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FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
FRENCH ' 
 
 POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY JAMES JR. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1878. 
 
 [The Eight of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.] 
 
NOTE. 
 
 THESE Essays originally appeared in several 
 American periodicals. To the seven papers repre- 
 sented by the title the Author has ventured to 
 add five others which have much in common with 
 the subjects of the former. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAI;E 
 
 ALFRED DE MUSSET 1 
 
 THEOPHILE GAUTIER 39 
 
 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 72 
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC 84 
 
 BALZAC'S LETTERS 151 
 
 GEORGE SAND 190 
 
 CHARLES DE BERNARD AND GUSTAVE FLAUBERT . . 237 
 
 IVAN TURGE~NIEFF 269 
 
 THE Two AMPERES 321 
 
 MADAME DE SABRAN 359 
 
 MERIMEE'S LETTERS 390 
 
 THE THEATRE FRANCAIS 403 
 
FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS, 
 
 ALFRED DE MUSSET. 
 
 IT had been known for some time that M. Paul de 
 Musset was preparing a biography of his illustrious 
 brother, and the knowledge had been grateful to 
 Alfred de Musset's many lovers ; for the author of 
 " Holla" and the "Lettre k Lamartine" has lovers. The 
 book has at last appeared more than twenty years 
 after the death of its hero. 1 It is probably not unfair 
 to suppose that a motive for delay has been removed 
 by the recent death of Madame Sand. M. Paul de 
 Musset's volume proves, we confess, rather disappoint- 
 ing. It is a careful and graceful but at the same time 
 a very slight performance, such as was to be expected 
 from the author of " Lui et Elle " and of the indignant 
 
 1 "Biographic de Alfred de Musset: sa Vie et ses (Euvres." 
 Par Paul de Musset. Paris : Charpentier. 
 
 u 
 
2 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 refutation (in the biographical notice which accompanies 
 the octavo edition of Alfred de Musset's works) of 
 M. Taine's statement that the poet was addicted to 
 walking about the streets late at night. As regards 
 this latter point, M. Paul de Musset hastened to 
 declare that his brother had no such habits that his 
 customs were those of a gentilhomme; by which the 
 biographer would seem to mean that when the poet 
 went abroad after dark it was in his own carriage, or 
 at least in a hired cab, summoned from the nearest 
 stand. M. Paul de Musset is a devoted brother and 
 an agreeable writer ; but he is not, from the critic's 
 point of view, the ideal biographer. This, however, 
 is not seriously to be regretted, for it is little to be 
 desired that the ideal biography of Alfred de Musset 
 should be written, or that he should be delivered over, 
 bound hand and foot, to the critics. Those who really 
 care for him would prefer to judge him with all kinds 
 of allowances and indulgences sentimentally and ima- 
 ginatively. Between him and his readers it is a matter 
 of affection, or it is nothing at all ; and there is some- 
 thing very happy, therefore, in M. Paul de Musset's 
 fond fraternal reticences and extenuations. He has 
 related his brother's life as if it were a pretty " story;" 
 and indeed there is enough that was pretty in it to 
 justify him. We should decline to profit by any 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 3 
 
 information that might be offered us in regard to its 
 prosaic, its possibly shabby side. To make the story 
 complete, however, there appears simultaneously with 
 M. Paul de Musset's volume a publication of a quite 
 different sort a biography of the poet by a clever 
 German writer, Herr Paul Lindau. 1 Herr Lindau is 
 highly appreciative, but he is also critical, and he says 
 a great many things that M. Paul de Musset leaves 
 unsaid. As becomes a German biographer, he is very 
 minute and exhaustive, and a stranger who should 
 desire a " general idea " of the poet would probably get 
 more instruction from his pages than from the French 
 memoir. Their fault is indeed that they are apparently 
 addressed to persons whose mind is supposed to be a 
 blank with regard to the author of " Holla." The exac- 
 tions of bookmaking alone can explain the long analyses 
 and prose paraphrases of Alfred de Musset's comedies 
 and tales to which Herr Lindau treats his readers the 
 dreariest kind of reading when an author is not in 
 himself essentially inaccessible. Either one has not 
 read Alfred de Musset's comedies or not felt the charm 
 of them in which case one will not be likely to resort 
 to Herr Lindau's memoirs or one has read them in 
 the charming original, and can therefore dispense with 
 an elaborate German summary. 
 
 1 " Alfred de Musset." Von Paul Lindau. Berlin : Hofniann. 
 
 B 2 
 
4 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 In saying just now that M. Paul de Musset's bio- 
 graphy of his brother is disappointing, we meant more 
 particularly to express our regret that he has given us 
 no letters or given us at least but two or three. It 
 is probable, however, that he had no more in his hands. 
 Alfred de Musset lived in a very compact circle ; he 
 spent his whole life in Paris, and his friends lived in 
 Paris near him. He was little separated from his 
 brother, who appears to have been his best friend (M. 
 Paul de Musset was six years Alfred's senior) and much 
 of his life was passed under the same roof with the 
 other members of his family. Seeing his friends con- 
 stantly, he had no occasion to write to them ; and as 
 he saw little of the world (in the larger sense of the 
 phrase) he would have had probably but little to write 
 about. He made but one attempt at travelling his 
 journey to Italy, at the age of twenty-three, with 
 George Sand. "He made no important journeys," says 
 Herr Lindau, " and if one excepts his love affairs, he 
 really had no experiences." But his love affairs, as a 
 general thing, could not properly be talked about. M. 
 de Musset shows good taste in not pretending to narrate 
 them. He mentions two or three of the more important 
 episodes of this class, and with regard to the others he 
 says that when he does not mention them they may 
 always be taken for granted. It is perhaps indeed in 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 5 
 
 a limited sense that Alfred de Musset's love affairs may 
 be said to have been in some cases more important than 
 in others. It was his own philosophy that in this 
 matter one thing is about as good as another 
 
 "Aimer est le grand point ; qu'importe la maitresse ? 
 Qu'importe le flacon pourvu qu'on ait 1'ivresse ? " 
 
 Putting aside the " ivresse," which was constant, 
 Musset's life certainly offers little material for narra- 
 tion. He wrote a few poems, tales, and comedies, and 
 that is all. He did nothing, in the sterner sense of 
 the word. He was inactive, indolent, idle ; his record 
 has very few dates. Two or three times the occasion 
 to do something was offered him, but he shook his head 
 and let it pass. It was proposed to him to accept a 
 place as attache to the French embassy at Madrid, a 
 comfortable salary being affixed to the post. But 
 Musset found no inspiration in the prospect. He had 
 written about Spain in his earlier years he had sung 
 in the most charming fashion about Juanas and Pepitas, 
 about senoras in mantillas stealing down palace stair- 
 cases that look "blue" in the starlight. But the 
 desire to see the picturesqueness that he had dreamt of 
 proved itself to have none of the force of a motive. 
 This is the fact in Musset's life which the writer of 
 these lines finds most regrettable the fact of his 
 contented smallness of horizon the fact that on his 
 
6 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 own line he should not have cared to go farther. 
 There is something really exasperating in the sight of 
 a picturesque poet wantonly slighting an opportunity 
 to go to Spain the Spain of forty years ago. It does 
 violence even to that minimum of intellectual eagerness 
 which is the portion of a contemplative mind. It is 
 annoying to think that Alfred de Musset should have 
 been meagrely contemplative. This is the weakness 
 that tells against him, more than the weakness of what 
 would be called his excesses. From the point of view 
 of his own peculiar genius it was a good fortune for 
 him to be susceptible and tender, sensitive and pas- 
 sionate. The trouble was not that he was all this, but 
 that he was lax and soft ; that he had too little energy 
 and curiosity. Shelley was at least equally tremulous 
 and sensitive equally a victim of his impressions, and 
 an echo, as it were, of his temperament. But even 
 Musset's fondest readers must feel that Shelley had 
 within him a firm, divinely-tempered spring, against 
 which his spirit might rebound indefinitely. As regards 
 intense sensibility that fineness of feeling which is the 
 pleasure and pain of the poetic nature M. Paul de 
 Musset tells two or three stories of his brother which 
 remind one of the anecdotes recorded of the author of 
 the " Ode to the West Wind." " One of the things that 
 he loved best in the world was a certain exclamation of 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 7 
 
 Racine's Phaedra, which expresses by its bizarrerie the 
 trouble of her sickened heart : 
 
 ' Ariane, ma sceur. de quel amour blessee, 
 Vous mourutes aux bords ou vous lutes laissee ! ' 
 
 When Rachel used to murmur forth this strange, un- 
 expected plaint, Alfred always took his head in his two 
 hands and turned pale with emotion." 
 
 The author describes the poet's early years, and gives 
 several very pretty anecdotes of his childhood. Alfred 
 de Musset was born in 1810, in the middle of old Paris, 
 on a spot familiar to those many American visitors who 
 wander across the Seine, better and better pleased as 
 they go, to the museum of the Hotel de Cluny. The 
 house in which Musset's parents lived was close to this 
 beautiful monument a happy birthplace for a poet ; 
 but both the house and the street have now disappeared. 
 M. Paul de Musset does not relate that his brother 
 began to versify in his infancy ; but Alfred was indeed 
 hardly more than an infant when he achieved his first 
 success. The poems published under the title of 
 " Contes d'Espagne et d'ltalie " were composed in his 
 eighteenth and nineteenth years ; he had but just com- 
 pleted his nineteenth when the volume into which 
 they had been gathered was put forth. There are cer- 
 tainly if we consider the quality of the poems few 
 more striking examples of literary precocity. The cases 
 
8 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 of Chatterton and Keats may be equally remarkable 
 but they are not more so. These first boyish verses of 
 Musset have a vivacity, a brilliancy, a freedom of feel- 
 ing and of fancy which may well have charmed the 
 little cenacle to which he read them aloud the group 
 of litterateurs and artists which clustered about Victor 
 Hugo, who, although at this time very young, was 
 already famous. M. Paul de Musset intimates that if 
 his brother was at this moment (and as we may sup- 
 pose, indeed, always) one of the warmest admirers of 
 the great author of "Hernani " and those other splendid 
 productions which project their violent glow across the 
 threshold of the literary era of 1830, and if Victor 
 Hugo gave kindly audience to "Don Paez" and "Mar- 
 doche," this kindness declined in proportion as the fame 
 of the younger poet expanded. Alfred de Musset was 
 certainly not fortunate in his relations with his more 
 distinguished contemporaries. Victor Hugo " dropped " 
 him ; it would have been better for him if George Sand 
 had never taken him up ; and Lamartine, to whom, in 
 the shape of a passionate epistle, he addressed the 
 most beautiful of his own, and one of the most beau- 
 tiful of all, poems, acknowledged the compliment only 
 many years after it was paid. The cenacle was all for 
 Spain, for local colour, for serenades, and daggers, and 
 Gothic arches. It was nothing if not audacious (it was 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 9 
 
 in the van of the Romantic movement), and it was 
 partial to what is called in France the " humoristic " 
 as well as to the ferociously sentimental. Musset pro- 
 duced a certain " Ballade a la Lune " which began 
 
 " C'etait dans la nuit brune 
 Sur le clocher jauni 
 
 La lane 
 Comme un point sur un i ! " 
 
 This assimilation of the moon . suspended above a 
 church spire to a dot upon an i became among the 
 young Romanticists a sort of symbol of what they 
 should do and dare ; just as in the opposite camp it 
 became a by-word of horror. But this was only play- 
 ing at poetry, and in his next things, produced in the 
 following year or two, Musset struck a graver and more 
 resonant chord. The pieces published under the title of 
 " Un Spectacle dans un Fauteuil " have all the youthful 
 grace and gaiety of those that preceded them ; but 
 they have beyond this a suggestion of the quality 
 which gives so high a value to the author's later and 
 best verses the accent of genuine passion. It is hard 
 to see what, just yet, Alfred de Musset had to be 
 passionate about ; but passion, with a poet, even when 
 it is most genuine, is very much an affair of the 
 imagination and the personal temperament (inde- 
 pendently, we mean, of strong provoking causes) and 
 
10 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the sensibilities of this young man were already exqui- 
 sitely active. His poems found a great many admirers, 
 and these admirers were often women. Hence for the 
 young poet, says M. Paul de Musset, a great many 
 romantic and " Boccacitnnes " adventures. " On several 
 occasions I was awaked in the middle of the night to 
 give my opinion on some question of high prudence. 
 All these little stories having been confided to me under 
 the seal of secrecy, I have been obliged to forget them ; 
 but I may affirm that more than one of them would 
 have aroused the envy of Bassompierre and Lauzun. 
 Women at that time were not wholly absorbed in their 
 care for luxury and dress. To hope to please, young 
 men had no need to be rich ; and it served a purpose 
 to have at nineteen years of age the prestige of talent 
 and glory." This is very pretty, as well as very Gallic; 
 but it is rather vague, and we may without offence sus- 
 pect it to be, to a certain extent, but that conventional 
 coup de cJmpeau which every self-respecting Frenchman 
 renders to actual or potential, past, present, or future 
 gallantry. Doubtless, however, Musset was, in the 
 native phrase, lance. He lived with his father and 
 mother, his brother and sister ; his purse was empty ; 
 Seville and Granada were very far away ; and these 
 "Andalusian passions," as M. Paul de Musset says, 
 were mere reveries and boyish visions. But they were 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 11 
 
 the visions of a boy who was all ready to compare 
 reality with romance, and who, in fact, very soon ac- 
 ceded to a proposal which appeared to offer a peculiar 
 combination of the two. It is noticeable, by the way, 
 that from our modest Anglo-Saxon point of view these 
 same " Andalusian passions," dealing chiefly with ladies 
 tumbling about on disordered couches, and pairs of 
 lovers who take refuge from an exhausted vocabulary in 
 biting each other, are an odd sort of thing for an in- 
 genuous lad, domiciled in the manner M. Paul de Musset 
 describes, and hardly old enough to have a latch-key, 
 to lay on the family breakfast-table. But this was very 
 characteristic all round the circle. Musset was not a 
 didactic poet, and he had no time to lose in going through 
 the preliminary paces of one. His business was to talk 
 about love in unmistakable terms, to proclaim its 
 pleasures and pains with all possible eloquence ; and he 
 would have been quite at a loss to understand why he 
 should have blushed or stammered in preluding to so 
 beautiful a theme. Herr Lindau thinks that even in 
 the germ Musset's inspiration is already vicious that 
 "his wonderful talent was almost simultaneously ripe 
 and corrupted." But Herr Lindau speaks from the 
 modest Saxon point of view ; a point of view, however, 
 
 from which, in such a matter, there is a great deal to 
 be said UNIVERSITY Of CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
12 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 The great event in Alfred de Musset's life, most 
 people would say, was his journey to Italy with George 
 Sand. This event has been abundantly superabun- 
 dantly described, and Herr Lindau, in the volume 
 before us, devotes a long chapter to it and lingers over 
 it with peculiar complacency. Our own sentiment would 
 be that there is something extremely displeasing in the 
 publicity which has attached itself to the episode ; that 
 there is indeed a sort of colossal indecency in the way 
 it has passed into the common fund of literary gossip. 
 It illustrates the base, the weak, the trivial side of all 
 the great things that were concerned in it fame, 
 genius and love. Either the Italian journey was in its 
 results a very serious affair for the remarkable couple 
 who undertook it in which case it should be left in 
 that quiet place in the history of the development of 
 the individual into which public intrusion can bring no 
 light, but only darkness or else it was a piece of levity 
 and conscious self-display ; in which case the attention 
 of the public has been invited to it on false grounds. 
 If there ever was an affair it should be becoming to be 
 silent about, it was certainly this one ; but neither the 
 actors nor the spectators have been of this way of 
 thinking ; one may almost say that there exists a whole 
 literature on the subject. To this literature Herr 
 Lindau's contribution is perhaps the most ingenious. 
 
ALFRED DE MITSSET. 13 
 
 He has extracted those pages from Paul de Musset's 
 novel of " Lui et Elle " which treat of the climax of 
 the relations of the hero and heroine, and he has printed 
 the names of George Sand and Alfred de Musset instead 
 of the fictitious names. The result is perhaps of a nature 
 to refresh the jaded vision of most lovers of scandal. 
 
 We must add that some cf his judgments on the 
 matter happen to have a certain felicity. M. Paul de 
 Musset has narrated the story more briefly having, 
 indeed, by the publication of " Lui et Elle," earned the 
 right to be brief. He mentions two or three facts, how- 
 ever, the promulgation of which he may have thought it 
 proper, as we said before, to postpone to Madame Sand's 
 death. One of them is sufficiently dramatic. Musset 
 had met George Sand in the summer of 1833, about the 
 time of the publication of " Holla " seeing her for the 
 first time at a dinner given to the contributors of the 
 " Revue des Deux Mondes," at the restaurant of the 
 Trois Freres Provencaux. George Sand was the only 
 woman present. Sainte-Beuve had already endeavoured 
 to bring his two friends together, but the attempt had 
 failed, owing to George Sand's reluctance, founded on 
 an impression that she should not like the young 
 poet. Alfred de Musset was twenty-three years of 
 age; George Sand, who had published "Indiana," 
 " Valentine," and " Lelia, "was close upon thirty. Alfred 
 
14 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 de Musset, as the author of " Holla," was a very extra 
 ordinary young man quite the young man of whom 
 Heinrich Heine could say " he has a magnificent past 
 before him." Upon his introduction to George Sand, 
 an intimacy speedily followed an intimacy commemo- 
 rated by the lady in expansive notes to Sainte-Beuve, 
 whom she kept informed of its progress. When the 
 winter came the two intimates talked of leaving Paris 
 together, and, as an experiment, paid a visit to Fon- 
 tainebleau. The experiment succeeded, but this was not 
 enough, and they formed the project of going to Italy. 
 To this project, as regarded her son, Madame de Musset 
 refused her consent. (Alfred's father, we should say, 
 had died before the publication of " Holla," leaving his 
 children without appreciable property, though during 
 his lifetime, occupying a post in a government office, he 
 had been able to maintain them comfortably.) His 
 mother's opposition was so vehement that Alfred gave 
 up the project and countermanded the preparations 
 that had already been made for departure. 
 
 " That evening toward nine o'clock," say M. Paul de 
 Musset, " our mother was alone with her daughter by 
 the fireside, when she was informed that a lady was 
 waiting for her at the door in a hired carriage and 
 begged urgently to speak with her. She went down 
 accompanied by a servant. The unknown lady named 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 15 
 
 herself; she besought this deeply grieved mother to 
 confide her son to her, saying that she would have for 
 him a maternal affection and care. As promises did 
 not avail, she went so far as sworn vows. She used all 
 her eloquence, and she must have had a great deal, since 
 her enterprise succeeded. In a moment of emotion the 
 consent was given." The author of "Lelia" and the 
 author of "Holla" started for Italy together. M. 
 Paul de Musset mentions that he accompanied them to 
 the mail coach "on a sad, misty evening, in the midst 
 of circumstances that boded ill." They spent the 
 winter at Venice, and M. Paul de Musset and his 
 mother continued to hear regularly from Alfred. But 
 toward the middle of February his letters suddenly 
 stopped, and for six weeks they were without news. 
 They were on the point of starting for Italy, to put an 
 end to their suspense, when they received a melancholy 
 epistle informing them that their son and brother was 
 on his way home. He was slowly recovering from an 
 attack of brain fever, but as soon as he should be able 
 to drag himself along he would seek the refuge of the 
 paternal roof. 
 
 On the 10th of April he reappeared alone. A quarter 
 of a century later, and a short time after his death, 
 Madame Sand gave to the world, in the guise of a novel, 
 
16 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 an account of the events which had occupied this in- 
 terval. The account was highly to her own advantage 
 and much to the discredit of her companion. Paul de 
 Musset immediately retorted with a little book which 
 is decidedly poor as fiction, but tolerably good, 
 probably, as history. As a devoted brother, given all 
 the circumstances, it was perhaps the best thing he 
 could do. It is believed that his reply was more than, 
 in the vulgar phrase, Madame Sand had bargained 
 for ; inasmuch as he made use of documents of whose 
 existence she had been ignorant. Alfred de Musset, 
 suspecting that her version of their relations would be 
 given to the world, had, in the last weeks of his life, 
 dictated to his brother a detailed statement of those 
 incidents to which misrepresentation would chiefly ad- 
 dress itself, and this narrative Paul de Musset simply 
 incorporated in his novel. The gist of it is that the 
 poet's companion took advantage of his being seriously 
 ill, in Venice, to be flagrantly unfaithful, and that, 
 discovering her infidelity, he relapsed into a brain 
 fever which threatened his life, and from which he 
 rose only to make his way home with broken wings 
 and a bleeding heart. Madame Sand's version of the 
 story is that his companion's infidelity was a delusion 
 of the fever itself and the charge was but the climax 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 17 
 
 of a series of intolerable affronts and general fantasti- 
 calities. 
 
 Fancy the great gossiping, vulgar-minded public, 
 deliberately invited to ponder this delicate question ! 
 The public should never have been appealed to ; but 
 once the appeal made, it administers perforce a rough 
 justice of its own. According to this rough justice, 
 the case looks badly for Musset's fellow-traveller. 
 She was six years older than he (at that time of life 
 a grave fact) ; she had drawn him away from his 
 mother, taken him in charge, assumed a responsibility. 
 Their two literary physiognomies were before the world, 
 and she was, on the face of the matter, the riper, 
 stronger, more reasonable nature. She had made great 
 pretensions to reason, and it is fair to say of Alfred 
 de Musset that he had made none whatever. What 
 the public sees is that the latter, unreasonable though 
 he may have been, comes staggering home, alone and 
 forlorn, while his companion remains quietly at Venice 
 and writes three or four highly successful romances. 
 Herr Lindau, who analyzes the affair, comes to the 
 same conclusion as the gross, synthetic public; and he 
 qualifies certain sides of it in terms of which observant 
 readers of George Sand's writings will recognise the 
 justice. It is very happy to say " she was something 
 of a Philistine ; " that at the bottom of all experience 
 
 c 
 
18 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 with her was the desire to turn it to some economical 
 account ; and that she probably irritated her companion 
 in a high degree by talking too much about loving 
 him as a mother and a sister. (This, it will be remem- 
 bered, is the basis of action with Th6rese, in " Elle et 
 Lui." She becomes the hero's mistress in order to retain 
 him in the filial relation, after the fashion of Rousseau's 
 friend, Madame de Warens). On the other hand, it seems 
 hardly fair to make it one of Musset's grievances that his 
 comrade was industrious, thrifty and methodical ; that she 
 had, as the French say, de I'ordre ; and that, being charged 
 with the maintenance of a family, she allowed nothing to 
 divert her from producing her daily stint of " copy." 
 
 It is easy to believe that Musset may have tried the 
 patience of a tranquil associate. George Sand's Jacques 
 Laurent in " Elle et Lui," is a sufficiently vivid portrait 
 of a highly endowed, but hopelessly petulant, unreason- 
 able and dissipated egotist. We are far from suspecting 
 that the portrait is perfectly exact; no portrait by 
 George Sand is perfectly exact. Whatever point of view 
 she takes, she always abounds too much in her own 
 sense. But it evidently has a tolerably solid foundation 
 in fact. Herr Lindau holds that Alfred de Musset's 
 life was literally blighted by the grief that he suffered 
 in Italy, and that the rest of his career was a long, 
 erratic, unprofitable elfort to drown the recollection of it. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 19 
 
 Our own inclination would be to judge him at once with 
 more and with less indulgence. Whether deservedly or 
 no, there is no doubt that his suffering was great ; his 
 brother quotes a passage from a document written five 
 years after the event, in which Alfred affirms that, on 
 his return to Paris, he spent four months shut up in his 
 room in incessant tears tears interrupted only by a 
 "mechanical" game of chess in the evening. But 
 Musset, like all poets, was essentially a creature of 
 impressions ; as with all poets, his sentimental faculty 
 needed constantly to renew itself. He found his account 
 in sorrow, or at least in emotion, and we may say, in 
 differing from Herr Lindau, that he was not a man to 
 let a grievance grow stale. To feel permanently the 
 need of smothering sorrow is in a certain sense to be 
 sobered by it. Musset was never sobered (a cynical 
 commentator would say he was never sober). Emotions 
 bloomed again lightly and brilliantly on the very stem 
 on which others had withered. After the catastrophe 
 at times his imagination saved him, distinctly, from 
 permanent depression ; and on a different line, this same 
 imagination helped him into dissipation. 
 
 M. Paul de Musset mentions that in 1837 his brother 
 conceived a " passion serieuse " for an attractive young 
 lady, and that the liaison lasted two years " two years 
 during which there was never a quarrel, a storm, a cool- 
 
 c 2 
 
20 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 ing-ofi ; never a pretext for umbrage or jealousy. This 
 is why," he adds, " there is nothing to be told of them. 
 Two years of love without a cloud cannot be narrated." 
 It is noticeable that this is the third " passion serieuse " 
 that M. Paul de Musset alludes to since the dolorous 
 weeks which followed the return from Venice. Shortly 
 after this period another passion had come to the front, a 
 passion which, like that which led him to Italy, was 
 destined to have a tragical termination. This particular 
 love affair is commemorated, in accents of bitter melan- 
 choly, in the "Nuit de Decembre," just as the other, which 
 had found its catastrophe at Yenice, figures, by clear allu- 
 sion, in the "!Nuit de Mai," published a few months 
 before. It may provoke a philosophic smile to learn, as 
 we do from M. Paul de Musset candid biographer ! 
 that the " motives " of these two poems are not identical, 
 as they have hitherto been assumed to be. It had never 
 occurred to the reader that one disillusionment could 
 follow so fast upon the heels of another. When we 
 add that a short time afterward as the duration of 
 great intimacies of the heart is measured Alfred 
 de Musset was ready to embark upon "two years 
 of love without a cloud " with still another object to 
 say nothing of the brief interval containing another 
 sentimental episode of which our biographer gives the 
 prettiest account we seem to be justified in thinking 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 21 
 
 that, for a "blighted" life, that of Alfred de Musset 
 exhibited a certain germinal vivacity. 
 
 During his stay in Italy he had written nothing ; but 
 the five years which followed his return are those of his 
 most active and brilliant productiveness. The finest of 
 his verses, the most charming of his tales, the most 
 original of his comedies, belong to this relatively busy 
 period. Everything that he wrote at this time has a 
 depth and intensity that distinguish it from the jocosely 
 sentimental productions of his commencement and from 
 the somewhat mannered and vapidly elegant compositions 
 which he put forth, at wide intervals, during the last 
 fifteen years of his life. This was the period of Mus- 
 set's intellectual virility. He was very precocious, but 
 he was at the same time, at first, very youthful. On 
 the other hand, his decline began early ; in most of his 
 later things, especially in his verses (they become very 
 few in number) the inspiration visibly runs thin. " Mon 
 verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre," he 
 had said, and both clauses of the sentence are true. His 
 glass held but a small quantity ; the best of his verses 
 those that one knows by heart and never wearies of 
 repeating are veiy soon counted. We have named 
 them when we have mentioned "Holla," the "Nuit de 
 Mai," the "Nuit d'Aout," and the " Nuit d'Octobre " ; 
 the "Lettre a Lamartine," and the "Stances a la 
 
22 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Malibran." These, however, are perfection ; and if Mus- 
 set had written nothing else he would have had a right 
 to say that it was from his own glass that he drank. 
 The most beautiful of his comedies, "II ne faut pas 
 badiner avec 1' Amour," dates from 1834, and to the 
 same year belongs the " Lorenzaccio," the strongest, if 
 not the most exquisite, of his dramatic attempts. His 
 two most agreeable nouvelles, " Emmeline " and " Frederic 
 et Bernerette," appeared about the same time. But we 
 have not space to enumerate his productions in detail. 
 During the fifteen last years of his life, as we have said, 
 they grew more and more rare ; the poet had, in a certain 
 sense, out-lived himself. Of these last years Herr 
 Lindau gives a rather realistic and unflattered sketch ; 
 picturing him especially as a figure publicly familiar to 
 Parisian loungers, who were used to observe him as ' ' an 
 unfortunate with an interesting face, dressed with ex- 
 treme care," with the look of youth and the lassitude of 
 age, seated in a corner of a cafe and gazing blankly over 
 a marble table on which " a half empty bottle of absinthe 
 and a quite empty glass " stood before him. M. Paul 
 de Musset, in describing his brother's later years, is 
 mindful of the rule to glide, not to press ; with a very 
 proper fraternal piety, he leaves a great many foibles 
 and transgressions in the shade. He mentions, however, 
 Alfred's partiality for stimulants a taste which had 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 23 
 
 defined itself in his early years. Musset made an ex- 
 cessive use of liquor ; in plain English, he got drunk. 
 Sainte-Beuve, somewhere in one of his merciless, but 
 valuable foot-notes, alludes to the author of " Holla " 
 coming tipsy to the sittings of the French Academy. 
 Herr Lindau repeats a pun which was current on such 
 occasions. " Musset s'absente trop," said some one. 
 " II s'absinthe trop," replied some one else. He had been 
 elected to the Academy in 1852. His speech on the 
 occasion of his reception was a disappointment to his 
 auditors. Herr Lindau attributes the sterility of his 
 later years to indolence and perversity ; and it is probable 
 that there is not a little justice in the charge. He was 
 unable to force himself ; he belonged to the race of gifted 
 people who must do as it pleases them. "When a literary 
 task was proposed to him and he was not in the humour 
 for it, he was wont to declare that he was not a maid-of- 
 all-work but an artist. He must write when the fancy 
 took him ; the fancy took him, unfortunately, less and 
 less frequently. With a very uncertain income and 
 harassed constantly by his debts, he scorned to cultivate 
 a pecuniary inspiration. He died in the arms of his 
 brother in the spring of 1857. 
 
 He was beyond question one of the first poets of 
 our day. If the poetic foice is measured by the 
 quality of the inspiration by its purity, intensity, and 
 
24 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 closely personal savour Alfred de Musset's place is 
 surely very high. He was, so to speak, a thoroughly 
 personal poet. He was not the poet of nature, of 
 the universe, of reflection, of morality, of history ; 
 he was the poet simply of a certain order of personal 
 emotions, and his charm is in the frankness and free- 
 dom, the grace and harmony, with which he expresses 
 these emotions. The affairs of the heart these were 
 his province; in no other verses has the heart spoken 
 more characteristically. Herr Lindau says very justly 
 that if he was not the greatest poet among his con- 
 temporaries, he was at any rate the most poetically 
 constituted nature. A part of the rest of Herr 
 Lindau' s judgment is worth quoting : 
 
 ' ' He Las remained the poet of youth. No one has sung so truth- 
 fully and touchingly its aspirations and its sensibilities, its doubts 
 and its hopes. No one has comprehended and justified its follies and 
 its amiable idiosyncrasies with a more poetic irony, with a deeper 
 conviction. His joy was young, his sorrow was young, and young 
 was his song. To youth he owed all happiness, and in youth he sang 
 his brightest chants. But the weakness of youth was his fatal enemy, 
 and with youth faded away his joy in existence and in creation." 
 
 This is exactly true. Half the beauty of Musset's 
 writing is its simple suggestion of youthfulness of 
 something fresh and fair, slim and tremulous, with a 
 tender epidermis. This quality, with some readers 
 may seem to deprive him of a certain proper dignity ; 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 25 
 
 and it is very true that he was was not a Stoic. You 
 may even call him unmanly. He cries out when he 
 is hurt ; he resorts frequently to tears, and he talks 
 much about his tears. (We have seen that after his 
 return from Venice they formed, for four months, his 
 principal occupation). But his defence is that if he 
 does not bear things like a man, he at least, according 
 to Shakespeare's distinction, feels them like a man. 
 What makes him valuable is just this gift for the 
 expression of that sort of emotion which the conven- 
 tions and proprieties of life, the dryness of ordinary 
 utterance, the stiffness of most imaginations, leave 
 quite in the vague, and yet which forms a part of human 
 nature important enough to have its exponent. If 
 the presumption is against the dignity of deeply lyric 
 utterance, poor Musset is, in the vulgar phrase, no- 
 where he is a mere grotesque sound of lamentation. 
 But if in judging him you do not stint your sympathy, 
 you will presently perceive him to have an extra- 
 ordinarily precious quality a quality equally rare in 
 literature and in life. He has passion. There is in 
 most poetry a great deal of reflection, of wisdom, of 
 grace, of art, of genius ; but (especially in English 
 poetry) there is little of this peculiar property of 
 Musset' s. When it occurs we feel it to be extremely 
 valuable ; it touches us beyond anything else. It 
 
26 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 was the great gift of Byron, the quality by which he 
 will live in spite of those weaknesses and imperfec- 
 tions which may be pointed out by the dozen. Alfred 
 de Musset in this respect resembled the poet whom 
 he appears most to have admired living at a time 
 when it had not begun to be the fashion to be 
 ashamed to take Byron seriously. Mr. Swinburne 
 in one of his prose essays speaks of him with violent 
 scorn as Byron's "attendant dwarf," or something 
 of that sort. But this is to miss the case altogether. 
 There is nothing diminutive in generous admiration, 
 and nothing dwarfish in being a younger brother ; 
 Mr. Swinburne's charge is too coarse a way of stating 
 the position. Musset resembles Byron in the fact that 
 the beauty of his verse is somehow identical with 
 the feeling of the writer with his immediate, sensi- 
 ble warmth <j,nd not dependent upon that reflective 
 stage into which, to produce its great effects, most 
 English poetic expression instantly passes, and which 
 seems to chill even while it nobly beautifies. Musset 
 is talked of nowadays in France very much as Byron 
 is talked of among ourselves ; it is noticed that he 
 often made bad verses, and he is accused of having 
 but half known his trade. This sort of criticism is 
 eminently just, and there is a weak side of the author 
 of "Holla" which it is easy to attack. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 27 
 
 Alfred de Musset, like Mr. Murray's fastidious 
 correspondent, wrote poetry as an amateur wrote 
 it, as they say in France, en gentilhomme. It is the 
 fashion, I believe, in some circles, to be on one's 
 guard against speaking foreign tongues too well (the 
 precaution is perhaps superfluous) lest a marked pro- 
 ficiency should expose one to be taken for a teacher 
 of languages. It was a feeling of this kind, perhaps, 
 that led Alfred de Musset to a certain affectation of 
 negligence and laxity : though he wrote for the 
 magazine she could boast a long pedigree, and he had 
 nothing in common with the natives of Grub Street. 
 Since his death a new school of poets has sprung 
 up of which, indeed, his contemporary, Theophile 
 Gautier, may be regarded as the founder. These gentle- 
 men have taught French Poetry a multitude of paces of 
 which so sober-footed a damsel was scarcely to have 
 been supposed capable ; they have discovered a great 
 many secrets that Musset appears never to have sus- 
 pected, or (if he did suspect them) to have thought 
 not worth finding out. They liave sounded the depths 
 of versification, and beside their refined, consummate 
 facture Musset 's simple devices and good-natured pro- 
 sody seem to belong to a primitive stage of art. It 
 is the difference between a clever performer on the 
 tight rope and a gentleman strolling along on soft 
 
28 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 turf with his hands in his pockets. If people care 
 supremely for form, Musset will merely but half satisfy 
 them. It is very pretty, they will say; but it is 
 confoundedly unbusinesslike. His verse is not chiselled 
 and pondered, and in spite of an ineffable natural 
 grace it lacks the positive qualities of cunning work- 
 manship those qualities which are found in such 
 high perfection in Theophile Gautier. To our own 
 sense Musset's exquisite feeling more than makes up 
 for one-half the absence of "chiselling," and the in- 
 effable grace we spoke of just now makes up for the 
 other half. His sweetness of passion, of which the 
 poets who have succeeded him have so little, is a 
 more precious property than their superior science. 
 His grace is often something divine ; it is in his 
 grace that we must look for his style. Herr Lindau 
 says that Heine speaks of " truth, harmony, and 
 grace " being his salient qualities. (By the first, we 
 take it, he meant what we have called Musset's 
 passion). His harmony, from the first, was often 
 admirable ; the rhythm of even some of his earliest 
 verses makes them haunt the ear after one has mur- 
 mured them aloud. 
 
 Ulric, des mers nul ceil n'a raesure 1'abime, 
 Ni les herons plongeurs, ni les vieux inatelots ; 
 Le soleil vient briser ses rayons sur leur cime, 
 Comme un soldat vaincu brise ses javelots. 
 
ALFRED DE MTJSSET. 29 
 
 Musset's grace, in its suavity, freedom, and unaf- 
 fectedness, is altogether peculiar ; though it must be 
 said that it is only in the poems of his middle period 
 that it is at its best. His latest things are, accord- 
 ing to Sainte-Beuve, colifichets baubles ; they are too 
 much in the rococo, the Dresden china, style. But as 
 we have said before, with his youth Musset's inspira- 
 tion failed him. It failed him in his prose as well 
 as in his verse. "II faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte 
 ou fermee," one of the last of his dramatic proverbs, 
 is very charming, very perfect in its way; but com- 
 pared with the tone of the " Caprices de Marianne," 
 the " Chandelier," " Fantasio," the sentiment is thin 
 and the style has rather a simper. It is what the 
 French call marivaudage. There can, however, be no 
 better example of the absoluteness of the poetic senti- 
 ment, of its justifying itself as it goes, of lyrical ex- 
 pression being as it were not only a means, but an end, 
 than the irresistible beauty of such effusions as the 
 " Lettre a Lamartine " and the " Nuit d'Aout." 
 
 Poete, je t'ecris pour te dire que j'aime ! 
 
 that is all, literally, that Musset has to say to the 
 " amant d'Elvire"; and it would be easy to make 
 merry at the expense of so simply candid a piece 
 of "gush." But the confidence is made with a 
 
36 J?IULJNOH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 transparent ardour, a sublime good faith, an audible, 
 touching tremour of voice, which, added to the 
 enchanting harmony of the verse, make the thing 
 one of the most splendid poems of our day. 
 
 Ce ne sont pas ties chants, ce ne sont que des larmes, 
 Et je ne te dirai que ce que Dieu m'a dit ! 
 
 Musset has never risen higher. He has, in strict- 
 ness, only one idea the idea that the passion of love 
 and the act of loving are the divinest things in a 
 miserable world; that love has a thousand disappoint- 
 ments, deceptions, and pangs, but that for its sake 
 they are all worth enduring, and that as Tennyson 
 has said, more curtly and reservedly, 
 
 'Tis better to have loved and lost 
 
 Than never to have loved at all. 
 
 Sometimes he expresses this idea in the simple epicu- 
 rean fashion, with gaiety and with a more or less 
 cynical indifference to the moral side of the divine 
 passion. Then he is often pretty, picturesque, fanciful, 
 but he remains essentially light. At other times he 
 feels its relation to the other things that make up 
 man's destiny, and the sense of aspiration mingles 
 with the sense of enjoyment or of regret. Then he 
 is at his best; then he seems an image of universally 
 sentient youth. 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 31 
 
 Je ne puis ; malgre moi, 1'infini me tonrmeiite, 
 Je n'y saurais songer sans crainte et sans espoir ; 
 Et quoiqu'on en ait (lit, ma raison s'epouvante 
 De ne pas le comprendre, et pourtant de le voir. ' 
 
 While we may suspect that there is something a little 
 over-coloured in M. Paul de Musset's account of the 
 degree to which his brother was haunted by the 
 religious sentiment by the impulse to grope for some 
 philosophy of life we may also feel that with 
 the poet's sense of the "divineness" of love there 
 went a conviction that ideal love implies a divine 
 object. This is the feeling expressed in the finest 
 lines of the " Lettre a Lamartine " in lines at least 
 which, if they are not the finest, are fine enough to 
 quote : 
 
 Eh bien, bon ou mauvais, inflexible oil fragile, 
 
 Humble ou gai, triste ou fier, mais toujours gemissant, 
 
 Get homme, tel qu'il est, cet etre fait d'argile, 
 
 Tu 1'a vu, Lamartine, et son .sang est ton sang. 
 
 Son bonheur est le tien ; sa douleur est la tienne ; 
 
 Et des maux qu'ici bas il lui faut endurer, 
 
 Pas nn qui ne te touche et qui ne t'appartienne ; 
 
 Puisque tu sais chanter, ami, tu sais pleurer. 
 
 Dis-moi, qu'en penses-tu dans tes jours de tristesse ? 
 
 Que t'a dit le malheur quand tu 1'as consulte ? 
 
 Trompe par tes amis, trahi par ta maitresse, 
 
 Du ciel et de toi-meme as-tu jamais doute ? 
 
 Xon, Alphonse, jamais. La triste experience 
 
 Xous apporte la cendre et neteint pas le feu. 
 
32 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Tu respectes le mal fait par la Providence ; 
 
 Tu le kisses passer et tu crois a ton Dieu. 
 
 Quelqu'il soit c'est le mien ; il n'est pas deux croyances. 
 
 Je ne sais pas son nom : j'ai regarde les cieux ; 
 
 Je sais qu'ils sont a lui, je sais qu'ils sont immenses, 
 
 Et que rimmensite ne peut pas etre a deux. 
 
 J'ai connu, jeune encor, de severes souffrances ; 
 
 J'ai vu verdir les bois et j'ai tente d' aimer. 
 
 Je sais ce que la terre engloutit d'esperances, 
 
 Et pour y recueillir ce qu'il y faut semer. 
 
