting; in the cry of a distant railway train; in the joy of two children munching pears with their crusts; in the sport of a dog who rolled on the grass with a youthful bark and the eyes of one in love with life. The red frock of a young girl passing by lent a note of force, of splendour, of intensity, to the golden afternoon.
'"It is so nice here!" said Albert.
'Georges, watching the silvery gossamer webs of the spiders, remembered all the visions he had ever had of liberty and space for kind animals and kind people.
'"I am young again!" murmured Lamarque.
'He was still pale, but his pallor was less corpse-like. Even the little François listened and enjoyed with a mute delight—mute because shut within himself—and loved his parents, his brothers, the driver, the trees, and the buzzing flies.
'"Stop," said the sick man suddenly. It was before a high gate, through which was visible a spectacle of Eden, a large garden.
'They could see a great pond, over which therecould float whole broods of delicate dreams; there were tall Lombardy poplars, and the grace of weeping willows. Drooping larches also hung over the water-lilies; there were the thick shade of Canadian poplars, and also the timid murmurs, the sensitive sighs, of aspens. Then there was the charm of woodland life reflected in the water; of the landscape repeated below, symmetrical, and sombre in an abyss of oxidised silver. Then came grassy walks and gentle slopes of turf; further off were clearings in which beautiful trees were half seen, half hidden in misty distance like a promise of abundance and of happiness. The felicity of the place entered into the souls of the poor family who looked on it; they had at once the anguish of feeling that nothing like this would ever be theirs, and the ecstasy of knowing that such beauty did exist.
'Standing up in their sorry hired carriage, they gazed in rapture, saying but few words.
'"One little corner of this garden would be wealth to us!" sighed the mother.
'"That corner—there," said Lamarque.
'"One could not eat one's garden," said Albert.
'Georges, hypnotised, followed with his eyes the flight of an insect. Poised in the sunlight, the creature was motionless awhile; then descended, ascended, then, swift as a sped arrow, vanished in the shadows. One would wish for such an atom, taking so small a place in creation, the joys, the instincts, the intelligence of a great animal. At anyrate, it symbolises all the enjoyments of life, repose on a leaf, movement, ecstasy of travel through space and towards mystery.
'"Ah!" thought Georges, in distress, "even to come and see this, one must have money!"
'The hard and heavy thought was like a blow on the tender heart of the boy. Soon this bitterness entered into the souls of all, even of the youngest child.'
What I have translated as 'oxidised silver' is in the original 'blackened nickel,' one of those unfortunate, grotesque, inharmonious expressions of which there are many in this work. To compare water, the liquid, the mobile, the translucent, to any metal is a strange and unfitting comparison. In this passage, which is serious and poetical, the intrusion of such words as 'blackened nickel' seems offensive, and mars all the impression of the phrase. But it is in this kind of offence to the ear and the intelligence thatles jeunesunhappily revel; they see in such offences signs of emancipation, of realism, of originality, when, in truth, the usage is no sign of anything except of a faulty ear and a lack of judgment.
Throughout the work, however, despite these occasional blemishes, every episode connected with the Lamarques is a masterpiece of pathos and of simplicity, until the last scene of all, when the three children with their mother are about to light the charcoal collected by the little François as it dropped from the waggons when they passed along the quay, and kept in a corner of the miserable room, in readiness for the last hour of all.