 Mais ce que j'ai senti, ce que je veux t'ecrire, 
 
 C'est ce que m'ont appris les anges de douleur ; 
 
 Je le sais mieux encor et puis mieux te le dire, 
 
 Car leur glaive, en entrant, 1'a grave dans mon cceur. 
 
 And the rest of the poem is a lyrical declaration of 
 belief in immortality. 
 
 "We have called the "Lettre k Lamartine" Musset's 
 highest flight, but the " Nuit de Mai " is almost as 
 fine a poem full of imaginative splendour and melan- 
 choly ecstasy. The series of the " Nuits " is altogether 
 superb ; with an exception made, perhaps, for the 
 "Nuit de Decembre," wjiich has a great deal of 
 sombre beauty, but which is not, like the others, in 
 the form of dialogue between the Muse and the poet 
 the Muse striving to console the world-wounded bard 
 for his troubles and urging him to take refuge in hope 
 and production. 
 
 Poe'te, prends ton luth et me donne un baiser ; 
 La fleur de 1'eglantier sent ses bourgeons eclore. 
 Le printemps nait ce soir ; les vents vont s'embraser ; 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 33 
 
 Et la bergeronnette, en attendant 1'aurore, 
 
 Aux premier buissons verts commence a se poser. 
 
 Poete, prends ton luth et me donne un baiser. 
 
 That is impregnated with the breath of a vernal 
 night. The same poem (the "Nuit de Mai") contains 
 the famous passage about the pelican the passage 
 beginning 
 
 Les plus desesperes sont les chants les plus*beaux, 
 Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots 
 
 in which the legend of the pelican opening his breast 
 to feed his starving young is made an image of what 
 the poet does to entertain his readers : 
 
 Poete, c'est ainsi que font les grands poetes. 
 Us laissent s'egayer ceux qui vivent un temps ; 
 Mais les festins humains qu'ils servent a leurs fetes 
 Ressemblent la plupart a ceux des pelicans. 
 
 This passage is perhaps unless we except the 
 opening verses of " Holla " Musset's noblest piece 
 of poetic writing. We must place next to it next to 
 the three " Nuits " the admirably passionate and 
 genuine " Stanzas to Malibran " a beautiful charac- 
 terization of the artistic disinterestedness of the singer 
 who suffered her genius to consume her who sang 
 herself to death. The closing verses of the poem have 
 a wonderful purity ; to rise so high, and yet in form, 
 
 D 
 
34 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 in accent, to remain so still and temperate, belongs 
 only to great poetry ; as it would be well to remind 
 the critic who thinks the author of the " Stanzas to 
 Malibran" dwarfish. There is another sort of verse 
 in which violence of movement is more sensible than 
 upwardness of direction. 
 
 So far in relation to Musset's lyric genius though 
 we have given but a brief and inadequate account of 
 it. He had besides a dramatic genius of the highest 
 beauty, to which we have left ourself space to devote 
 only a few words. It is true that the drama with 
 Musset has a decidedly lyrical element, and that though 
 his persons always talk prose, they are constantly 
 saying things which would need very little help to 
 fall into the mould of a stanza or a sonnet. In his 
 dramas as in his verses his weakness is that he is 
 amateurish ; they lack construction ; their merit is 
 not in their plots, but in what, for want of a better 
 term, we may call their sentimental perfume. The 
 earliest of them failed upon the stage, and for many 
 years it was supposed they could not be played. Musset 
 supposed so himself, and took no trouble to encourage 
 the experiment. He made no concessions to contem- 
 porary " realism." But at last they were taken up 
 almost by accident and it was found that, in the 
 hands of actors whose education enabled them to 
 
ALFRED DE MUSSET. 35 
 
 appreciate their delicacy, this delicacy might become 
 wonderfully effective. If feeling is the great quality 
 in his verses, the case is the same in his strange, 
 fantastic, exquisite little comedies; comedies in the 
 literal English sense of the word we can hardly call 
 them, for they have almost always a melancholy or 
 a tragical termination. They are thoroughly senti- 
 mental; he puts before us people who convince us 
 that they really feel; the drama is simply the his- 
 tory of their feeling. In the emotions of Valentin 
 and Perdican, of Fantasio and Fortunio, of Celio and 
 Octave, of Carmosine and Bettine, there is something 
 contagious, irresistibly touching. But the great charm 
 is Musset's dramatic world itself, the atmosphere in 
 which his figures move, the element they breathe. 
 
 It seems at first a reckless thing to say, but we will 
 risk it : in the quality of his fancy Musset always 
 reminds us of Shakespeare. His little dramas go 
 forward in the country^of " As You Like It " and the 
 " Winter's Tale"; the author is at home there, like 
 Shakespeare himself, and he moves with something of 
 the Shakespearean lightness and freedom. His fancy 
 loves to play with human life, and in the tiny mirror 
 that it holds up we find something of the depth and 
 mystery of the object. Musset's dialogue, in its 
 mingled gaiety and melancholy, its sweetness and 
 
 D 2 
 
36 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 irony, its allusions to real things and its kinship 
 with a romantic world, has an altogether indefinable 
 magic. To utter it on the stage is almost to make 
 it coarse. Once Musset attempted a larger theme 
 than usual ; in " Lorenzaccio " he wrote an historical 
 drama on the scale of Shakespeare's histories ; that is, 
 with multitudes of figures, scenes, incidents, illustra- 
 tions. He laid his hand on an admirable subject 
 the story of a certain Lorenzino de' Medici, who played 
 at being a debauchee and a poltroon in order better 
 to put the tyrant of Florence (his own cousin) off his 
 guard, and serve his country by ridding her of him. 
 The play shows an extraordinary abundance and 
 vivacity of imagination, and really, out of those same 
 " histories " of Shakespeare, it is hard to see where 
 one should find an equal spontaneity in dealing with 
 the whole human furniture of a period. Alfred de 
 Musset, in "Lorenzaccio," has the air of being as 
 ready to handle a hundrecl figures as a dozen of 
 having imagination enough for them all. The thing 
 has the real creative inspiration, and if it is not the 
 most perfect of his productions it is probably the 
 most vigorous. 
 
 We have not spoken of his tales; their merit is 
 the same as of the comedies that of spontaneous feel- 
 ing, and of putting people before us in whose feelings 
 
ALFEED DE MUSSET. 37 
 
 we believe. Besides this, they have Musset's grace 
 and delicacy in a perhaps excessive degree ; they are 
 the most mannered of his productions. Two or three 
 of them, however " Emmeline," " Les Deux Mai- 
 tresses," "Frederic et Bernerette" are masterpieces: 
 this last epithet is especially to be bestowed upon the 
 letter written by the heroine of the last-mentioned 
 tale (an incorrigibly volage grisette) to her former 
 lover on the occasion of his marrying and settling. 
 The incoherency, the garrulity, the mingled resigna- 
 tion and regret of an amiable flirt of the lower orders, 
 divided between the intensity of her emotion and the 
 levity of her nature, are caught in the act. And yet 
 it is not fair to say of anything represented by Musset 
 that it is caught in the act. Just the beauty and 
 charm of it is that it is not the exact reality, but a 
 something seen by the imagination a tinge of the 
 ideal, a touch of poetry. We must try to see Musset 
 himself in the same way; his own figure needs to a 
 certain extent the help of our imagination. And yet, 
 even with such help taken, we cannot but feel that he 
 is an example of the wasteful way in which nature and 
 history sometimes work of their cruel indifference to 
 our personal standards of economy of the vast amount 
 of material they take to produce a little result. 
 
 Alfred de Musset's superfine organization, his exalta- 
 
38 FEENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 tions and weaknesses, his pangs and tears, his 
 passions and debaucheries, his intemperance and idle- 
 ness, his years of unproductiveness, his innumerable 
 mistresses (with whatever pangs and miseries it may 
 seem proper to attribute to them) his quarrel with a 
 woman of genius, and the scandals, exposures, and 
 recriminations that are so ungracefully bound up with 
 it all this was necessary in order that we should have 
 the two or three little volumes into which his best 
 could be compressed. It takes certainly a great deal 
 of life to make a little art ! In this case, however, 
 we must remember, that little is exquisite. 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 
 
 THERE very recently died in Paris a man of genius 
 whom his eulogists all made haste to proclaim a true 
 poet. Many of them, indeed, spoke of Theophile 
 Gautier as a great poet, and one, we remember, men- 
 tioned his last little volume, " Tableaux de Siege," as 
 the crowning glory of the resistance to the Prussians. 
 Gautier was indeed a poet and a strongly representative 
 one a French poet in his limitations even more than 
 in his gifts ; and he remains an interesting example of 
 how, even when the former are surprisingly great, a 
 happy application of the latter may produce the most 
 delightful works. Completeness on his own scale is to 
 our mind the idea he most instantly suggests. Such as 
 his finished task now presents him, he is almost sole of 
 his kind. He has had imitators who have imitated 
 everything but his spontaneity and his temper ; and 
 as they have therefore failed to equal him, we doubt 
 whether the literature of our day presents so naturally 
 
40 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 perfect a genius. "We say this with no desire to transfer 
 Gautier to a higher pedestal than he has fairly earned 
 a poor service, for the pedestal sometimes sadly 
 dwarfs the figure. His great merit was that he under- 
 stood himself so perfectly and handled himself so skil- 
 fully. Even more than Alfred de Musset (with whom 
 the speech had a shade of mock-modesty) he might 
 have said that, if his glass was not large, at least it was 
 all his own glass. As an artist, he never knew an 
 hour's weakness or failed to strike the note that should 
 truly render his idea. He was, indeed, of literary 
 artists the most accomplished. He was not of the 
 Academy, but he completes not unworthily the pictur- 
 esque group, gaining relief from isolation, of those 
 eminent few Moliere, Pascal, Balzac, Beranger, George 
 Sand who have come near making it the supreme 
 literary honour in France not to be numbered among 
 the Forty. There are a host of reasons why we should 
 not compare Gautier with such a poet as Browning ; and 
 yet there are several why we should. If we do so, with 
 all proper reservations, we may wonder whether we are 
 the richer, or, at all events, the better entertained, as a 
 poet's readers should before all things be, by the clear, 
 undiluted strain of Gautier's minor key, or by the vast, 
 grossly commingled volume of utterance of the author 
 of "Men and Women." This, perhaps, is an idle 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIEE. 41 
 
 question ; and the artificer of " Emaux et Canines " was 
 presumably of opinion that it is idle at all times to 
 point a moral. But if there are sermons in stones, 
 there are profitable reflections to be made even on 
 Theophile Gautier ; notably this one that a man's 
 supreme use in the world is to master his intellectual 
 instrument and play it in perfection. 
 
 There is, perhaps, scant apparent logic in treating a 
 closed career more tenderly than an open one ; but we 
 suspect it belongs to the finer essence of good criticism 
 to do so, and, at any rate, we find our judgment of the 
 author of the " Voyage en Espagne " and the " Capitaine 
 Fracasse " turning altogether to unprotesting kindness. 
 We had a vague consciousness of lurking objections ; but 
 on calling them to appear they gave no answer. Gautier's 
 death, indeed, in the nature of things could not but be 
 touching and dispose one to large allowances. The world 
 he left was the sum of the universe for him, and upon 
 any other his writings throw but the dimmest light 
 project, indeed, that contrasted darkness which surrounds 
 the edges of a luminous surface. The beauty and variety 
 of our present earth and the insatiability of our earthly 
 temperament were his theme, and we doubt whether 
 these things have ever been placed in a more flattering 
 light. He brought to his task a sort of pagan bonhomie 
 which makes most of the descriptive and pictorial poets 
 
42 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 seem, by contrast, a group of shivering ascetics or 
 muddled metaphysicians. He excels them by his mag- 
 nificent good temper and the unquestioning serenity 
 of his enjoyment of the great spectacle of nature and 
 art. His style certainly is one of the latest fruits of 
 time ; but his mental attitude before the universe has 
 an almost Homeric simplicity. His world was all 
 material, and its outlying darkness hardly more 
 suggestive, morally, than a velvet canopy studded with 
 silver nails. To close his eyes and turn his back on it 
 must have seemed to him the end of all things ; death, 
 for him, must have been as the sullen dropping of a 
 stone into a well. His faculty of visual discrimination 
 was extraordinary. His observation was so penetrating 
 and his descriptive instinct so unerring, that one might 
 have fancied grave Nature, in a fit of coquetry, or tired 
 of receiving but half -justice, had determined to con- 
 struct a genius with senses of a finer strain than the 
 mass of the human family. Gautier, as an observer, 
 often reminds us of those classic habitues of the opera 
 who listen with a subtler sense than their neighbours 
 and register with a murmured brava the undistinguish- 
 able shades of merit in a prima donna's execution. He 
 was for many years a diligent theatrical critic, faithful 
 to his post in all dramatic weathers, so that one has 
 only to extend the image a little to conceive him as 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 43 
 
 always in an orchestra-stall before the general stage ? 
 watching a lamplit performance flaring gas in one 
 case, the influence of his radiant fancy in the other. 
 "Descriptive" writing, to our English taste, suggests 
 nothing very enticing a respectable sort of padding, 
 at best, but a few degrees removed in ponderosity from 
 downright moralizing. The prejudice, we admit, is a 
 wholesome one, and the limits of verbal portraiture of 
 all sorts should be jealously guarded. But there is no 
 better proof of Gautier's talent than that he should 
 have triumphantly reformed this venerable abuse and, 
 in the best sense, made one of the heaviest kinds of 
 writing one of the lightest. Of his process and his 
 success we could give an adequate idea only by a 
 long series of citations, and these we lack the oppor- 
 tunity to collect. The reader would conclude with 
 us, we think, that Gautier is an inimitable model. 
 He would never find himself condemned to that 
 thankless task of pulling the cart up hill retouch- 
 ing the picture which in most descriptions is fatal 
 to illusion. The author's manner is so light and 
 true, so really creative, his fancy so alert, his taste 
 so happy, his humour so genial, that he makes illu- 
 sion almost as contagious as laughter ; the image, 
 the object, the scene, stands arrested by his phrase 
 with the wholesome glow of truth overtaken. Gautier's 
 
44 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 native gift of expression was extremely rich, and he 
 cultivated and polished it with a diligence that may 
 serve to give the needed balance of gravity to his 
 literary character. He enriched his picturesque vocabu- 
 lary from the most recondite sources; it has a most 
 robust comprehensiveness. His favourite reading, we 
 have somewhere seen, was the dictionary ; he loved 
 words for themselves for their look, their aroma, 
 their colour, their fantastic intimations. He kept a 
 supply of the choicest constantly at hand and intro- 
 duced them at effective points. In this respect he 
 was a sort of immeasurably lighter-handed Rabelais, 
 whom, indeed, he resembled in that sensuous exu- 
 berance of temperament which his countrymen are fond 
 of calling peculiarly "Gaulois." He had an almost 
 Rabelaisian relish for enumerations, lists, and catalogues 
 a sort of grotesque delight in quantity. "We need 
 hardly remind the reader that these are not the 
 tokens of a man of thought, and Gautier was none. 
 In the line of moral expression his phrase would 
 have halted sadly ; and when occasionally he emits a 
 reflection he is a very Philistine of Philistines. In 
 his various records of travel, we remember, he never 
 takes his seat in a railway train without making a 
 neat little speech on the marvels of steam and the 
 diffusion of civilization. If it were not in a Parisian 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 45 
 
 feuilleton it might proceed from Mr. Barlow, and be 
 addressed to Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton. 
 These genial commonplaces are Gautier's only tributes 
 to philosophy. It seems as absurd to us as that very 
 puerile performance itself that the philosophic pre- 
 tensions of the famous preface to " Mademoiselle de 
 Maupin " should have provoked any other retort than 
 a laugh. Gautier was incapable of looking, for an 
 appreciable duration of time, at any other than the 
 superficial, the picturesque, face of a question. If you 
 find him glancing closer, you may be sure, with all 
 respect, that the phenomenon will last just as long 
 as a terrier will stand on his hind-legs. 
 
 To raise on such a basis so large a structure was 
 possible only to a Frenchman, and to a Frenchman 
 inordinately endowed with the national sense of form 
 and relish for artistic statement. Gautier's structure 
 is composed of many pieces. He began, in his early 
 youth, with "Mademoiselle de Maupin." It has seemed 
 to us rather a painful exhibition of the prurience of 
 the human mind that, in most of the recent notices 
 of the author's death (those, at least, published in 
 England and America) this work alone should have 
 been selected as the critic's text. It is Gautier's one 
 disagreeable performance ; how it came to be written 
 it is of small profit at this time to inquire. In certain 
 
46 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 lights the book is almost ludicrously innocent, and 
 we are at a loss what to think of those critics who 
 either hailed of denounced it as a serious profession 
 of faith. With faith of any sort Gautier strikes us 
 as slenderly furnished. Even his aesthetic principles 
 are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows him, 
 for instance, to say in a hundred places the most 
 delightfully sympathetic and pictorial things about the 
 romantic or Shakespearean drama, and yet to describe 
 a pedantically classical revival of the "Antigone" at 
 Munich with the most ungrudging relish. The only 
 very distinct statement of intellectual belief that we 
 remember in his pages is the singularly perfect little 
 poem which closes the collection of chiselled and 
 polished verses called "Emaux et Camees." It is a 
 charming example of Gautier at his best, and we 
 shall be pardoned for quoting it. 
 
 L'ART. 
 
 Oui, 1'ceuvre sort plus belle 
 D'une forme au travail 
 
 Rebelle, 
 Vers, marbre, onyx, email. 
 
 Point de contraintes fausses ! 
 Mais que pour marcher droit 
 
 Tu chausses, 
 Muse, un cothurne etroit. 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 47 
 
 Fi du rhythme commode, 
 Comme un soulier trop grand, 
 
 Du mode 
 Que tout pied quitte et prend ! 
 
 Statuaire, repousse 
 L'argile que petrit 
 
 Le pouce, 
 Quand flotte ailleurs 1'esprit ; 
 
 Lutte avec le carrare, 
 Avec le paros dur 
 
 Et rare, 
 Gardiens du contour pur ; 
 
 Emprante a Syracuse 
 Son bronze ou fermement 
 
 S'accuse 
 Le trait fier et charmant ; 
 
 D'une main delicate] 
 Poursuis dans un filon 
 
 D'agate 
 Le profil d'Apollon. 
 
 Peintre, fuis 1'aquarelle, 
 Et fixe la couleur 
 
 Trop frele 
 Au four de l'emailleur ; 
 
 Fais les sirenes bleues, 
 Tordant de cent famous 
 
 Leurs queues; 
 Les monstres des blasoiis ; 
 
48 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Dans son nimbe trilobe 
 La Vierge et son Jesus ; 
 
 Le globe 
 Avec la croix dessus. 
 
 Tout passe. L'art robuste 
 Seul a 1'eternite. 
 
 Le buste 
 Survit a la cite. 
 
 Et la medaille austere 
 Que trouve un laboreur 
 
 Sous terre 
 Revele un empereur. 
 
 Les dieux eux-memes meurent, 
 Mais les vers souverains 
 
 Demeurent 
 Plus forts que les airains. 
 
 Sculpte, lime, cisele ; 
 Que ton reve flottant 
 
 Se scelle 
 Dans le bloc resistant. 
 
 These admirable verses seem to us to be almost tinged 
 with intellectual passion. It is a case of an aesthetic, 
 an almost technical, conviction, glowing with a kind of 
 moral fervour. They vividly reflect, in our opinion, the 
 great simplicity of the author's mind. We doubt 
 whether life often addressed him a more puzzling 
 question than the one he has so gracefully answered 
 
THfiOPHILE GAUTIER. 49 
 
 here. He had, of course, his likes and dislikes; and, 
 as the poet of the luxuries of life, he naturally 
 preferred those paternal governments which pay heavy 
 subventions to opera-houses, order palace frescos by the 
 half-mile, and maintain various picturesque sinecures. 
 He was sensuously a conservative ; although, after all, 
 as an observer and describer, he was the frankest of 
 democrats. He had a glance for everything and a 
 phrase for everything on the broad earth, and all that 
 he asked of an object, as a source of inspiration, was 
 that it should have length, breadth and colour. Much 
 of Gautier's poetry is of the same period as " Made- 
 moiselle de Maupin," and some of it of the same 
 quality; notably the frantically picturesque legend of 
 "Albertus," written in the author's twenty-first year, 
 and full of the germs of his later flexibility of diction. 
 " Emaux et Camees," the second volume of his collected 
 verses, contains, evidently, his poetic bequest. In this 
 chosen series every poem is a masterpiece; it has 
 received the author's latest and fondest care; all, as 
 the title indicates, is goldsmiths' work. In Gautier's 
 estimation, evidently, these exquisite little pieces are 
 the finest distillation of his talent; not one of them 
 but ought to have outweighed a dozen Academic 
 blackballs. Gautier's best verse is neither sentimental, 
 satirical, narrative, nor even lyrical. It is always 
 
 E 
 
FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 pictorial and plastic a matter of images, "effects/ 
 and colour. Even when the motive is an idea of 
 course, a slender one the image absorbs and swallows 
 it, and the poem becomes a piece of rhythmic imitati on 
 What is this delightful little sonnet the "Pot de 
 Fleurs " but a piece of self -amused imagery 1 
 
 Parfois un enfant trouve line petite grain e, 
 Et tout d'abord, charme de ses vives couleurs, 
 Pour la planter, il prend un pot de porcelaine 
 Orni de dragons bleus et de bizarres fleurs. 
 
 II s'en va. La racine en couleuvres s'allonge, 
 Sort de terre, fleurit et devient arbrisseau ; 
 Chaque jour, plus avant, son pied chevelu plonge 
 Tant qu'il fasse eclater le ventre du vaisseau. 
 
 L'enfant revient ; surpris, il voit la plante grasse 
 Sur les debris du pot brandir ses verts poignards ; 
 II la veut arracher, mais la tige est tenace ; 
 II s'obstine, et ses doigts s'ensanglantent aux dards. 
 
 Ainsi germa 1'ainour dans mon &ine surprise ; 
 Je croyais ne semer qu'ime fleur de printemps : 
 C'est un grand aloes dont la racine brise 
 Le pot de porcelaine aux dessins eclatants. 
 
 We may almost fancy that the whole sonnet was 
 wiitten for the sake of the charming line we have 
 marked a bit of Keats Gallicized. Gautier's first and 
 richest poetry, however, is to be found in his prose 
 the precious, artistic prose which for forty years he 
 
THfiOPHILE GAUTIER. 51 
 
 lavished in newspaper feuilletons and light periodicals. 
 Here the vivid, plastic image is his natural, constant 
 formula ; he scatters pictures as a fine singer roulades ; 
 every paragraph is the germ of a sonnet, every sentence 
 a vignette. "It is pure Lacrima-Christi," as Sainte- 
 Beuve says, " qu'on vous verse au'coin cFune borne." The 
 twenty-five volumes or so into which this long daily 
 labour has been gathered feuilletons and sketches, novels 
 and tales, records of travel, reports of " damned " plays 
 and unsold pictures form a great treasury of literary 
 illustration. "When Gautier, according to present 
 promise, begins to be remembered mainly as the author 
 of an indecent novel whose title is circulated in the 
 interest of virtue, needy poets may deck their wares for 
 the market with unmissed flowers of description from 
 his blooming plantations. He has commemorated every 
 phase and mood and attribute of nature and every 
 achievement and possibility of art ; and you have only 
 to turn his pages long enough to find the perfect pre- 
 sentment of your own comparatively dim and unshaped 
 vision. 
 
 Early in life he began to travel to travel far for a 
 Frenchman and, of course, to publish his impressions. 
 They relate altogether to the look of the countries he 
 visited to landscape, art-collections, street- sceneiy and 
 costume. On the " institutions " of foreign lands he is 
 
 E 2 
 
52 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 altogether silent. His delightful vividness on his 
 chosen points is elsewhere unapproached, and his 
 " Voyage en Espagne," his " Constantinople," his 
 " Italia," and his " Voyage en Russie," seem to us his 
 most substantial literary titles. No other compositions 
 of the same kind begin to give us, in our chair, under the 
 lamp, the same sense of standing under new skies, among 
 strange scenes. With Gautier's readers the imagination 
 travels in earnest and makes journeys more profitable in 
 some respects than those we really undertake. He has 
 the broad-eyed, universal, almost innocent gaze at things 
 of a rustic at a fair, and yet he discriminates them with 
 a shrewdness peculiarly his own. We renew over his 
 pages those happiest hours of youth when we have 
 strolled forth into a foreign town, still sprinkled with 
 the dust of travel, and lost ourselves deliciously in the 
 fathomless sense of local difference and mystery. 
 Gautier had a passion for material detail, and he vivifies, 
 illuminates, interprets it, woos it into relief, resolves it 
 into pictures, with a joyous ingenuity which makes him 
 the prince of ciceroni. His " Voyage en Espagne " is, in 
 this respect, a masterpiece and model. It glows, from 
 beginning to end, with an overcharged verisimilitude in 
 which we seem to behold some intenser essence of Spain 
 of her light and colour and climate, her expression 
 and personality. All this borrows a crowning 
 
TH&DPHILE GAUTIEE. 53 
 
 vivacity from the author's genial unpretentiousness, 
 his almost vainglorious triviality. A " high standard " 
 is an excellent thing ; but we sometimes fancy it 
 takes away more than it gives, and that an untamed 
 natural faculty of enjoying at a venture is a better 
 conductor of aesthetic light and heat. Gautier's 
 superbly appreciative temperament makes him, at the 
 least, as solid an observer as the representative German 
 doctor in spectacles, bristling with critical premises. 
 It is signally suggestive to compare his lusty tribute 
 to San Moise at Venice, in his " Italia," with Ruskin's 
 stern dismissal of it in his " Stones of Venice " 
 Ruskin so painfully unable to see the " joke " of it 
 and Gautier, possibly, so unable to see anything but 
 the joke. We may, in strictness, agree with Ruskin, 
 but we envy Gautier. It was to be expected of such 
 a genius that he should enjoy the East ; and Gautier 
 professed a peculiar devotion to it. He was fond of 
 pretending that he was really an Oriental come astray 
 into our Western world. He has described Eastern 
 scenery and manners, Eastern effects of all kinds, with 
 incomparable gusto ; and, on reading the libretti to the 
 three or four ballets included in the volume we 
 have named, we wonder whether his natural atti- 
 tude was not to recline in the perfumed dusk of 
 a Turkish divan, puffing a chibouque and fore- 
 
54 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 casting the successive episodes of a Mohammedan 
 immortality. This pretension, however, did him in- 
 justice : and such a book as the "Voyage en Russie;" 
 such chapters as his various notes on the Low Countries, 
 their landscape and their painters ; such a sketch, in- 
 deed, as his wonderful humoristigue history of a week 
 in London, in his " Caprices et Zigzags " prove abun- 
 dantly that he had more than one string to his bow. 
 He shot equally far with them all. Each of his 
 chapters of travel has a perfect tone of its own and 
 that unity of effect which is the secret of the rarest 
 artists. The "Voyage en Espagne " is a masterly 
 mixture of hot lights and warm shadows ; the " Con- 
 stantinople " is an immense verbal Decamps, as one 
 may say; and the "Voyage en Russie," compounded 
 of effects taken from the opposite end of the 'scale, is 
 illuminated with the cold blue light of the North. 
 Gau tier's volumes abound in records of the most un- 
 adventurous excursions light sketches of a feuille- 
 tonist's holidays. His fancy found its account in the 
 commonest things as well as the rarest in Callot as 
 well as in Paul Veronese and these immediate notes 
 are admirable in their multicoloured reflections of the 
 perpetual entertainment of Nature. Gautier found 
 Nature supremely entertaining ; this seems to us the 
 shortest description of him. She had no barren places 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIEK. 55 
 
 for him, for he rendered her poverty with a brio that 
 made it as picturesque as her wealth. He professed 
 always to care for nothing but beauty. "Fortunio," 
 he says, in the preface to this grotesquely meretri- 
 cious production, "is a hymn to Beauty, Wealth, and 
 Happiness the only three divinities we recognise. It 
 celebrates gold, marble, and purple." But, in fact, 
 he was too curious an artist not to enjoy ugliness 
 very nearly as much, and he drew from it some of 
 his most striking effects. We ^recommend to the 
 reader the account of a stroll among the slaughter- 
 houses and the asylums of lost dogs and cats in the 
 Paris banlieue, in the " Caprices et Zigzags ; " his 
 elaborate pictures, several times repeated, of Spanish 
 bull-fights (which show to what lengths Vart pour I'art 
 can carry the kindliest tempered of men), and a 
 dozen painful passages in his " Tableaux de Siege." 
 This little volume, the author's last, is a culminating 
 example of his skill. It is a common saying with 
 light litterateurs, that to describe a thing you must 
 not know it too well. Gautier knew Paris pictur- 
 esque Paris with a forty years' knowledge ; yet he 
 has here achieved the remarkable feat of suppressing 
 the sense of familiarity and winning back, for the 
 sake of inspiration, a certain freshness of impres- 
 sion. The book was written in evil days ; but nothing 
 
56 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 from Gautier's hand is pleasanter ; and the silvery 
 strain of his beautiful rhetoric, after so long a 
 season of thunderous bulletins and proclamations, 
 suggests the high, clear note of some venerable night- 
 ingale after a summer storm. Deprived of his cus- 
 tomary occupation he became a forced observer of 
 certain vulgarly obvious things, and discovered that 
 they, too, had their poetry, and that, if you only 
 look at it closely, everything is remunerative. He 
 found poetry in th<j poor rawboned lions and tigers 
 of the Jardin des Plantes ; in the hungry dogs in the 
 street, hungrily eyed ; in a trip on a circular railway 
 and on the penny steamers on the Seine ; in that 
 delicacy of vanished seasons, a pat of fresh butter in 
 Chevet's window. Beneath his touch these pheno- 
 mena acquire the finely detailed relief of the acces- 
 sories and distances in a print of Albert Diirer's ; we 
 remember no better example of the magic of style. 
 But the happiest performance in the book is a series 
 of chapters on Versailles, when the whirligig of time 
 had again made its splendid vacancy an active 
 spot in the world's consciousness. No one should go 
 there now without Gautier's volume in his pocket. 
 It was his good fortune that his autumn was as 
 sound as his summer and his last writing second 
 to none before it. The current of diction in this 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 57 
 
 final volume is as full and clear as in the "Voyage 
 en Espagne." 
 
 Gautier's stories and novels belong, for the most 
 part, to his prime ; he reached his climax as a story- 
 teller ten years ago, with "Le Capitaine Fracasse." 
 His productions in this line are not numerous, for 
 dramatic invention with him was evidently not abun- 
 dant. As was to be supposed, the human interest in 
 his tales is inferior to the picturesque. They remind 
 us of those small cabinet paintings of the contemporary 
 French school, replete with archaeological details as 
 to costume and furniture, which hang under glass in 
 immense gilt frames and form the delight of con- 
 noisseurs. Gautier's figures are altogether pictorial ; 
 he cared for nothing and knew nothing in men and 
 women but the epidermis. With this, indeed, he was 
 marvellously acquainted, and he organized in its ser- 
 vice a phraseology as puzzlingly various as the array 
 of pots and brushes of a coiffeur. His attitude to- 
 wards the human creature is, in a sublimated degree, 
 that of a barber or tailor. He anoints and arranges 
 and dresses it to perfection ; but he deals only in 
 stuffs and colours. His fable is often pretty enough ; 
 but one imagines it always written in what is called a 
 studio light on the corner of a table littered with 
 brushes and frippery. The young woman before the 
 
58 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 easel, engaged at forty sous a sitting to take off her 
 dress and let down her hair, is obviously the model for 
 the heroine. His stories are always the measure of 
 an intellectal need to express an ideal of the exquisite 
 in personal beauty and in costume, combined with 
 that of a certain serene and full-blown sensuality in 
 conduct, and accompanied with gorgeous visions of 
 upholstery and architecture. Nothing classifies Gautier 
 better, both as to the individual and the national 
 quality of his genius, than the perfect frankness of 
 his treatment of the human body. We of English 
 speech pass (with the French) for prudish on this 
 point ; and certain it is that there is a limit to the 
 freedom with which we can comfortably discourse of 
 hair and skin, and teeth and nails, even to praise 
 them. The French, on the other hand, discuss their 
 physical texture as complacently as we discuss that 
 of our trousers and boots. The Parisians profess, 
 we believe, to have certain tendencies in common with 
 the old Athenians; this unshrinking contemplation 
 of our physical surfaces might be claimed as one 
 of them. Practically, however, it gives one a very 
 different impression from the large Greek taste for 
 personal beauty ; for the French type, being as meagre 
 as the Greek was ample, has been filled out with 
 the idea of "grace," which, by implying that the 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 59- 
 
 subject is conscious, makes modesty immediately 
 desirable and the absence of it vicious. Gautier, in 
 this respect, is the most eloquent of our modern 
 Athenians, and pays scantiest tribute to our English 
 scruples. Flesh and blood, noses and bosoms, arms 
 and legs were a delight to him, and it was his mission 
 to dilate upon them. For any one who has glanced 
 at the dusky background of Parisian life, with its sal- 
 low tones and close odours, among which no Athenian 
 sky makes a blue repoussoir either for statues or 
 mortals, there is something almost touchingly heroic 
 in Gautier's fixed conception of sublime good looks. 
 He invents unprecedented attributes, and it is nothing 
 to say of his people that they are too good to live. 
 In "Une Nuit de Cleopatre," the hero, inflamed with 
 a hopeless passion for the Egyptian queen, has been 
 pursuing her barge in a little skiff, and rowing so 
 fast, under an Egyptian sun, that he has overtaken 
 her fifty oarsmen. " He was a beautiful young man 
 of twenty, with hair so black that it seemed blue? 
 a skin blond as gold, and proportions so perfect that 
 he might have been taken for a bronze of Lysippus. 
 Although he had been rowing some time, he betrayed 
 no fatigue, and had not on his broiv a single drop cf 
 sweat" Gautier's heroines are always endowed with 
 transparent finger tips. These, however, are his idler 
 
60 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 touches. His real imaginative power is shown in his 
 masterly evocation of localities, and in the thick- 
 coming fancies that minister to his inexhaustible con- 
 ception of that pictorial " setting " of human life which 
 interested him so much more than human life itself. In 
 the " Capitaine Fracasse," the " Roman de la Momie," 
 "Le Roi Candaule," "Une Nuit de Cleopatre," and 
 " Aria Marcella " he revels in his passion for scenic 
 properties and backgrounds. His science, in so far 
 as it is archaeological, is occasionally at fault, we 
 suspect, and his facts slightly fantastic; but it all 
 sounds very fine and his admirable pictorial instinct 
 makes everything pass. He reconstructs the fabulous 
 splendours of old Egypt with a magnificent audacity of 
 detail, and rivals John Martin, of mezzotinto fame, in 
 the energy with which he depicts the light of torches 
 washing the black basalt of palace stairs. If the por- 
 trait is here and there inaccurate, so much the worse 
 for the original. The works we have just mentioned 
 proceed altogether by pictures. No reader of the 
 " Roman de la Momie " will have forgotten the por- 
 tentous image of the great Pharaoh, who sits like a 
 soulless idol upon his palace roof and watches his 
 messengers swim across the Nile and come and lie 
 on their faces (some of them dying) at his feet. 
 Such a picture as the following, from " Une Nuit 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 61 
 
 de Cleopatre," may be rather irresponsible archaeology, 
 but it is admirable imagery : 
 
 Le spectacle changeait r a chaque instant ; tan tot c'etait de 
 gigantesques propylees qui venaient mirer au flenve leurs murailles 
 en talus, plaquees de larges panneaux de figures bizarres ; des 
 pylones aux chapiteaux evases, des rampes cotoyees de grands 
 sphinx accroupis, coifles du bonnet a barbe cannelee, et croisant 
 sous leurs mamelles aigues leurs pattes de basalte noir ; des palais 
 demesures, faisant saillir sur l'horizou les lignes horizontals et 
 severes de leur entablement, ou le globe emblematique ouvrait les 
 ailes mysterieuses comme un aigle a 1'envergure demesuree ; des 
 temples aux colonnes enormes, grosses comme des tours, ou se 
 detachait sur un fond d'eclatante blancheur des processions des 
 figures hieroglyphiques ; toutes les prodigiosites de cette architec- 
 ture de Titans ; tantot des passages d'une aridite desolante ; des 
 collines formees par des petits eclats de pierre provenant des 
 fouilles et des constructions, miettes de cette gigantesque debauche 
 de granit qui dura plus de trente sieeles ; des montagnes exfoliees 
 de chaleur, dechiquetees et zebrees de rayures noires, semblables 
 aux cauterizations d'une incendie ; des tertres bossus et difformes, 
 accroupis comme le creocephale des tombeaux, et decoupant au bord 
 du ciel leur attitude contrefaite ; des marnes verdatres, des ochres 
 roux, des tufs d'un blanc farineux, et, de temps a autre, quelque 
 escarpement de marbre couleur rose-seche, ou baillaient les bouches 
 noires des carrieres. 
 
 If, as an illustration, we could transfuse the essence 
 of one of Gautier's best performances into this colour- 
 less report, we should choose the " Capitaine Fracasse." 
 In this delightful work Gautier surpassed himself, 
 and produced the model of picturesque romances. The 
 
2 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 stoiy was published, we believe, some twenty-five 
 years after it was announced and announced because 
 the author had taken a fancy to the title and pro- 
 posed to write "up" to it. We cannot say how 
 much of the long interval was occupied with this 
 endeavour ; but certainly the " Capitaine Fracasse " 
 Is as good as if a quarter of a century had been 
 given to it. Besides being his most ambitious work 
 it bears more marks of leisure aud meditation than 
 its companions. M. Meissonier might have written 
 it, if, with the same talent and a good deal more 
 geniality, he had chosen to use the pen rather than 
 the brush. The subject is just such a one as Gautier 
 was born to appreciate a subject of which the pictorial 
 side emphasizes itself as naturally as that of "Don 
 Quixote." It is borrowed, indeed, but as great talents 
 borrow for a use that brings the original into fashion 
 again. Scarron's "Roman Comique," which furnished 
 Gautier with his starting-point, is as barren to the 
 eye as " Gil Bias " itself, besides being a much coarser 
 piece of humour. The sort of memory one retains 
 of the " Capitaine Fracasse " is hard to express, save 
 by some almost physical analogy. We remember the 
 perusal of most good novels as an intellectual pleasure 
 a pleasure which varies in degree, but is as far as 
 it goes an affair of the mind. The hours spent over 
 
THfiOPHILE GAUTIER. 63 
 
 the " Capitaine Fracasse " seem to have been an 
 affair of the senses, of personal experience, of obser- 
 vation and contact as illusory as those of a peculiarly 
 vivid dream. The novel presents the adventures of 
 a company of strolling players of Louis XIII. 's time, 
 their vicissitudes collective and individual, their 
 miseries and gayeties, their loves and squabbles, and 
 their final apportionment of worldly comfort very 
 much in that symmetrical fashion in which they have 
 so often stood forth to receive it at the fall of the 
 curtain. It is a fairy-tale of Bohemia, a triumph 
 of the picaresque. In this case, by a special exten- 
 sion of his power, the author has made the dramatic 
 interest as lively as the pictorial, and lodged good 
 human hearts beneath the wonderfully-painted rusty 
 doublets and tarnished satins of his maskers. The 
 great charm of the book is a sort of combined 
 geniality of feeling and colouring, which leaves one 
 in doubt whether the author is the most joyous of 
 painters or the cleverest of poets. It is a master- 
 piece of good-humour a good-humour sustained by 
 the artist's indefatigable relish for his theme. In 
 artistic " bits," of course, the book abounds ; it is a 
 delightful gallery of portraits. The models, with 
 their paint and pomatum, their broken plumes and 
 threadbare velvet, their false finery and their real 
 
64 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 hunger, their playhouse manners and morals, are 
 certainly not very choice company; but the author 
 handles them with an affectionate, sympathetic jocosity 
 of which we so speedily feel the influence that, long 
 before we have finished, we seem to have drunk with 
 them one and all out of the playhouse goblet to the 
 confusion of respectability and life before the scenes. 
 If we incline to look for deeper meanings, we can 
 fancy the work in the last analysis an expression 
 of that brotherly sympathy with the social position 
 of the comedian which Gautier was too much what 
 the French call an homme de thedtre not to entertain 
 as an almost poetic sentiment. The " Capitaine 
 Fracasse" ranks, in our opinion, with the first works 
 of imagination produced in our day. 
 
 Of Gautier as a critic there is not much to say 
 that we have not said of him as a traveller and 
 storyteller. Rigid critic he was none ; it was not 
 in his nature to bring himself to fix a standard. 
 The things he liked he spoke well of ; of the things 
 he disliked, a little less well. His brother critics, 
 who would have preferred to count on him to sub- 
 stantiate their severities, found him unpardonably 
 "genial." We imagine that, in the long run, he 
 held a course nearer the truth than theirs, and did 
 better service. His irresistible need for the positive 
 
THOPHILE GAUTIEK. 65 
 
 in art, for something describable phrasable, as we 
 may say often led him to fancy merit where it was 
 not, but more often, probably, to detect it where 
 it lurked. He was a constructive commentator ; and 
 if the work taken as his text is often below his 
 praise, the latter, with its magical grasp of the idea, 
 may serve as a sort of generous lesson. His work as 
 a critic is very abundant and has been but partially 
 collected. For many years he reported elaborately 
 on the annual Salon and produced a weekly review 
 of the theatre. His accounts of the Salon, which 
 have yet to be republished, form, probably, the best 
 history if also the least didactic of modern French 
 art. When pictures and statues have passed out of 
 sight, it is rather meagre entertainment to peruse 
 amendments to their middle distance and to the finer 
 points in their anatomy. Gautier's pages preserve 
 what was best in them the attempt, the image, the 
 vision. His criticism illustrates more pointedly, per- 
 haps, than his poems and tales, his native incapacity 
 to moralize. Occasionally, we think, a promising sub- 
 ject comes near being sacrificed to it. We were 
 lately struck, in reading the delightful " Correspond- 
 ance " of Henri Regnault, whose herald-in-chief 
 Gautier constituted himself, with the latter's fatally 
 shallow conception of the duties of an aesthetic guide, 
 
 F 
 
66 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 philosopher and friend. Gautier, possibly, claimed no 
 such office ; but, at any rate, he spoke with authority; 
 and the splendid, unmeasured flattery which he pours 
 out on the young painter gives us something of the 
 discomfort with which we should see an old man 
 plying a young lad with strong wine. Eegnault, 
 fortunately, had a strong head; but the attitude, in 
 Gautier, is none the less immoral. He repaints the 
 young man's pictures, verbally, with almost superior 
 power, and consecrates their " more ominous eccen- 
 tricities by his glowing rhetoric. To assure a youth 
 of genius, by sound of trumpet, that his genius is 
 infallible, is, doubtless, good comradeship, but, from 
 a high point of view, it is poor aesthetics. 
 
 The first half of Gautier's theatrical feuilletons have 
 been gathered into six volumes, under the ambitious 
 title a device, evidently, of the publishers rather 
 than the author of "L'Histoire de 1'Art Dramatique 
 en France." In the theatre, as at the Salon, he is 
 the most good-natured of critics, and enjoys far less 
 picking a feeble drama to pieces than sketching fine 
 scenery and good acting. The book, however, is an 
 excellent one; its tone is so easy, its judgments so 
 happy and unpedantic, its good taste so pervasive, its 
 spirit so wholesomely artistic. But we confess that 
 what has most struck us, in turning it over, has 
 
THfiOPHILE GAUTIER. 67 
 
 been the active part played by the stage in France 
 during these forty years, its incalculable fertility and 
 its insatiable absorption of talent and ingenuity. 
 Buried authors and actors are packed away in Gautier's 
 pages as on the shelves of an immense mausoleum ; 
 and if, here and there, they exhibit the vivifying 
 touch of the embalmer, the spectacle is on the whole 
 little less lugubrious. It takes away one's breath 
 to think of the immense consumption of witticisms 
 involved in the development of civilization. Gautier's 
 volumes seem an enormous monument to the shadowy 
 swarm of jokes extinct and plots defunct dim-featured 
 ghosts, still haunting 'the lawless circumference of 
 literature in pious confidence that the transmigration 
 of souls will introduce them to the foot-lights again. 
 Gautier's dealings with the theatre were altogether 
 those of a spectator; for the little comedies collected 
 in the volume which forms the text of our remarks 
 are not of the sort approved by managers. They are 
 matters of colour, not of structure, and masterpieces 
 of style rather than of "effect." The best of them, 
 the " Tricome Enchante, Bastonnade en un Acte, 
 et en Yers, Melee d'un Couplet," has been repre- 
 sented since the author's death, but, we believe, with 
 only partial success. The piece is a pastiche, suggested 
 by various sources Moliere, Goldoni, the old prints 
 
 F 2 
 
68 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 of the figures in the conventional Italian 'farce. The 
 style is a marvel of humorous ingenuity and exhales 
 a delightful aroma of the grotesque stage-world of 
 jealous guardians and light-fingered valets, saucy 
 waiting-maids and modest ingenues. The verse occa- 
 sionally emulates Moliere with the happiest vivacity. 
 Geronte, having lost his valet, determines to serve 
 himself. 
 
 Quel est done le fosse, quelle est done la muraille ' 
 
 Ou git, cuvant son vin, cette brave canaille? 
 
 Champagne ! es-tu mort ? As-tu pris pour cercueil 
 
 Un tonneau defonce de brie ou d'argenteuil ? 
 
 Modele des valets, perle des domestiques, 
 
 Qui passais en vertu les esclaves antiques, 
 
 Que le ciel avait fait uniquement pour moi, 
 
 Par qui remplacer, comment vivre sans toi ? 
 
 Parbleu ! Si j'essayais de me servir moi-meme ? 
 
 Ce serait la faoii de trancher le probleme. 
 
 Je me commanderais et je m'obeirais. 
 
 Je m'aurais sous la main, et quand je me voudrais, 
 
 Je n'aurais pas besoin de me pendre aux sonnettes. 
 
 Nul ne sait mieux que moi que j'ai des mceurs honnetes, 
 
 Que je me suis toujours conduit loyalement. 
 
 Ainsi done je m'accepte avec empressement. 
 
 Ah, Messieurs les blondins, si celui-la me trompe, 
 
 Yous le pourrez aller crier a son de trompe : 
 
 J'empocherai votre or, et me le remettrai : 
 
 Vos billets pleins de muse, c'est moi qui les lirai. 
 
 D'ailleurs, je prends demain, qu'on me lone ou me blame, 
 
 Mademoiselle Inez, ma pupille, pour femme. 
 
THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 69 
 
 Elle me soignera dans mes quintes de toux, 
 Et pres d'elle couche, je me rirai de vous, 
 Les Amadis transis, les coureurs de fortune, 
 Gelant sous le balcon par un beau clair de lune ! 
 Et, quand j'apercevrai mon coquin de neveu, 
 De deux ou trois seaux d'eau j'arroserai son feu ! 
 
 The little piece called "Une Lanne du Diable," to 
 which the author has affixed the half -apologetic qualifi- 
 cation of "Mystere," is one of his cleverest and most 
 characteristic performances. None illustrates better, 
 perhaps, what we have called the simplicity of his mind 
 the way in which he conceived the most exalted ideas 
 as picturesque and picturesque only. " Une Larme du 
 Diable " is a light pastiche of a mediaeval miracle-play, 
 just as the " Tricorne Enchante " is an imitation of a 
 seventeenth-century farce. The scene is alternately in 
 heaven and on earth. Satanas is the hero, and le Bon 
 Dieu and Christus, grotesquely associated with Othello 
 and Desdemona, are among the minor characters. Chris- 
 tus himself, conversing in heaven, manifests a taste for 
 the picturesque. " Ce matin je me suis deguise en men- 
 diant, je leur (the two heroines) ai demande Vaumftne ; 
 elles ont depose dans ma main lepreuse, c/iacune ct leur tour, 
 une grosse piece de cuivre, toute glacee de vert-de-gris." 
 These copper coins, glazed with verdigris, are a sort of 
 symbol of the drama a drama in which the celestial 
 
70 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 mind has a turn for bric-a-brac. Shrewdly fantastic as 
 is the whole composition, it is a capital example of the 
 weakness of an imagination dependent wholly upon the 
 senses. That Gautier's fancy should have prompted him 
 to write " Une Larme du Diable " is up to a certain 
 point to its credit; that it should have carried him 
 through the task suggests unutterable things as to his 
 profundity. He had evidently no associations with 
 divine images that it cost him a moment's hesitation to 
 violate ; and one may say of him that he was incapable 
 of blasphemy because he was incapable of respect. He 
 is compounded of consistent levity. These are strange 
 things to find one's self saying of a poet, and they bring 
 us back to our first remark that our author's really 
 splendid development is inexorably circumscribed. In- 
 finite are the combinations of our faculties. Some of 
 us are awkward writers and yearning moralists ; others 
 are masters of a perfect style which has never reflected 
 a spiritual spark. Gautier's disposition served him to 
 the end, and enabled him to have a literary heritage 
 perfect of its kind. He could look every day at a group 
 of beggars sunning themselves on the Spanish Steps at 
 Rome, against their golden wall of mouldering traver- 
 tine, and see nothing but the fine brownness of their 
 rags and their flesh-tints see it and enjoy it for ever, 
 without an hour's disenchantment, without a chance of 
 
THOPHILE GAUTIER. 71 
 
 one of those irresistible revulsions of mood in which 
 the " mellowest " rags are but filth, and filth is poverty, 
 and poverty a haunting shadow, and picturesque squalor 
 a mockery. His unfaltering robustness of vision of 
 appetite, one may say made him not only strong but 
 enviable. 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 
 
 As a brief discussion was lately carried on 1 touching 
 the merits of the writer whose name we have prefixed 
 to these lines, it may not be amiss to introduce him to 
 some of those readers who must have observed the con- 
 test with little more than a vague sense of the strange- 
 ness of its subject. Charles Baudelaire is not a novelty 
 in literature ; his principal work 2 dates from 1857, and 
 his career terminated a few years later. But his 
 admirers have made a classic of him and elevated him 
 to the rank of one of those subjects which are always 
 in order. Even if we differ with them on this point, 
 such attention as Baudelaire demands will not lead us 
 very much astray. He is not, in quantity (whatever he 
 may have been in quality), a formidable writer ; having 
 
 1 There had been an exchange of letters on the subject in an 
 American journal. 
 
 2 " Les Fleurs du Mai." Par Charles Baudelaire. Precede d'une 
 Notice par The phile Gautier. Paris : Michel Levy. 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 73 
 
 died young, he was not prolific, and the most noticeable 
 of his original productions are contained in two small 
 volumes. 
 
 His celebrity began with the publication of "Les 
 Fleurs du Mai," a collection of verses of which some 
 had already appeared in periodicals. The " Revue des 
 Deux Mondes" had taken the responsibility of intro- 
 ducing a few of them to the world or rather, though it 
 held them at the baptismal font of public opinion, it had 
 declined to stand godfather. An accompanying note 
 in the "Revue" disclaimed all editorial approval of 
 their morality. This of course procured them a good 
 many readers ; and when, on its appearance, the volume 
 we have mentioned was overhauled by the police a still 
 greater number of persons desired to possess it. Yet in 
 spite of the service rendered him by the censorship, 
 Baudelaire has never become in any degree popular; 
 the lapse of twenty years has seen but five editions of 
 "Les Fleurs du Hal." The foremost feeling of the 
 reader of the present day will be one of surprise, 
 and even amusement, at Eaudelaire's audacities hav- 
 ing provoked this degree of scandal. The world has 
 travelled fast since then, and the French censorship 
 must have been, in the year 1857, in a very prudish 
 mood. There is little in " Les Fleurs du Mai " to make 
 the reader of either French or English prose and verse 
 
74 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 of the present day even open his eyes. We have passed 
 through the fiery furnace and profited by experience. 
 We are happier than Racine's heroine, who had not 
 
 Su se faire un front qui ne rougit jamais. 
 
 Baudelaire's verses do not strike us as being dictated by 
 a spirit of bravado though we have heard that, in talk, 
 it was his habit, to an even tiresome degree, to cultivate 
 the quietly outrageous to pile up monstrosities and 
 blasphemies without winking and with the air of utter- 
 ing proper commonplaces. 
 
 " Les Fleurs du Mai " is evidently a sincere book so 
 far as anything for a man of Baudelaire's temper and 
 culture could be sincere. Sincerity seems to us to belong 
 to a range of qualities with which Baudelaire and his 
 friends were but scantily concerned. His great quality 
 was an inordinate cultivation of the sense of the 
 picturesque, and his care was for how things looked, and 
 whether some kind of imaginative amusement was not 
 to be got out of them, much more than for what they 
 meant and whither they led and what was their use in 
 human life at large. The later editions of " Les Fleurs 
 du Mai" (with some of the interdicted pieces still 
 omitted and others, we believe, restored) contain a long 
 preface by Theophile Gautier, which throws a curious 
 side-light upon what the Spiritualist newspapers would 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 75 
 
 call- Baudelaire's "mentality." Of course Baudelaire is 
 not to be held accountable for what Gautier says of him, 
 but we cannot help judging a man in some degree by 
 the company he keeps. To admire Gautier is certainly 
 excellent taste, but to be admired by Gautier we cannot 
 but regard as rather compromising. He gives a mag- 
 nificently picturesque account of the author of "Les 
 Fleurs du Mai," in which, indeed, the question of pure 
 exactitude is evidently so very subordinate that it seems 
 grossly ill-natured for us to appeal to such a standard. 
 While we are reading him, however, we find ourselves 
 wishing that Baudelaire's analogy with the author him- 
 self were either greater or less. Gautier was perfectly 
 sincere, because he dealt only with the picturesque and 
 pretended to care only for appearances. But Baudelaire 
 (who, to our mind, was an altogether inferior genius to 
 Gautier) applied the same process of interpretation to 
 things as regards which it was altogether inadequate ; 
 so that one is constantly tempted to suppose he cares 
 more for his process for making grotesquely-pictorial 
 verse than for the things themselves. On the whole, as 
 we have said, this inference would be unfair. Baudelaire 
 had a certain groping sense of the moral complexities of 
 life, and if the best that he succeeds in doing is to drag 
 them down into the very turbid element in which he 
 himself plashes and flounders, and there present them to 
 
76 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 us much besmirched and bespattered, this was not a 
 want of goodwill in him, but rather a dulness and 
 permanent immaturity of vision. For American readers, 
 furthermore, Baudelaire is compromised by his having 
 made himself the apostle of our own Edgar Poe. He 
 translated, very carefully and exactly, all of Poe's 
 prose writings, and, we believe, some of his very value- 
 less verses. With all due respect to the very original 
 genius of the author of the "Tales of Mystery," it 
 seems to us that to take him with more than a certain 
 degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one's self. 
 An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly 
 primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him 
 a profound philosopher, the neglect of whose golden 
 utterances stamped his native land with infamy. Never- 
 theless, Poe was vastly the greater charlatan of the two, 
 as well as the greater genius. 
 
 "Les Meurs du Mai" was a very happy title for 
 Baudelaire's verses, but it is not altogether a just one. 
 Scattered flowers incontestably do bloom in the quaking 
 swamps of evil, and the poet who does not mind en- 
 countering bad odours in his pursuit of sweet ones is 
 quite at liberty to go in search of them. But Baudelaire 
 has, as a general thing, not plucked the flowers he has 
 plucked the evil-smelling weeds (we take it that he did 
 not use the word flowers in a purely ironical sense) and 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 77 
 
 he has often taken up mere cupfuls of mud and bog- 
 water. He had said to himself that it was a great 
 shame that the realm of evil and unclean things should 
 be fenced off from the domain of poetry ; that it was 
 full of subjects, of chances and effects ; that it had its 
 light and shade, its logic and its mystery ; and that 
 there was the making of some capital verses in it. So 
 he leaped the barrier and was soon immersed in it up to 
 his neck. Baudelaire's imagination was of a melancholy 
 and sinister kind, and, to a considerable extent, this 
 plunging into darkness and dirt was doubtless very 
 spontaneous and disinterested. But he strikes us on the 
 whole as passionless, and this, in view of the unquestion- 
 able pluck and acuteness of his fancy, is a great pity. 
 He knew evil not by experience, not as something 
 within himself, but by contemplation and curiosity, 
 as something outside of himself, by which his own 
 intellectual agility was not in the least discomposed, 
 rather, indeed (as we say his fancy was of a dusky cast) 
 agreeably nattered and stimulated. In the former 
 case, Baudelaire, with his other gifts, might have been a 
 great poet. But, as it is, evil for him begins outside 
 and not inside, and consists primarily of a great deal of 
 lurid landscape and unclean furniture. This is an 
 almost ludicrously puerile view of the matter. Evil is 
 represented as an affair of blood and carrion and 
 
78 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 physical sickness there must be stinking corpses and 
 starving prostitutes and empty laudanum bottles in 
 order that the poet shall be effectively inspired. 
 
 A good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is 
 to say that he was, in his treatment of evil, exactly 
 what Hawthorne was not Hawthorne, who felt the 
 thing at its source, deep in the human consciousness. 
 Baudelaire's infinitely slighter volume of genius apart, 
 he was a sort of Hawthorne reversed. It is the 
 absence of this metaphysical quality in his treatment 
 of his favourite subjects (Poe was his metaphysician, 
 and his devotion sustained him through a translation 
 of " Eureka !") that exposes him to that class of accusa- 
 tions of which M. Edmond Scherer's accusation of feed- 
 ing upon pourriture is an example ; and, in fact, in his 
 pages we never know with what we are dealing. "We 
 encounter an inextricable confusion of sad emotions 
 and vile things, and w y e are at a loss to know whether 
 the subject pretends to appeal to our conscience or 
 we were going to say to our olfactories. " Le Mai ? " 
 we exclaim ; " you do yourself too much honour. This 
 is not Evil ; it is not the wrong ; it is simply the 
 nasty ! " Our impatience is of the same order as 
 that which we should feel if a poet, pretending to 
 pluck " the flowers of good," should come and present 
 us, as specimens, a rhapsody on plumcake and eau 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 79 
 
 du Cologne. Independently of the question of his 
 subjects, the charm of Baudelaire's verse is often of 
 a very high order. He belongs to the class of geniuses 
 in whom we ourselves find but a limited pleasure 
 the laborious, deliberate, economical writers, those 
 who fumble a long time in their pockets before they 
 bring out their hand with a coin in the palm. But 
 the coin, when Baudelaire at last produced it, was 
 often of a high value. He had an extraordinary 
 verbal instinct and an exquisite felicity of epithet. 
 We cannot help wondering, however, at Gautier's 
 extreme admiration for his endowment in this direc- 
 tion; it is the admiration of the writer who gushes 
 for the writer who trickles. In one point Baudelaire 
 is extremely remarkable in his talent for suggesting 
 associations. His epithets seem to have come out 
 of old cupboards and pockets; they have a kind of 
 magical mustiness. Moreover, his natural sense of 
 the superficial picturesqueness of the miserable and 
 the unclean was extremely acute; there may be a 
 difference of opinion as to the advantage of possess- 
 ing such a sense; but whatever it is worth Baude- 
 laire had it in a high degree. One of his poems 
 " To a Bed-haired Beggar Girl " is a masterpiece in 
 the way of graceful expression of this high relish of 
 what is shameful : 
 
80 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Pour moi, poete chetif, 
 Ton jeune corps maladif, 
 Plein de taches de rousseur, 
 A sa douceur. 
 
 Baudelaire repudiated with indignation the charge 
 that he was what is called a realist, and he was 
 doubtless right in doing so. He had too much fancy 
 to adhere strictly to the real ; he always embroiders 
 and elaborates endeavours to impart that touch of 
 strangeness and mystery which is the very raison 
 d'etre of poetry. Baudelaire was a poet, and for a 
 poet to be a realist is of course nonsense. The idea 
 that Baudelaire imported into his . theme was, as a 
 general thing, an intensification of its repulsiveness, 
 but it was at any rate ingenious. When he makes 
 an invocation to "la Debauche aux bras immondes" 
 one may be sure he means more by it than is evident 
 to the vulgar he means, that is, an intenser perver- 
 sity. Occasionally he treats agreeable subjects, and 
 his least sympathetic critics must make a point of 
 admitting that his most successful poem is also his 
 most wholesome and most touching; we allude to 
 "Les Petites Vieilles " a really masterly production. 
 But if it represents the author's maximum, it is a 
 note that he very rarely struck. 
 
 Baudelaire, of course, is a capital text for a dis- 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 81 
 
 cussion of the question as to the importance of the 
 morality or of the subject-matter in general of a 
 work of art; for he offers a rare combination of 
 technical zeal and patience and of vicious sentiment. 
 But eren if we had space to enter upon such a dis- 
 cussion, we should spare our words ; for argument on 
 this point wears to our sense a really ridiculous aspect. 
 To deny the relevancy of subject-matter and the im- 
 portance of the moral quality of a work of art strikes 
 us as, in two words, ineffably puerile. We do not 
 know what the great moralists would say about the 
 matter they would probably treat it very good- 
 humouredly ; but that is not the question. There is 
 very little doubt what the great artists would say. 
 These geniuses feel that the whole thinking man is 
 one, and that to count out the moral element in one's 
 appreciation of an artistic total is exactly as sane as 
 it would be (if the total were a poem) to eliminate 
 all the words in three syllables, or to consider only 
 such portions of it as had been written by candle- 
 light. The crudity of sentiment of the advocates of 
 " art for art " is often a striking example of the fact 
 that a great deal of what is called culture may fail 
 to dissipate a well-seated provincialism of spirit. 
 They talk of morality as Miss Edgeworth's infantine 
 heroes and heroines talk of " physic " they allude to 
 
 G 
 
82 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 its being put into and kept out of a work of art, 
 put into and kept out of one's appreciation of the 
 same, as if it were a coloured fluid kept in a big- 
 labelled bottle in some mysterious intellectual closet. 
 It is in reality simply a part of the essential rich- 
 ness of inspiration it has nothing to do with the 
 artistic process and it has everything to do with the 
 artistic effect. The more a work of art feels it at its 
 source, the richer it is ; the less it feels it, the 
 poorer it is. People of a large taste prefer rich 
 works to poor ones and they are not inclined to 
 assent to the assumption that the process is the whole 
 work. "We are safe in believing that all this is com- 
 fortably clear to most of those who have, in any 
 degree, been initiated into art by production. For 
 them the subject is as much a part of their work as 
 their hunger is a part of their dinner. Baudelaire 
 was not so far from being of this way of thinking 
 as some of his admirers would persuade us; yet we 
 may say on the whole that he was the victim of a 
 grotesque illusion. He tried to make fine verses on 
 ignoble subjects, and in our opinion he signally 
 failed. He gives, as a poet, a perpetual impression 
 of discomfort and pain. He went in search of cor- 
 ruption, and the ill-conditioned jade proved a thankless 
 muse. The thinking reader, feeling himself, as a critic, 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. S3 
 
 all one, as we have said, finds the beauty perverted 
 by the ugliness. What the poet wished, doubtless, 
 was to seem to be always in the poetic attitude ; 
 what the reader sees is a gentleman in a painful- 
 looking posture, staring very hard at a mass of 
 things from which, more intelligently, we avert our 
 heads. 
 
 G 2 
 
HOKORE DE BALZAC. 
 
 THE French in general do their duty by their great 
 men; they render them a liberal tribute of criticism, 
 commentary, annotation, biographical analysis. They 
 do not, indeed, make them the subject of " memoirs " 
 in the English sense ; there are few French examples of 
 that class of literature to which Boswell's " Joluison " 
 and Lockhart's " Scott " belong. But there usually 
 clusters about the image of a conspicuous writer an 
 infinite number of travaux, as the French say, of every 
 degree of importance. Many of these are very solid and 
 serious ; their authors are generally to be charged with 
 attaching too absolute a value to their heroes. The 
 departed genius is patiently weighed and measured ; 
 his works are minutely analysed ; the various episodes 
 of his life are made the object of exhaustive research ; 
 his letters are published, and his whole personality, 
 physical, moral, intellectual, passes solemnly into 
 literature. He is always in order as a " subject " ; it is 
 
DE BALZAC. 85 
 
 admitted that the last word can never be said about 
 him. From this usual fate of eminent Frenchmen, one 
 of the greatest has been strikingly exempted. Honorg 
 de Balzac is weighted neither with the honours nor 
 with the taxes of an accumulated commentary. The 
 critic who proposes to study him, and who looks for 
 extrinsic assistance in his task, perceives such aid to 
 be very meagre. Balzac has been discussed with first- 
 rate ability only by one writer. M. Taine's essay, 
 incomplete as it is, may be said at any rate to be 
 essentially worthy of its subject. Sainte-Beuve wrote 
 upon Balzac two or three times, but always with striking 
 and inexplicable inadequacy. There is a long article 
 on the author of the " Comedie Humaine " by The'ophile 
 Gautier, which is admirably picturesque but not at all 
 critical. M. Edmond Scherer, a writer upon whom an 
 ample fold of Sainte-Beuve'sj mantle has fallen, lately 
 published a few pages which are suggestive, but in which 
 he affirms that Balzac is neither an artist, a master, nor 
 a writer. The great novelist's countrymen, in a word, 
 have taken him less seriously than was to be expected. 
 If we desire biographical details we are reduced to 
 consulting the very flimsy gossip of M. Leon Gozlan. 
 Balzac has indeed what is called his legende, but it has 
 been chiefly in the keeping of the mere tattlers of litera- 
 ture. The critic is forced to look for the man almost 
 
86 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 exclusively in his works ; and it must be confessed that 
 in the case of a writer so voluminous as Balzac such a 
 field is ample. We should rather rejoice than regret 
 that there are not more pages to turn. Balzac's 
 complete works occupy twenty-three huge octavo 
 volumes in the stately but inconvenient "edition de- 
 finitive," lately published. There is a prospect of his 
 letters being given to the world in a complementary 
 volume. 
 
 I. 
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC was born at Tours in 1799 ; he 
 died at Paris in 1850. Most first-rate men at fifty- 
 one have still a good deal of work in them, and there 
 is no reason to believe that, enormous as had been the 
 demands he made upon it, Balzac's productive force 
 was fully spent. His prefaces are filled with confident 
 promises to publish novels that never appeared. Never- 
 theless it is impossible altogether to regret that Balzac 
 died with work still in him. He had written enough ; 
 he had written too much. His novels, in spite of their 
 
 extraordinary closeness of tissue, all betray the want 
 
 * 
 
 of leisure in the author. It is true that shortly before 
 his death he had encountered a change of fortune ; he 
 had married a rich woman and he was in a position to 
 
DE BALZAC. 87 
 
 drive his pen no faster than his fancy prompted. It is 
 interesting to wonder whether Balzac at leisure Balzac 
 with that great money-question which was at once the 
 supreme inspiration and the aesthetic alloy of his life, 
 placed on a relatively ideal basis would have done 
 anything essentially finer than " Les Parents Pauvres" 
 or "Le Pere Goriot." We can hardly help doubting 
 it. M. Taine, looking as usual for formulas and labels, 
 says that the most complete description of Balzac is 
 that he was a man of business a man of business in 
 debt. The formula here is on the whole satisfactory ; 
 it expresses not only what he was by circumstances, 
 but what he was by inclination. We cannot say how 
 much Balzac liked being in debt, but we are very sure 
 he liked, for itself, the process of manufacture and sale, 
 and that even when all his debts had been paid he 
 would have continued to keep his shop. 
 
 Before he was thirty years old he had published, 
 under a variety of pseudonyms, some twenty long 
 novels, veritable Grub Street productions, written in 
 sordid Paris attics, in poverty, in perfect obscurity. 
 Several of these " oeuvres de jeunesse " have lately 
 been republished, but the best of them are unreadable. 
 No writer ever served a harder apprenticeship to his 
 art, or lingered more hopelessly at the base of the 
 ladder of fame. This early incompetence seems at 
 
88 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 first an anomaly, but it is only partially an anomaly. 
 That so vigorous a genius should have learned his trade 
 so largely by experiment and so little by divination ; 
 that in order to discover what he could do he should 
 have had to make specific trial of each of the things 
 he could not do this is something which needs ex- 
 planation. The explanation is found, it seems to us, 
 simply in the folly of his attempting, at that age, to 
 produce such novels as he aspired to produce. It was 
 not that he could not use his wings; it was simply 
 that his wings had not grown. The wings of great 
 poets generally sprout very early ; the wings of great 
 artists in prose, great explorers of the sources of prose, 
 begin to spread themselves only 'after the man is 
 tolerably formed. Good observers, we believe, will 
 confess to a general mistrust of novels written before 
 thirty. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamartine, Victor 
 Hugo, Alfred de Musset, were hardly in their twenties 
 before they struck their fully resonant notes. Walter 
 Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, Madame Sand, waited 
 till they were at least turned thirty, and then without 
 prelude, or with brief prelude, produced a novel that 
 was a masterpiece. If it was well for them to wait, 
 it would have been infinitely better for Balzac. Balzac 
 was to be preeminently a social novelist ; his strength 
 was to lie in representing the innumerable actual facts 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 89 
 
 of the French civilization of his day things only to 
 be learned by patient experience. Balzac's inspiration, 
 his stock, his fonds, was outside of him, in the complex 
 French world of the nineteenth century. If, instead 
 of committing to paper impossible imaginary tales, he 
 could have stood for a while in some other relation to 
 the society about him than that of a scribbler, it 
 would have been a very great gain. The great general 
 defect of his manner, as we shall see, is the absence of 
 fresh air, of the trace of disinterested observation ; he 
 had from his earliest years, to carry out our metaphor, 
 an eye to the shop. In every great artist who possesses 
 taste there is a little a very little of the amateur ; 
 but in Balzac there is absolutely nothing of the amateur, 
 and nothing is less to be depended upon than Balzac's 
 taste. But he was forced to write ; his family wished 
 to make a lawyer of him, and he preferred to be a 
 romancer. He mastered enough law to be able to 
 incorporate the mysteries of legal procedure in the 
 "Comedie Humaine," and then embarked upon the 
 most prolific literary career, perhaps, that the world 
 has seen. His family cut down his supplies and tried 
 to starve him out; but he held firm, and in 1830 made 
 his first step into success. Meanwhile he had engaged 
 in several commercial ventures, each one of which 
 failed, leaving him a ponderous legacy of debt. To the 
 
90 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 end of his life he was haunted with undischarged obli- 
 gations and was constantly trying new speculations and 
 investments. It is true, we believe, that he amused 
 himself with representing this pecuniary incubus as far 
 more mysteriously and heroically huge than it was. 
 His incessant labour brought him a remuneration which 
 at this day and in this country would be considered 
 contemptible. M. Gozlan affirms that his annual 
 income, in his successful years, rarely exceeded 12,000 
 francs. This appears incredible until we find the 
 editor of the " Revue de Paris " crying out against 
 his demand of 3,000 francs for the MS. of " Eugenie 
 Grandet." There is something pitiful in the contrast 
 between this meagre personal budget and his lifelong 
 visions of wealth and of the ways of amassing wealth, 
 his jovial, sensual, colossal enjoyment of luxury, and 
 the great monetary architecture as it were of the 
 " Come'die Humaine." Money is the most general 
 element of Balzac's novels ; other things come and go, 
 but money is always there. His great ambition and 
 his great pretension as a social chronicler was to be 
 complete, and he was more complete in this direction 
 than in any other. He rarely introduces a person 
 without telling us in detail how his property is invested, 
 and the fluctuations of his rentes impartially divide 
 the writer's attention with the emotions of his heart. 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 91 
 
 Balzac never mentions an object without telling us 
 what it cost, and on every occasion he mentions an 
 enormous number of objects. His women, too, talk 
 about money quite as much as his men, and not only 
 his ignoble and mercenary women (of whom there 
 are so many) but his charming women, his heroines, 
 his great ladies. Madame de Mortsauf is intended as 
 a perfect example of feminine elevation, and yet 
 Madame de Mortsauf has the whole of her husband's 
 agricultural economy at her fingers' ends; she strikes 
 us at moments as an attorney in petticoats. Each 
 particular episode of the " Comedie Humaine " has 
 its own hero and heroine, but the great general 
 protagonist is the twenty-franc piece. 
 
 One thing at any rate Balzac achieved during these 
 early years of effort and obscurity; he had laid the 
 foundations of that intimate knowledge of Paris which 
 was to serve as the basis the vast mosaic pavement 
 of the " Comedie Humaine." Paris became his world, 
 his universe ; his passion for the great city deserves 
 to rank in literature beside Dr. Johnson's affection 
 for London. Wherever in his novels Paris is not 
 directly presented she is even more vividly implied ; 
 the great negative to this brilliant positive, that vie 
 de province of which he produced such elaborate pic- 
 tures, is always observed from the standpoint of the 
 
92 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Boulevard. If Balzac had represented any other country 
 than France, if his imagination had ever left a footprint 
 in England or Germany, it is a matter of course for 
 those who know him that his fathomless Parisian 
 cockneyism would have had on these occasions a still 
 sharper emphasis. But there is nothing to prove 
 that he in the least " realized," as we say, the existence 
 of England and Germany. That he had of course a 
 complete theory of the British constitution and the 
 German intellect makes little difference ; for Balzac's 
 theories were often in direct proportion to his ignorance. 
 He never perceived with any especial directness that 
 the civilized world was made up of something else 
 than Paris and the provinces; and as he is said to 
 have been able to persuade himself, by repeating it a 
 few times, that he had done various things which he 
 had not done made a present of a white horse, for 
 instance, to his publisher so he would have had only 
 to say often enough to himself that England was a 
 mythic country to believe imperturbably that there 
 was in fact, three hundred miles away, no magnificent 
 far-spreading London to invalidate his constant assump- 
 tion that Paris is the pivot of human history. Never 
 was a great genius more essentially local. Shakespeare, 
 Scott, Goethe, savour of their native soil ; but they have 
 a glance that has only to fix itself a moment to call 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 93 
 
 up easily other horizons. Balzac's power of creation 
 gains perhaps in intensity what it loses in reach ; it is 
 certain at any rate that his conception of the stage 
 on which the " Comedie Humaine " is perpetually 
 being acted is surrounded by a Chinese wall. Never 
 was an imagination more in sympathy with the French 
 theory of centralization. 
 
 When his letters are. published it will be interesting 
 to learn from them, in so far as we may, how his life 
 was spent during these first ten years of his manhood. 
 He began very early to write about countesses and 
 duchesses ; and even after he had become famous, the 
 manner in which he usually portrays the denizens of 
 the Faubourg St. Germain obliges us to believe that 
 the place they occupy in his books is larger than any 
 that they occupied in his experience. Did he go into 
 society ? did he observe manners from a standpoint that 
 commanded the field? It was not till he became 
 famous that he began to use the aristocratic prefix; 
 in his earlier years he was plain M. Balzac. I believe 
 it is more than suspected that the pedigree represented 
 by this de was as fabulous (and quite as ingenious) as 
 any that he invented for his heroes. Balzac was 
 profoundly and essentially roturier ; we shall see that 
 the intrinsic evidence of his plebeian origin is abundant. 
 He may very well, like his own Eugene de Bastignac, 
 
94 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 have lived at a Maison Vauquer ; but did he, like Kastig- 
 nac, call upon a Madame de Beauseant and see her receive 
 him as a kinsman ? We said just now that we had to 
 look for Balzac almost altogether in his books; and 
 yet his books are singularly void of personal revela- 
 tions. They tell us a vast deal about his mind, but 
 they suggest to us very little about his life. It is 
 hard to imagine a writer less autobiographic. This is 
 certainly a proof of the immense sweep of his genius 
 of the incomparable vividness of his imagination. The 
 things he invented were as real to him as the things 
 he knew, and his actual experience is overlaid with a 
 thousand thicknesses, as it were, of imaginary experi- 
 ence. The person is irrecoverably lost in the artist. 
 There is sufficient evidence, however, that the person 
 led a rather hungry and predatory life during these 
 early years, and that he was more familiar with what 
 went on in the streets than with what occurred in the 
 salons. Whatever he encountered, however, he observed. 
 In one of his tales he describes a young man who 
 follows people in the street to overhear what they say. 
 This at least is autobiographic, and the young man is 
 Honorc de Balzac, "devoured by his genius and by 
 the consiousness of his genius," as M. Taine says with 
 all the unwritten " Come die Humaine " within him. 
 " In listening to these people I could espouse their life. 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 95 
 
 I felt their rags upon my back; I walked with my 
 feet in their tattered shoes ; their desires, their wants 
 everything passed into my soul, and my soul passed 
 into theirs ; it was the dream of a waking man." This 
 glimpse of Balzac laying up data is especially interest- 
 ing because it is singularly rare. It must be that for 
 years he spent many an hour in silent, instinctive con- 
 templation, for his novels imply a period of preparatory 
 research, of social botanizing, geologizing, palseontolo- 
 gizing, just as Humboldt's "Cosmos" implies a large 
 amount of travel. It happens that most of the anec- 
 dotes about Balzac pertain to his productive period, 
 and present him to us in his white friar's dress, getting 
 out of bed at midnight to work, in a darkened room, 
 three weeks at a sitting. The open-air Balzac, as we 
 may call it, has been little commemorated. White 
 Dominican robes, darkened rooms, deep potations of 
 coffee, form the staple of M. Gozlan's reminiscences. 
 Every man works as he can and as he must ; and if, in 
 order to write the " Parents Pauvres," Balzac had had 
 to dress himself in a bearskin, we trust he would not 
 have hesitated. But it is nevertheless true that be- 
 tween the lines of the " Comedie Humaine " the reader 
 too often catches a glimpse of the Dominican robe and 
 the darkened room, and longs for an open window 
 and a costume somewhat less capricious. A realistic 
 
96 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 novelist, he remembers, is not an astrologer or an 
 alchemist. 
 
 In 1830 Balzac published the "Peau de Chagrin" 
 the first work of the series on which his reputation 
 rests. After this, for twenty years, he produced with- 
 out cessation. The quantity of his work, when we 
 consider the quality, seems truly amazing. There are 
 writers in the same line who have published an abso- 
 lutely greater number of volumes. Alexandre Dumas, 
 Madame Sand, Anthony Trollope, have all bfeen immensely 
 prolific; but they all weave a loose web, as it were, 
 and Balzac weaves a dense one. The tissue of his tales 
 is always extraordinarily firm and hard ; it many not 
 at every point be cloth of gold, but it has always a 
 metallic rigidity. It has been worked over a dozen 
 times, and the work can never be said to belong 
 to light literature. You have only to turn the pages 
 of a volume of Balzac to see that, whatever may 
 be the purity of the current, it at least never runs 
 thin. There is none of that wholesale dialogue, chopped 
 into fragments, which Alexandre Dumas manufactures 
 by the yard, and which bears the same relation to real 
 narrative architecture as a chain of stepping-stones 
 tossed across a stream does to a granite bridge. Balzac 
 is always definite ; you can say Yes or No to him as 
 you go on ; the story bristles with references that must 
 
HONOKfi DE BALZAC. 97 
 
 be verified, and if sometimes it taxes the attention 
 more than is thought becoming in a novel, we must 
 admit that, being as hard reading in the way of enter- 
 tainment as Hallam or Guizot, it may also have been very 
 hard writing. This it is that makes Balzac's fertility 
 so amazing the fact that, whether we relish its results 
 or not, we at least perceive that the process is not 
 superficial. His great time was from 1830 to 1840 
 it was during these ten years that he published his 
 most perfect works. " Eugenie Grandet," " La Recherche 
 de 1'Absolu," "Le Pere Goriot," "Tin Menage de 
 Garden," " Le Cabinet des Antiques," belong to the 
 earlier period. " Beatrix," " Modeste Mignon," " Une 
 Tenebreuse Affaire," " Les Illusions Perdues," the 
 " Memoires de deux Jeunes Marie'es," " La Muse du 
 Departement," "Le Depute d'Arcis," belong to the 
 latter. Balzac is never simple, and in a sense which 
 it will be interesting to attempt to explain, he is always 
 corrupt ; but " La Recherche de Absolu " and " Le Pere 
 Goriot" we will not mention "Eugenie Grandet," 
 which was so praised for its innocence that the author 
 found himself detesting it have a certain relative 
 simplicity and purity; whereas in the " Jeunes Mariees," 
 " Beatrix," and " Modeste Mignon," we are up to our 
 necks in sophistication. If, however, the works of 
 the first half of Balzac's eminent period are, generally 
 
98 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 speaking, superior to those of the second half, it must 
 be added that there are two or three incongruous 
 transpositions. " Le Lys dans la Vallee," published in 
 1835, is bad enough to be coupled with "Beatrix"; 
 and "Les Parents Pauvres " and " Les Paysans," 
 finished shortly before the author's death, are in many 
 respects his most powerful achievements. Most of 
 Balzac's shorter tales are antecedent to 1840, and his 
 readers know how many masterpieces the list contains. 
 "Le Colonel Chabert " and " I/Interdiction " are 
 found in it, as well as " La Femme Abandonnee," " La 
 Grenadiere " and " Le Message," and the admirable 
 little stories grouped together (in the common duode- 
 cimo edition) with "Les Marana," The duration of 
 Balzac's works will certainly not be in proportion to 
 their length. "LeCure de Tours," for all its brevity, 
 will be read when " Le Depute d'Arcis " lies unopened ; 
 and more than one literary adventurer will turn, out- 
 wearied, from " La Peau de Chagrin " and find conso- 
 lation in "Un Debut dans la Yie." 
 