The characters of the three boys, so dissimilar and yet united by the vague likeness of race, are drawn witha life-like distinctness: Georges, pensive and philosophic, proud, gentle, observant; Albert, sceptic and scornful, with his passionate sense that, since death killed his father through serving others, there can be no God; and the youngest, François, timid, imaginative, devoted, hiding himself under the table, to still the pangs of hunger with fancies of a lonely fairy isle where neither want nor death should come. These three children offer one of the most perfect pictures of innocent and unmerited suffering which literature can offer, and the limner of them and of their sorrows is a fine writer. Jacques Fougeraye, the central figure of the romance, yields his place to them as its chief interest; and is also perhaps inferior in interest to his unhappy and generous patron Dargelle. One would desire to know through what circumstances a man of the talent and character of Fougeraye comes to be destitute in the streets of Paris; something also of the parentage, education, influences which have gone towards making him what he is. In the same way one would wish to know how Lamarque fell into poverty, how his children became so cultured and refined, how the whole family is aloof in every way from their common and odious kindred.Les jeunesdo not deign to throw light on the antecedents of theirdramatis personæ; they are wrong, for two reasons: one because they thus baulk the natural and legitimate curiosity of their readers; the second, that there is no true psychology (the word they worship) without study of the causes which have contributed to make a man or woman what the observer of them finds them to be. A writer like Gyp may with airy grace jump, as through a circus-hoop,into the middle of the lives of her personages without further explanation, but in a philosophic student of human nature in its sad seriousness such saltatory pranks are unbecoming.
One could well spare the hundreds of pages devoted to long and, one must say, tiresome descriptions of moral and mental states, for a few pages of lucid and graphic information as to the causes which brought the characters of the book to the pass in which we find them at their first appearance. But this is a method of composition too simple, direct, and natural to commend itself toles jeunes. And when on rare occasions they do furnish personal descriptions, these are so wrapped up in anatomical and physiological language that we can conjure up from them little or no real likeness. The characteristic of this new school is an extreme vagueness, an intentional nebulosity. Their personages are never introduced to the reader, nor are they given any pedigree; even personal description of them is of the slightest. They come abruptly on the scene as though they came up through a trap-door. It is left to the intelligence of the reader to supply all the details which the author disdains to furnish. In a book, as in life, one likes to have people duly presented before making their acquaintance; but this is a prejudice which the new school scorns to gratify.
There is a certain tedium in some of the experiences of Fougeraye, such as in his visits to the hospitals and the asylum of misshappen human creatures; and the young woman Louise, a medical student, who has learned to look on death with professional indifference, is so virtuous and self-satisfied that one is indisposed toshare the admiration which Fougeraye feels for her. He himself is so unpretentious, so warm-hearted, so single-minded, and so manly that he deserves a more sympathetic and less vain helpmeet than this female doctor, with her too prosy platitudes and her chill philosophies.
Jeanne Dargelle, whom he rejects, is the least truthful, the most artificial, figure in the book. We are never interested in her. The breath of life has not been breathed into her; and when she kills herself we remain indifferent; we know that in her world women do not kill themselves, and a very proud woman would have found the idea of dying, because her husband's secretary had no love for her, altogether unendurable. We feel also that in real life Fougeraye would probably have shared her passion, and the struggle it would have caused between his temptation, and his loyalty and gratitude to Dargelle, would have been of profound interest. The chapter following on her death, in which Dargelle is alone with her dead body, is very fine, and reflects exactly that strange mixture of emotions and sensations which sway the survivor who passes long hours of solitude beside the corpse of one once dear to him—the trivial incongruities which force themselves in amidst intense regret, the eccentric fancies which dance like marsh-lights over the sombre swamp of a deep despair. Who amongst us has not cried, like Dargelle, 'Pardon, pardon!' from the depths of an aching heart, looking on the dead features of one to whom, in the eyes of the world, we had no fault?
There is in the Rosnys the distressing habit, commonto all the more recent French writers, with few exceptions, of endeavouring to be pedantic, to be involved, to express an idea barbarously and bewilderingly instead of harmoniously and clearly; to sayépidermeinstead ofpeau,véridiqueinstead ofvrai,prunellesinstead ofyeux; to use the jargon of science, the abomination of foreign or technical idioms; to turn away from the natural, the direct, the usual, the obvious, and seek an appearance of profundity in what is merely a confusion of sounds. These affectations, these efforts, spoil many of the pages, and weary the most attentive reader in many of the chapters; as does also the incessant tendency to find similes of the most bizarre and eccentric kind, such as the comparison of dead leaves to the fur of animals; of a simile 'frail as the downy blow-ball of dandelion-seed'; of a sky 'of a powdery blue, with the horizon of an aquarium'; of a heart beating 'like a pear oscillating in a breeze,' and many others as far-fetched, as incongruous, and as grotesque. The excessive use of simile, however apt and exact, is always a fault; but similes as absurd and as strained as are most of those employed by the Rosnys, become a deformity of style, annoy the mind, and disagreeably abstract and distract the thoughts.