 We know not how early Balzac formed the plan 
 of the " Comedie Humaine " ; but the general preface, 
 in which he explains the unity of his work and 
 sets forth that each of his tales is a block in a 
 single immense edifice and that this edifice aims to 
 be a complete portrait of the civilization of his 
 
DE BALZAC. 99 
 
 time this remarkable manifesto dates from 1842. 
 (If we call it remarkable, it is not that we under- 
 stand it; though so much as we have just expressed 
 may easily be gathered from it. From the moment 
 that Balzac attempts to philosophize, readers in the 
 least sensible of the difference between words and 
 things must part company with him.) He complains* 
 very properly, that the official historians have given 
 us no information about manners that is worth speak- 
 ing of ; that this omission is unpardonable and that 
 future ages will care much more for the testimony 
 of the novel, properly executed, than for that of 
 the writers who " set in order facts which are 
 about the same in all nations, look up the spirit 
 of laws which have fallen into disuse, elaborate 
 theories which lead nations astray, or, like certain 
 metaphysicians, endeavour to explain what is." In- 
 spired by this conviction, Balzac proposed to himself 
 to illustrate by a tale or a group of tales every 
 phase of French life and manners during the first 
 half of the nineteenth century. To be colossally 
 and exhaustively complete complete not only in the 
 generals but in the particulars to touch upon every 
 salient point, to illuminate every typical feature, 
 to reproduce every sentiment, every idea, every 
 person, every place, every object, that has played a 
 
 H 2 
 
100 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 part, however minute, however obscure, in the life 
 of the French people nothing less than this was 
 his programme. The undertaking was enormous, but 
 it will not seem at first that Balzac underestimated 
 the needful equipment. He was conscious of the 
 necessary talent and he deemed it possible to acquire 
 the necessary knowledge. This knowledge was almost 
 encyclopaedic, and yet, after the vividness of his 
 imagination, Blazac's strongest side is his grasp of 
 actual facts. Behind our contemporary civilization 
 is an immense and complicated machinery the 
 machinery of government, of police, of the arts, the 
 professions, the trades. Among these things Balzac 
 moved easily and joyously ; they form the rough 
 skeleton of his great edifice. There is not a little 
 pedantry in his pretension to universal and infallible 
 accuracy ; but his accuracy, so far as we can mea- 
 sure it, is extraordinary, and in dealing with Balzac 
 we must, in every direction, make our account with 
 pedantry. He made his cadres, as the French say; 
 he laid out his field in a number of broad divisions ; 
 he subdivided these, and then he filled up his moulds, 
 pressing the contents down and packing it tight. You 
 may read the categories on the back of the cover 
 of the little common edition. There are the " Scenes 
 de la Vie Privee " " de la Vie de Province " " de 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 101 
 
 la Yie Parisienne " " de la Yie Politique " " de la 
 Yie Militaire " " de la Yie de Campagne " ; and 
 in a complementary way there are the " Etudes Philo- 
 sophiques " (this portentous categoiy contains the 
 picturesque " Recherche de 1'Absolu") and the 
 t f Etudes Analytiques. " Then, in the way of sub- 
 divisions, there are " Les Celibataires," " Les Parisiens 
 en Province," " Les Rivalites," " Les Illusions Per- 
 dues," the " Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes," 
 the "Parents Pauvres," the " Envers de 1'Histoire 
 Contemporaine." This goodly nomenclature had a 
 retroactive effect ; the idea of the " Come die Humaine," 
 having developed itself when the author was midway 
 in his career, a number of its component parts are 
 what we may call accomplices after the fact. They 
 are pieces that dovetail into the vast mosaic as they 
 best can. But even if the occasional disparities were 
 more striking they would signify little, for what is 
 most interesting in Balzac is not the achievement 
 but the attempt. The attempt was, as he himself has 
 happily expressed it, to " faire concurrence a 1'etat 
 civil " to start an opposition, as we should say in 
 America, to the civil registers. He created a com- 
 plete social system an hierarchy of ranks and pro- 
 fessions which should correspond with that of which 
 the officers of the census have cognizance. Every- 
 
102 EKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 thing is there, as we find it in his pages the king 
 (in"Le Depute d'Arcis " Louis XVIII. is introduced 
 and makes witticisms quite inedits) the administration, 
 the church, the army, the judicature, the aristocracy, 
 the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry, the 
 artists, the journalists, the men of letters, the 
 actors, the children (a little girl is the heroine of 
 " Pierrette," and an urchin the hero of "Un Debut 
 dans la Vie ") the shopkeepers of every degree, the 
 criminals, the thousand irregular and unclassified 
 members of society. All this in Balzac's hands 
 becomes an organic whole ; it moves together ; it has 
 a pervasive life ; the blood circulates through it ; its < 
 parts are connected by sinuous arteries. We have 
 seen in English literature, in two cases, a limited 
 attempt to create a permanent stock, a standing 
 fund, of characters. Thackeray has led a few of 
 his admirable figures from one novel to another, and 
 Mr. Trollope has deepened illusion for us by his re- 
 peated evocations of Bishop Proudie and Archdeacon 
 Grantley. But these things are faint shadows of 
 Balzac's extravagant thoroughness his fantastic co- 
 hesiveness. A French brain alone could have persisted 
 in making a system of all this. Balzac's " Comedie 
 Humaine " is on the imaginative line very much 
 what Comte's " Positive Philosophy" is on the scientific. 
 
HOXOKfi DE BALZAC. 103 
 
 These great enterprises are equally characteristic of 
 the French passion for completeness, for symmetry, 
 for making a system as neat as an epigram of its 
 intolerance of the indefinite, the unformulated. The 
 French mind likes better to squeeze things into a 
 formula that mutilates them, if need be, than to 
 leave them in the frigid vague. The farther limit of 
 its power of arrangement (so beautiful as it generally 
 is) is the limit of the knowable. Consequently we 
 often see in the visions and systems of Frenchmen 
 what may be called a conventional infinite. The civiliza- 
 tion of the nineteenth century is of course not infinite, 
 but to us of English speech, as we survey it, it 
 appears so multitudinous, so complex, so far spreading, 
 so suggestive, so portentous it has such misty edges 
 and far reverberations that the imagination, oppressed 
 and overwhelmed, shrinks from any attempt to grasp 
 it as a whole. The French imagination, in the person 
 of Balzac, easily dominates it, as he would say, 
 and, without admitting that the problem is any the 
 less vast, regards it as practically soluble. He w^ould 
 be an incautious spirit who should propose here- 
 upon to decide whether the French imagination or 
 the English is the more potent. The one sees a 
 vast number of obstacles and the other a vast number 
 of remedies the one beholds a great many shadows 
 
104 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 and the other a great many lights. If the human 
 comedy, as Balzac pours it, condensed and solidified, 
 out of his mould, is a very reduced copy of its 
 original, we may nevertheless admit that the mould 
 is of enormous dimensions. "Very good," the Eng- 
 lish imagination says ; " call it large, but don't 
 call it universal." The impartial critic may assent ; 
 but he privately remembers that it was in the con- 
 venient faculty of persuading himself that he could 
 do everything that Balzac found the inspiration to 
 do so much. 
 
 In addition to possessing an immense knowledge 
 of his field, he was conscious that he needed a 
 philosophy a system of opinions. On this side too 
 he equipped himself ; so far as quantity goes no man 
 was ever better provided with opinions. Balzac has 
 an opinion on everything in heaven and on earth, 
 and a complete, consistent theory of the universe, 
 which was always ready for service. "The signs of 
 a superior mind," says M. Taine, in speaking of him, 
 "are vues d'ensemble general views"; and judged by 
 its wealth in this direction Balzac's should be the 
 greatest mind the world has seen. "We can think 
 of no other mind that has stood ready to deliver 
 itself on quite so many subjects. We doubt whether, 
 on the whole, Aristotle had so many vues d'ensemble 
 
DE BALZAC. 105 
 
 as Balzac. In Plato, in Bacon, in Shakespeare, in 
 Goethe, in Hegel, there are shameful intermissions 
 and lapses, ugly blank spots, ungraceful liabilities to 
 be taken by surprise. But Balzac, as the showman 
 of the human comedy, had measured his responsi- 
 bilities unerringly and concluded that he must not 
 only know what everything is, but what everything 
 should be. He is thus par excellence the philosophic 
 novelist ; his pages bristle with axioms, moral, 
 political, ethical, sesthetical ; his narrative groans 
 beneath the weight of metaphysical and scientific 
 digression. The value of his philosophy and his 
 science is a question to be properly treated apart ; we 
 mean simply to indicate that, formally, in this direc- 
 tion he is as complete as in the others. In the 
 front rank, of course, stand his political and religious 
 opinions. These are anchored to "the two eternal 
 truths the monarchy and the Catholic Church." 
 Balzac is, in other words, an elaborate conservative 
 a Tory of the deepest dye. How well, as a 
 picturesque romancer, he knew what he was about 
 in adopting this profession of faith will be plain 
 to the most superficial reader. His philosophy, his 
 morality, his religious opinions have a certain 
 picturesque correspondence with his political views. 
 Speaking generally, it may be said that he had little 
 
106 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 belief in virtue and still less admiration for it. He 
 is so large and various that you find all kinds of 
 contradictory things in him; he has that sign of the 
 few supreme geniuses that, if you look long enough 
 he offers you a specimen of every possible mode of 
 feeling. He has represented virtue, innocence and 
 purity in the most vivid forms. Cesar Birotteau, 
 Eugenie Grandet, Mile. Cormon, Mine. Graslin, Mme. 
 Claes, Mme. de Mortsauf, Popinot, Genestas, the 
 Cousin Pons, Schmucke, Chesnel, Joseph Bridau, 
 Mme. Hulot these and many others are not only 
 admirably good people, but they are admirably suc- 
 cessful figures. They live and move, they produce 
 an illusion, for all their goodness, quite as much 
 as their baser companions Mme. Yauquer, Mme. 
 Marneffe, Yautrin, Philippe Bridau, Mme. de Roche- 
 fide. Balzac had evidently an immense kindliness, 
 a salubrious good nature which enabled him to feel 
 the charm of all artless and helpless manifestations 
 of life. That robustness of temperament and those 
 high animal spirits which carried him into such 
 fantastic explorations of man's carnal nature as the 
 "Physiologie du Mariage " and the " Contes Drola- 
 tiques" that lusty natural humour which was not 
 humour in our English sense, but a relish, senti- 
 mentally more dry but intellectually more keen, of 
 
HOXORJ6 DE BALZAC. 107 
 
 all grotesqueness and quaintness and uncleanness, 
 and which, when it felt itself nagging, had still the 
 vigour to keep itself up a while as what the French 
 call the " hunioristic " to emulate Eabelais, to torture 
 words, to string together names, to be pedantically 
 jovial and archaically hilarious all this helped Balzac 
 to appreciate the simple and the primitive with an 
 intensity subordinate only to his enjoyment of cor- 
 ruption and sophistication. "We do wrong indeed to 
 say subordinate; Balzac was here as strong and as 
 frank as he was anywhere. We are almost inclined 
 to say that his profoundly simple people are his 
 best that in proportion to the labour expended upon 
 them they are most lifelike. Such a figure as " big 
 Nanon," the great, strapping, devoted maid- servant 
 in "Eugenie Grandet," may stand as an example. 
 (Balzac is full, by the way, of good servants; from 
 Silvie and Christophe in " Le Pere Goriot " to Chesnel 
 the notary, whose absolutely canine fidelity deprives 
 him even of the independence of a domestic, in " Le 
 Cabinet des Antiques.") What he represents best is 
 extremely simple virtue, and vice simple or complex, 
 as you please. In superior virtue, intellectual virtue, 
 he fails; when his superior people begin to reason 
 they are lost they become prigs and hypocrites, or 
 worse. Madame de Mortsauf, who is intended to be 
 
108 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 at once the purest and cleverest of his good women, 
 is a kind of fantastic monster; she is perhaps only 
 equalled by the exemplary Madame de 1'Estorade, who 
 (in " Le Depute d'Arcis") writes to a lady with whom 
 she is but scantily acquainted a series of pros and cons 
 on the question whether "it will be given" (as she 
 phrases it) to a certain gentleman to make her 
 " manquer a ses devoirs." This gentleman has snatched 
 her little girl from under a horse's hoofs, and for a 
 while afterward has greatly annoyed her by his 
 importunate presence on her walks and drives. She 
 immediately assumes that he has an eye to her 
 " devoirs." Suddenly, however, he disappears, and it 
 occurs to her that he is " sacrificing his fancy to the 
 fear of spoiling his fine action." At this attractive 
 thought her "devoirs" begin to totter, and she in- 
 genuously exclaims, "But on this footing he would 
 really be a man to reckon with, and, my dear M. de 
 1'Estorade, you would have decidedly to look out ! " 
 And yet Madame de 1' Estorade is given us as a model 
 of the all-gracious wife and mother ; she figures in the 
 "Deux Jeunes Maric'es" as the foil of the luxurious, 
 passionate and pedantic Louise de Chaulieu the young 
 lady who, on issuing from the convent where she has 
 got her education, writes to her friend that she is the 
 possessor of a "virginite savante." 
 
HONORE DE BALZAC. 109 
 
 There are two writers in Balzac the spontaneous 
 one and the reflective one the former of which is 
 much the more delightful, while the latter is the 
 more extraordinary. It was the reflective observer 
 that aimed at colossal completeness and equipped 
 himself with a universal philosophy : and it was of 
 this one we spoke when we said just now that 
 Balzac had little belief in virtue. Balzac's beliefs, 
 it must be confessed, are delicate ground ; from cer- 
 tain points of view, perhaps, the less said about them 
 the better. His sincere, personal beliefs may be 
 reduced to a very compact formula; he believed that 
 it was possible to write magnificent novels, and that 
 he was the man to do it. He believed, otherwise 
 stated, that human life was infinitely dramatic and 
 picturesque, and that he possessed an incomparable 
 analytic perception of the fact. His other convictions 
 were all derived from this and humbly danced attend- 
 ance upon it ; for if being a man of genius means 
 being identical with one's productive faculty, never 
 was there such a genius as Balzac's. A monarchical 
 society is unquestionably more picturesque, more 
 available for the novelist than any other, as the 
 others have as yet exhibited themselves; and there- 
 fore Balzac was with glee, with gusto, with imagina- 
 tion, a monarchist. Of what is to be properly called 
 
110 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 religious feeling we do not remember a suggestion in 
 all his many pages ; on the other hand, the reader 
 constantly encounters the handsomest compliments to 
 the Catholic Church as a social regime. A hierarchy 
 is as much more picturesque than a " congregational 
 society" as a mountain is than a plain. Bishops, 
 abbe's, priests, Jesuits, are invaluable figures in fiction, 
 and the morality of the Catholic Church allows of an 
 infinite chiaroscuro. In " La Fille aux Yeux d'Or " 
 there is a portrait of a priest who becomes preceptor 
 to the youthful hero. " This priest, vicious but politic, 
 sceptical but learned, perfidious but amiable, feeble in 
 aspect, but as strong in body as in head, was so truly 
 useful to his pupil, so complaisant to his vices, so 
 good a calculator of every sort of force, so deep 
 when it was necessary to play some human trick, so 
 young at table, at the gaming house, at I don't 
 know where that the only thing the grateful Henry 
 de Marsay could feel soft-hearted over in 1814 was 
 the portrait of his dear bishop the single object of 
 personal property he was able to inherit from this 
 prelate, an admirable type of the men whose genius 
 will save the Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church." 
 It is hardly an exaggeration to say that we here come 
 as near as we do at any point to Balzac's religious 
 feeling. The reader will see that it is simply a lively 
 
HOXOEfi DE BALZAC. Ill 
 
 assent to that great worldly force of the Catholic 
 Church, the art of using all sorts of servants and all 
 sorts of means. Balzac was willing to accept any 
 morality that was curious and unexpected, and he 
 found himself as a matter of course more in sym- 
 pathy with a theory of conduct which takes account of 
 circumstances and recognises the merits of duplicity, 
 than with the comparatively colourless idea that virtue 
 is nothing if not uncompromising. Like all persons 
 who have looked a great deal at human life, he had 
 been greatly struck with most people's selfishness, 
 and this quality seemed to him the most general in 
 mankind. Selfishness may go to dangerous lengths, 
 but Balzac believed that it may somehow be regulated 
 and even chastened by a strong throne and a brilliant 
 court, with MM. de Rastignac and de Trailles as sup- 
 ports of the one and Mesdames de Maufrigneuse and 
 d'Espard as ornaments of the other, and by a clever 
 and impressive Church, with plenty of bishops of the 
 pattern of the one from whose history a leaf has just 
 been given. If we add to this that he had a great 
 fancy for "electricity" and animal magnetism, we 
 have touched upon the most salient points of Balzac's 
 philosophy. This makes, it is true, rather a bald 
 statement of a matter which at times seems much 
 more considerable ; but it may be maintained that 
 
112 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 an exact analysis of Ms heterogeneous opinions will 
 leave no more palpable deposit. His imagination was 
 so fertile, the movement of his mind so constant, his 
 curiosity and ingenuity so unlimited, the energy of 
 his phrase so striking, he raises such a cloud of dust 
 about him as he goes, that the reader to whom he 
 is new has a sense of his opening up gulfs and 
 vistas of thought and pouring forth flashes and 
 volleys of wisdom. But from the moment he ceases 
 to be a simple dramatist Balzac is an arrant char- 
 latan. It is probable that no equally vigorous mind 
 was ever at pains to concoct such elaborate messes 
 of folly. They spread themselves over page after 
 page, in a close, dense verbal tissue, which the 
 reader scans in vain for some little flower of avail- 
 able truth. It all rings false it is all mere 
 flatulent pretension. It may be said that from the 
 moment he attempts to deal with an abstraction 
 the presumption is always dead against him. About 
 what the discriminating reader thus brutally dubs 
 his charlatanism, as about everything else in Balzac, 
 there would be very much more to say than this 
 small compass admits of. (Let not the discrimi- 
 nating reader, by the way, repent of his brutality ; 
 Balzac himself was brutal, and must be handled 
 with his own weapons. It would be absurd to write 
 
DE BALZAC. 113 
 
 of him in semi-tones and innuendoes; he never used 
 them himself.) The chief point is that he himself 
 was his most perfect dupe ; he believed in his own 
 magnificent rubbish, and if he made it up, as the 
 phrase is, as he went along, his credulity kept pace 
 with his invention. This was, briefly speaking, be- 
 cause he was morally and intellectually so superficial. 
 He paid himself, as the French say, with shallower 
 conceits than ever before passed muster with a 
 strong man. The moral, the intellectual atmosphere 
 of his genius is extraordinarily gross and turbid ; 
 it is no wonder that the flower of truth does not 
 bloom in it, nor any natural flower whatever. The 
 difference in this respect between Balzac and the 
 other great novelists is extremely striking. "When 
 we approach Thackeray and George Eliot, George 
 Sand and Turgenieff, it is into the conscience and 
 the mind that we enter, and we think of these 
 writers primarily as great consciences and great 
 minds. When we approach Balzac we seem to enter 
 into a great temperament a prodigious nature. He 
 strikes us half the time as an extraordinary physical 
 phenomenon. His robust imagination seems a sort 
 of physical faculty and impresses us more with its 
 sensible mass and quantity than with its lightness 
 or fineness. 
 
 I 
 
114 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 This brings us back to what was said just now 
 touching his disbelief in virtue and his homage to 
 the selfish passions. He had no natural sense of 
 morality, and this we cannot help thinking a serious 
 fault in a novelist. Be the morality false or true, 
 the writer's deference to it greets us as a kind of 
 essential perfume. We find such a perfume in 
 Shakespeare; we find it, in spite of his so-called 
 cynicism, in Thackeray ; we find it, potently, in 
 George Eliot, r in George Sand, in Turgenieff. They 
 care for moral questions ; they are haunted by a 
 moral ideal. This southern slope of the mind, as 
 we may call it, was very barren in Balzac, and it 
 is partly possible to account for its barrenness. 
 Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he 
 hangs perfectly together. He pays for his merits and 
 he sanctifies his defects. He had a sense of this 
 present terrestrial life which has never been sur- 
 passed, and which in his genius overshadowed every- 
 thing else. There are many men who are not 
 especially occupied with the idea of another world, 
 but we believe there has never been a man so com- 
 pletely detached from it as Balzac. This world of 
 our senses, of our purse, of our name, of our Uason 
 (or the absence of it) this palpable world of houses 
 and clothes, of seven per cents and multiform human 
 
DE BALZAC. 115 
 
 faces, pressed upon his imagination with an unpre- 
 cedented urgency. It certainly is real enough to 
 most of us, but to Balzac it was ideally real 
 charmingly, absorbingly, absolutely real. There is 
 nothing in all imaginative literature that in the least 
 resembles his mighty passion for things for material 
 objects, for furniture, upholstery, bricks and mortar. 
 The world that contained these things filled his con- 
 sciousness, and being, at its intensest, meant simply 
 being thoroughly at home among them. Balzac pos- 
 sessed indeed a lively interest in the supernatural : 
 "La Peau de Chagrin," "Louis Lambert," "Sera- 
 phita," are a powerful expression of it. But it was a 
 matter of adventurous fancy, like the same quality in 
 Edgar Poe ; it was perfectly cold, and had nothing 
 to do with his moral life. To get on in this world, 
 to succeed, to live greatly in all one's senses, to have 
 plenty of things this was Balzac's infinite ; it was 
 here that his heart expanded. It was natural, there- 
 fore, that the life of mankind should seem to him 
 above all an eager striving along this line a multi- 
 tudinous greed for personal enjoyment. The master- 
 passion among these passions the passion of the 
 miser he has depicted as no one else has begun to 
 do. "Wherever we look, in the " Comedie Humaine," 
 we see a miser, and he or she is sure to be a 
 
 i 2 
 
116 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 marvel of portraiture. In the struggle and the 
 scramble it is not the sweetest qualities that come 
 uppermost, and Balzac, watching the spectacle, takes 
 little account of these. It is strength and cunning 
 that are most visible the power to climb the ladder, 
 to wriggle to the top of the heap, to clutch the 
 money-bag. In human nature, viewed in relation 
 to this end, it is force only that is desirable, and a 
 feeling is fine only in so far as it is a profitable 
 practical force. Strength of purpose seems the su- 
 premely admirable thing, and the spectator lingers 
 over all eminent exhibitions of it. It may show itself 
 in two great ways in vehemence and in astuteness, 
 in eagerness and in patience. Balzac has a vast relish 
 for both, but on the whole he prefers the latter form 
 as being the more dramatic. It admits of duplicity, 
 and there are few human accomplishments that Balzac 
 professes so explicit a respect for as this. He scatters 
 it freely among his dear "gens d'eglise," and his 
 women are all compounded of it. If he had been 
 asked what was, for human purposes, the faculty he 
 valued most highly, he would have said the power of 
 dissimulation. He regards it as a sign of all superior 
 people, and he says somewhere that nothing forms the 
 character so finely as having had to exercise it in one's 
 youth, in the bosom of one's family. In this attitude 
 
DE BALZAC. 117 
 
 of Balzac's there is an element of affectation and of 
 pedantry; he praises duplicity because it is original 
 and audacious to do so. But he praises it also because 
 it has for him the highest recommendation that any- 
 thing can have it is picturesque. Duplicity is more 
 picturesque than honesty just as the line of beauty 
 is the curve and not the straight line. In place of a 
 moral judgment of conduct, accordingly, Balzac usually 
 gives us an sssthetic judgment. A magnificent action 
 with him is not an action which is remarkable for 
 its high motive, but an action with a great force of 
 will or of desire behind it, which throws it into 
 striking and monumental relief. It may be a magni- 
 ficent sacrifice, a magnificent devotion, a magnificent 
 act of faith ; but the presumption is that it will be 
 a magnificent lie, a magnificent murder, or a magni- 
 ficent adultery. 
 
 II. 
 
 THIS overmastering sense of the present world was 
 of course a superb foundation for the work of a 
 realistic romancer, and it did so much for Balzac 
 that one is puzzled to know where to begin to enu- 
 merate the things he owed to it. It gave him in the 
 first place his background his mise en scene. This 
 
118 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 part of his story had with Balzac an importance his 
 rendering of it a solidity which it had never enjoyed 
 before, and which the most vigorous talents in the 
 school of which Balzac was founder have never been 
 able to restore to it. The place in which an event 
 occurred was in his view of equal moment with the 
 event itself ; it was part of the action ; it was not a 
 thing to take or to leave, or to be vaguely and gracefully 
 indicated ; it imposed itself ; it had a part to play ; it 
 needed to be made as definite as anything else. There 
 is accordingly a very much greater amount of descrip- 
 tion in Balzac than in any other writer, and the 
 description is mainly of towns, houses and rooms. 
 Descriptions of scenery, properly so called, are rare, 
 though when they occur they are often admirable. 
 Almost all of his tales " de la vie de province " are 
 laid in different towns, and a more or less minute 
 portrait of the town is always attempted. How far 
 in these cases Balzac's general pretension to be exact 
 and complete was sustained we are unable to say ; we 
 know not what the natives of Limoges, of Saranur, 
 of Angouleme, of Alencon, of Issoudun, of Guerande, 
 thought of his presentation of these localities ; but if 
 the picture is not veracious, it is at least always definite 
 and masterly. And Balzac did what he could, we 
 believe, to be exact; he often made a romancer's 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 119 
 
 pilgrimage to a town that lie wished to introduce into 
 a story. Here he picked out a certain number of houses 
 to his purpose, lodged the persons of his drama in them, 
 and reproduced them even to their local odours. Many 
 readers find all this very wearisome, and it is certain 
 that it offers one a liberal chance to be bored. We, for 
 our part, have always found Balzac's houses and rooms 
 extremely interesting ; we often prefer his places to 
 his people. He was a profound connoisseur in these 
 matters ; he had a passion for bric-a-brac, and his 
 tables and chairs are always in character. It must 
 be admitted that in this matter as in every other he 
 had his right and his wrong, and that in his enumera- 
 tions of inanimate objects he often sins by extrava- 
 gance. He has his necessary houses and his superfluous 
 houses : often when in a story the action is running 
 thin he stops up your mouth against complaint, as it 
 were, by a choking dose of brick and mortar. The 
 power of his memory, his representative vision, as 
 regards these things is something amazing; the reader 
 never ceases to wonder at the promptness with which 
 he can " get up" a furnished house at the immense 
 supply of this material that he carries about in his 
 mind. He expends it with a royal liberality ; where 
 another writer makes an allusion Balzac gives you a 
 Dutch picture. In " Le Cabinet des Antiques," on 
 
120 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the verge of its close, Madame Camusot makes a 
 momentary appearance. She has only twenty lines 
 to speak, but immediately we are confronted with her 
 domicile. "Leaning against the next house, so as to 
 present its front to the court, it had on each floor but 
 one ( window on the street. The court, confined in its 
 width by two walls ornamented by rose-bushes and 
 privet, had at its bottom, opposite the house, a shed 
 supported upon two brick arches. A little half -door 
 admitted you into this dusky house, made duskier 
 still by a great walnut-tree planted in the middle 
 of the court." We are told furthermore about the 
 dining-room and the kitchen, about the staircase and 
 the rooms on the first floor. We learn that the 
 second floor was an attic, and that it had one room for 
 the cook and another for the femme de chambre, who 
 kept the children with her. We are informed that 
 the woodwork, painted a dirty grey, was of the most 
 melancholy aspect, and that Madame Camusot 's bed- 
 room had a carpet and blue and white ornaments. 
 All this is entirely out of the current of the story, 
 which pretends to be short and simple, and which is 
 ostensibly hurrying towards its denoument. Some 
 readers will always remember the two brick arches of 
 Madame Camusot' s shed, the dirty grey of her walls 
 and the blue and white upholstery of her room ; others 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 121 
 
 will say that they care nothing about them, and these 
 are not to be gainsaid. 
 
 Three or four descriptions of this kind stand out 
 in the reader's memory. One is the picture of the 
 dark and chill abode in which poor Eugenie Grandet 
 blooms and fades ; another is the elaborate and ele- 
 gant portrait of the beautiful old house at Douai, half 
 Flemish, half Spanish, in which the delusions of 
 Balthazar Claes bring his family to ruin ; the best of 
 all is the magnificent account of the " pension bourgeoise 
 des deux sexes et autres," kept by Madame Yauquer, 
 nee de Conflans, preceded by a glass door armed with a 
 shrill alarm-bell, through which you see an arcade in 
 green marble painted on a wall and a statue of Cupid 
 with the varnish coming off in scales. In this musty 
 and mouldy little boarding-house the Pere Goriot is 
 the senior resident. Certain students in law and 
 medicine, from the Quartier Latin, hard by, subscribe 
 to the dinner, where Maman Yauquer glares at them 
 when she watches them cut their slice from the loaf. 
 When the Pere Goriot dies horribly, at the end of 
 the tragedy, the kindest thing said of him, as the 
 other boarders unfold their much-crumpled napkins, 
 is, " Well, he won't sit and sniff his bread any more ! " 
 and the speaker imitates the old man's favourite 
 gesture. The portrait of the Maison Yauquer and its 
 
122 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 inmates is one of the most portentous settings of the 
 scene in all the literature of fiction. In this case 
 there is nothing superfluous ; there is a profound corre- 
 spondence between the background and the action. It 
 is a pity not to be able to quote the whole description, 
 or even that of the greasy, dusky dining-room in 
 which so much of the story goes forward. "This 
 apartment is in all its lustre at the moment when, 
 toward seven o'clock in the morning, Madame Yau- 
 quer's cat precedes his mistress, jumping on the side- 
 boards, smelling at the milk contained in several 
 basins covered with plates, and giving forth his matu- 
 tinal purr. Presently the widow appears, decked out 
 in her tulle cap, under which hangs a crooked band 
 of false hair ; as she walks she drags along her 
 wrinkled slippers. Her little plump elderly face, from 
 the middle of which protrudes a nose like a parrot's 
 beak; her little fat dimpled hands, her whole person, 
 rounded like a church-rat, the waist of her gown, too 
 tight for its contents, which flaps over it, are all in 
 harmony with this room, where misfortune seems to 
 ooze, where speculation lurks in corners, and of which 
 Madame Yauquer inhales the warm, fetid air without 
 being nauseated. Her countenance, fresh as a first 
 autumn frost, her wrinkled eyes, whose expression 
 passes from the smile prescribed to danseuses to the 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 123 
 
 acrid scowl of the discounter her whole person, in 
 short, is an explanation of the boarding-house, as the 
 boarding-house is an implication of her person. . . . Her 
 worsted petticoat, which falls below her outer skirt, 
 made of an old dress, and with the wadding coming 
 out of the slits in the stuff, which is full of them, 
 resumes the parlour, the dining-room, the yard, an- 
 nounces the kitchen, and gives a presentiment of the 
 boarders." But we must pause, for we are passing from 
 the portraiture of places to that of people. 
 
 This latter is Balzac's strongest gift, and it is so strong 
 that it easily distances all competition. Two other writers 
 in this line have gone very far, but they suffer by 
 comparison with Jiirn. Dickens often sets a figure 
 before us with extraordinary vividness ; but the outline 
 is fantastic and arbitrary ; we but half believe in it, and 
 feel as if we were expected but half to believe in it. 
 It is like a silhouette in cut paper, in which the artist 
 has allowed great license to his scissors. If Balzac had 
 a rival, the most dangerous rival would be Turgenieff. 
 With the Russian novelist the person represented is 
 equally definite or meant to be equally definite ; and 
 the author's perception of idiosyncrasies is sometimes 
 even more subtle. With Turgenieff as with Balzac the 
 whole person springs into being at once ; the character 
 is never left shivering for its fleshly envelope, its face, 
 
124 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 its figure, its gestures, its tone, its costume, its name, 
 its bundle of antecedents. But behind Balzac's figures 
 we feel a certain heroic pressure that drives them home 
 to our credence a contagious illusion on the author's 
 own part. The imagination that produced them is 
 working at a greater heat ; they seem to proceed from a 
 sort of creative infinite and they help each other to be 
 believed in. It is pictorially a larger, sturdier, more 
 systematic style of portraiture than Turgenieff's. This 
 is altogether the most valuable element in Balzac's 
 novels ; it is hard to see how the power of physical 
 evocation can go farther. In future years, if people 
 find his tales, as a whole, too rugged and too charmless, 
 let them take one up occasionally and, turning the 
 leaves, read simply the portraits. In Balzac every one 
 who is introduced is minutely described ; if the indi- 
 vidual is to say but three words he has the honours of a 
 complete portrait. Portraits shape themselves under 
 his pen as if in obedience to an irresistible force ; 
 while the effort with most writers is to collect the ma- 
 terial to secure the model the effort with Balzac is 
 to disintegrate his visions, to accept only one candidate 
 in the dozen. And it is not only that his figures are 
 so definite, but that they are so plausible, so real, so 
 characteristic, so recognisable. The fertility of his 
 imagination in this respect was something marvellous. 
 
HONOB. DE BALZAC. 125 
 
 When we think of the many hundred complete human 
 creatures (he calls the number at least two thousand) 
 whom he set in motion, with their sharp differences, 
 their histories, their money-matters, their allotted place 
 in his great machine, we give up the attempt to gauge 
 such a lusty energy of fancy. In reading over Balzac, 
 we have marked a great many portraits for quotation, 
 but it is hard to know what to choose or where to begin. 
 The appreciative reader may safely begin at hazard. He 
 opens the little tale of " I/Interdiction," and finds the 
 physiognomy of the excellent Judge Popinot thus de- 
 picted : " If nature, therefore, had endowed M. Popinot 
 with an exterior but scantily agreeable, the magistracy 
 had not embellished him. His frame was full of angular 
 lines. His big knees, his large feet, his broad hands, 
 contrasted with a sacerdotal face, which resembled 
 vaguely the head of a calf, soft to insipidity, feebly 
 lighted by two lateral eyes, altogether bloodless, divided 
 by a straight flat nose, surmounted by a forehead with- 
 out protuberance, decorated by two huge ears, which 
 bent awkwardly forward. His hair, thin in quantity 
 and quality, exposed his skill in several irregular fur- 
 rows. A single feature recommended this countenance 
 to the student of physiognomy. The man had a mouth 
 on whose lips a divine goodness hovered. These were 
 good big red lips, sinuous, moving, with a thousand 
 
126 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 folds, through which nature had never expressed any 
 but high feelings lips which spoke to the heart," &c. 
 
 That is certainly admirable for energy and vividness 
 closeness to the individual. But, after all, Popinot 
 plays a part ; he appears in several tales ; he is the type 
 of the upright judge, and there is a fitness in his figure 
 being strongly lighted. Here is Madame de Kergarouet, 
 who merely crosses the stage in " Beatrix," who risss in 
 answer to a momentary need, and yet who is as ripe and 
 complete, as thoroughly seen, felt and understood, as if 
 she had been soaked, as it were, for years in the author's 
 consciousness : " As for the Vicomtesse de Kergarouet, 
 she was the perfect provincial?,. Tall, dry, faded, full of 
 hidden pretensions which showed themselves after they 
 had been wounded; talking much and, by dint of 
 talking, catching a few ideas, as one cannons at billiards, 
 and which gave her a reputation for cleverness ; trying 
 to humiliate the Parisians by the pretended bonhomie of 
 departmental wisdom, and by a make-believe happiness 
 which she was always putting forward ; stooping to get 
 herself picked up and furious at being left on her 
 knees ; fishing for compliments, and not always taking 
 them; dressing herself at once strikingly and care- 
 lessly; taking the want of affability for impertinence, 
 and thinking to embarrass people greatly by paying them 
 no attention ; refusing what she wanted in order to have 
 
HONORfi_DE BALZAC. ' 127 
 
 it offered to her twice, and to seem to be urged beyond 
 resistance ; occupied with the things that people have 
 ceased to talk about and greatly astonished at not 
 being in the current of fashion finally, keeping quiet 
 with difficulty an hour without bringing up Nantes, and 
 the tigers of Nantes, and the affairs of the high society 
 of Nantes, and complaining of Nantes, and criticising 
 Nantes, and making a personal application of the 
 phrases extracted from the people whose attention 
 wandered, and who agreed with her to get rid of her. 
 Her manners, her language, her ideas, had all more or 
 less rubbed off on her four daughters." Here also, to 
 prove that Balzac's best portraits are not always his 
 harshest, is an admirably friendly portrait of an old 
 rustic gentlewoman, taken from the same novel : " Ma- 
 demoiselle Zephirine, deprived of her sight, was igno- 
 rant of the changes which her eighty years had made 
 in her physiognomy. Her pale, hollow face, which 
 the immobility of her white, sightless eyes caused to 
 look like that of a dead person, which three or four 
 protruding teeth rendered almost threatening, in 
 which the deep orbit of the eyes was circled with 
 red tones, in which a few signs of virility, already 
 white, cropped up about the mouth and chin this 
 cold, calm face was framed in a little nun-like cap 
 of brown calico, pricked like a counterpane, garnished 
 
128 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 with a cambric frill, and tied under the chin by two 
 strings which were always a trifle rusty. She wore 
 a short gown of coarse cloth, over a petticoat of 
 pique, a real mattress which contained forty-franc 
 pieces as also a pair of pockets sewed to a belt 
 which she put on and took off morning and night 
 like a garment. Her body was fastened into the 
 common jacket of Brittany, in stuff matching with 
 that of her skirt, ornamented with a little collar of 
 a thousand folds, the washing of which was the sub- 
 ject of the only dispute she ever had with her sister- 
 in-law she herself wishing to change it but once a 
 week. From the great wadded sleeves of this jacket 
 issued two desiccated but nervous arms, at the end 
 of which moved two hands of a ruddy hue, which 
 made her arms appear as white as the wood of the 
 poplar. Her hands, with the fingers hooked and con- 
 tracted by knitting, were like a stocking-loom for 
 ever wound up ; the phenomenon would have been to 
 see them stop. From time to time she took a long 
 knitting-needle that was planted in her bosom, and 
 thrust it in between her cap and her head, while 
 she rummaged in her white hair. A stranger would 
 have laughed at the carelessness with which she 
 stuck the needle back again, without the least fear 
 of wounding herself. She was as straight as a belfry. 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 129 
 
 This columnar rectitude might have passed for one 
 of those egotisms practised by old people, which prove 
 that pride is a passion necessary to life. Her smile 
 was gay." 
 
 One of the most striking examples of Balzac's 
 energy and facility of conception and execution in 
 this line is the great gallery of portraits of the 
 people who come to the party given by Madame de 
 Bargeton, in "Les Illusions Perdues." These people 
 are all mere supernumeraries ; they appear but on 
 this occasion, and having been marshalled forth in 
 their living grotesqueness, they stand there simply 
 to deepen the local colour about the central figure of 
 Madame de Bargeton. When it lets itself loose 
 among the strange social types that vegetate in silent 
 corners of provincial towns, and of which an old and 
 complex civilization, passing from phase to phase, 
 leaves everywhere so thick a deposit, Balzac's imagi- 
 nation expands and revels and rejoices in its strength. 
 In these cases it is sometimes kindly and tender and 
 sympathetic ; but as a general thing it is merciless 
 in its irony and contempt. There is almost always, 
 to us English readers, something cruel and wounding 
 in French irony something almost sanguinary in 
 French caricature. To ba ridiculous is made to ap- 
 pear like a crime and to deprive the unhappy victim 
 
 K 
 
130 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 of any right that an acute observer is bound to 
 respect. The Dodson family, in George Eliot's " Mill 
 on the Floss" the illustrious stock from which 
 Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Pullet issue are apparently a 
 scantily mitigated mixture of the' ridiculous and the 
 disagreeable ; and yet every reader of that admirable 
 novel will remember how humanly, how generously 
 these ladies are exhibited, and how in the author's 
 treatment of them the highest sense of their absurdi- 
 ties never leads her to grudge them a particle of 
 their freedom. In a single word, the picture is not 
 invidious. Balzac, on the other hand, in correspond- 
 ing pictures pictures of small middle-class ignorance, 
 narrowness, penury, poverty, dreariness, ugliness 
 physical and mental is always invidious. He grudges 
 and hates and despises. These sentiments certainly 
 often give a masterly force to his touch ; but they 
 deepen that sense, which he can so ill afford to have 
 deepened, of the meagreness of his philosophy. It is 
 very true that the " vie de province " of the "Comedie 
 Humaine " is a terribly dreary and sordid affair ; but, 
 making every concession to the ignorant and self- 
 complacent stupidity of the small French bourgeoisie 
 during the Restoration and the reign of Louis Philippe, 
 it is impossible to believe that a chronicler with a 
 scent a little less rabidly suspicious of Philistinism 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 131 
 
 would not have shown us this field in a somewhat 
 rosier light. Like all French artists and men of 
 letters, Balzac hated the bourgeoisie with an immiti- 
 gable hatred, and more than most of his class he 
 hated the provincial. All the reasons for this general 
 attitude it would take us too far to seek; two oi 
 them, we think, are near the surface. Balzac and hi.' 
 comrades hate the bourgeois, in the first place, because 
 the bourgeois hates them, and in the second place 
 because they are almost always fugitives from th( 
 bourgeoisie. They have escaped with their lives, ant 
 once in the opposite camp they turn and shake theii 
 fists and hurl defiance. Provincial life, as Balza< 
 represents it, is a tissue of sordid economies and 
 ignoble jealousies and fatuous tittle-tattle, in cold, 
 musty, unlovely houses, in towns where the grass 
 grows in the streets, where the passage of a stranger 
 brings grotesquely eager faces to the window, where 
 one or two impotently pretentious salons, night after 
 night, exhibit a collection of huiran fossils. Here 
 and there a brighter thread runs through the dusky 
 web we remember Veronique Tascheron, Eugtnie 
 Grandet, Marguerite Cla'c's, Ursule Mirouet, David 
 and Eve Sechard "White has a high picturesque 
 value when properly distributed, and Balzac's innocent 
 people, who are always more or less tragical dupes 
 
 K 2 
 
132 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 and victims, serve admirably to deepen the general 
 effect of dreariness, stinginess and ferocious venality. 
 With what a grasp of the baser social realities, with 
 what energy and pathos and pictorial irony he has 
 moulded these miseries and vices into living figures, 
 it would be interesting to be able to exhibit in detail. 
 It is grim economy that is always in the foreground 
 it is the clutch of the five-franc piece that is the 
 essence of every gesture. It is the miser Grande t, 
 doling out the sugar lump by lump for the coffee of 
 the household ; it is that hideous she-wolf of thrift, 
 Silvie Rogron, pinching and persecuting and starving 
 little Pierrette Lorrain ; it is the heirs male and 
 female of Doctor MirouUt nocking to the reading of 
 his will like vultures and hyenas. 
 
 Balzac's figures, as a general thing, are better than 
 the use he makes of them ; his touch, so unerring in 
 portraiture and description, often goes wofully astray 
 in narrative, in the conduct of a tale. Of all the 
 great novelists, he is the weakest in talk ; his con- 
 versations, if they are at all prolonged, become 
 unnatural, impossible. One of his pupils, as they 
 say in French, Charles de Bernard (who had, however, 
 taken most justly the measure of his own talent, and 
 never indiscreetly challenged comparison with the 
 master) this charming writer, with but a tenth of 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 133 
 
 Balzac's weight and genius,, very decidedly excels him 
 in making his figures converse. It is not meant by 
 this, however, that the story in Balzac is not gene- 
 rally powerfully conceived and full of dramatic stuff. 
 Afraid of nothing as he was, he attacked all the 
 deepest things in life and laid his hand upon every 
 human passion. He has even to be complete 
 described one or two passions that are usually deemed 
 unmentionable. He always deals with a strong 
 feeling in preference to a superficial one, and his 
 great glory is that he pretended to take cognizance 
 of man's moral nature to its deepest, most unillumined 
 and, as the French say, most scabreux depths that 
 he maintained that for a writer who proposes seriously 
 to illustrate the human soul there is absolutely no 
 forbidden ground. He has never, that we remember, 
 described what we call in English a flirtation, but he 
 has described ardent love in a thousand forms (some- 
 times very well, sometimes horribly ill), with its 
 clustering attributes of sensuality and jealousy, exalta- 
 tion and despair, good and evil. It is hard to think 
 of a virtue or a vice of which he has not given some 
 eminent embodiment. The subject, in other words, is 
 always solid and interesting ; through his innumerable 
 fallacies of form and style, of taste and art, that is 
 always valuable. Some of his novels rise much above 
 
134 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the others in this dignity and pregnancy of theme ; 
 M. Tame, in his essay, enumerates the most striking 
 cases, and his sonorous echo of Balzac's tragic note 
 is a tribut3 to our author's power. Balzac's master- 
 piece, to our own sense, if we must choose, is "Le 
 Pere Goriot." In this tale there is most of his 
 characteristic felicity and least of his characteristic 
 infelicity. Shakespeare had been before him, but 
 there is excellent reason to believe that beyond 
 knowing that "King Lear" was the history of a 
 doting old man, buffeted and betrayed by cruel 
 daughters, Balzac had not placed himself in a posi- 
 tion to be accused of plagiarism. He had certainly 
 not read the play in English, and nothing is more 
 possible than that he had not read it in such French 
 translations as existed in 1835. It would please him 
 to have his reader believe that he has read everything 
 in the world; but there are limits to the reader's 
 good nature. " Le Pere Goriot " holds so much, and 
 in proportion to what it holds is, in comparison with 
 its companions, so simple and compact, that it easily 
 ranks among the few greatest novels we possess. 
 Nowhere else is there such a picture of distracted 
 paternal love, and of the battle between the voice of 
 nature and the constant threat of society that you 
 shall be left to rot by the roadside if you drop out 
 
HOXORfi DE BALZAC. 135 
 
 of the ranks. In every novel of Balzac's, on the 
 artistic line, there are the great intentions that fructify 
 and the great intentions that fail. In "Le Pere 
 Goriot " the latter element, though perceptible, comes 
 nearest to escaping notice. Balzac has painted a 
 great number of "careers"; they begin in one story 
 and are unfolded in a dozen others. He has a host 
 of young men whom he takes up on the threshold of 
 life, entangles conspicuously in the events of their 
 time, makes the pivots of contemporaneous history. 
 Some of them are soldiers, some men of letters, some 
 artists ; those he handles with most complacency are 
 young men predestined by high birth to politics. These 
 latter are, as a class, Balzac's most conspicuous failures, 
 but they are also his most heroic attempts. The reader 
 will remember De Marsay, De Trailles, Rastignac, 
 the two Yandenesses, D'Esgrignon, Baudenord, Des 
 Lupeaulx, Tillet, Blondet, Bridau, Nathan, Bixiou, 
 Kubempre, Lousteau, D'Arthez. The man whose 
 career is most distinctly traced is perhaps Eugene de 
 Rastignac, whose first steps in life we witness in 
 " Le Pere Goriot." The picture is to some extent in- 
 jured by Balzac's incurable fatuity and .snobbishness ; 
 but the situation of the young man, well born, clever, 
 and proud, who comes up to Paris, equipped by his 
 family's savings, to seek his fortune and find it at 
 
136 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 any cost, and who moves from the edge of one social 
 abyss to the edge of another (finding abysses in every 
 shaded place he looks into) until at last his nerves 
 are steeled, his head steadied, his conscience cased in 
 cynicism and his pockets filled all this bears a deep 
 imaginative stamp. The donnee of " Le Pore Goriot " 
 is typical ; the shabby Maison Vauquer, becoming the 
 stage of vast dramas, is a sort of concentrated focus 
 of human life, with sensitive nerves radiating out into 
 the infinite. Then there is Madame d'Espard's attempt 
 to prove that her excellent husband is insane and to 
 have him sequestrated ; and the Countess Ferraud, 
 who repudiates her husband, when he reappears, 
 crippled and penniless, after having been counted 
 among the slain at the battle of Eylau ; and Philippe 
 Bridau, who bullies, sponges, swindles, bleeds his 
 family to death to pay for his iniquities ; Madame 
 Marneffe, who drags an honourable family into deso" 
 lation and ruin by the rapacity of her licentiousness, 
 and the Baron Hulot d'Ervy, who sees his wife and 
 children beggared and disgraced, and yet cannot give up 
 Madame Marneffe ; Yicturnien d'Esgrignon, who comes 
 up from Alenfon to see the world, and sees it with a 
 vengeance, so that he has to forge a note to pay for his 
 curiosity, and his doting family have to beggar themselves 
 to pay for his note ; Madame de La Baudraye, who leaves 
 
HONORE DE BALZAC. 137 
 
 her husband, burns her ships, and comes to live in 
 Paris with an ignoble journalist, partly for the love 
 of letters and partly for the love of the journalist 
 himself ; Lucien de Rubempre, who tries to be a great 
 poet, and to give an airing, in the highest places, to 
 the poetic temperament, and who, after irrecordable 
 alternations of delight and of misery, hangs limself 
 in a debtors' prison; Marguerite Claes, who finds her 
 father turning monomaniac and melting down her 
 patrimony, and her motherless brother's and sister's, 
 in the crucible of alchemy, and who fights for years 
 a hand-to-hand duel with him, at great cost to her 
 natural tenderness and her reputation ; Madame de 
 Mortsauf, wfyo, after years of mysterious anguish, dies 
 brokenhearted, between a brutal husband and a 
 passionate lover, without ever having said a word to 
 offend the one or, as she regards it, to encourage the 
 other ; poor Cousin Pons, the kindly virtuoso, who has 
 made with years of patient labour a precious collec- 
 tion of pictures, and who is plundered, bullied, and 
 morally murdered by rapacious relatives, and left 
 without a penny to bury him. 
 
 It is the opinion of many of Balzac's admirers, and 
 it was the general verdict of his day, that in all this 
 the greatest triumphs are the characters of women. 
 Every French critic tells us that his immense success 
 
138 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 came to him through women that they constituted 
 his first, his last, his fondest public. " Who rendered 
 more deliciously than he," asks Sainte-Beuve, "the 
 duchesses and viscountesses of the end of the Restora- 
 tion those women of thirty who, already on the stage, 
 awaited their painter with a vague anxiety, so that 
 when he and they stood face to face there was a sort 
 of electric movement of recognition?" Balzac is sup- 
 posed to have understood the feminine organism as no 
 one had done before him to have had the feminine 
 heart, the feminine temperament, feminine nerves, at 
 his fingers' ends to have turned the feminine puppet, 
 as it were, completely inside out. He has placed an 
 immense number of women on the stage, and even 
 those critics who are least satisfied with his most 
 elaborate female portraits must at least admit that he 
 has paid the originals the compliment to hold that 
 they play an immense part in the world. It may be 
 said, indeed,, that women are the keystone of the 
 "Com^die Humaine." If the men were taken out, 
 there would be great gaps and fissures ; if the women 
 were taken out, the whole fabric would collapse. 
 Balzac's superior handling of women seems to us to 
 be both a truth and a fallacy ; but his strength and 
 weakness so intermingle and overlap that it is hard 
 to keep a separate account with each. 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 139 
 
 His reader very soon perceives, to begin with, 
 that he does not take that view of the sex that 
 would commend him to the " female sympathizers " 
 of the day. There is not a line in him that would 
 not be received with hisses at any convention for 
 giving women the suffrage, for introducing them into 
 Harvard College, or for trimming the exuberances of 
 their apparel. His restrictive remarks would be 
 considered odious ; his flattering remarks would be 
 considered infamous. He takes the old fashioned view 
 he recognises none but the old-fashioned categories. 
 Woman is the female of man and in all respects his 
 subordinate; she is pretty and ugly, virtuous and 
 vicious, stupid and cunning. There is the great 
 metier de femme the most difficult perhaps in the 
 world, so that to see it thoroughly mastered is pecu- 
 liarly exhilarating. The metier de femme includes a 
 great many branches, but they may be all summed 
 up in the art of titillating in one way or another 
 the senses of man. Woman has a " mission " cer- 
 tainly, and this is it. Man's capacity for entertain- 
 ment fortunately is large, and he may be gratified 
 along a far-stretching line ; so that woman in this 
 way has a very long rope and no reason to complain 
 of want of liberty. Balzac's conception of what a 
 woman may be and do is very comprehensive j there 
 
140 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 is no limit to her cleverness, her energy, her courage, 
 her devotion ; or, on the other hand, to her vices, her 
 falsity, her meanness, her cruelty, her rapacity. But 
 the great sign of Balzac's women is that in all these 
 things the sexual quality is inordinately emphasized 
 and the conscience on the whole inordinately sacrificed 
 to it. It is an idea familiar to all novelists it is 
 indeed half their stock in trade that women in good 
 and in evil act almost exclusively from personal mo- 
 tives. Men do so often, the romancer says ; women 
 do so always. Balzac carries this idea infinitely farther 
 than any other novelist, and imparts to the personal 
 motive a peculiar narrowness and tenacity. It suggests 
 the agility and the undulations, the claws and the 
 vemon, of the cat and the serpent. That perfectly 
 immoral view of what people do, which we spoke of 
 as one of his great characteristics, is supremely con- 
 spicuous in Balzac's dealings with his heroines. " Leur 
 gros libertin de pkre," M. Taine calls him in relation 
 to certain of them ; and the phrase really applies to 
 him in relation to all, even the purest and most 
 elevated. It is their, personal, physical quality that 
 he relishes their attitudes, their picturesqueness, the 
 sense that they give him of playing always, sooner or 
 later, into the hands of man gros libertin that he 
 naturally and inevitably is. He has drawn a great 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 141 
 
 many women's figures that are nobly pure in inten- 
 tion ; he has even attempted three or four absolute 
 saints. But purity in Balzac's hands is apt to play 
 us the strangest tricks. Madame Graslin is a saint 
 who has been privy to the murder of her lover and 
 who allows an innocent man to suffer the penalty of 
 the law; Madame Hulot is a saint who at fifty 
 (being very well preserved) offers herself to a man 
 she loathes in order to procure money for her daughter's 
 marriage portion ; Madame de Mortsauf is a saint 
 familiar with the most cynical views of life (vide her 
 letter of advice to Felix de Yandenesse on his entering 
 upon his career, in which the tone is that of a poli- 
 tician and shrewd man of the world) who drives about 
 with her lover late at night, kissing his head and 
 otherwise fondling him. Balzac's women and indeed 
 his characters in general are best divided into the 
 rich and the poor, the Parisians and the rustics. His 
 most ambitious female portraits are in the former 
 class his most agreeable, and on the whole his most 
 successful, in the latter. Here the women, young and 
 old, are more or less grotesque, but the absence of 
 the desire to assimilate them to the type of the in- 
 describable monster whom Balzac enshrines in the 
 most sacred altitudes of his imagination as the 
 Parisienne, has allowed them to be more human and 
 
142 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 more consonant to what we, at least, of ths Anglo- 
 Saxon race, consider the comfortable social qualities 
 in the gentler sex. Madame Bridau, Madame Grandet, 
 Mademoiselle Cormon, Madame Sechard these, in 
 Balzac, are the most natural figures of good women. 
 His imagination has easily comprehended them ; they 
 are homely and pious and natives, and their horizon 
 is bounded by the walls of their quiet houses. It is 
 when Balzac enters the field of the great ladies and 
 the courtesans that he is supposed to have won his 
 greatest triumphs, the triumphs that placed all tbe 
 women on his side and made them confess that they 
 had fornd their prophet and their master. To this 
 view of the matter the writer of these lines is far 
 from assenting. He finds it impossible to understand 
 that the painter of Louise de Chaulieu and Madame 
 d'Espard, of Madame de La Baudraye and Madame de 
 Bargeton, of Lady Dudley and Madame de Maufri- 
 gneuse, should not have made all the clever women 
 of his time his enemies. 
 
 It is not however, certainly, that here his energy, 
 his force of colour, his unapproached power of what 
 the French call in analytic portrayal " rummaging " 
 to fouiller are not at their highest. Never is he 
 more himself than among his coquettes and courte- 
 sans, among Madame Schontz and Jos6pha, Madame 
 
HONOEfi DE BALZAC. 143 
 
 Marneffe and Madame de Rochefide. "Balzac loves 
 his Valerie," says M. Taine, speaking of his attitude 
 toward the horrible Madame Marneffe, the depths of 
 whose depravity he is so actively sounding ; and para- 
 doxical as it sounds it is perfectly true. She is, 
 according to Balzac's theory of the matter, a con- 
 summate Parisienne, and the depravity of a Parisienne 
 is to his sense a more remunerative spectacle than 
 the virtue of any provinciale, whether her province be 
 Normandy or Gascony, England or Germany. Never 
 does he so let himself go as in these cases never 
 does his imagination work so at a heat. Feminine 
 nerves, feminine furbelows, feminine luxury and 
 subtlety, intoxicate and inspire him ; he revels among 
 his innumerable heroines like Mahomet in his paradise 
 of houris. In saying just now that women could not 
 complain of Balzac's restrictions upon their liberty, 
 we had in mind especially the liberty of telling lies. 
 This exquisite and elaborate mendacity he considers 
 the great characteristic of the finished woman of the 
 world, of Mesdames d'Espard, de Serisy, de Langeais, 
 de Maufrigneuse. The ladies just enumerated have 
 all a great many lovers, a great many intrigues, a 
 great many jealousies, a terrible entanglement of life 
 behind the scenes. They are described as irresistibly 
 charming, as grandes dames in the supreme sense of 
 
H4 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the word ; clever, cold, self-possessed, ineffably elegant, 
 holding salons, influencing politics and letting nothing 
 interfere with their ambition, their coquetry, their 
 need for money. Above all they are at swords' 
 points with each other ; society for them is a deadly 
 battle for lovers, disguised in a tissue of caresses. 
 To our own sense this whole series of figures is fit 
 only to have a line drawn through it as a laborious 
 and extravagant failure a failure on which treasures 
 of ingenuity have been -expended, but which is perhaps 
 on that account only the more provocative of smiles. 
 These ladies altogether miss the mark; they are 
 vitiated by that familiar foible which Thackeray com- 
 memorated in so many inimitable pages. Allusion 
 was made in the earlier part of these remarks to 
 Balzac's strong plebeian strain. It is no reproach to 
 him; if he was of the "people," he was magnificently 
 so ; and if the people never produced anything less 
 solid and sturdy it would need to fear no invidious 
 comparisons. But there is something ineffably snob- 
 bish in his tone when he deals with the aristocracy, 
 and in the tone which those members of it who cir- 
 culate through his pages take from him. They are 
 so conscious, so fatuous, so poseurs, so perpetually 
 alluding to their grandeurs and their quarterings, so 
 determined to be impertinent, so afraid they shall 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 145 
 
 not be impertinent enough, so addicted to re 
 minding you that they are not bourgeois, that they 
 do not pay their debts or practise the vulgar virtuts, 
 that they really seem at times to be the creatures of 
 the dreams of an ambitious hairdresser who should 
 have been plying his curling-irons all day and reading 
 fashionable novels all the evening. The refinement of 
 purpose in Balzac, in everything that relates to the 
 emphasis of the aristocratic tone, is often extraordi- 
 nary ; and to see such heroic ingenuity so squandered 
 and dissipated gives us an alarming sense of what a 
 man of genius may sometimes do in the way of not 
 seeing himself as others see him. Madame d'Espard, 
 when she has decided to "take up" her provincial 
 cousine, Madame de Bargeton, conveys her one night 
 to the opera. Lucien de Rubempre comes into the 
 box and, by his provincial dandyism and ingenuous 
 indiscretions, attracts some attention. A rival who is 
 acquainted with the skeleton in his closet goes and 
 tells Madame d'Espard's friends and enemies that he 
 is not properly a De Kubempre (this being only his 
 mother's name), and that- his father was M. Chardon, 
 a country apothecary. Then the traitor comes and 
 announces this fact to Madame d'Espard and inti- 
 mates that her neighbours know it. This great lady 
 hereupon finds the situation intolerable, and informs 
 
146 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 her companion that it will never do to be seen at 
 the opera with the son of an apothecary. The ladies, 
 accordingly, beat a precipitate retreat, leaving Lucien 
 the master of the field. The caste of Yere de Yere 
 in this case certainly quite forgot its repose. But 
 its conduct is quite of a piece with that of the young 
 men of high fashion who, after Madame de Bargeton 
 has been a fortnight in Paris (having come very ill- 
 dressed from Angouleme) are seen to compliment her 
 on the " metamorphosis of her appearance." What is 
 one to say about Madame de Rochefide, a person of 
 the highest condition, who has by way of decoration 
 of her drawing-room a series of ten water-colour 
 pictures representing the different bedrooms she lias 
 successively slept in ? What Balzac says is that this 
 performance "gave the measure of a superior imper- 
 tinence " ; and he evidently thinks that he has bestowed 
 the crowning touch upon a very crushing physiognomy. 
 What is here indicated of Balzac's great ladies is 
 equally true of his young dandies and lions his De 
 Marsays and De Trailles. The truly initiated reader 
 of the " Comedie Humaine " will always feel that he 
 can afford to skip the page when he sees the name 
 of De Marsay. Balzac's dandies are tremendous 
 fellows from a picturesque point of view ; the account 
 of De Marsay in "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or" is an 
 
HOXORE DE BALZAC. 147 
 
 example of the "sumptuous" gone mad. Balzac 
 leaves nothing vague in the destinies he shapes for 
 these transcendant fops. Rastignac is prime minister 
 of France, and yet Rastignac in his impecunious youth 
 has been on those terms with Madame de Nucingen 
 which characterized the relations of Tom Jones with 
 Lady Bellaston. Fielding was careful not to make 
 his hero a rival of Sir Robert Walpole. Balzac's 
 young gentihhommes, as possible historical figures, are 
 completely out of the question. They represent, 
 perhaps, more than anything else, the author's extra- 
 ordinary union of vigour and shallowness. In this, 
 however, they have much in common with several 
 other classes of characters that we lack space to 
 consider. There are the young girls (chiefly of the 
 upper class) like Modeste Mignon and Louise de 
 Chaulieu ; there are the women of literary talent, like 
 Mademoiselle des Touches and Madame de La Baud- 
 raye ; there are the journalists, like Lousteau and 
 Emile Blondet. In all these cases Balzac " rummages " 
 with extraordinary ardour; but his faults of taste 
 reach their maximum and offer us an incredible im- 
 broglio of the superb and the ignoble. Mademoiselle 
 de Chaulieu talks about her arms, her bosom, her 
 hips, in a way to make a trooper blush. Lousteau, 
 when a lady says a clever thing, tells her he will 
 
 L 2 
 
148 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 steal it from her for his newspaper and get two 
 dollars. As regards Rubempre and Canalis, we have 
 specimens of their poetry, but we have on the whole 
 more information about their coats and trousers, their 
 gloves and shirts and cosmetics. 
 
 In all this it may seem that there has been more 
 talk about faults than about merits, and that if it is 
 claimed that Balzac did a great work we should have 
 plucked more flowers and fewer thistles. But the 
 greatest thing in Balzac cannot be exhibited by speci- 
 mens. It is Balzac himself it is the whole attempt 
 it is the method. This last is his unsurpassed, his 
 incomparable merit. That huge, all-compassing, all- 
 desiring, all-devouring love of reality which was the 
 source of so many of his fallacies and stains, of so 
 much dead-weight in his work, was also the foundation 
 of his extraordinary power. The real, for his imagi- 
 nation, had an authority that it has never had for 
 any other. When he looks for it in the things in 
 which we all feel it, he finds it with a marvellous 
 certainty of eye, and proves himself the great novelist 
 that he pretends to be. When he tries to make it 
 prevail everywhere, explain everything and serve as 
 a full measure of our imagination then he becomes 
 simply the greatest of dupes. He is an extraordinary 
 tissue of contradictions. He is at once one of the 
 
HONORS DE BALZAC. 143 
 
 most corrupt of writers and one of the most naif, the 
 most mechanical and pedantic, and the fullest of 
 bonhomie and natural impulse. He is one of the finest 
 of artists and one of the coarsest. Viewed in one 
 way, his novels are ponderous, shapeless, overloaded ; 
 his touch is graceless, violent, barbarous. Viewed in 
 another, his tales have more colour, more composition, 
 more grasp of the reader's attention than any others. 
 Balzac's style would demand a chapter apart. It is 
 the least simple style, probably, that ever was written ; 
 it bristles, it cracks, it swells and swaggers; but it 
 is a perfect expression of the man's genius. Like his 
 genius, it contains a certain quantity of everything, 
 from immaculate gold to flagrant dross. He was a 
 very bad writer, and yet unquestionably he was a very 
 great writer. We may say briefly, that in so far as 
 his method was an instinct it was successful, and that 
 in so far as it was a theory it was a failure. But 
 both in instinct and in theory he had the aid of an 
 immense force of conviction. His imagination warmed 
 to its work so intensely that there was nothing his 
 volition could not impose upon it. Hallucination 
 settled upon him, and he believed anything that was 
 necessary in the circumstances. This accounts for all 
 his grotesque philosophies, his heroic attempts to fur- 
 nish specimens of things of which lie was profoundly 
 
150 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 ignorant. He believed that he was about as creative 
 as the Deity, and that if mankind and human history 
 were swept away the " Comedie Humaine " would be a 
 perfectly adequate substitute for them. M. Taine says 
 of him very happily that, after Shakespeare, he is 
 our great magazine of documents on human nature. 
 When Shakespeare is suggested we feel rather his 
 differences from Shakespeare feel how Shakespeare's 
 characters stand out in the open air of the universe, 
 while Balzac's are enclosed in a peculiar artificial 
 atmosphere, musty in quality and limited in amount, 
 which persuades itself with a sublime sincerity that 
 it is a very sufficient infinite. But it is very true 
 that Balzac may, like Shakespeare, be treated as a 
 final authority upon human nature ; and it is very 
 probable that as time goes on he will be resorted to 
 much less for entertainment, and more for instruction. 
 He has against him that he lacks that slight bu 
 needful thing charm. To feel how much he lacked 
 it, you must read his prefaces, with their vanity, 
 avidity, and garrulity, their gross revelation of his 
 processes, of his squabbles with his publishers, their 
 culinary atmosphere. But our last word about him 
 is that he had incomparable power. 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 
 
 THE first feeling of the reader of the two volumes 
 which have lately been published under the foregoing 
 title is that he has almost done wrong to read them. 
 He reproaches himself with having taken a shabby 
 advantage of a person who is unable to defend him- 
 self. He feels as one who has broken open a cabinet 
 or rummaged an old desk. The contents of Balzac's 
 letters are so private, so personal, so exclusively his 
 own affairs and those of no one else, that the generous 
 critic constantly lays them down with a sort of dismay 
 and asks himself in virtue of what peculiar privilege 
 or what newly discovered principle it is that he is 
 thus burying his nose in them. Of course he presently 
 reflects that he has not broken open a cabinet nor 
 violated a desk, but that these repositories have been 
 very freely and confidently emptied into his lap. The 
 two stout volumes of the " Correspondance de H. de 
 
152 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Balzac, 1819 1850," 1 lately put forth, are remarkable, 
 like many other French books of the same sort, for 
 the almost complete absence of editorial explanation 
 or introduction. They have no visible sponsor, only 
 a few insignificant lines of preface and the scantiest 
 possible supply of notes. Such as the book is, in 
 spite of its abruptness, we are thankful for it ; in 
 spite, too, of our bad conscience. What we mean by 
 our bad conscience is the feeling with which we see 
 the last remnant of charm, of the graceful and the 
 agreeable, removed from Balzac's literary physiognomy. 
 His works had not left much of this favouring shadow, 
 but the present publication has let in the garish light 
 of full publicity. The grossly, inveterately profes- 
 sional character of all his activity, the absence of 
 leisure, of contemplation, of disinterested experience, 
 the urgency of his consuming money- hunger all this 
 is rudely exposed. It is always a question whether 
 we have a right to investigate a man's life for the 
 sake of anything but his official utterances his 
 results. The picture of Balzac's career which is given 
 in these letters is a record of little else but painful 
 processes, unrelieved by reflections or speculations, 
 by any moral or intellectual emanation. To prevent 
 
 1 Paris : Calmann Levy. 1876. 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 153 
 
 misconception, however, we hasten to add that they tell 
 no disagreeable secrets; they contain nothing for the 
 lovers of scandal. Balzac was a very honest man, 
 but he was a man almost tragically uncomfortable, 
 and the unsightly underside of his discomfort stares 
 us full in the face. Still, if his personal portrait is 
 without ideal beauty, it is by no means without a 
 certain brightness, or at least a certain richness, of 
 colouring. Huge literary ogre as he was, he was 
 morally nothing of a monster. His. heart was capa- 
 cious, and his affections vigorous; he was powerful, 
 coarse and kind. 
 
 The first letter in the series is addressed to his elder 
 sister, Laure, who afterward became Madame de Sur- 
 ville, and who, after her illustrious brother's death, 
 published in a small volume some agreeable remini- 
 scences of him. For this lady he had, especially in 
 his early years, a passionate affection. He had in 
 1819 come up to Paris from Touraine, in which province 
 his family lived, to seek his fortune as a man of 
 letters. The episode is a strange and gloomy one. 
 His vocation for literature had not been favourably 
 viewed at home, where money was scanty; but the 
 parental consent, or rather the parental tolerance, was 
 at last obtained for his experiment. The future author 
 of the " Pere Goriot " was at this time but twenty 
 
154 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 years of age, and in the way of symptoms of genius 
 had nothing but a very robust self-confidence to show. 
 His family, who had to contribute to his support 
 while his masterpieces were a-making, appear to have 
 regretted the absence of farther guarantees. He came 
 to Paris, however, and lodged in a garret, where the 
 allowance made him by his father kept him neither 
 from shivering nor from nearly starving. The situa- 
 tion had been arranged in a way very characteristic 
 of French manners. The fact that Honore had gone 
 to Paris was kept a secret from the friends of the 
 family, who were told that he was on a visit to a 
 cousin in the South. He was on probation, and if he 
 failed to acquire literary renown his excursion should 
 be hushed up. This pious fraud did not contribute 
 to the comfort of the young scribbler, who was afraid 
 to venture abroad by day lest he should be seen by 
 an acquaintance of the family. Balzac must have 
 been at this time miserably poor. If he goes to the 
 theatre, he has to pay for the pleasure by fasting. 
 He wishes to see Talma (having, to go to the play, 
 to keep up the fiction of his being in the South, in a 
 latticed box). " I shall end by giving in. ... 
 My stomach already trembles." Meanwhile he was 
 planning a tragedy of " Cromwell," which came to 
 nothing, and writing the " Heritiere de Birague," his 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 155 
 
 first novel, which he sold for one hundred and sixty 
 dollars. Through these early letters, in spite of his 
 chilly circumstances, there flows a current of youthful 
 ardour, gaiety, and assurance. Some passages in his 
 letters to his sister are a sort of explosion of animal 
 spirits : " Ah, my sister, what torments it gives us 
 the love of glory ! Long live grocers ! they sell all 
 day, count their gains in the evening, take their plea- 
 sure from time to time at some frightful melodrama 
 and behold them happy ! Yes, but they pass their 
 time between cheese and soap. Long live rather men 
 of letters ! Yes, but these are all beggars in pocket, 
 and rich only in conceit. Well, let us leave them 
 all alono, and long live every one ! " 
 
 Elsewhere he scribbles: " Farewell, suror ! I hope 
 to have a letter sororis, to answer sorori, then to see 
 sororem," &c. Later, after his sister is married, he 
 addresses her as "the box that contains everything 
 pleasing; the elixir of virtue, grace, and beauty; the 
 jewel, tJte phenomenon of Normandy; the pearl of 
 Bayeux, the fairy of St. Lawrence, t/ie virgin of the 
 Hue Teinture, the guardian angel of Caen, the goddess 
 of enchantments, the treasure of friendship " 
 
 We shall continue to quote, without the fear of 
 our examples exceeding, in the long run, our com- 
 mentary. " Find me some widow, a rich heiress," he 
 
156 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 writes to his sister at Bayeux, whither her husband 
 had taken her to live. " You know what I mean. 
 Only brag about me. Twenty-two years old, a good 
 fellow, good manners, a bright eye, fire, the best 
 dough for a husband that heaven has ever kneaded. 
 I will give you five per cent, on the dowry." "Since 
 yesterday," he writes in another letter, " I have 
 given up dowagers and have come down to widows 
 of thirty. Send all you find to Lord Rhoone [this 
 remarkable improvisation was one of his early noms 
 de plume] ; that's enough he is known at the city 
 limits. Take notice. They are to be sent prepaid, 
 without crack or repair, and they are to be rich and 
 amiable. Beauty isn't required. The varnish goes 
 and the bottom of the pot remains ! " 
 
 Like many other young men of ability, Balzac felt 
 the little rubs or the great ones of family life. 
 His mother figures largely in these volumes (she sur- 
 vived her glorious son), and from the scattered 
 reflection of her idiosyncrasies the attentive reader 
 constructs a sufficiently vivid portrait. She was the 
 old middle-class Frenchwoman whom he has so often 
 seen devoted, active, meddlesome, parsimonious, ex- 
 acting veneration and expending zeal. Honore tells 
 his sister that "the other day, coming back from 
 Paris much bothered, it never occurred to me to thank 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 157 
 
 maman for a black coat which she had had made for 
 me ; at my age one isn't particularly sensitive to such 
 a present. Nevertheless, it would not have cost me 
 much to seem touched by the attention, especially as 
 it was a sacrifice. But I forgot it. Maman began to 
 pout, and you know what her aspect and her face 
 amount to at those moments. I fell from the clouds, 
 and racked my brain to know what I had done. 
 Happily Laurence [his i younger sister] came and 
 notified me, and two or three words as fine as amber 
 mended maman' s countenance. The thing is nothing 
 a mere drop of water ; but it's to give you an 
 example of our manners. Ah, we are a jolly set of 
 originals in our holy family. What a pity I can't 
 put us into novels ! " 
 
 His father wished to find him an opening in some 
 profession, and the thought of being made a notary was 
 a bugbear to the young man : " Think of me as dead if 
 they cap me with that extinguisher." And yet, in the 
 next sentence he breaks out into a cry of desolate 
 disgust at the aridity of his actual circumstances : 
 "They call this mechanical rotation living this per- 
 petual return of the same things. If there were only 
 something to throw some charm or other over my cold 
 existence I I have none of the flowers of life, and yet 
 I am in the season in which they bloom. What will be 
 
158 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the use of fortune and pleasures when my youth has 
 departed ? What need of the garments of an actor if 
 one no longer plays a part ? An old man is a man who 
 has dined and who watches others eat ; and I, young as 
 I am my plate is empty, and I am hungry. Laure, 
 Laure, my two only and immense desires, to be famous 
 and to be loved will they ever be satisfied 1 " 
 
 These occasional bursts of confidence in his early 
 letters to his sister are (with the exception of certain 
 excellent pages addressed in the last years of his life to 
 the lady he eventually married) Balzac's most delicate, 
 most emotional utterances. There is a touch of the 
 ideal in them. Later one wonders where he keeps his 
 ideal. He has one of course, artistically, but it never 
 peeps out. He gives up talking sentiment and he never 
 discusses "subjects"; he only talks business. Mean- 
 while, however, at this period business was increasing 
 with him. He agrees to write three novels for eight 
 hundred and twenty dollars. Here begins the inex- 
 tricable mystery of Balzac's literary promises, pledges, 
 projects, contracts. His letters form a swarming 
 register of schemes and bargains through which he 
 passes like a hero of the circus, riding half a dozen 
 piebald coursers at once. We confess that in this 
 matter we have been able to keep no sort of account ; 
 the wonder is that Balzac should have accomplished the 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 159 
 
 feat himself. After the first year or two of his career 
 we never see him working upon a single tale; his 
 productions dovetail and overlap, dance attendance upon 
 each other in the most bewildering fashion. As soon 
 as one novel is fairly on the stocks he plunges into 
 another, and while he is rummaging in this with one 
 hand he stretches out an heroic arm and breaks ground 
 in a third. His plans are always vastly in advance of 
 his performance ; his pages swarm with titles of books 
 that were never to be written. The title circulates 
 with such an assurance that we are amazed to find, 
 fifty pages later, that there is no more of it than of 
 the cherubic heads. With this, Balzac was constantly 
 paid in advance by his publishers paid for works 
 not begun, or barely begun ; and the money was as 
 constantly spent before the equivalent had been de- 
 livered. Meanwhile more money was needed, and new 
 novels were laid out to obtain it ; but prior promises 
 had first to be kept. Keeping them, under these 
 circumstances, was not an exhilarating process ; and 
 readers familiar with Balzac will reflect with wonder 
 that these were yet the circumstances in which some 
 of his best tales were written. They were written, as 
 it were, in the fading light, by a man who saw night 
 coming on and yet could not afford to buy candles. He 
 could only hurry. But Balzac's way of hurrying was 
 
160 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 all his own ; it was a sternly methodical haste and 
 might have been mistaken, in a more lightly-weighted 
 genius, for elaborate, trifling. The close texture of his 
 work never relaxed ; he went on doggedly and in- 
 sistently, pressing it down and packing it together, 
 multiplying erasures, alterations, repetitions, trans- 
 forming proof-sheets, quarrelling with editors, en- 
 closing subject within subject, accumulating notes 
 upon notes. 
 
 The letters make a jump from 1822 to 1827, during 
 which interval he had established, with borrowed 
 capital, a printing house, and seen his enterprise com- 
 pletely fail. This failure saddled him with a mountain 
 of debt which pressed upon him crushingly for years, 
 and of which he rid himself only toward the close of 
 his life. Balzac's debts are another labyrinth in which 
 we do not profess to hold a clue. There is scarcely 
 a page of these volumes in which they are not alluded 
 to, but the reader never quite understands why they 
 should bloom so perennially. The liabilities incurred 
 by the collapse of the printing-scheme can hardly have 
 been so vast as not to have been for the most part 
 cancelled by ten years of heroic work. Balzac appears 
 not to have been extravagant; he had neither wife nor 
 children (unlike many of his comrades, he had no 
 known illegitimate offspring), and when he admits us 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 161 
 
 to a glimpse of his domestic economy we usually find 
 it to be of a very meagre pattern. He writes to his 
 sister in 1827 that he has not the means either to 
 pay the postage of letters or to use omnibuses, and that 
 he goes out as little as possible, so as not to wear out 
 his clothes. In 1829, however, we find him in corre- 
 spondence with a duchess, Madame d'Abrantes, the 
 widow of Junot, Napoleon's rough marshal, and author 
 of those voluminous memoirs upon the imperial court 
 which it was the fashion to read in the early part of the 
 century. The Duchesse d'Abrantes wrote bad novels, 
 like Balzac himself at this period, and the two became 
 good friends. 
 
 The year 1830 was the turning-point in Balzac's 
 career. Renown, to which he had begun to lay siege in 
 Paris in 1820, now at last began to show symptoms of 
 self-surrender. Yet one of the strongest expressions of 
 discontent and despair in the pages before us belongs to 
 this brighter moment. It is also one of the finest 
 passages: "Sacredieu, my good friend, I believe that 
 literature, in the day we live in, is no better than the 
 trade of a woman of the town, who prostitutes herself 
 for a dollar. It leads to nothing. I have an itch to go 
 off and wander and explore, make of my life a drama, 
 risk my life ; for, as for a few miserable years more or 
 less! . . . Oh, when one looks at these great skies of 
 
 M 
 
162 FRENCH POETS' AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 a beautiful night, one is ready to unbutton ." But 
 
 the modesty of the English tongue forbids us to trans- 
 late the rest of the phrase. Dean Swift might have 
 related how Balzac aspired to express his contempt for 
 all the royalties of the earth. Now that he is in the 
 country, he goes on, "I have been seeing real splen- 
 dours, such as fine sound fruit and gilded insects; 
 I have been quite turning philosopher, and if I happen 
 to tread upon an anthill, I say, like that immortal 
 Bonaparte, ' These creatures or men : what is it to 
 Saturn, or Yenus, or the North Star?' And then 
 my philosopher comes down to scribble 'items' for 
 a newspaper. Proh pudor ! And so it seems to me 
 that the ocean, a brig, and an English vessel to 
 sink, if you must sink yourself to do it, are rather 
 better than a writing-desk, a pen, and the Rue St. 
 Denis." 
 
 But Balzac was fastened to the writing-desk. In 
 1831 he tells one of his correspondents that he is work- 
 ing fifteen or sixteen hours a day. Later, in 1837, 
 he describes himself repeatedly as working eighteen 
 hours out of the twenty-four. In the midst of all this 
 (it seems singular) he found time for visions of public 
 life, of political distinction. In a letter written in 
 1830 he gives a succinct statement of his political views, 
 from which we learn that he approved of the French 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 163 
 
 monarchy possessing a constitution, and of instruction 
 being diffused among the lower orders. But he desired 
 that the people should be kept " under the most power- 
 ful yoke possible," so that in spite of their instruction 
 they should not become disorderly. It is fortunate, pro- 
 bably, both for Balzac and for France, that his political 
 role was limited to the production of a certain number 
 of forgotten editorials in newspapers ; but we may be 
 sure that his dreams of statesmanship were brilliant 
 and audacious. Balzac indulged in no dreams that 
 were not. 
 
 Some of his best letters are addressed to Madame 
 Zulma Carraud, a lady whose acquaintance he had 
 made through his sister Laure, of whom she was an 
 intimate friend, and whose friendship (exerted almost 
 wholly through letters, as she always lived in the 
 country) appears to have been one of the brightest and 
 most salutary influences of his life. He writes to her 
 thus in 1832 : "There are vocations which we must 
 obey, and something irresistible draws me on to glory 
 and power. It is not a happy life. There is within 
 me the worship of woman (le culle de la femme) and 
 a need of love which has never been fully satisfied. 
 Despairing of ever being loved and understood by such 
 a woman as I have dreamed of, having met her only 
 under one form, that of the heart, I throw myself into 
 
 M 2 
 
164 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the tempestuous sphere of political passions and into 
 the stormy and desiccating atmosphere of literary glory. 
 I shall fail perhaps on both sides ; but, believe me, if I 
 have wished to live the life of the age itself, instead of 
 running my course in happy obscurity, it is just because 
 the pure happiness of mediocrity has failed me. When 
 one has a fortune to make, it is better to make it great 
 and illustrious ; because, pain for pain, it is better to 
 suffer in a high sphere than in a low one, and I prefer 
 dagger-blows to pin-pricks." All this, though written 
 at thirty years of age, is rather juvenile ; there was 
 to be much less of the " tempest " in Balzac's life than 
 is here foreshadowed. He was tossed and shaken a 
 great deal, as we all are, by the waves of the time, but 
 he was too stoutly anchored at his work to feel the 
 winds. 
 