A too long, too technical, and too involved description is an inventory which leaves no concrete whole upon the reader's mind; it is a mere conglomeration of items. Take, as an instance, this description of Dargelle's physiognomy; and be it remembered that we never know who or what Dargelle is, how he came by his vast fortune, or anything, indeed, about him, except that he isun pauvre riche, a capitalist, onesupposes, rich by inheritance. Here is the personal description of him:—
'A fat face, sad, meditative; his cheeks fell in; they were flabby. The forehead was a half-circle, with three deep wrinkles, the temples inflamed. The brow was vast but undecided, despite heavy eyebrows above violent eyes. The lips of a wild beast; a short beard which had never grown; flat hair, forming a little patch behind the brow and advancing laterally to the ears. The whole a Finnish face, very pale, with a disposition of the skin to become scaly. The nose long, broad, very irregular, between the snub and the aquiline, the end raised, the bridge bowed. Hardly any back to the head; the neck, like a Celt's, running straight up to the crown. The ears folded backward, stiff, cartilaginous,' etc., etc., etc.
'A fat face, sad, meditative; his cheeks fell in; they were flabby. The forehead was a half-circle, with three deep wrinkles, the temples inflamed. The brow was vast but undecided, despite heavy eyebrows above violent eyes. The lips of a wild beast; a short beard which had never grown; flat hair, forming a little patch behind the brow and advancing laterally to the ears. The whole a Finnish face, very pale, with a disposition of the skin to become scaly. The nose long, broad, very irregular, between the snub and the aquiline, the end raised, the bridge bowed. Hardly any back to the head; the neck, like a Celt's, running straight up to the crown. The ears folded backward, stiff, cartilaginous,' etc., etc., etc.
This long and disagreeable description merely conveys the impression of a monster; and it does not in any way agree with the character of Dargelle, magnanimous, tender, generous, and sensitive; suffering acutely from a sense of utter loneliness amidst the parasites, who trade on his kind feelings. A man of this temperament would not have violent eyes or wild-beast lips; and the elevation of his sentiments would certainly have given some beauty of expression to his features.
Of Jacques Fougeraye, the hero of the work, we are given no description whatever. On the other hand, the portraiture of the frightful occupant of amonsters' asylum is traced in fullest and most minute detail, with an ostentation of technical knowledge, in that passion for what is horrible and abnormal which is characteristic of this school.
Dargelle, morally, is throughout consistent and lovable, from his first movement of suspicion and distrust, feeling that his new favourite will only use him and cheat him, as all the other dispensers of his charities have done, to the last frank smile with which, though jealous of the happiness he has himself created, he says: 'Allons donc! Je vois bien que vous m'aimez aussi.'
The rich man will only have the crumbs of the bread of the soul which is called love, but his generosity is content with it. 'Le pauvre riche!' say the Rosnys, with rare insight into the small consolation which, to those in full possession of them, the powers of wealth can give. Dargelle is unique, and it is almost to be regretted that he should occupy but a secondary place in the narrative. The description of his physical malady is perhaps exaggerated; deafness would scarcely cause such violent moral and mental torture; but the pathos of his last appearance is unexaggerated, and goes to the heart of the reader. By his mere word so many people are made happy, and yet, to secure happiness, even relief, for himself his millions are powerless! This is what many a rich and generous man must have felt. The irony of fate is more cruel in a sense to the heirs, than to the disinherited, of fortune. But the pain which the rich suffer is purely sentimental, and there are very few indeed who have nobility of nature enough to feel this at all.