 In 1832 "Louis Lambert" followed the " Peau de 
 Chagrin," the first in the long list of his masterpieces. 
 He describes " Louis Lambert " as "a work in which 
 I have striven to rival Goethe and Byron, Faust and 
 Manfred. I don't know whether I shall succeed, but 
 the fourth volume of the ' Philosophical Tales ' must be 
 a last reply to my enemies and give the presentiment 
 of an incontestable superiority. You must therefore 
 forgive the poor artist his fatigue [he is writing to his 
 sister] his discouragements, and especially his momen- 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 165 
 
 tary detachment from any sort of interest that does 
 not belong to his subject. ' Louis Lambert ' has cost 
 me so much work ! To write this book I have had to 
 read so many books ! Some day or other, perhaps, it 
 will throw science into new paths. If I had made it 
 a purely learned work, it would have attracted the 
 attention of thinkers, who now will not drop their eyes 
 upon it. But if chance puts it into their hands, per- 
 haps they will speak of it ! " In this passage there is 
 an immense deal of Balzac of the great artist who 
 was so capable at times of self-deceptive charlatanism. 
 "Louis Lambert," as a whole, is now quite unread- 
 able ; it contains some admirable descriptions, but the 
 " scientific " portion is mere fantastic verbiage. There 
 is something extremely characteristic in the way Balzac 
 speaks of its having been optional with him to make 
 it a " purely learned " work. His pretentiousness was 
 simply colossal, and there is nothing surprising in his 
 wearing even the mask enfamille (the letter we have just 
 quoted from is, as we have said, to his sister) ; he wore 
 it during his solitary fifteen-hours sessions in his study. 
 But the same letter contains another passage, of a very 
 different sort, which is in its way as characteristic : 
 " Yes, you are right. My progress is real, and my 
 infernal courage will be rewarded. Persuade my 
 mother of this too, dear sister ; tell her to give me 
 
366 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 her patience in charity ; her devotion will be laid up 
 in her favour. One day, I hope, a little glory will pay 
 her for everything. Poor mother, that imagination of 
 hers which she has given me throws her for ever from 
 north to south and from south to north. Such journeys 
 tire us ; I know it myself ! Tell my mother that I 
 love her as when I was a child. As I write you these 
 lines my tears start tears of tenderness and despair ; 
 for I feel the future and I need this devoted mother 
 on the day of triumph ! When shall I reach it 1 Take 
 good care of our mother, Laure, for the present and 
 the future. . . . Some day, when my works are un- 
 folded, you will see that it must have taken many 
 hours to think and write so many things ; and then 
 you will absolve me of everything ..that has dis- 
 pleased you, and you will excuse, not the selfish- 
 ness of the man (the man has none), but the selfish- 
 ness of the worker." 
 
 Nothing can be more touching than that; Balzac's 
 natural affections were as robust as his genius and his 
 physical nature. The impression of the reader of his 
 letters quite confirms his assurance that the man proper 
 had no selfishness. Only we are constantly reminded 
 that the man had almost wholly resolved himself into 
 the worker, and we remember a statement of Sainte- 
 Beuve's, in one of his malignant foot-notes, to the effect 
 

 BALZAC'S LETTERS. 167 
 
 that Balzac was " the grossest, greediest example of 
 literary vanity that he had ever known " Vamour- 
 propre litteraire le plus avide et le plus grassier que faie 
 connu. When we think of what Sainte-Beuve must 
 have known in this line these few words acquire a 
 portentous weight. 
 
 By this time (1832) Balzac was, in French phrase, 
 thoroughly lance. He was doing, among other things, 
 some of his most brilliant work, certain of the " Contes 
 Drolatiques." These were written, as he tells his 
 mother, for relaxation, as a rest from harder labour. 
 One would have said that no work could have been 
 much harder than concocting the marvellously suc- 
 cessful imitation of mediaeval French in which these 
 tales are written. He had, however, other diversions 
 as well. In the autumn of 1832 he was at Aix-les- 
 Bains with the Duchesse de Castries, a great lady and 
 one of his kindest friends. He has been accused of 
 drawing portraits of great ladies without knowledge of 
 originals ; but Madame de Castries was an inexhaustible 
 fund of instruction upon this subject. Three or four 
 years later, speaking of the story of the " Duchesse 
 de Laugeais " to one of his correspondents, another 
 femme du monde, he tells her that as a femme du monde 
 she is not to pretend to find flaws in the picture, a 
 high authority having read the proofs for the express 
 
168 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 purpose of removing them. The authority is evidently 
 the Duchesse de Castries. 
 
 Balzac writes to Madame Carraud from Aix : " At 
 Lyons I corrected ' Lambert ' again. I licked my cub, 
 like a she-bear. . . . On the whole, I am satisfied ; it 
 is a work of profound melancholy and of science. Truly, 
 I deserve to have a mistress, and my sorrow at not 
 having one increases daily ; for love is my life and my 
 essence. ... I have a simple little room," he goes on, 
 "from which I see the whole valley. I rise pitilessly 
 at five o'clock in the morniog and work before my 
 window until half -past five in the evening. My break- 
 fast comes from the club an egg. Madame de Castries 
 has good coffee made for me. At six o'clock we dine 
 together and I pass the evening with her. She is the 
 finest type (le type le plus fin) of woman ; Madame de 
 Beauseant [from "Le Pere Goriot"] improved; only, 
 are not all these pretty manners acquired at the 
 expense of the soul ? " 
 
 During his stay at Aix he met an excellent oppor- 
 tunity to go to Italy ; the Due de Fitz- James, who was 
 travelling southward, invited him to become a member 
 of his party. He discusses the economical problem (in 
 writing to his mother) with his usual intensity, and 
 throws what will seem to the modern traveller the 
 light of enchantment upon that golden age of cheapness. 
 
BALZAC'S LETTEKS. 169 
 
 Occupying the fourth place in the carriage of the 
 Duchesse de Castries, his quarter of the total travelling 
 expenses from Geneva to Rome (carriage, beds, food, &c.) 
 was to be fifty dollars ! But he was ultimately pre- 
 vented from joining the party. He went to Italy some 
 years later. 
 
 He mentions, in 1833, that the chapter entitled 
 " Juana," in the superb tale of "Les Marana," as also 
 the story of "La Grenadiere," was written in a single 
 night. He gives at the same period this account of 
 his habits of work : " I must tell you that I am up 
 to my neck in excessive work. My life is mechanically 
 arranged. I go to bed at six or seven in the evening, 
 with the chickens ; I wake up at one in the morning 
 and work till eight ; then I take something light, a cup 
 of pure coffee, and get into the shafts of my cab until 
 four ; I receive, I take a bath, or I go out, and after 
 dinner I go to bed. I must lead this life for some 
 months longer, in order not to be overwhelmed by my 
 obligations. The profit comes slowly ; my debts are in- 
 exorable and fixed. Now, it is certain that I will make 
 a great fortune ; but I must wait for it, and work for 
 three years. I must go over things, correct them again, 
 put everything ct Vetat monumental; thankless work not 
 counted, without immediate profit." He speaks of 
 working at this amazing rate for three years longer; 
 
170 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 in reality lie worked for fifteen. But two years after 
 the declaration we have just quoted it seemed to him 
 that he should break down : " My poor sister, I am 
 draining the cup to the dregs. It is in vain that I 
 work my fourteen hours a day; I cannot do enough. 
 While I write this to you I find myself so weary that 
 I have just sent August e to take back my word from 
 certain engagements that I had formed. I am so weak 
 that I have advanced my dinner-hour in order to go 
 to bed earlier; and I go nowhere." The next year he 
 writes to his mother, who had apparently complained 
 of his silence : " My good mother, do me the charity 
 to let me carry my burden without suspecting my heart. 
 A letter, for me, you see, is not only money, but an 
 hour of sleep and a drop of blood." 
 
 We spoke just now of Balzac's sentimental consola- 
 tions ; but it appears that at times he was more acutely 
 conscious of what he missed than of what he enjoyed. 
 " As for the soul," he writes to Madame Carraud in 
 1833, "I am profoundly sad. My work alone sustains 
 me in life. Is there then to be no woman for me in this 
 world 1 My physical melancholy and ennui last longer 
 and grow more frequent. To fall from this crushing 
 labour to nothing not to have near me that soft, 
 caressing mind of woman, for whom I have done so 
 much ! " He had, however, a devoted feminine friend, 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 171 
 
 to whom none of the letters in these volumes are 
 addressed, but who is several times alluded to. This 
 lady, Madame de Berny, died in 1836, and Balzac speaks 
 of her ever afterward with extraordinary tenderness and 
 veneration. But if there had been a passion between 
 them it was only a passionate friendship. " Ah, my 
 dear mother," he writes on New Year's day, 1836, " I 
 am harrowed with grief. Madame de Berny is dying ; 
 it is impossible to doubt it. No one but God and myself 
 knows what my despair is. And I must work work 
 while I weep ! " He writes of Madame de Berny at 
 the time of her death as follows. The letter is addressed 
 to a lady with whom he was in correspondence more or 
 less sentimental, but whom he never saw : " The person 
 whom I have lost was more than a mother, more than a 
 friend, more than any creature can be for another The 
 term divinity only can explain her. She had sustained 
 me by word, by act, by devotion, during my worst 
 weather. If I live, it is by her \ she was everything 
 for me. Although for two years illness and time had 
 separated us, we were visible at a distance for each other. 
 She reacted upon me ; she was a moral sun. Madame de 
 Mortsauf, in the 'Lys dans la Yallee,' is a pale expres- 
 sion of this person's slightest qualities." Three years 
 afterward he writes to his sister : " I am alone against 
 all my troubles, and formerly, to help me to resist them, 
 
172 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 I had with me the sweetest and bravest person in the 
 world; a woman who every day is born again in my 
 heart, and whose divine qualities make the friendships 
 that are compared with hers seem pale. I have now no 
 adviser in my literary difficulties ; I have no guide but 
 the fatal thought, l What would she say if she were 
 living ? ' ' And he goes on to enumerate some of his 
 actual and potential friends. He tells his sister that 
 she herself might have been for him a close intellectual 
 comrade if her duties of wife and mother had not given 
 her too many other things to think about. The same is 
 true of Madame Carraud : " Never has a more extra- 
 ordinary mind been more smothered : she will die in her 
 corner unknown ! George Sand," he continues, " would 
 speedily be my friend ; she has no pettiness whatever 
 in her soul none of the low jealousies that obscure so 
 many contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in 
 this; but she has not the critical sense. Madame 
 Hanska is all this; but I cannot weigh upon her 
 destiny." Madame Hanska was the Polish lady whom he 
 ultimately married and of whom we shall speak. Mean- 
 while, for a couple of years (1836 and 1837), he carried 
 on an exchange of opinions, of the order that the French 
 call intimes, with the unseen correspondent to whom 
 we have alluded, and who figures in these volumes as 
 " Louise." The letters, however, are not love-letters ; 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 173 
 
 Balzac, indeed, seems chiefly occupied in calming the 
 ardour of the lady, who was evidently a woman of 
 social distinction. "Don't have any friendship for 
 me," he writes ; " I need too much. Like all people who 
 struggle, suffer, and work, I am exacting, mistrustful, 
 wilful, capricious. ... If I had been a woman, I should 
 have loved nothing so much as some soul buried like 
 a well in the desert discovered only when you place 
 yourself directly under the star which indicates it to 
 the thirsty Arab." 
 
 His first letter to Madame Hanska here given bears 
 the date of 1835 ; but we are informed in a note that he 
 had at that moment been for some time in correspondence 
 with her. The correspondence had begun, if we are not 
 mistaken, on Madame Hanska's side, before they met ; 
 she had written to him as a literary admirer. She was 
 a Polish lady of great fortune, with an invalid husband. 
 After her husband's death, projects of marriage defined 
 themselves more vividly, but practical considerations 
 kept them for a long time in the background. Balzac 
 had first to pay off his debts, and Madame Hanska, as 
 a Polish subject of the Czar Nicholas, was not in a 
 position to marry from one day to another. The growth 
 of their intimacy is, however, amply reflected in these 
 volumes, and the denoument presents itself with a 
 certain dramatic force. Balzac's letters to his future 
 
174 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 wife, as to every one else, deal almost exclusively with 
 his financial situation. He discusses the details of this 
 matter with all his correspondents, who apparently 
 have or are expected to have his monetary entangle- 
 ments at their fingers' ends. It is a constant enumera- 
 tion of novels and tales begun or delivered, revised or 
 bargained for. The tone is always profoundly sombre 
 and bitter. The reader's general impression is that of 
 lugubrious egotism. It is the rarest thing in the world 
 that there is an allusion to anything but Balzac's own 
 affairs, and the most sordid details of his own affairs. 
 Hardly an echo of the life of his time, of the world he 
 lived in, finds its way into his letters; there are no 
 anecdotes, no impressions, no opinions, no descriptions, 
 no allusions to things heard, people seen, emotions felt 
 other emotions, at least, than those of the exhausted 
 or the exultant worker. The reason of all this is of 
 course very obvious. A man could not be such a worker 
 as Balzac and be much else besides. The note of animal 
 spirits which we observed in his early letters is sounded 
 much less frequently as time goes on; although the 
 extraordinary robustness and exuberance of his tem- 
 perament plays richly into his books. The "Contes 
 Drolatiques" are full of it and his conversation was 
 also full of it. But the letters constantly show us a man 
 with the edge of his spontaneity gone a man groaning 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 175 
 
 and sighing as from Promethean lungs, complaining of 
 his tasks, denouncing his enemies, in complete ill 
 humour, generally, with life. Of any expression of 
 enjoyment of the world, of the beauties of nature, art, 
 literature, history, human character, these pages are 
 singularly destitute. And yet we know that such enjoy- 
 men t instinctive, unreasoning, essential is half the 
 inspiration of the poet. The truth is that Balzac was 
 as little as possible of a poet he often speaks of himself 
 as one, but he deserved the name as little as his own 
 Canalis or his own Rubempre. He was neither a poet 
 nor a moralist, though the latter title in France is often 
 bestowed upon him a fact which strikingly helps to 
 illustrate the Gallic lightness of soil in the moral region. 
 Balzac was the hardest and deepest of prosateurs ; the 
 earth-scented facts of life, which the poet puts under 
 his feet, he had put above his head. Obviously there 
 went on within him a large and constant intellectual 
 unfolding. His mind must have had a history of its 
 own a history of which it would be very interesting 
 to have an occasional glimpse. But the history is not 
 related here, even in glimpses. His books are full of 
 ideas ; his letters have almost none. It is probably 
 not unfair to argue from this fact that there were few 
 ' ideas that he greatly cared for. Making all allowance 
 for the pressure and tyranny of circumstances, we may 
 
176 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 believe that if he had greatly cared to se recueittir, as 
 the French say greatly cared, in the Miltonic phrase, 
 " to interpose a little ease " he would sometimes have 
 found an opportunity for it. Perpetual work, when it 
 is joyous and salubrious, is a very fine thing ; but 
 perpetual work, when it is executed with the temper 
 which more than half the time appears to have been 
 Balzac's, has in it something almost debasing. We 
 constantly feel that his work would have been greatly 
 better if the Muse of "business" had been elbowed 
 away by her larger-browed sister. Balzac himself, 
 doubtless, often felt in the same way; but, on the 
 whole, " business " was what he most cared for. The 
 " ComMie Humaine " represents an immense amount 
 of joy, of spontaneity, of irrepressible artistic life. 
 Here and there in the letters this occasionally breaks 
 out in accents of mingled exultation and despair. 
 " Never," he writes in 1836, " has the torrent which 
 bears me along been more rapid ; never has a work 
 more majestically terrible imposed 'itself upon the 
 human brain. I go to my work as the gamester to 
 the gaming-table ; I am sleeping now only five hours 
 and working eighteen ; I shall arrive dead. . . . 
 "Write to me ; be generous ; take nothing in bad part, 
 for you don't know how, at moments, I deplore this 
 life of fire. But how can I jump out of the chariot ? ' ' 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 377 
 
 We have already had occasion in these pages to say 
 that his great characteristic, far from being a passion 
 for ideas, was a passion for things. "We said just 
 now that his books are full of ideas ; but we must 
 add that his letters make us feel that these ideas 
 are themselves in a certain sense "things." They 
 are pigments, properties, frippery; they are always 
 concrete and available. Balzac cared for them only 
 if they would fit into his inkstand. 
 
 He never jumped out of his chariot ; but as the years 
 went on he was able at times to let the reins hang 
 more loosely. There is no evidence that he made the 
 great fortune he had looked forward to ; but he must 
 have made a great deal of money. In the beginning 
 his work was very poorly paid, but after his reputation 
 was solidly established he received large sums. It is 
 true that they were swallowed up in great part by his 
 " debts " that dusky, vaguely outlined, insatiable maw 
 which we see grimacing for ever behind him, like the 
 face on a fountain which should find itself receiving 
 a stream instead of giving it out. But he travelled 
 (working all the while en route). He went to Italy, 
 to Germany, to Russia; he built houses, he bought 
 pictures and pottery. One of his journeys illustrates 
 his singular mixture of economic and romantic impulses. 
 He made a breathless pilgrimage to the island of 
 
173 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Sardinia to examine the scoriae of certain silver mines, 
 anciently worked by the Romans, in which he had heard 
 that the metal was still to be found. The enterprise 
 was fantastic and impracticable; but he pushed his 
 excursion through night and day, as he had written the 
 " Pere Goriot." In his relative prosperity, when once 
 it was established, there are strange lapses and stum- 
 bling-places. After he had built and was living in his 
 somewhat fantastical villa of Les Jardies at Sevres, 
 close to Paris, he invites a friend to stay with him on 
 these terms : "I can take you to board at forty sous 
 a day, and for thirty-five francs you will have fire- 
 wood enough for a month." In his jokes he is apt to 
 betray the same preoccupation. Inviting Charles de 
 Bernard and his wife to come to Les Jardies to help 
 him to arrange his books, he adds that they will have 
 fifty sous a day and their wine. He is constantly 
 talking of his expenses, of what he spends in cab- 
 hire and postage. His letters to the Countess Hanska 
 are filled with these details. " Yesterday I was run- 
 ning about all day; twenty-five francs for carriages ! " 
 The man of business is never absent. For the first 
 representations of his plays he arranges his audiences 
 with an eye to effect, like an impresario or an agent. 
 In the boxes, for " Vautrin," "I insist upon there 
 being handsome women." Presenting a copy of the 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 179 
 
 " Comedie Humaine " to the Austrain ambassador, he 
 accompanies it with a letter calling attention, in the 
 most elaborate manner, to the typographical beauty 
 and the cheapness of the work ; the letter reads like 
 a prospectus or an advertisement. 
 
 In 1840 (he was forty years old) he thought seriously 
 of marriage with this remark as the preface to the 
 announcement : "Jene veux plus avoir de cceur / . . . 
 If you meet a young girl of twenty-two," he goes on, 
 " with a fortune of 200,000 francs, or even of 100,000, 
 provided it can be used in business, you will think 
 of me. I want a woman who shall be able to be what 
 the events of my life may demand of her the wife 
 of an ambassador or a housewife at Les Jardies. But 
 don't speak of this ; it's a secret. She must be an 
 ambitious, clever girl." This project, however, was not 
 carried out ; Balzac had no time to marry. But his 
 friendship with Madame Hanska became more and more 
 absorbing, and though their pioject of marriage, which 
 was executed in 1850, was kept a profound secret 
 until after the ceremony, it is apparent that they had 
 had it a long time in their thoughts. 
 
 For this lady Balzac's esteem and admiration seem 
 to have been unbounded ; and his letters to her, which 
 in the second volume are very numerous, contain many 
 noble and delicate passages, " You know too well," 
 
 N 2 
 
180 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 he says to her somewhere, with a happy choice of words 
 for his diction was here and there as felicitous as it 
 was generally intolerable " Vous savez trop lien que 
 tout ce qui~n'est pas vous n'est que surface, sottise et vains 
 palliatifs de Vabsence" " You must be proud of your 
 children," he writes to his sister from Poland : " such 
 daughters are the recompense of your life. You must 
 not be unjust to destiny; you may now accept many 
 misfortunes. It is like myself with Madame Hanska. 
 The gift of her affection explains all my troubles, my 
 weariness and my toil ; I was paying to evil, in 
 advance, the price of such a treasure. As Napoleon 
 said, we pay for everything here below; nothing is 
 stolen. It seems to me that I have paid very little. 
 Twenty-five years of toil and struggle are nothing 
 as the purchase-money of an attachment so splendid, 
 so radiant, so complete." 
 
 Madame Hanska appears to have come rarely to 
 Paris, and, when she came, to have shrouded her 
 visits in mystery ; but Balzac arranged several meet- 
 ings with her abroad and visited her at St. Petersburg 
 and on her Polish estates. He was devotedly fond 
 of her children, and the tranquil, opulent family life 
 to which she introduced him appears to have been 
 one of the greatest pleasures he had known. In 
 several passages which, for Balzac, may be called 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 181 
 
 graceful and playful, lie expresses his homesickness 
 for her chairs and tables, her books, the sight of her 
 dresses. Here is something, in one of his letters to 
 her, that is worth quoting : "In short, this is the game 
 that I play ; four men will have had, in this century, 
 an immense influence Xapoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell. I 
 should like to be the fourth. The first lived on the 
 blood of Europe ; il sest inocule des armees ; the second 
 espoused the globe ; the third became the incarnation 
 of a people ; I I shall have carried a whole society 
 in my head. But there will have been in me a much 
 greater and much happier being than the writer and 
 that is your slave. My feeling is finer, grander, more 
 complete, than all the satisfactions of vanity or of 
 glory. "Without this plenitude of the heart I should 
 never have accomplished the tenth part of my work ; 
 I should not have had this ferocious courage." During 
 a few days spent at Berlin, on his way back from St. 
 Petersburg, he gives his impressions of the "capital 
 of Brandenburg" in a tone which almost seems to 
 denote a prevision of the style of allusion to this 
 locality and its inhabitants which was to become 
 fashionable among his countrymen thirty years later. 
 Balzac detested Prussia and the Prussians. "It is 
 owing to this charlatanism [the spacious distribution 
 of the streets. &c.] that Berlin has a more populous 
 
182 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 look than Petersburg ; I would have said " more 
 animated" look if I had been speaking of another 
 people ; but the Prussian, with his brutal heaviness, 
 will never be able to do anything but crush. To 
 produce the movement of a great European capital 
 you must have less beer and bad tobacco and more of 
 the French or Italian spirit ; or else you must have 
 the great industrial and commercial ideas which have 
 produced the gigantic development of London ; but 
 Berlin and its inhabitants will never be anything but 
 an ugly little city, inhabited by an ugly big people." 
 
 " I have seen Tieck en famille" he says in another 
 letter. "He seemed pleased with my homage. He 
 had an old countess, his contemporary in spectacles, 
 almost an octogenarian a mummy with a green eye- 
 shade, whom I supposed to be a domestic divinity. . . . 
 I am at home again ; it is half-past six in the evening, 
 and I have eaten nothing since this morning. Berlin 
 is the city of ennui ; I should die here in a week. Poor 
 Humboldt is dying of it ; he drags with him every- 
 where his nostalgia for Paris." 
 
 Balzac passed the winter of 1848-'49 and several 
 months more at Yierzschovnia, the Polish estate of 
 Madame Hanska and her children. His health had 
 been gravely impaired, and the doctors had abso- 
 lutely forbidden him to work. His inexhaustible and 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 183 
 
 indefatigable brain had at last succumbed to fatigue. 
 But the prize was gained ; his debts were paid ; he was 
 looking forward to owning at last the money that he 
 made. He could afford relatively speaking at least 
 to rest. His fame had been solidly built up ; the public 
 recognised his greatness. Already, in 1846, he had 
 written : " You will learn with pleasure, I am sure, 
 that there is an immense reaction in my favour. At 
 last I have conquered ! Once more my protecting star 
 has watched over me. ... At this moment the public 
 and the papers turn toward me favourably ; more than 
 that, there is a sort of acclammation, a general conse- 
 cration. ... It is a great year for me, dear Countess." 
 To be ill and kept from work was, for Balzac, to be 
 a chained Prometheus; but there was much during 
 these last months to alleviate his impatience. His 
 letters at this period are easier, less painfully pre- 
 occupied than at any other; and he found in Poland 
 better medical advice than he deemed obtainable in 
 Paris. He was preparing a house in Paris to receive 
 him as a married man preparing it apparently with 
 great splendour. At Les Jardies the pictures and 
 divans and tapestries had mostly been nominal had 
 been present only in grand names, chalked grotesquely 
 upon the empty walls. But during the last years of 
 his life Balzac appears to have been a great collector. 
 
184 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 He bought many pictures and other objects of value ; in 
 particular there figures in these letters a certain set of 
 Florentine furniture which he was willing to sell again, 
 but to sell only to a royal purchaser. The King of 
 Holland appears to have been in treaty for it. Readers 
 of the " Comedie Humaine " have no need to be re- 
 minded of the author's passion for furniture ; nowhere 
 else are there such loving or such invidious descriptions 
 of it. " Decidedly," he writes once to Madame Hanska, 
 " I will send to Tours for the Louis XYI. secretary 
 and bureau ; the room will then be complete. It's a 
 matter of a thousand francs ; but for a thousand francs 
 what can one get in modern furniture ? DCS platitudes 
 bourgeoises, des miser es sans valeur et sans gout" 
 
 Old Madame de Balzac was her son's factotum and 
 universal agent. His letters from Vierzschovnia are 
 filled with prescriptions of activity for his mother, 
 accompanied always with the urgent reminder that she 
 is to use cabs ad libitum. He goes into the minutest 
 details (she was overlooking the preparation of his 
 house in the Rue Fortunee, which must have been con- 
 verted into a very picturesque residence): "The 
 carpet in the dining-room must certainly be readjusted. 
 Try and make M. Henry send his carpet-layer. I owe 
 that man a good pour-boire ; he laid all the carpets, and 
 I once was rough with him. You must tell him that 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 185 
 
 in September lie can come and get his present. I want 
 particularly to give it to him myself." 
 
 His mother occasionally annoyed him by unreason- 
 able exactions and untimely interferences. There is 
 an episode of a letter which she writes to him 
 at Yerzschovnia, and which, coming to Madame 
 Hanska's knowledge, endangers his prospect of mar- 
 riage. He complains bitterly to his sister that his 
 mother cannot get it out of her head that he is still 
 fifteen years old. But there is something very touching 
 in his constant tenderness toward her as well as 
 something very characteristically French very charac- 
 teristic of the French sentiment of family consistency 
 and solidarity in the way in which, by constantly 
 counting upon her practical aptitude and zeal, he 
 makes her a fellow-worker toward the great total of 
 his fame and fortune. At fifty years of age, at the 
 climax of his distinction, announcing to her his brilliant 
 marriage, he signs himself Tonfih soumis. To his old 
 friend Madame Carraud he speaks thus of this same 
 event : " The denoument of that great and beautiful 
 drama of the heart which has lasted these sixteen 
 years. . . . Three days ago I married the only woman 
 I have loved, whom I love more than ever, and whom 
 I shall love until death. I believe that this union is 
 the recompense that God has held in reserve for me 
 
136 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 through so many adversities, years of work, difficulties 
 suffered and surmounted. I had neither a happy youth 
 nor a flowering spring ; I shall have the most brilliant 
 summer, the sweetest of all autumns." It had been, 
 as Balzac says, a drama of the heart, and the^ denoii- 
 ment was of the heart alone. Madame Hanska, on 
 her marriage, made over her large fortune to her 
 children. 
 
 Balzac had at last found rest and happiness, but his 
 enjoyment of these blessings was brief. The energy 
 that he had expended to gain them left nothing behind 
 it. His terrible industry had blasted the soil it passed 
 over ; he had sacrificed to his work the very things he 
 worked for. One cannot do what Balzac did and live- 
 He was enfeebled, exhausted, broken. He died in Paris 
 th r ee months after his marriage. The reader feels 
 that premature death is the logical, the harmonious, 
 completion of such a career. The strongest man has 
 but a certain fixed quantity of life to expend, and we 
 may expect that if he works habitually fifteen hours a 
 day, he will spend it while, arithmetically speaking, 
 he is yet young. 
 
 We have been struck in reading these letters with 
 the strong analogy between Balzac's career and that of 
 the great English writer whose history was some time 
 since so expansively written by Mr. Forster. Dickens 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 187 
 
 and Balzac have much in common ; as individuals they 
 strongly resemble each other; their differences are 
 chiefly differences of race. Each was a man of affairs, 
 an active, practical man, with a temperament of almost 
 phenomenal vigour and a prodigious quantity of life to 
 expend. Each had a character and a will what is 
 nowadays called a personality that imposed themselves 
 irresistibly; each had a boundless self-confidence and 
 a magnificent egotism. Each had always a hundred 
 irons on the fire ; each was resolutely determined to 
 make money, and made it in large quantities. In 
 intensity of imaginative power, the power of evoking 
 visible objects and figures, seeing them themselves with 
 the force of hullucination and making others see them 
 all but just as vividly, they were almost equal. Here 
 there is little to choose between them ; they have had 
 no rivals but each other and Shakespeare. But they 
 most of all resemble each other in the fact that they 
 treated their extraordinary imaginative force as a 
 matter of business; that 'they .worked it as a gold- 
 mine, violently and brutally ; overworked and ravaged 
 it. They succumbed to the task that they had laid 
 upon themselves and they are as similar in their deaths 
 as in their lives. Of course, if Dickens is an English 
 Balzac, he is a very English Balzac. His fortune was 
 
188 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the easier of the two and his prizes were greater than 
 the other's. His brilliant, opulent English prosperity, 
 centered in a home and diffused through a progeny, 
 is in strong contrast with the almost scholastic penury 
 and obscurity of much of Balzac's career. But the 
 analogy is still very striking. 
 
 In speaking of Balzac elsewhere in these pages we 
 insisted upon the fact that he lacked charm ; but we 
 said that our last word upon him should be that he 
 had incomparable power. His letters only confirm 
 these impressions, and above all they deepen our sense 
 of his strength. They contain little that is delicate 
 and not a great deal that is positively agreeable ; but 
 they express an energy before which we stand lost in 
 wonder, in an admiration that almost amounts to awe. 
 The fact that his omnivorous observation of the great 
 human spectacle has no echo in his letters only makes 
 us feel how concentrated and how intense was the 
 labour that went on in his closet. Certainly no solider 
 intellectual work has ever been achieved by man. 
 And in spite of the massive egotism, the personal 
 absoluteness, to which these pages testify, they leave 
 us with a downright kindness for the author. He 
 was coarse, but he was tender ; he was corrupt, in a 
 way, but he was immensely natural. If he was 
 
BALZAC'S LETTERS. 189 
 
 ungracefully eager and voracious, awkwardly blind to all 
 things that did not contribute to his personal plan, at 
 least his egotism was exerted in a great cause. The 
 " Comedie Humaine " has a thousand faults, but it is 
 a monumental excuse. 
 
GEORGE SAND. 
 
 AMONG the eulogies and .-dissertations called forth by 
 the death of the great writer who shared with Victor 
 Hugo the honour of literary pre-eminence in France, 
 quite the most valuable was the short notice published 
 in the " Journal des Debats," by M. Taine. In this 
 notice the apostle of the " milieu " and the " moment " 
 very justly remarked that George Sand is an exception- 
 ally good case for the study of the pedigree of a genius 
 for ascertaining the part of prior generations in 
 forming one of those minds which shed back upon them 
 the light of glory. "What renders Madame Sand so 
 available an example of the operation of heredity is the 
 fact that the process went on very publicly, as one 
 may say ; that her ancestors were people of qualities 
 at once very strongly marked and very abundantly 
 recorded. The record has been kept in a measure by 
 George Sand herself. When she was fifty years old she 
 wrote her memoirs, and in this prolix and imperfect 
 
GEORGE SAND 191 
 
 but extremely entertaining work a large space is devoted 
 to the heroine's parents and grandparents. 
 
 It was a very picturesque pedigree quite an' [ideal 
 pedigree for a romancer. Madame Sand's great-grand- 
 father was the Marechal Maurice de Saxe, one of the 
 very few generals in the service of Louis XY. who 
 tasted frequently of victory. Maurice de Saxe was a 
 royal bastard, the son of Augustus II., surnamed the 
 Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, and 
 of a brilliant mistress, Aurore de Konigsmark. The 
 victories of the Marechal de Saxe were not confined to 
 the battlefield ; one of his conquests was an agreeable 
 actress much before the Parisian public. This lady 
 became the mother of Madame Sand's grandmother, who 
 was honourably brought up and married at a very early 
 age to the Comte de Horn. The Comte de Horn shortly 
 died, and his widow, after an interval, accepted the 
 hand of M. Dupin de Francueil, a celebrity and a very 
 old man. M. Dupin was one of the brilliant figures in 
 Paris society during the period immediately preceding 
 the devolution. He had a large fortune, and he too 
 was a conqueror. A sufficiently elaborate portrait of 
 him may be found in that interesting, if disagreeable, 
 book, the " Memoires " of Madame d'Epinay. This 
 clever lady had been one of his spoils of victory. Old 
 enough to be his wife's grandfather, he survived his 
 
192 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 marriage but a few years, and died with all his illusions 
 intact, on the eve of the Revolution, leaving to Madame 
 Dupin an only son. His wife outweathered the tempest, 
 which, however, swept away her fortune ; though she 
 was able to buy a small property in the country the 
 rustic Chateau de Nohant, which George Sand has so 
 often introduced into her writings. Here she settled 
 herself with her son, a boy of charming promise, who 
 was in due time drawn into the ranks of Napoleon's 
 conquering legions. Young Dupin became an ardent 
 Bonapartist and an accomplished soldier. He won rapid 
 promotion. In one of the so-called " glorious " Italian 
 campaigns he met a young girl who had followed the 
 army from Paris, from a personal interest in one of its 
 officers ; and falling very honestly in love with her he 
 presently married her, to the extreme chagrin of his 
 mother. This young girl, the daughter of a bird- 
 catcher, and, as George Sand calls her, an "enfant du 
 vieux pave de Paris," became the mother of the great 
 writer. She was a child of the people and a passionate 
 democrat, and in the person of her daughter we see the 
 confluence of a plebeian stream with a strain no less (in 
 spite of its irregularity) than royal. On the paternal 
 side Madame Sand was cousin (in we know not what 
 degree) to the present Bourbon claimant of the French 
 crown; on the other she was affiliated to the stock 
 
GEORGE SAND. 193 
 
 which, out of the "vieux pave," makes the barricades 
 before which Bourbons go down. 
 
 This may very properly be called a " picturesque " 
 descent ; it is in a high degree .what the French term 
 accidente. Its striking feature is that each conjunction 
 through which it proceeds is a violent or irregular one. 
 Two are illegitimate those of the King of Poland and 
 his son with their respective mistresses ; the other two, 
 though they had the sanction of law, may be called 
 in a manner irregular. It was irregular for the fresh 
 young Comtesse de Horn to be married to a man of 
 seventy ; it was irregular in her son, young Dupin, to 
 make a wife of another man's mistress, often as this 
 proceeding has been reversed. If it is a fair description 
 of Madame Sand to say that she was, during that por- 
 tion of her career which established her reputation, an 
 apostle of the rights of love quand meme, a glance at 
 her pedigree shows that this was a logical disposition. 
 She was herself more sensibly the result of a series of 
 love-affairs than most of us. In each of these cases the 
 woman had been loved with a force that asserted itself 
 in contradiction to propriety or to usage. 
 
 We may observe moreover, in this course of trans- 
 mission, the opposition of the element of insubordination 
 and disorder (which sufficiently translated itself in out- 
 ward acts in Madame Sand's younger years) and the 
 
 o 
 
194 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 " official " element, the respectable, conservative, ex- 
 clusive strain. Three of our author's ancestresses 
 were light women women at odds with society, defiant 
 of it, and, theoretically at least, discountenanced by it. 
 The grand- daughter of the Comtesse de Konigsmark 
 and of Mademoiselle Yerrieres, the daughter of Madame 
 Dupin the younger, could hardly have been expected 
 not to take up this hereditary quarrel. It is striking 
 that on the feminine side of the house what is called 
 respectability was a very relative quality. Madame 
 Dupin the elder took it very hard when her only and 
 passionately loved son married &femme galante. She did 
 not herself belong to this category, and her opposition 
 is easily conceivable; but the reader of "L'Histoire 
 de ma Vie" cannot help smiling a little when he 
 reflects that this irreconcilable mother-in-law was the 
 offspring of two illegitimate unions, and that her mother 
 and grandmother had each enjoyed a plurality of lovers. 
 At the same time, if there is anything more striking 
 in George Sand, as a literary figure, than a certain tra- 
 ditional Bohemianism, it is that other very different 
 quality which we just now called official, and which is 
 constantly interrupting and complicating her Bohemi- 
 anism. " George Sand immoral ? " I once heard one of 
 her more conditional admirers exclaim. " The fault I 
 find with her is that she is so insufferably virtuous." 
 
GEORGE SAND. 195 
 
 The military and aristocratic side of her lineage is 
 attested by this " virtuous " property by her constant 
 tendency to edification and didacticism, her love of phi- 
 losophizing and preaching, of smoothing and harmonizing 
 things, and by her great literary gift, her noble and 
 imperturbable style, the style which, if she had been 
 a man, would have seated her in that temple of all the 
 proprieties, the French Academy. 
 
 It is not the purpose of these few pages to recapitu- 
 late the various items of George Sand's biography. 
 Many of these are to be found in "L'Histoire de ma 
 Vie, "a work which, although it was thought disappoint- 
 ing at the time of its appearance, is very well worth 
 reading. It was given to the world day by day, as the 
 feuilleton of a newspaper, and, like all the author's com- 
 positions, it has the stamp of being written to meet a 
 current engagement. It lacks plan and proportion ; 
 the book is extremely ill made. But it has a great 
 charm, and it contains three or four of the best portraits 
 the only portraits, we were on the point of saying 
 that the author has painted. The story was begun, but 
 was never really finished ; this was the public's disap- 
 pointment. It contained a great deal about Madame 
 Sand's grandmother and her father a large part of two 
 volumes are given to a transcript of her father's letters 
 (and very charming letters they are). It abounded in 
 
 o 2 
 
196 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 anecdotes of the writer's childhood, her playmates, her 
 pet animals, her school-adventures, the nuns at the 
 Couvent des Anglaises by whom she was educated \ it 
 related the juvenile unfolding of her mind, her fits of 
 early piety, and her first acquaintance with Montaigne 
 and Rousseau ; it contained a superabundance of 
 philosophy, psychology, morality and harmless gossip 
 about people unknown to the public; but it was 
 destitute of just that which the public desired an 
 explicit account of the more momentous incidents of 
 the author's maturity. When she reaches the point at 
 which her story becomes peculiarly interesting (up to 
 that time it has simply been agreeable and entertaining) 
 she throws up the game and drops the curtain. In 
 other words, she talks no scandal a consummation 
 devoutly to be rejoiced in. 
 
 The reader nevertheless deems himself unfairly used, 
 and takes his revenge in seeing something very typical 
 of the author in the shortcomings of the work. He 
 declares it to be a nondescript performance, which has 
 neither the value of truth nor the illusion of fiction ; 
 and he inquires why the writer should preface her 
 task with such solemn remarks upon the edifying 
 properties of autobiography, and adorn it with so 
 pompous an epigraph, if she meant simply to tell what 
 she might tell without trouble. It may be remem- 
 
GEORGE SAND. 197 
 
 bered, however, that George Sand has sometimes been 
 compared to Goethe, and that there is this ground for 
 the comparison that in form " L'Histoire de ma Yie " 
 greatly resembles the "Dichtung und Wahrheit." 
 There is the same charming, complacent expatiation 
 upon youthful memories, the same arbitrary confidences 
 and silences, the same digressions and general judg- 
 ments, the same fading away of the narrative on the 
 threshold of maturity. We should never look for 
 analogies between George Sand and Goethe ; but we 
 should say that the lady's long autobiographic fragment 
 is in fact extremely typical the most so indeed of all 
 her works. It shows in the highest degree her great 
 strength and her great weakness her unequalled 
 faculty of improvisation, as it may be called, and her 
 peculiar want of veracity. Every one will recognise 
 what we mean by the first of these items. People may 
 like George Sand or not, but they can hardly deny that 
 she is the great improvisatrice of literature the w r riter 
 who best answers to Shelley's description of the sky- 
 lark singing "in profuse strains of unpremeditated 
 art." No writer has produced such great effects with 
 an equal absence of premeditation. 
 
 On the other hand, what we have called briefly and 
 crudely her want of veracity requires some explanation. 
 It is doubtless a condition of her serene volubility ; 
 
198 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 but if this latter is a great literary gift, its value is 
 impaired by our sense that it rests to a certain extent 
 upon a weakness. There is something very liberal and 
 universal in George Sand's genius, as well as very 
 masculine ; but our final impression of her always is 
 that she is a woman and a Frenchwoman. Women, 
 we are told, do not value the truth for its own sake, 
 but only for some personal use they make of it. My 
 present criticism involves an assent to this somewhat 
 cynical dogma. Add to this that woman, if she happens 
 to be French, has an extraordinary taste for investing 
 objects with a graceful drapery of her own contrivance, 
 and it will be found that George Sand's cast of mind 
 includes both the generic and the specific idiosyncrasy. 
 We have more than once heard her readers say (whether 
 it was professed fact or admitted fiction that they had 
 in hand), " It is all very well, but I can't believe a 
 word of it ! " There is something very peculiar in this 
 inability to believe George Sand even in that relative 
 sense in which we apply the term to novelists at large. 
 We believe Balzac, we believe Gustave Flaubert, we be- 
 lieve Dickens and Thackeray and Miss Austen. Dickens 
 is far more incredible than George- Sand, and yet he pro- 
 duces much more illusion. In spite of her plausibility, 
 the author of " Consuelo " always appears to be telling 
 a fairy-tale. We say in spite of her plausibility, but we 
 
GEORGE SAND. 199 
 
 might rather say that her excessive plausibility is the 
 reason of our want of faith. The narrative is too 
 smooth, too fluent ; the narrator has a virtuous inde- 
 pendence that the Muse of history herself might envy 
 her. The effect it produces is that of a witness who 
 is eager to tell more than is asked him, the worth of 
 whose testimony is impaired by its importunity. The 
 thing is beautifully done, but you feel that rigid truth 
 has come off as it could ; the author has not a high 
 standard of exactitude ; she never allows facts to make 
 her uncomfortable. "L'Histoire de ma Vie" is full 
 of charming recollections and impressions of Madame 
 Sand's early years, of delightful narrative, of generous 
 and elevated sentiment ; but we have constantly the 
 feeling that it is what children call " made up." If 
 the fictitious quality in our writer's reminiscences is 
 very sensible, of course the fictitious quality in her 
 fictions is still more so ; and it must be said that in 
 spite of its odd mixture of the didactic and the irre- 
 sponsible, " L'Histoire de ma Yie " sails nearer to the 
 shore than its professedly romantic companions. 
 
 The usual objection to the novels, and a very just 
 one, is that they contain no living figures, no people 
 who stand on their feet, and who, like so many of the 
 creations of the other great novelists, have become 
 part of the public fund of allusion and quotation. As 
 
200 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 portraits George Sand's figures are vague in outline 
 deficient in detail. Several of those, however, which 
 occupy the foreground of her memoirs have a remark- 
 able vividness. In the four persons associated chiefly 
 with her childhood and youth she really makes us 
 believe. The first of these is the great figure which 
 appears quite to have filled up the background of her 
 childhood almost to the exclusion of the child her- 
 self that of her grandmother, Madame Dupin, the 
 daughter of the great soldier. The second is that of 
 her father, who was killed at Nohant by a fall 
 from his horse, while she was still a young girl. The 
 third is that of her mother a particularly remarkable 
 portrait. The fourth is the grotesque but softly-lighted 
 image of Deschartres, -the old pedagogue who served 
 as tutor to Madame Sand and her half-brother ; the 
 latter youth being the fruit of an " amourette " be- 
 tween the Commandant Dupin and one of his mother's 
 maids. Madame Dupin philosophically adopted the 
 child \ she dated from the philosophers of the preceding 
 century. It is worth noting that George Sand's other 
 playmate the "Caroline" of the memoirs was a 
 half-sister on her mother's side, a little girl whose 
 paternity antedated the Commandant Dupin's ac- 
 quaintance with his wife. 
 
 In George Sand's account of her father there is 
 
GEORGE SAND. 201 
 
 something extremely delightful ; full of filial passion 
 as it is, and yet of tender discrimination. She makes 
 him a charming figure the ideal "gallant" French- 
 man of the old type; a passionate soldier and a 
 delightful talker, leaving fragments of his heart on 
 every bush ; clever, tender, full of artistic feeling and 
 of Gallic gaiety having in fair weather and foul 
 always the mot pour rire. His daughter's publication 
 of his letters has been called a rather inexpensive mode 
 of writing her own biography ; but these letters 
 charming, natural notes to his mother during his boyish 
 campaigns were well worth bringing to the light. All 
 George Sand is in the author's portrait of her mother ; 
 all her great merit and all her strange defects. We 
 should recommend the perusal of the scattered passages 
 of "L'Histoire de ma Yie " which treat of this lady 
 to a person ignorant of Madame Sand and desiring to 
 make her acquaintance ; they are an excellent measure 
 of her power. On one side an extraordinary familiarity 
 with the things of the mind, the play of character, 
 the psychological mystery, and a beautiful clearness and 
 quietness, a beautiful instinct of justice in dealing with 
 them ; on the other side a startling absence of delicacy, 
 of reticence, of the sense of certain spiritual sanctities 
 and reservations. That a woman should deal in so 
 free-handed a fashion with a female parent upon whom 
 
202 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 nature and time have enabled her to look down from 
 an eminence, seems at first a considerable anomaly; 
 and the woman who does it must to no slight extent 
 have shaken herself free from the bonds of custom. "We 
 do not mean that George Sand talks scandal and tittle- 
 tattle about her mother; but that Madame Dupin 
 having been a light woman and an essentially irregular 
 character, her daughter holds her up in the sunshine 
 of her own luminous contemplation with all her im- 
 perfections on her head. At the same time it is very 
 finely done very intelligently and appreciatively; it 
 is at the worst a remarkable exhibition of the dis- 
 interestedness of a great imagination. 
 
 It must be remembered also that the young Aurore 
 Dupin " belonged " much more to her grandmother 
 than to her mother, to whom in her childhood she was 
 only lent, as it were, on certain occasions. There is 
 nothing in all George Sand better than her history of 
 the relations of these two women, united at once and 
 divided (after the death of the son and husband) by 
 a common grief and a common interest ; full of mutual 
 jealousies and defiances, and alternately quarrelling and 
 "making up" over their little girl. Jealousy carried 
 the day. One was a patrician and the other a jealous 
 democrat, and no common ground was attainable. 
 Among the reproaches addressed by her critics to the 
 
GEORGE SAND. 203 
 
 author of " Valentine " and " Valvedre " is the charge 
 of a very imperfect knowledge of family life and a 
 tendency to strike false notes in the portrayal of it. 
 It is apparent that both before and after her marriage 
 her observation of family life was peculiarly restricted 
 and perverted. Of what it must have been in the 
 former case this figure of her mother may give us an 
 impression; of what it was in the latter we may 
 get an idea from the somewhat idealized menage in 
 " Lucrezia Floriani." 
 
 George Sand's literary fame came to her very 
 abruptly. The history of her marriage, which is 
 briefly related in her memoirs, is sufficiently well known. 
 The thing was done, on her behalf, by her relatives 
 (she had a small property) and the husband of their 
 choice, M. Dudevant, was neither appreciative nor 
 sympathetic. His tastes were vulgar and his manners 
 frequently brutal ; and after a short period of violent 
 dissension and the birth of two children, the young 
 couple separated. It is safe to say, however, that even 
 with an " appreciative " husband Madame Sand would 
 not have accepted matrimony once for all. She repre- 
 sents herself as an essentially dormant, passive and 
 shrinking nature, upon which celebrity and produc- 
 tiveness were forced by circumstances, and whose 
 unconsciousness of its own powers was dissipated only 
 
204 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 by the violent breaking of a spell. There is evidently 
 much truth in these assertions ; for of all great literary 
 people few strike us as having had a smaller measure 
 of the more vulgar avidities and ambitions. But for 
 all that, it is tolerably plain that even by this 
 profoundly slumbering genius the most brilliant 
 matrimonial associate would have been utterly over- 
 matched. 
 
 Madame Sand, even before she had written " In- 
 diana," was too imperious a force, too powerful a 
 machine, to make the limits of her activity coincide 
 with those of wifely submissiveness. It is very possible 
 that for her to write "Indiana" and become a woman 
 of letters a spell had to be broken; only, the real 
 breaking of the spell lay not in the vulgarity of a 
 husband, but in the deepening sense, quickened by the 
 initiations of marriage, that outside of the quiet mea- 
 dows of Nohant there was a vast affair called life, with 
 which she had a capacity for making acquaintance at 
 first hand. This making acquaintance with life at first 
 hand is, roughly speaking, the great thing that, as a 
 woman, Madame Sand achieved ; and she was pre- 
 destined to achieve it. She was more masculine than 
 any man she might have married ; and what powerfully 
 masculine person even leaving genius apart is content 
 at five -and- twenty with submissiveness and renuncia- 
 
GEORGE SAND. 205 
 
 tion ? " It was a mere accident that George Sand was 
 a woman," a person who had known her well said to 
 the writer of these pages ; and though the statement 
 needs an ultimate corrective, it represents a great 
 deal of truth. What was feminine in her was the 
 quality of her genius ; the quantity of it its force, 
 and mass, and energy was masculine, and masculine 
 were her temperament and character. All this mascu- 
 linity needed to set itself free ; which it proceeded to 
 do according to its temporary light. Her separation 
 from her husband was judicial, and assured her the 
 custody of her children ; but as, in return for this 
 privilege, she made financial concessions, it left her 
 without income (though in possession of the property 
 of Nohant) and dependent upon her labours for 
 support. She had betaken herself to Paris in quest 
 of labour, and it was with this that her career began. 
 This determination to address herself to life at first 
 hand this personal, moral impulse, which was not 
 at all a literary impulse was her great inspiration, 
 the great pivot on which her history wheeled round 
 into the bright light of experience and fame. It is, 
 strictly, as we said just now, the most interesting thing 
 about her. Such a disposition was not customary, 
 was not what is usually called womanly, was not 
 modest nor delicate, nor, for many other persons, in 
 
206 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 any way comfortable. But it had one great merit : it 
 was in a high degree original and active ; and because 
 it was this it constitutes the great service which 
 George Sand rendered her sex a service in which, we 
 hasten to add, there was as much of fortune as of 
 virtue. The disposition to cultivate an " acquaintance 
 with life at first hand" might pass for an elegant way 
 of describing the attitude of many young women who 
 are never far to seek, and who render no service to 
 their own sex whatever they may render to the other. 
 George Sand's superiority was that she looked at life 
 from a high point of view, and that she had an extra- 
 ordinary talent. She painted fans and glove-boxes to 
 get money, and got very little. "Indiana," however 
 a mere experiment put her on her feet, and her 
 reputation dawned. She found that she could write, 
 and she took up her pen never to lay it down. Her 
 early novels, all of them brilliant, and each one at 
 that day a literary event, followed each other with 
 extraordinary rapidity. About this sudden entrance 
 into literature, into philosophy, into rebellion, and into 
 a great many other matters, there are various different 
 things to be said. Very remarkable, indeed, was the 
 immediate development of the literary faculty in this 
 needy young woman who lived in cheap lodgings and 
 looked for " employment." She wrote as a bird sings ; 
 
GEORGE SAND. 207 
 
 but unlike most birds, she found it unnecessary to 
 indulge, by way of prelude, in twitterings and vocal 
 exercises ; she broke out at once with her full volume 
 of expression. From the beginning she had a great 
 style. " Indiana," perhaps, is rather in falsetto, as 
 the first attempts of young, sentimental writers are 
 apt to be ; but in " Valentine," which immediately 
 followed, there is proof of the highest literary instinct 
 an art of composition, a propriety and harmony of 
 diction, such as belong only to the masters. 
 
 One might certainly have asked Madame Sand, as 
 Lord Jeffrey asked Macaulay on the appearance of his 
 first contribution to the "Edinburgh Review," where 
 in the world she had picked up that style. She had 
 picked it up apparently at Nohant, among the meadows 
 and the traines the deeply-sunken byroads among 
 the thick, high hedges. Her language had to the end an 
 odour of the hawthorn and the wild honeysuckle the 
 mark of the "climat souple et chaud," as she some- 
 where calls it, from which she had received " 1'initiation 
 premiere." How completely her great literary faculty 
 was a matter of intuition is indicated by the fact that 
 " L'Histoire de ma Vie " contains no allusion to it, 
 no account of how she learned to write, no record of 
 effort or apprenticeship. She appears to have begun 
 at a stage of the journey at which most talents arrive 
 
208 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 only when their time is up. During the: five-and forty 
 years of her literary career, she had something to say 
 about most things in the universe ; but the thing 
 about which she had least to say was the writer's, 
 the inventor's, the romancer's art. She possessed it 
 by the gift of God, but she seems never to have felt 
 the temptation to examine the pulse of the machine. 
 To the cheap edition of her novels, published in 
 1852-'3, she prefixed a series of short prefaces, in which 
 she relates the origin of each tale the state of mind 
 and the circumstances in which it was written. These 
 prefaces are charming; they almost justify the pub- 
 lisher's declaration that they form the " most beautiful 
 examination that a great mind has ever made of itself." 
 But they all commemorate the writer's extraordinary 
 facility and spontaneity. One of them says that on 
 her way home from Spain she was shut up for some 
 days at an inn, where she had her children at play 
 in the same room with her. She found that the sight 
 of their play quickened her imagination, and while 
 they tumbled about the floor near her table, she pro- 
 duced "Gabriel" a work which, though inspired by 
 the presence of infancy, cannot be said to be addressed 
 to infants. Of another story she relates that she wrote 
 it at Fontainebleau, where she spent all her days 
 wandering about the forest, making entomological 
 
GEORGE SAND. 209 
 
 collections, with her son. At night she came home 
 and took up the thread of "La Derniere Aldini," 
 on which she had never bestowed a thought all 
 day. Being at Venice, much depressed, in a vast 
 dusky room in an old palace that had been turned 
 into an inn, while the sea wind roared about her 
 windows, and brought up the sound of the carnival 
 as a kind of melancholy wail, she began a novel 
 by simply looking round her and describing the 
 room and the whistling of the mingled tumult with- 
 out. She finished it in a week, and, hardly reading 
 it over, sent it to Paris as " Leone Leoni " a master- 
 piece. 
 
 In the few prefatory lines to " Isidora " I remember 
 she says something of this kind : "It was a beautiful 
 young woman who used to come and see me, and 
 profess to relate her sorrows. I saw that she was 
 attitudinizing before me, and not believing herself a 
 word of what she said. So it is not her I described 
 in ' Isidora.' " This is a happy way of saying how a 
 hint a mere starting point was enough for her. 
 Particularly charming is the preface to the beautiful 
 tale of " Andre " ; it is a capital proof of what one 
 may call the author's limpidity of reminiscence, and 
 want of space alone prevents me from quoting it. She 
 was at Venice, and she used to hear her maid-servant 
 
 p 
 
210 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 and her sempstress, as they sat at work together, 
 chattering in the next room. She listened to their 
 talk in order to accustom her ear to the Venetian 
 dialect, and in so doing she came into possession of 
 a large amount of local gossip. The effect of it was 
 to remind her of the small social life of the little 
 country* town near Nohant. The women told each 
 other just such stories as might have been told there, 
 and indulged in just such reflections and "apprecia- 
 tions " as would have been there begotten. She was 
 reminded that men and women are everywhere the 
 same, and at the same time she felt homesick. " I 
 recalled the dirty, dusky streets, the tumble-down 
 houses, the poor moss-grown roofs, the shrill concerts 
 of cocks, children and cats, of my own little town. I 
 dreamed too of our beautiful meadows, of our prefumed 
 hay, of our little running streams, and of the botany 
 beloved of old which I could follow now only on the 
 muddy mosses and the floating weeds that adhered to 
 the sides of the gondolas. I don't know amid what 
 vague memories of various types I set in motion the 
 least complex and the laziest of fictions. These types 
 belonged quite as much to Venice as to Berry. Change 
 dress and language, sky, landscape and architecture, 
 the outside aspect of people and things, and you will 
 find that at the bottom of all this man is always the 
 
GEORGE SAND. 211 
 
 same, and woman still more, because of the tenacity 
 of her instincts." 
 
 George Sand says that she found she could write for 
 an extraordinary length of time without weariness, 
 and this is as far as she goes in the way of analysis 
 of her inspiration. From the time she made the dis- 
 covery to the day of her death her life was an extremely 
 laborious one. She had evidently an extraordinary 
 physical robustness. It was her constant practice to 
 write at night, beginning after the rest of the world 
 had gone to sleep. Alexandre Dumas the younger 
 described her somewhere, during her latter years, as 
 an old lady who came out into the garden at midday 
 in a broad-brimmed hat and sat down on a bench or 
 wandered slowly about. So she remained for hours, 
 looking about her, musing, contemplating. She was 
 gathering impressions, says M. Dumas, absorbing the 
 universe, steeping herself in nature ; and at night she 
 would give all this forth as a sort of emanation. 
 Without using too vague epithets one may accept 
 this term " emanation " as a good account of her 
 manner. 
 
 If it is needless to go into biographical detail, this 
 is because George Sand's real history, the more in- 
 teresting one, is the history of her mind. The history 
 of her mind is of course closely connected with her 
 
 p 2 
 
212 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 personal history ; she is indeed a writer whose personal 
 situation, at a particular moment, is supposed to be 
 reflected with peculiar vividness in her work. But 
 to speak of her consistently we must regard the events 
 of her life as intellectual events, and its landmarks 
 as opinions, convictions, theories. The oaly difficulty 
 is that such landmarks are nearly as numerous as the 
 trees in a forest. Some, however, are more salient 
 than others. Madame Sand's account of herself is that 
 her ideal of life was repose, obscurity and idleness 
 long days in the country spent in botany and entomo- 
 logy. She affirms that her natural indolence was 
 extreme, and that the need of money alone induced 
 her to take her pen into her hand. As this need was 
 constant, her activity was constant ; but it was a 
 perversion of the genius of a kind, simple, friendly, 
 motherly, profoundly unambitious woman, who would 
 have been amply content to take care of her family, 
 live in slippers, gossip with peasants, walk in the 
 garden and listen to the piano. All this is certainly so 
 far true as that no person of equal celebrity ever made 
 fewer explicit pretensions. She philosophized upon a 
 great many things that she did not understand, and 
 toward the close of her life, in especial, was apt to 
 talk metaphysics, in writing, with a mingled volubility 
 and vagueness which might have been taken to denote 
 
GEORGE SAND. 213 
 
 an undue self confidence. But in such things as these, 
 as they come from George Sand's pen, there is an air 
 as of not expecting any one in particular to read them. 
 She never took herself too much au serieux she never 
 postured at all as a woman of letters. She scribbled, 
 she might have said scribbled as well as she could ; 
 but when she was not scribbling she never thought of 
 it ; though she liked to think of all the great things 
 that were worth scribbling about love and religion 
 and science and art, and man's political destiny. Her 
 reader feels that she has no vanity, and all her contem- 
 poraries agree that her generosity was extreme. 
 
 She calls herself a sphinx bon enfant, or says at least 
 that she looked like one. Judgments may differ as to 
 what degree she was a sphinx ; but her good nature is 
 all-pervading. Some of her books are redolent of it 
 some of the more " objective " ones : " Consuelo," 
 " Les Maitres Sonneurs," " L'Homme de Neige," " Les 
 beaux Messieurs de Bois-Dore." She is often passionate, 
 but she is never rancorous ; even her violent attacks 
 upon the Church give us no impression of small acri- 
 mony. She has all a woman's loquacity, but she has 
 never a woman's shrillness j and perhaps we can hardly 
 indicate better the difference between great passion 
 and small than by saying that she never is hysterical. 
 During the last half of her career, her books went 
 
214 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 out of fashion among the new literary generation. 
 " Realism " had been invented, or rather propagated ; 
 and in the light of " Madame Bovary " her own facile 
 fictions began to be regarded as the work of a sort of 
 superior Mrs. Radcliffe. She was antiquated ; she 
 belonged to the infancy of art. She accepted this 
 destiny with a cheerfulness which it would have 
 savoured of vanity even to make explicit. The Realists 
 were her personal friends ; she knew that they did 
 not, and could not, read her books ; for what could 
 Gustave Flaubert make of "Monsieur Sylvestre," what 
 could Ivan Turgemeff make of " Cesarine Dietrich " ? 
 It made no difference; she contented herself with 
 reading their productions, never mentioned her own, 
 and continued to write charming, improbable romances 
 for initiated persons of the optimistic class. 
 
 After the first few years she fell into this more and 
 more ; she wrote stories for the story's sake. Among 
 the novels produced during a long period before her 
 death I can think of but one, "Mademoiselle La 
 Quintinie," that is of a controversial cast. All her 
 early novels, on the other hand, were controversial 
 if this is not too mild a description of the passionate 
 contempt for the institution of marriage expressed in 
 "Indiana," "Valentine," "Lelia," and "Jacques." 
 Her own acquaintance with matrimony had been of a 
 
GEORGE SAND. 215 
 
 painful kind, and the burden of three at least of these 
 remarkable tales (" Lelia " stands rather apart) is the 
 misery produced by an indissoluble matrimonial knot. 
 " Jacques " is the story of an unhappy marriage from 
 which there is no issue but by the suicide of one 
 of the partners; the husband throws himself into 
 an Alpine crevasse in order to leave his wife to an 
 undisturbed enjoyment of her lover. 
 
 It very soon became apparent that these matters 
 were handled in a new and superior fashion. There 
 had been plenty of tales about husbands, wives, and 
 " third ? parties," but since the "Nouvelle HeloTse " 
 there had been none of a high value or of a philoso- 
 phic tone. Madame Sand, from the first, was nothing 
 if not philosophic ; the iniquity of marriage arrange- 
 ments was to her mind but one of a hundred abomina- 
 tions in a society which needed a complete overhauling, 
 and to which she proceeded to propose a loftier line 
 of conduct. The passionate eloquence of the writer in 
 all this was only equalled by her extraordinary self- 
 confidence. " Valentine " seems to us even now a very 
 eloquent book, and " Jacques " is hardly less so ; it is 
 easy to imagine their having made an immense impres- 
 sion. The intellectual freshness, the sentimental force 
 of "Valentine," must have had an irresistible charm; 
 and we say this with a full sense of what there is false 
 
216 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 and fantastical in the substance of both books. Hold 
 them up against the light of a certain sort of ripe 
 reason, and they seem as porous as a pair of sieves; 
 but subject them simply to the literary test, and they 
 hold together very bravely. 
 
 The author's philosophic predilections were at once 
 her merit and her weakness. On the one side it was 
 a great mind, curious about all things, open to all 
 things, nobly accessible to experience, asking only to 
 live, expand, respond ; on the other side stood a great 
 personal volition, making large exactions of life and 
 society and needing constantly to justify itself stir- 
 ring up rebellion and calling down revolution in order 
 to cover up and legitimate its own agitation. George 
 Sand's was a French mind, and as a French mind it 
 had to theorize ; but if the positive side of its criti- 
 cism of most human institutions was precipitate and 
 ill-balanced, the error was in a great measure atoned 
 for in later years. The last half of Madame Sand's 
 career was a period of assent and acceptance ; she had 
 decided to make the best of those social arrangements 
 which surrounded her remembering, as it were, the 
 homely native proverb which declares that when one 
 has not got what one likes one must like what one has 
 got. Into the phase of acceptance and serenity, the 
 disposition to admit that even as it is society pays, 
 
GEORGE SAND. 217 
 
 according to the vulgar locution, our author passed at 
 about the time that the Second Empire settled down 
 upon France. We suspect the fact we speak of 
 was rather a coincidence than an effect. It is very 
 true that the Second Empire may have seemed the 
 death-knell of " philosophy " ; it may very well have 
 appeared profitless to ask questions of a world which 
 anticipated you with such answers as that. But we 
 take it rather that Madame Sand was simply weary of 
 criticism; the pendulum had swung into the opposite 
 quarter as it is needless to remark that it always 
 does. 
 
 We have delayed too long to say how far it had 
 swung in the first direction j and we have delayed from 
 the feeling that it is difficult to say it. We have seen 
 that George Sand was by the force of heredity pro- 
 jected into this field with a certain violence ; she took 
 possession of a portion of it as a conqueror, and she 
 was never compelled to retreat. The reproach brought 
 against her by her critics is that, as regards her parti- 
 cular advocacy of the claims of the heart, she has for 
 the most part portrayed vicious love, not virtuous love. 
 But the reply to this, from her own side, would be that 
 she has at all events portrayed something which those 
 who disparage her activity have not portrayed. She 
 may claim, that although she has the critics against 
 
218 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 her, the writers of her own class who represent virtuous 
 love have not pushed her out of the field. She has 
 the advantage that she has portrayed a passion, and 
 those of the other group have the disadvantage that 
 they have not. In English literature, which, we sup- 
 pose, is more especially the region of virtuous love, we 
 do not "go into" the matter, as the phrase is (we 
 speak of course of English prose). We have agreed 
 among our own confines that there is a certain point 
 at which elucidation of it should stop short ; that 
 among the things which it is possible to say about 
 it, the greater number had on the whole better not 
 be said. It would be easy to make an ironical state- 
 ment of the English attitude, and it would be, if not 
 easy, at least very possible, to make a sound defence 
 of it. The thing with us, however, is not a matter of 
 theory ; it is above all a matter of practice, and the 
 practice has been that of the leading English novel- 
 ists. Miss Austen and Sir Walter Scott, Dickens and 
 Thackeray, Hawthorne and George Eliot, have all repre- 
 sented young people in love with each other ; but no 
 one of them has, to the best of our recollection, described 
 anything that can be called a passion put it into 
 motion before us and shown us its various paces. To 
 say this is to say at the same time that these writers 
 have spared us much that we consider disagreeable, 
 
GEORGE SAND. 219 
 
 and that George Sand has not spared us ; but it is to 
 say furthermore that few persons would resort to 
 English prose fiction for any information concerning 
 the ardent forces of the heart for any ideas upon 
 them. It is George Sand's merit that she has given 
 us ideas upon them that she has enlarged the novel- 
 reader's conception of them and proved herself in all 
 that relates to them an authority. This is a great 
 deal. From this standpoint Miss Austen, Walter 
 Scott and Dickens will appear to have omitted the 
 erotic sentiment altogether, and George Eliot will seem 
 to have treated it with singular austerity. Strangely 
 loveless, seen in this light, are those large, compre- 
 hensive fictions " Middlemarch " and "Daniel Deron- 
 da." They seem to foreign readers, probably, like 
 vast, cold, commodious, respectable rooms, through 
 whose window-panes one sees a snow-covered land- 
 scape, and across whose acres of sober-hued carpet one 
 looks in vain for a fireplace or a fire. 
 
 The distinction between virtuous and vicious love is not 
 particularly insisted upon by George Sand. In her view 
 love is always love, is always divine in its essence and 
 ennobling in its operation. The largest life possible 
 is to hold one's self open to an unlimited experience of 
 this improving passion. This, I believe, was Madame 
 Sand's practice, as it was certainly her theory a 
 
220 FEENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 theory to the exposition of which one of her novels, 
 at least, is expressly dedicated. " Lucrezia Floriani" is 
 the history of a lady who, in the way of love, takes 
 everything that comes along, and who sets forth her 
 philosophy of the matter with infinite grace and felicity. 
 It is probably fortunate for the world that ladies of 
 Lucrezia Floriani's disposition have not as a general 
 thing her argumentative brilliancy. About all this there 
 would be much more to say than these few pages afford 
 space for. Madame Sand's plan was to be open to all 
 experience, all emotions, all convictions ; only to keep 
 the welfare of the human race, and especially of its 
 humbler members, well in mind, and to trust that one's 
 moral and intellectual life would take a form profitable 
 to the same. One was therefore not only to extend 
 a great hospitality to love, but to interest one's self in 
 religion and politics. This Madame Sand did with 
 great activity during the whole of the reign of Louis 
 Philippe. She had broken utterly with the Church, of 
 course, but her disposition was the reverse of sceptical. 
 Her religious feeling, like all her feelings, was power- 
 ful and voluminous, and she had an ideal of a sort of 
 etherealized and liberated Christianity, in which un- 
 married but affectionate couples might find an element 
 friendly to their " expansion." Like all her feelings, 
 too, her religious sentiment was militant ; her ideas 
 
GEORGE SAND. 221 
 
 about love were an attack upon marriage ; her faith 
 was an attack upon the Church and the clergy; her 
 socialistic sympathies were an attack upon all present 
 political arrangements. These things all took hold of 
 her hy turn shook her hard, as it were, and dropped 
 her, leaving her to be played upon by some new in- 
 spiration ; then, in some cases, returned to her, took 
 possession of her afresh and sounded another tune. M. 
 Renan, in writing of her at the time of her death, used 
 a fine phrase about her; he said that she was "the 
 JEolian harp of our time ; " he spoke of her " sonorous 
 soul." This is very just; there is nothing that 
 belonged to her time that she had not a personal 
 emotion about an emotion intense enough to produce 
 a brilliant work of art a novel that had bloomed as 
 rapidly and perfectly as the flower that the morning 
 sun sees open on its stem. In her care about many 
 things during all these years, in her expenditure of 
 passion, reflection, and curiosity, there is something 
 quite unprecedented. Never had philosophy and art 
 gone so closely hand in hand. Each of them suffered 
 a good deal ; but it had appeared up to that time that 
 their mutual concessions must be even greater. Balzac 
 was a far superior artist ; but he was incapable of a 
 lucid reflection. 
 
 We have already said that mention has been made 
 
222 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 of George Sand's analogy with Goethe, who claimed for 
 his lyrical poems the merit of being each the result of 
 a particular incident in his life. It was incident too 
 that prompted Madame Sand to write; but what it 
 produced in her case was not a short copy of verses, 
 but an elaborate drama, with a plot and a dozen cha- 
 racters. It will help us to understand this extraordinary 
 responsiveness of mind and fertility of imagination to 
 remember that inspiration was often embodied in a 
 concrete form ; that Madame Sand's " incidents " were 
 usually clever, eloquent, suggestive men. "Le style 
 c'est 1'homme" of her, it has been epigramatically 
 said, that is particularly true. Be this as it may, these 
 influences were strikingly various, and they are reflected 
 in works which may be as variously labelled : amatory 
 tales, religious tales, political, aesthetic, pictorial, musical, 
 theatrical, historical tales. And it is to be noticed that 
 in whatever the author attempted, whether or no she 
 succeeded, she appeared to lose herself. The " Lettres 
 d'un Yoyageur " read like a writer's single book. This 
 melancholy, this desolation and weariness, might pass 
 as the complete distillation of a soul. In the same 
 way " Spiridion " is exclusively religious and theologi- 
 cal. The author might, in relation to this book, have 
 replied to such of her critics as reproach her with 
 being too erotic, that she had performed the very rare 
 
GEORGE SAND. 223 
 
 feat of writing a novel not only containing no love 
 save divine love, but containing not one woman's figure. 
 We can recall but one rival to " Spiridion " in this 
 respect Godwin's " Caleb Williams." 
 
 But if other things come and go with George Sand, 
 amatory disquisition is always there. It is of all 
 kinds, sometimes very noble and sometimes very dis- 
 agreeable. Numerous specimens of the two extremes 
 might be cited. There is to our taste a great deal too 
 much of it ; the total effect is displeasing. The author 
 illuminates and glorifies the divine passion, but she does 
 something which may be best expressed by saying that 
 she cheapens it. She handles it too much ; she lets it 
 too little alone. Above all she is too positive, too 
 explicit, too business-like ; she takes too technical a 
 view of it. Its various signs and tokens and stages, 
 its ineffable mysteries, are all catalogued and tabu- 
 lated in her mind, and she whisks out her references 
 with the nimbleness with which the doorkeeper at an 
 exhibition hands you back your umbrella in return for a 
 check. In this relation, to the English mind, discretion 
 is a great point a virtue so absolute and indispensable 
 that it speaks for itself and cannot be analysed away 
 and George Sand is judged from our point of view by 
 one's saying that for her discretion is simply non-existent. 
 Its place is occupied by a sort of benevolent, an almost 
 
224 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 conscientious disposition to sit down, as it were, and 
 "talk over" the whole matter. The subject fills her 
 with a motherly loquacity; it stimulates all her 
 wonderful and beautiful self-sufficiency of expression 
 the quality that we have heard a hostile critic call 
 her "glibness." 
 
 We can hardly open a volume of George Sand with- 
 out finding an example of what we mean. We glance 
 at a venture into " Teverino," and we find Lady G., who 
 has left her husband at the inn and gone out to spend 
 a day with the more fascinating Leonce, " passing her 
 beautiful hands over the eyes of Leonce, peut-etre par 
 tendresse naive, perhaps to convince herself that it was 
 really tears she saw shining in them." The peut-etre here, 
 the tendresse naive, the alternatives, the impartial way in 
 which you are given your choice, are extremely charac- 
 teristic of Madame Sand. They remind us of the 
 heroine of " Isidora," who alludes in conversation to 
 " une de mes premieres fautes." In the list of Madame 
 Sand's more technically amatory novels, however, there 
 is a distinction to be made; the earlier strike us as 
 superior to the later. The fault of the earlier the fact 
 that passion is too intellectual, too pedantic, too 
 sophistical, too much bent upon proving itself abnega- 
 tion and humility, maternity, fraternity, humanity, or 
 some fine thing that it really is not and that it is much 
 
GEORGE SAND. 225 
 
 simpler and better for not pretending to be this 
 fault is infinitely exaggerated in the tales written 
 after "Lncrezia Floriani." "Indiana," "Valentine," 
 "Jacques," and "Mauprat" are, comparatively speak- 
 ing, frankly and honestly passionate; they do not 
 represent the love that declines to compromise with 
 circumstances as a sort of eating of one's cake and 
 having it too an eating it as pleasure and a having it 
 as virtue. But the stories of the type of " Lucrezia 
 Floriani," which indeed is the most argumentative, 1 
 have an indefinable falsity of tone. Madame Sand 
 had here begun to play with her topic intellectually ; 
 the first freshness of her interest in it had gone, and 
 invention had taken the place of conviction. To acquit 
 one's self happily of such experiments, one must cer- 
 tainly have all the gifts that George Sand possessed. 
 But one must also have two or three that she lacked. 
 Her sense of purity was certainly defective. This is a 
 brief statement, but it means a great deal, and of 
 what it means there are few of her novels that do not 
 contain a number of illustrations. 
 
 There is something very fine, for instance, about 
 "Valentine," in spite of its contemptible hero; there 
 is something very sweet and generous in the figure of 
 
 1 "Constance Terrier," " Isidora," "Pauline," "Le dernier 
 Amour," "La Daniella," "Francia," "Mademoiselle Merquem." 
 
226 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the young girl. But why, desiring to give us an im- 
 pression of great purity in her heroine,^ should the 
 author provide her with a half-sister who is at once an 
 illegitimate daughter and the mother of a child born 
 out of wedlock, and who, in addition, is half in love 
 with Valentine's lover ? though George Sand thinks to 
 better the matter by representing this love as partly 
 maternal. After Valentine's marriage, a compulsory 
 and most unhappy one, this half-sister plots with the 
 doctor to place the young wife and the lover whom she 
 has had to dismiss once more en rapport. She hesitates, 
 it is true, and inquires of the physician if their scheme 
 will not appear unlawful in the eyes of the world. 
 But the old man reassures her, and asks, with a 
 " sourire malin et affectueux," why she should care 
 for the judgment of a world which has viewed so 
 harshly her own irregularity of conduct. Madame 
 Sand constantly strikes these false notes ; we meet in 
 her pages the most startling confusions. In "Jacques " 
 there is the oddest table of relations between the 
 characters. Jacques is possibly the brother of Silvia, 
 who is probably, on another side, sister of his wife, 
 who is the mistress of Octave, Silvia's dismissed amant ! 
 Add to this that if Jacques be not the brother of 
 Silvia, who is an illegitimate child, he is convertible 
 into her lover. On s'y perd. Silvia, a clever woman, 
 
GEORGE SAND. 227 
 
 is the guide, philosopher, and friend of this melancholy 
 Jacques ; and when his wife, who desires to become 
 the mistress of Octave (her discarded lover), and yet, 
 not finding it quite plain sailing to do so, weeps over 
 the crookedness of her situation, she writes to the 
 injured husband that she has been obliged to urge 
 Fernande not to take things so hard : " je suis forcee 
 de la consoler et de la relever a ses propres yeux." 
 Very characteristic of Madame Sand is this fear lest 
 the unfaithful wife should take too low a view of her- 
 self. One wonders what had become of her sense of 
 humour. Fernande is to be " relevee " before her fall, 
 and the operation is somehow to cover her fall pro- 
 spectively. 
 
 Take another example from " Leone Leoni." The 
 subject of the story is the sufferings of an infatuated 
 young girl, who follows over Europe the most faithless, 
 unscrupulous and ignoble, but also the most irresistible 
 of charmers. It is " Manon Lescaut," with the incur- 
 able fickleness of Manon attributed to a man ; and as 
 in the Abbe Prevost's story the touching element is 
 the devotion and constancy of the injured and deluded 
 Desgrieux, so in " Leone Leoni " we are invited to 
 feel for the too closely-clinging Juliette, who is dragged 
 through the mire of a passion which she curses and yet 
 which survives unnameable outrage. She tells the tale 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 herself and yet it might have been expected that, to 
 deepen its effect, the author would have represented 
 her as withdrawn from the world and cured of her 
 excessive susceptibility. But we find her living with 
 another charmer, jewelled and perfumed ; in her own 
 words, she is a fille entretenue, and it is to her new 
 lover that she relates the story of the stormy life she 
 ed with the old. The situation requires no comment 
 beyond our saying that the author had morally no taste. 
 Of this want of moral taste we remember another 
 striking instance. Mademoiselle Merquem, who gives 
 her name to one of the later novels, is a young girl 
 of the most elevated character, beloved by a young 
 man, the intensity of whose affection she desires to 
 test. To do this she contrives the graceful plan of in- 
 troducing into her house a mysterious infant, of whose 
 parentage she offers an explanation so obtrusively 
 vague, that the young man is driven regretfully to the 
 induction that its female parent is none other than 
 herself. We forget to what extent he is staggered, 
 but, if we rightly remember, he withstands the test. 
 We do not judge him, but it is permitted to judge the 
 young lady. 
 
 We have called George Sand an improvisatrice, and in 
 this character, where she deals with matters of a more 
 " objective " cast, she is always delightful ; nothing could 
 
GEORGE SAND. 229 
 
 be more charming than her tales of mystery, intrigue, 
 and adventure. " Consuelo," "L'Homme de Neige,'' 
 " Le Piccinino," "Teverino," " Le Beau Laurence" and 
 its sequel, "Pierre qui Roule," "Antonia," " Tamaris," 
 "La Famille de Germandre," "La Filleule," "La 
 derniere Aldini," "Cadio," "Flamarande" these things 
 have all the spontaneous inventiveness of the romances 
 of Alexandre Dumas, his open-air quality, his pleasure 
 in a story for a story's sake, together with an intellectual 
 refinement, a philosophic savour, a reference to spiritual 
 things, in which he was grotesquely deficient. 
 
 We have given, however, no full enumeration of the 
 author's romances, and it seems needless to do so. We 
 have lately been trying to read them over, and we 
 frankly confess that we have found it impossible. They 
 are excellent reading for once, but they lack that quality 
 which makes things classical makes them impose them- 
 selves. It has been said that what makes a book a 
 classic is its style. We should modify this, and instead 
 of style say/orra. Madame Sand's novels have plenty 
 of style, but they have no form. Balzac's have not a 
 shred of style, but they have a great deal of form. 
 Posterity doubtless will make a selection from each list, 
 but the few volumes of Balzac it preserves will remain 
 with it much longer, we suspect, than those which it 
 borrows from his great contemporary. We cannot easily 
 
230 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 imagine posterity travelling with "Valentine" or 
 Mauprat," " Consuelo" or the "Marquis de Yillemer" 
 in its trunk. At the same time we can imagine that if 
 these admirable tales fall out of fashion, such of our 
 descendants as stray upon them in the dusty corners of 
 old libraries will sit down on the bookcase ladder with 
 the open volume and turn it over with surprise and 
 enchantment. What a beautiful mind ! they will say ; 
 what an extraordinary style ! Why have we not known 
 more about these things? And as, when that time 
 comes, we suppose the world will be given over to a 
 "realism" that we have not as yet begun faintly to 
 foreshadow, George Sand's novels will have, for the 
 children of the twenty- first century, something of the 
 same charm which Spenser's "Fairy Queen" has for 
 those of the nineteenth. For a critic of to-day to pick 
 and choose among them seems almost pedantic ; they all 
 belong quite to the same intellectual family. They are 
 the easy writing which makes hard reading. 
 
 In saying this we must immediately limit our mean- 
 ing. All the world can read George Sand once and not 
 find it in the least hard. But it is not easy to return 
 to her ; putting aside a number of fine descriptive pages, 
 the reader will not be likely to resort to any volume that 
 he has once laid down for a particular chapter, a brilliant 
 passage, an entertaining conversation. George Sand 
 
GEORGE SAND. 231 
 
 invites reperusal less than any mind of equal eminence. 
 Is this because after all she was a woman, and the 
 laxity of the feminine intellect could not fail to claim 
 its part in her 1 We will not attempt to say ; especially 
 as, though it may be pedantic to pick and choose among 
 her works, we immediately think of two or three that 
 have as little as possible of intellectual laxity. " Mau- 
 prat " is a solid, masterly, manly book ; " Andre " and 
 " La Mare au Diable " have an extreme perfection of 
 form. M. Taine, whom we quoted at the beginning of 
 these remarks, speaks of our author's rustic tales (the 
 group to which the "Mare au Diable" belongs 1 ) as a 
 signal fproof of her activity and versatility of mind. 
 Besides being charming stories, they are in fact a real 
 study in philology such a study as Balzac made in the 
 "Contes Drolatiques," and as Thackeray made in "Henry 
 Esmond." George Sand's attempt to return to a more 
 artless and archaic stage of the language which she 
 usually handled in so modern and voluminous a fashion 
 was quite as successful as that of her fellows. In " Les 
 Maitres Sonneurs" it is extremely felicitous, and the 
 success could only have been achieved by an extra- 
 ordinarily sympathetic and flexible talent. This is one 
 of the impressions George Sand's reader even if he 
 have read her but once brings away with him. His 
 
 1 "Francois le Cliampi," "La Petite Fadette." 
 
232 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 other prevailing impression will bear upon that quality 
 which, if it must be expressed in a single word, may 
 best be called the generosity of her genius. It is true 
 that there are one or two things which limit this 
 generosity. We think, for example, of Madame Sand's 
 peculiar power of self-defence, her constant need to 
 justify, to glorify, to place in a becoming light, to 
 ''arrange," as we said at the outset, those errors and 
 weaknesses in which her own personal credit may be at 
 stake. She never accepts a weakness as a weakness; 
 she always dresses it out as a virtue; and if her 
 heroines abandon their lovers and lie to their husbands, 
 you may be sure it is from motives of the highest 
 morality. Such productions as "Lucrezia Floriani" 
 and "Elle et Lui " may be attributed to an ungenerous 
 disposition both of them being stories in which Madame 
 Sand is supposed to have described her relations with 
 distinguished men who were dead, and whose death 
 enabled her without contradiction to portray them as 
 monsters of selfishness, while the female protagonist 
 appeared as the noblest of her sex. But without taking 
 up the discussion provoked by these works, we may say 
 that, on the face of the matter, there is a good deal of 
 justification for their author. She poured her material 
 into the crucible of art, and the artist's material is of 
 necessity in a large measure his experience. Madame 
 
GEORGE SAND. 233 
 
 Sand never described the actual ; this was often her 
 artistic weakness, and as she has the reproach she 
 should also have the credit. " Lucrezia Floriani " and 
 " Elle et Lui " were doubtless to her imagination simply 
 tales of what might have been. 
 
 It is hard not to feel that there is a certain high good 
 conscience and passionate sincerity in the words in 
 which, in one of her prefaces, she alludes to the poor 
 novel which Alfred de Musset's brother put forth as an 
 incriminative retort to "Elle et Lui." Some of her 
 friends had advised her not to notice the book ; " but 
 after reflection she judged it to be her duty to attend to 
 it at the proper time and place. She was, however, by 
 no means in haste. She was in Auvergne following the 
 imaginary traces of the figures of her new novel along 
 the scented byways, among the sweetest scenes of spring. 
 She had brought the pamphlet with her to read it ; but 
 she did not read it. She had forgotten her herbarium, 
 and the pages of the infamous book, used as a substitute, 
 were purified by the contact of the wild flowers of Puy_ 
 de-Dome and Sancy. Sweet perfumes of the things of 
 God, who to you could prefer the memory of the foul- 
 nesses of civilization ? " 
 
 It must, however, to be just all round, be farther 
 remembered that those persons and causes which Madame 
 Sand has been charged first and last with misrepresent- 
 
234 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 ing belonged to the silent, inarticulate, even defunct 
 class. She was always the talker, the survivor, the 
 adversary armed with a gift of expression so magical as 
 almost to place a premium upon sophistry. To weigh 
 everything, we imagine she really outlived experience, 
 morally, to a degree which made her feel, in retrospect, 
 as if she were ^dealing with the history of another 
 person. " Ou sont-ils, ou sont-ils, nos amours passes ? " 
 she exclaims in one of her later novels. (What has 
 become of the passions we have shuffled off ? into what 
 dusky limbo are they flung away ?) And she goes on to 
 say that it is a great mistake to suppose that we die 
 only once and at last. We die piecemeal ; some part of 
 us is always dying ; it is only what is left that dies at 
 last. As for our " amours passes," where are they 
 indeed? Jacques Laurent and the Prince Karol may 
 be fancied, in echo, to exclaim. 
 
 In saying that George Sand lacks truth the critic 
 more particularly means that she lacks exactitude 
 lacks the method of truth. Of a certain general 
 truthfulness she is full to overflowing ; we feel that to 
 her mind nothing human is alien. We should say of 
 her, not that she knew human nature, but that she felt 
 it. At all events she loved it and enjoyed it. She 
 was contemplative; but she was not, in the deepest 
 sense, observant. She was a very high order of senti- 
 
GEORGE SAND. 235 
 
 mentalist, but she was not a moralist. She perceived a 
 thousand things, but she rarely in strictness judged ; so 
 that although her books have a great deal of wisdom, 
 they have not what is called weight. With the physical 
 world she was as familiar as with the human, and she 
 knew it perhaps better. She would probably at any 
 time have said that she cared much more for botany, 
 mineralogy and astronomy, than for sociology. 
 "Nature," as we call it landscape, trees and flowers, 
 rocks and streams and clouds plays a larger part in 
 her novels than in any others, and in none are they 
 described with such a grand general felicity. If Turner 
 had written his landscapes rather than painted them he 
 might have written as George Sand has done. If she 
 was less truthful in dealing with men and women, says 
 M. Taine, it is because she had too high an ideal for 
 them ; she could not bear not to represent them as 
 better than they are. She delights in the represen- 
 tation of virtue, and if we sometimes feel that she has 
 not really measured the heights on which she places her 
 characters, that so to place them has cost little to her 
 understanding, we are nevertheless struck with the 
 nobleness of her imagination. M. Taine calls her an 
 idealist ; we should say, somewhat more narrowly, that 
 she was an optimist. An optimist "lined," as the 
 French say, with a romancer, is not the "making of a 
 
236 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 moralist. George Sand's optimism, her idealism, are very 
 beautiful, and the source of that impression of largeness, 
 luminosity and liberality which she makes upon us. 
 But we suspect that something even better in a novelist 
 is that tender appreciation of actuality which makes 
 even the application of a single coat of rose-colour seem 
 an act of violence. 
 
CHARLES DE BERNARD AND GUSTAVE 
 FLAUBERT. 
 
 SAINTE-BEUVE, whose literary judgments are always 
 worth noting, whether they strike us as correct or not, 
 has somewhere a happy sentence about Charles de 
 Bernard about "that ease and irresponsible grace 
 which was the gift of this first of Balzac's pupils of 
 him who might have been superior to the master if 
 a pupil ever were so, and especially if he had done 
 more if, in short, he had lived." We call these words 
 happy in spite of their slight fundamental unsoundness. 
 Charles de Bernard was only in a very imperfect sense 
 a pupil of Balzac. His style has as little as possible 
 in common with that of his great contemporary, and 
 he is guilty of no visible attempt to tread in the 
 latter' s footsteps. The two writers belong to two very 
 distinct categories Balzac to the type of mind that 
 takes things hard, and Charles de Bernard to the type 
 of mind that takes things easily. The author of 
 
238 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 " Gerfaut " was Balzac's protege rather than his pupil, 
 and though we have Sainte-Beuve's affirmation that 
 Balzac's literary vanity was the " most gross and rapa- 
 cious " he had ever known, it does not appear that he 
 took umbrage at his " pupil's" ripening talent. How 
 many budding reputations Balzac may have endeavoured 
 to drive to the wall, we are of course unable to say ; but 
 there are at least two recorded cases of his extending 
 to unfriended genius an open hand. "When Stendhal, 
 who for a long time was at once the most powerful and 
 the most obscure of romancers, published his " Char- 
 treuse de Parme," Balzac greeted the book in a long, 
 florid, redundant review, with a series of the hand- 
 somest compliments that one literary man ever paid to 
 another. And his admiration was perfectly sincere; 
 the artist was captivated by the artist. In like manner, 
 in 1834, when Charles de Bernard, after coming up to 
 Paris from his native Besangon to seek his literary 
 fortune and quite failing to find it, had returned 
 to his provincial neat in some discouragement, Balzac, 
 struck with the promise of a volume of verse which 
 had been the principal result of his excursion, sought 
 him out, urged him to try again, and gave him some 
 fraternal literary advice. He " started" him, as the 
 phrase is. It is true that he started him left foot 
 foremost, and his advice has a singular sound. He 
 
CHARLES DE BERNARD. 239 
 
 recommended him to try his hand at historical novels 
 something in the line of "Walter Scott. Fortunately 
 Charles de Bernard had taken his own measure. He 
 began to write tales, but they were anything but his- 
 torical. They were short stories of the day, in the 
 lightest style of improvisation. "Gerfaut," his first 
 regular novel, and on the whole his best, alone reveals 
 some traces of Balzac's advice. There is an old castle? 
 and a good deal of killing, a secret closet in the wall, 
 and a very good portrait of a feudal nobleman born too 
 late. 
 
 Charles de Bernard has at the present day hardly 
 more than an historical value, and his novels are not 
 to be recommended to people who have anything of 
 especial importance at hand to read. But in speaking 
 of the secondary French novelists it is but fair to allow 
 him a comfortable niche, for if he be not especially 
 worth studying he at least leaves you a very friendly 
 feeling for him if he comes in your way. He is old- 
 fashioned, faded, ineffectively realistic ; his cleverness 
 is not the cleverness of the present hour; his art 
 and his artifice seem a trifle primitive and meagre; 
 and yet for all that he is more enjoyable than 
 many of his highly perfected modern successors. If 
 the prime purpose of a novel is to give us pleasure, 
 Charles de Bernard is a better novelist than Gustave 
 
240 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Flaubert. " Gerfaut " and " Les Ailes d'Icare " proceed 
 doubtless from a very much less powerful and original 
 mind than "Madame Bovary"; but they are at any 
 rate works of entertainment, of amenity. "Bealism," 
 as we understand it now, has been invented since this 
 writer's day, and however much we may admire and 
 applaud it, we cannot but feel that it was a good for- 
 tune for a charming story-teller to have come a little 
 before it. And since Balzac has been mentioned, it may 
 really be said that when it comes to being agreeable 
 Charles de Bernard need not shrink from comparison 
 with even so imposing a name. He is slight and 
 loose in tissue, pale in colouring ; in a word, a second- 
 rate genius. Balzac is a genius of all time ; he towers 
 and overshadows ; and yet if half a dozen volumes of 
 each writer were standing on your shelf, and you should 
 feel an impulse to taste of the sweets of fiction, you 
 were wiser to take down Charles de Bernard than 
 Balzac. The writer of these lines feels for the author 
 of " Gerfaut " that particular kindness which many 
 people who relish the beautiful qualities of the French 
 mind in their purity entertain for the talents that 
 flourished and fell before the second Empire set its seal 
 upon things. It is not taking the matter too tragically 
 to say that Charles de Bernard just escaped. Certainly, 
 many of the brilliant writers of the same generation 
 
CHARLES DE BERNARD. 241 
 
 have lived through the Empire and held their own 
 against it. To George Sand and Victor Hugo the 
 Empire could give nothing, and it could take nothing 
 away from them. But Charles de Bernard was not of 
 their calibre ; he ranks, in the degree of his talent, with 
 the Feydeaus, the Octave Feuillets, the Edmond Abouts 
 of literature. Readers who appreciate shades of differ- 
 ence, and who, while they admire the extreme clever- 
 ness of these writers, find something in their tone that 
 fails to attract personal sympathy, will discover a great 
 deal to relish in Charles de Bernard. Whether he too 
 would have been corrupted, whether his easy, natural 
 manner would have learned the perversities and sophis- 
 tries of the Decadence, is more than I can say. At 
 any rate, fortune was kind to him ; she never gave him 
 a chance. She broke him smoothly off, and in com- 
 pensation for the brevity of his career, she made him 
 a type of some of the agreeable things that were about 
 to pass away. He may represent, to an imaginative 
 critic, the old French cleverness as distinguished from 
 the new. Of the lightness, the ease, the gaiety, the 
 urbanity, the good taste, the good spirits, the discretion 
 of all those charming things that have traditionally 
 marked the cultivated French character at its best 
 Charles de Bernard is an excellent illustration. He 
 seems to me the last of the light writers in whom these 
 
 B 
 
242 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 gifts are fresh and free. In the later generation the 
 quality of wit undergoes an indefinable transformation. 
 The cleverness is greater than ever, but the charm is 
 gone ; the music is elaborate, but the instrument is 
 cracked. The gaiety becomes forced and hard and 
 the urbanity ironical; the lightness turns to levity. 
 Charles de Bernard answers to our notion of the 
 Frenchman of an earlier date, who was before all things 
 good company who had in a supreme degree the 
 sociable virtues. Thackeray, in his " Paris Sketch- 
 Book," devotes a chapter to him (he was then a con- 
 temporary) and gives an abstract of one of his novels. 
 He evidently relished this urbane quality in him, and 
 we remember even to have seen it somewhere affirmed 
 that he had taken him for his model and declared that 
 it was the height of his own ambition to do for English 
 society what Charles de Bernard had done for French. 
 This last strikes us as a rather apocryphal tale ; Charles 
 de Bernard was a satirist, but his satire is to that of 
 " Vanity Fair " what lemonade is to prime Burgundy. 
 In Thackeray there are, morally, many Charles de 
 Bernards. It is as against Eugene Sue and George 
 Sand (whom he seems rather unphilosophically to lump 
 together) that he praises the author of "Les Ailes 
 d'Icare," and he especially commends his gentlemanly 
 tone. The "gentlemanly tone," with its merits and 
 
CHARLES DE BERNARD. 243 
 
 limitations, is an incontestable characteristic of our 
 author. It may be said that in a thoroughly agreeable 
 style good-breeding is never an aggressive quality, and 
 that a gentleman who keeps reminding you that he 
 is a gentleman is a very ambiguous personage. But 
 Charles de Bernard is gentlemanly by juxtaposition, as 
 it were. He quietly goes his way, and it is only when 
 you compare his gait with that of his neighbours that 
 you see how very well he holds himself. The truth is, 
 that many of his companions in this matter swagger 
 deplorably; and here again, curiously (to return to 
 Balzac) is another point at which the small man is 
 superior to the great. The tone of good-breeding 
 Balzac never in any degree possessed; the greatest 
 genius in his line conceivable, he was absolutely and 
 positively not a gentleman. He sweats blood and 
 water to appear one, but his efforts only serve to be- 
 tray more vividly his magnificently middle-class tem- 
 perament. M. Armand de Pontmartin, the author of 
 the biographical sketch prefixed to the collected edition 
 of Charles de Bernard's novels, has some rather felici- 
 tous remarks upon the difference, in this respect, 
 between his hero and the latter's rivals. " Eugene Sue 
 and Alexandre Dumas, who have had their phase of 
 rubbing shoulders (or of trying to) with the aristocracy, 
 their repeated attempts at flattery and advances to what 
 
 R 2 
 
244 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the hairdressers and the milliners call the monde 
 elegant, have never been able to produce anything but 
 caricatures when they endeavoured to represent it. Its 
 doors were open to them ; they found a passport in 
 the irresistible although imprudent curiosity of its 
 members; the models were there in position, before 
 their eyes ; they were dying with the desire to persuade 
 their readers that they lived the same life and breathed 
 the same air ; that they were not naturalized, but indi- 
 genous. No expenditure of dazzling description, be- 
 spangled with armorial mottoes and shields ; no female 
 portraits a la Lawrence, smothered in silk, and lace, and 
 velvet; no inventories of coachmakers and architects, 
 tailors and jewellers nothing of all this was spared. 
 But, alas, it might have been ; the struggle was vain ! 
 The false note sounded in the finest place the long ear 
 peeped out of the thickest of the lion's skin." This 
 is very well though it is painful to have to record that 
 M. de Pontmartin too, who understands the matter so 
 well, has been accused of snobbery by no less acute 
 a literary detective than Sainte-Beuve. But Charles de 
 Bernard, though he often wrote of the monde elegant, 
 was emphatically not a snob. The point of view of the 
 man who is conscious of good blood in his veins was the 
 one he instinctively took; but in dealing with the 
 people and things that usually excite the snobbish 
 
CHARLES DE BERNARD. 245 
 
 passion, lie is always perfectly simple. He is never 
 pretentious ; he is easy, natural, and impartially civil. 
 
 His literary career was very short ; his novels were 
 all published between 1838 and 1847 a period of nine 
 years. His life was uneventful ; it was altogether in 
 his works. The author of the short memoir I have 
 mentioned notes the singular fact that although his 
 novels are essentially what are called novels of manners, 
 he led a secluded life and went very little into the 
 world. Gaiety and hilarity abound in his tales, and 
 yet M. de Pontmartin intimates that the man himself 
 was rather sombre. "He had long had the good taste 
 to prefer domestic life to the vie de salon, and in the 
 evening he liked much better to remain with his wife 
 and children than to go into the world in pursuit of 
 models and originals. And nevertheless, muffled in 
 from the outer world, inaccessible or deaf to its 
 sounds, solitary, almost misanthropic, he seems to have 
 listened at doors, to have painted from nature. He 
 guessed what he did not see ; he heard what he did 
 not listen to." He had this mark of a man of genius 
 he divined. His literary personality was apparently 
 quite distinct from his private one, and this, taken in 
 connection with the extreme facility and neatness of 
 his style, entitles him in a measure to be called a man 
 of genius. His inspiration was his own, and he was 
 
246 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 an excellent writer. If his inspiration was his own, 
 however, it must be added that it was never of a very 
 high order. The most general praise we can give his 
 novels is that they are extremely diverting. The 
 humour is neither broad nor coarse ; it is always dis- 
 criminating, and it is often delicate ; but it is humour 
 of the second-rate sort. It is not rich nor suggestive ; 
 your entertainment begins and ends with your laugh. 
 Many of his tales are very short, so that half a dozen 
 go into a volume. These are always highly readable, 
 and if you begin one you will be sure to finish it. 
 The best of his novels, "Les Ailes d'Icare," " Un 
 Homme Serieux," " Le Gentilhomme Campagnard," are 
 no less clever ; and yet it may be that here and there 
 even a well-disposed reader will lay the book down 
 at the end of a hundred pages. For a serious writer, 
 he will say, you are really too light; it is all too 
 smooth and shallow, too artificial. Once at least, 
 however, in " Gerfaut," Charles de Bernard seems 
 to have felt the impulse to grasp a subject nearer its 
 roots. In spite of a number of signs of immaturity, 
 this is his solidest and most effective work. His tales 
 are usually comedies ; this is a tragedy. The reader 
 cares little for his hero, who is a gentleman of a type 
 excessively familiar in French literature a distin- 
 guished man of letters, of restless imagination, who 
 
CHAELES DE BERNARD. 247 
 
 comes down to the Chateau de Bergenheim for the 
 express purpose of seducing its pretty mistress, and 
 who, when installed among its comforts, and smothered 
 in hospitality by the husband, proceeds in the most 
 scientific manner to bombard the affections of the wife. 
 Nor are we much more interested in Madame de 
 Bergenheim herself, who surrenders after a barely 
 nominal siege and without having at all convinced us 
 that her affections are worth possessing. But the book, 
 in spite of a diffuseness of which afterward the author 
 was rarely guilty, is written with infinite spirit and 
 point, and some of the subordinate figures are forcibly 
 and wittily sketched. Nothing could be lighter and more 
 picturesquely humorous than the portrait of Marillac, 
 the irrepressible Bohemian and the Jtdus Achates of 
 the hero. " Talent apart, Marillac was an artist tooth 
 and nail an artist from the point, or rather from the 
 plateau, of his great crop of hair to the tips of his 
 boots, which he would have liked to pull out to the 
 mediaeval longitude; for he excelled especially in 
 dressing for his profession, and possessed the longest 
 moustaches in literature. If he had no great amount 
 of art in his brain, he had at least its name perpetually 
 in his mouth. Art ! to pronounce the word he 
 rounded his lips like M. Jourdain saying O ! Farces 
 or pictures, poetiy or music, he did a bit of everything, 
 
248 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 like a horse who is warranted good either for the 
 shafts or the saddle. When he came out of the 
 musical shafts he bravely got into the literary harness, 
 which he considered his veritable vocation and his 
 principal glory. He signed his name ' Marillac, man 
 of letters.' Nevertheless, in spite of a profound 
 disdain for the bourgeois, whom he spoke of as a 
 grocer, and for the French Academy, to which he had 
 taken an oath never to belong, one could accuse him 
 of no serious defects. One could forgive him being 
 an artist before everything, in spite of everything, an 
 artist damnation ! " A still better image is that of 
 Christian de Bergenheim, the husband of the decidedly 
 inexpensive heroine. It reads, for definiteness and 
 vigour, like a page torn from Balzac. " He was one of 
 those men whom Napoleon had in some sort brought 
 to life again the type which had been gradually dying 
 out since the feudal ages ; a man of action exclusively, 
 spending nothing superfluous in imagination or sensi- 
 bility, and, on momentous occasions, never letting his 
 soul travel farther than the swing of his sabre. The 
 complete absence of that sense which most people call 
 morbid irritability and others poetry had caused the 
 springs of his character to retain their native hard- 
 ness and stiffness. His soul lacked wings to leave 
 the world of the real ; but this incapacity had its com- 
 
CHARLES DE BERNARD. 249 
 
 pensation. It was impossible to apply a more vigorous 
 arm than his to anything that came under the head of 
 material resistance. He lived neither yesterday nor 
 to-morrow j he lived to-day. Of small account before 
 or after, he displayed at the critical moment an energy 
 the more powerful that no waste, no leakage of untimely 
 emotion, had diminished its force. The few ideas 
 contained in his brain had become clear, hard, and 
 impenetrable, like diamonds. By the inner light of 
 these fixed stars he walked in all things, as one walks 
 in the sunshine, his head erect, straight before him, 
 ready to crush with his foot all obstacles and inter- 
 ruptions." A few passages of that sort, scattered 
 through his novels, mark Charles de Bernard's maxi- 
 mum as an analyst. But if this is the maximum, the 
 average is very high. He has described all sorts of 
 social types, narrated all kinds of intrigues, always 
 ingeniously, vividly, and with a natural, epicurean 
 irony. Considering that we do not recommend the 
 reader who is unacquainted with him to make any 
 great point of retracing his steps along the crowded 
 highway of what we nowadays call culture, to bend 
 over our author where his own march stopped and left 
 him, it may seem that we are lingering too long upon 
 Charles de Bernard. But there is another word to 
 say, and it is an interesting one. Charles de Bernard's 
 
250 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 talent is great very great, greater than the impression 
 it leaves ; and the reason why this clever man remains 
 so persistently second-rate is, to our sense, because he 
 had no morality. By this we of course do not mean 
 that he did not choose to write didactic tales, winding 
 up with a goody lecture and a distribution of prizes and 
 punishments. We mean that he had no moral emotion, 
 no preferences, no instincts no moral imagination, in 
 a word. His morality was altogether traditional, and, 
 such as it was, it seems to have held him in a very 
 loose grasp. It was not the current social notion of 
 right and wrong, of honour and dishonour, that he repre- 
 sented, but something even less consistent. What we 
 find in him. is not the average morality, but a morality 
 decidedly below the average. He does not care, he does 
 not feel, and yet his indifference is not philosophic. 
 He has no heat of his own, save that of the raconteur ; 
 his laugh is always good-natured, but always cold. He 
 describes all sorts of mean and ignoble things without 
 in the least gauging their quality. He belongs to the 
 intellectual family and very large it is in France 
 of the amusing author of " Gil Bias." All its mem- 
 bers know how to write, and how, up to a certain point, 
 to observe ; but their observation has no reflex action, 
 as it were, and they remain as dry as they are brilliant. 
 Yet for all this the author of these lines is conscious 
 
CHAELES DE BERNARD. 251 
 
 of a tender regard for Charles de Bernard, which he 
 would be sorry not to confess to in conclusion. He 
 remembers turning over, as a child, an old back-parlour 
 volume of the] " keepsake " genus, bound in tarnished 
 watered silk, as such volumes are apt to be. It was 
 called, if memory serves him, the " Idler in France/' 
 and it was written if written is the word by the 
 Countess of Blessington. With the text he was too 
 timorous to grapple ; but the volume was embellished 
 with beautiful steel plates, depicting the delights of 
 the French capital. There was the good old crooked, 
 dirty, picturesque Paris of Charles X. and Louis 
 Philippe the Paris ignorant of Louis Napoleon and 
 Baron Haussmann, the new Boulevards and the 
 " American quarter." There were pictures of the old 
 Boulevards and the Palais Royal, the staircase at the 
 Opera, the table d'hote at the Hotel des Princes, a salon 
 in the Chaussee d'Antin. The gentlemen all wore high 
 rolling coat- collars and straps to their trousers ; the 
 ladies wore large-brimmed bonnets and cross-laced 
 slippers. The Paris of these antediluvian Parisians 
 seemed to his fancy a paradise ; and he supposes that a 
 part of his lurking tenderness for Charles de Bernard 
 rests upon the fact that it appears to live again in his 
 pages. 
 
252 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 II. 
 
 Since those days the novel has flourished more and 
 more, and if all that is needful to make us like a certain 
 order of things is to see it vividly and picturesquely 
 portrayed, we should assuredly long since have been won 
 over to an aesthetic tendresse for the Empire. The 
 Empire has had its novelists by the dozen ; emulation, 
 competition, and the extraordinary favour which this 
 branch of literature has come to enjoy, have rendered 
 them remarkably skilful and audacious. For entertain- 
 ment of a high flavour we have only to choose at hazard. 
 If at the same time, however, we are modestly inclined 
 to edification, there must be a certain logic in our choice. 
 The array is somewhat embarrassing ; to the roll-call of 
 novelists of the second Empire a formidable host responds. 
 Octave Feuillet, Gustave Flaubert, Ernest Feydeau, 
 Edmond About, the brothers De Goncourt, Gustave 
 Droz, the younger Dumas, Victor Cherbuliez, Erckmann- 
 Chatrian these are some of the names that immediately 
 present themselves. All these names, with one exception 
 (that of Alexandre Dumas), represent a constellation of 
 romances more or less brilliant ; and in their intervals 
 glitters here and there a single star a very clever tale 
 by an author who has tried, or succeeded, but once. 
 
GUSTAVE FLAUBEKT. 253 
 
 A couple of examples of this latter class are the 
 exquisite " Dominique " of Eugene Frometin, and the 
 crude and vulgar, but powerful and touching, " Divorce " 
 of Mme. Andre Leo. When we cannot look at every- 
 thing, we must look at what is most characteristic. 
 The most characteristic work in this line, in France, of 
 the last five-and-twenty years, is the realistic, descrip- 
 tive novel which sprang out of Balzac, began in its 
 effort at intensity of illusion where Balzac halted, and 
 which, whether or no it has surpassed him, has at least 
 exceeded him. Everything in France, proceeds by 
 " schools," and there is no artist so bungling that he 
 will not find another to . call him "dear master." 
 Gustave Flaubert is 'of the school of Balzac; the 
 brothers De Goncourt and Emile Zola are of the school 
 of Flaubert. This last writer is altogether the most 
 characteristic and powerful representative of what has 
 lately been most original in the evolution of the French 
 imagination, and he has for ourselves the farther merit 
 that he must always be strange and curious. English 
 literature has certainly been doing some very odd things 
 of late, and striving hard to prove she is able to be 
 anything that individual writers choose to make her. 
 But at the best we are all flies in amber, and however 
 furiously we may buzz and rattle, the amber sticks to 
 our wings. It is not in the temper of English vision to 
 
254 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 see things as M. Flaubert sees them, and it is not in the 
 genius of the English language to present them as he 
 presents them. With all respect to " Madame Bovary," 
 " Madame Bovary" is fortunately an inimitable work. 
 
 " Madame Bovary " was M. Flaubert's first novel, and it 
 has remained altogether his best. He has produced little 
 and his works bear the marks of the most careful pre- 
 paration. His second work of fiction was " Salammbo," 
 an archaeological novel of the highest preten- 
 sions. Salammbo is a Carthaginian princess, the elder 
 sister of Hannibal. After this came, at a long interval, 
 " L' Education Sentimentale," a tale of the present day, 
 and lastly appeared " La Tentation de St. Antoine " 
 archaeology, but in the shape of something that was 
 neither novel nor drama ; a sort of free imitation of the 
 mediaeval " mystery." " Madame Bovary" was a great 
 success a success of merit, and, as they say in France, 
 a success of scandal ; but the public verdict has not 
 been flattering to its companions. The mass of the 
 public finds them dull, and wonders how a writer can 
 expend such an immensity of talent in making himself 
 unreadable. To a discriminating taste, however, 
 M. Flaubert can write nothing that does not repay 
 attention. 
 
 The " scandal " in relation to " Madame Bovary " 
 was that the book was judicially impeached and 
 
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. 255 
 
 prosecuted for immorality. The defence was eloquent, 
 and the writer was aquitted ; the later editions of the 
 book contain, in an appendix, a full report of the trial. 
 It is a work upon which it is possible to be very para- 
 doxical, or rather in relation to which sincere opinion 
 may easily have the air of paradox. It is a book adapted 
 for the reverse of what is called family reading, and yet 
 we remember thinking, the first time we read it, in the 
 heat of our admiration for its power, that it would 
 make the most useful of Sunday-school tracts. In M. 
 Taine's elaborate satire, " The Opinions of M. Grain- 
 dorge," there is a report of a conversation at a dinner 
 party between an English spinster of didactic habits and 
 a decidedly audacious Frenchman. He begs to recom- 
 mend to her a work which he has lately been reading 
 and which cannot fail to win the approval of all persons 
 interested in the propagation of virtue. The lady lends 
 a sympathetic ear, and he gives a rapid sketch of the 
 tale the history of a wicked woman who goes from one 
 abomination to another, until at last the judgment of 
 Heaven descends upon her, and, blighted and blasted, 
 she perishes miserably. The lady grasps her pencil and 
 note-book and begs for the name of the edifying volume, 
 and the gentleman leans across the dinner table and 
 answers with a smile " ' Madame Bovary ; or, The Con- 
 sequences of Misconduct.' " This is a very pretty 
 
256 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 epigram and it is more than an epigram. It may be 
 very seriously maintained that M. Flaubert's master- 
 piece is the pearl of " Sunday reading." Practically M. 
 Flaubert is a potent moralist ; whether, when he wrote 
 his book, he was so theoretically is a matter best 
 known to himself. Every out-and-out realist who pro- 
 vokes serious meditation may claim that he is a moralist 
 for that, after all, is the most that the moralists can do 
 for us. They sow the seeds of virtue ; they can hardly 
 pretend to raise the crop. Excellence in this matter 
 consists in the tale and the moral hanging well together, 
 and this they are certainly more likely to do when there 
 has been a definite intention that intention of which 
 artists who cultivate " art for art " are usually so 
 extremely mistrustful ; exhibiting thereby, surely, a 
 most injurious disbelief in the illimitable alchemy of 
 art. We may say on the whole, doubtless, that the 
 highly didactic character of " Madame Bo vary "is an 
 accident, inasmuch as the works that have followed it, 
 both from its author's and from other hands, have been 
 things to read much less for meditation's than for sensa- 
 tion's sake. M. Flaubert's theory as a novelist, briefly 
 expressed, is to begin on the outside. Human life, we 
 may imagine him saying, is before all things a spectacle, 
 an occupation and entertainment for the eyes. What 
 our eyes show us is all that we are sure of ; so with 
 
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. 257 
 
 this we will, at any rate, begin. As this is infinitely 
 curious and entertaining, if we know how to look at it, 
 and as such looking consumes a great deal of time and 
 space, it is very possible that with this also we may 
 end. We admit nevertheless that there is something 
 else, beneath and behind, that belongs to the realm 
 of vagueness and uncertainty, and into this we must 
 occasionally dip. It crops up sometimes irrepressibly, 
 and of course we do not positively count it out. On the 
 whole, we will leave it to take care of itself and let 
 it come off as it may. If we propose to represent the 
 pictorial side of life, of course we must do it thoroughly 
 well we must be complete. There must be no botch- 
 ing, no bungling, no scamping; it must be a very 
 serious matter. We will " render " things anything, 
 everything, from a chimney-pot to the shoulders of a 
 duchess as painters render them. We believe there is 
 a certain particular phrase, better than any other, for 
 everything in the world, and the thoroughly accomplished 
 writer ends by finding it. We care only for what is 
 we know nothing about what ought to be. Human life 
 is interesting, because we are in it and of it ; all kinds 
 of curious things are taking place in it (we do not 
 analyse the curious for artists it is an ultimate fact) ; 
 we select as many of them as possible. Some of the 
 most curious are the most disagreeable, but the chance 
 
 s 
 
258 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 for " rendering " in the disagreeable is as great as any- 
 where else (some people think even greater), and more- 
 over the disagreeable is extremely characteristic. The 
 real is the most satisfactory thing in the world, and if 
 we once fairly advance on this line nothing shall 
 frighten us back. 
 
 Some such words as those may stand as a rough 
 sketch of the sort of intellectual conviction under which 
 " Madame Bovary " was written. The theory in this 
 case at least was applied with brilliant success; it 
 produced a masterpiece. Realism seems to us with 
 " Madame Bovary " to have said its last word. We 
 doubt whether the same process will ever produce 
 anything better. In M. Flaubert's own hands it has 
 distinctly failed to do so. " L'Education Sentimentale" 
 is in comparison mechanical and inanimate. The great 
 good fortune of "Madame Bovary" is that here the 
 theory seems to have been invented after the fact. The 
 author began to describe because he had laid up a great 
 fund of disinterested observations ; he had been looking 
 at things for years, for his own edification, in that 
 particular way. The imitative talents in the same line, 
 those whose highest ambition is to "do" their Balzac 
 or their Flaubert, give us the sense of looking at the 
 world only with the most mercenary motives of going 
 about to stare at things only for the sake of their forth- 
 
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. 259 
 
 coming novel. M. Flaubert knew what he was describing 
 knew it extraordinarily well. One can hardly congra- 
 tulate him on his knowledge ; anything drearier, more 
 sordid, more vulgar and desolate than the greater 
 part of the subject-matter of this romance it would be 
 impossible to conceive. " Mceurs de Province," the 
 sub-title runs, and the work is the most striking 
 possible example of the singular passion, so common 
 among Frenchmen of talent, for disparaging their pro- 
 vincial life. Emma Bovary is the daughter of a small 
 farmer, who has been able to send her to boarding- 
 school, and to give her something of an " elegant " 
 education. She is pretty and graceful, and she marries a 
 small country doctor the kindest, simplest, stupidest of 
 husbands. He takes her to live in a squalid* little 
 country town, called Yonville-1'Abbaye, near Rouen ; 
 she is luxurious and sentimental : she wastes away with 
 ennui, loneliness, and hatred of her narrow lot and 
 absent opportunities, and on the very first chance she 
 takes a lover. "With him she is happy for a few months, 
 and then he deserts her brutally and cynically. She 
 falls violently ill, and comes near dying ; then she gets 
 well, and takes another lover of a different kind. All 
 the world the very little world of Yonville-l'Abbaye 
 sees and knows and gossips ; her husband alone neither 
 sees nor suspects. Meanwhile she has been spending 
 
 s 2 
 
260 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 money remorselessly and insanely ; she has made pro- 
 missory notes, and she is smothered in debt. She has 
 undermined the ground beneath her husband's feet ; 
 her second lover leaves her ; she is ruined, dishonoured, 
 utterly at bay. She goes back as a beggar to her first 
 lover, and he refuses to give her a sou. She tries to 
 sell herself and fails ; then, in impotence and des- 
 peration, she collapses. She takes poison, and dies 
 horribly, and the bailiffs come down on f her husband, 
 who is still heroically ignorant. At last he learns the 
 truth, and it is too much for him ; he loses all courage, 
 and dies one day on his garden-bench, leaving twelve 
 francs fifty centimes to his little girl, who is sent to get 
 her living in a cotton-mill. The tale is a tragedy, 
 unillumined and unredeemed, and it might seem, on this 
 rapid and imperfect showing, to be rather a vulgar- 
 tragedy. Women who get into trouble with the 
 extreme facility of Emma Bovary, and by the same 
 method, are unfortunately not rare, and the better 
 opinion seems to be that they deserve but a limited 
 degree of sympathy. The history of M. Flaubert's 
 heroine is nevertheless full of substance and meaning. 
 In spite of the elaborate system of portraiture to which 
 she is subjected, in spite of being minutely described in 
 all her attitudes and all her moods, from the hem of her 
 garment to the texture of her finger-nails, she remains 
 
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. 261 
 
 a living creature, and as a living creature she interests 
 us. The only thing that poor Charles Bovary, after her 
 death, can find to say to her lovers is, "It's the fault of 
 fatality." And in fact, as we enter into the situation, 
 it is. M. Flaubert gives his readers the impression of 
 having known few kinds of women, but he has evidently 
 known intimately this particular kind. We see the 
 process of her history j we see how it marches from 
 step to step to its horrible termination, and we see that it 
 could not have been otherwise. It is a case of the passion 
 for luxury, for elegance, for the world's most agreeable 
 and comfortable things, of an intense and complex 
 imagination, corrupt almost in the germ, and finding 
 corruption, and feeding on it, in the most unlikely and 
 unf avouring places it is a case of all this being pressed 
 back upon itself with a force which makes an explosion 
 inevitable. Madame Bovary has an insatiable hunger 
 for pleasure, and she lives in the midst of dreariness ; 
 she is ignorant, vain, naturally depraved ; of the things 
 she dreams about not an intimation ever reaches her ; 
 so she makes her trouee, as the French say, bores her 
 opening, scrapes and scratches her way out into the 
 light,* where she can. The reader may protest against a 
 heroine who is " naturally depraved. " You are welcome, 
 he may say, to make of a heroine what you please, to 
 carry her where you please ; but in mercy do not set us 
 
262 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 down to a young lady of whom, on the first page, there 
 is nothing better to be said than that. But all this is a 
 question of degree. Madame Bovary is typical, like all 
 powerfully-conceived figures in fiction. There are a 
 great many potential Madame Bovarys, a great many 
 young women, vain, ignorant, leading ugly, vulgar, 
 intolerable lives, and possessed of irritable nerves and 
 of a high natural appreciation of luxury, of admiration, 
 of agreeable sensations, of what they consider the 
 natural rights of pretty women, who are more or less 
 launched upon the rapid slope which she descended to 
 the bottom. The gentleman who recommended her 
 history to the English lady at M. Taine's dinner-party 
 would say that her history was in .intention a solemn 
 warning to such young women not to allow themselves 
 to think too much about the things they cannot have. 
 Does M. Flaubert in this case complete his intention ? 
 does he suggest an alternative a remedy ? plenty of 
 plain sewing, serious reading, general house-work ? M. 
 Flaubert keeps well out of the province of remedies ; he 
 simply relates his facts in all their elaborate horror. 
 The accumulation of detail is so immense, the vividness 
 of portraiture of people, of places, of times and hours, is 
 so poignant and convincing, that one is dragged into 
 the very current and tissue of the story ; the reader 
 himself seems to have lived in it all, more than in any 
 
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. 263 
 
 novel we can recall. At the end the intensity of 
 illusion becomes horrible ; overwhelmed with disgust 
 and pity he closes the book. 
 
 Besides being the history of the most miserable of 
 women, " Madame Bovary " is also an elaborate picture 
 of small bourgeois rural life. Anything in this direc- 
 tion more remorseless and complete it would be hard to 
 conceive. Into all that makes life ignoble and vulgar 
 and sterile M. Flaubert has entered with an extraordi- 
 nary penetration. The dullness and flatness of it all 
 suffocate us; the pettiness and ugliness sicken us. 
 Every one in the book is either stupid or mean, but 
 against the shabby-coloured background two figures 
 stand out in salient relief. One is Charles Bovary, the 
 husband of the heroine; the other is M. Homais, the 
 village apothecary. Bovary is introduced to us in his 
 childhood, at school, and we see him afterwards at 
 college and during his first marriage a union with 
 a widow of meagre charms, twenty years older than 
 himself. He is the only good person of the book, but 
 he is stupidly, helplessly good. At school " he had for 
 correspondent a wholesale hardware merchant of the 
 Rue Ganterie, who used to fetch him away once a 
 month, on a Sunday, send him to walk in the harbour 
 and look at the boats, and then bring him back to 
 college, by seven o'clock, before supper. Every Thurs- 
 
264 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 day evening he wrote a long letter to his mother, with 
 red ink and three wafers ; then he went over his copy 
 books, or else read an old volume of * Anacharsis ' 
 which was knocking about the class-room. In our 
 walks he used to talk with the servant, who was from 
 the country like himself." In Homais, the apothecary, 
 M. Flaubert has really added to our knowledge of 
 human nature at least as human nature is modified by 
 French social conditions. To American readers, for- 
 tunately, this figure represents nothing familiar ; we do 
 not as yet possess any such mellow perfection of char- 
 latanism. The apothecary is that unwholesome com- 
 pound, a Philistine radical a pere de famille, a free- 
 thinker, a rapacious shopkeeper, a stern moralist, an 
 ardent democrat and an abject snob. He is a complete 
 creation ; he is taken, as the French say, sur le vif, and 
 his talk, his accent, his pompous vocabulary, his atti- 
 tudes, his vanities, his windy vacuity, are superbly 
 rendered. Except her two lovers, M. Homais is Mme. 
 Bovary's sole male acquaintance, and her only social 
 relaxation is to spend the evening with his wife and her 
 own husband in his back shop. Her life has known, in 
 the way of recreation, but two other events. Once she 
 has been at a ball at the house of a neighbouring noble- 
 man, for whom her husband had lanced an abscess in 
 the cheek, and who sends the invitation as part 
 
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. 265 
 
 payment a fatal ball, which has opened her eyes to her 
 own deprivations and intolerably quickened her desires ; 
 and once she has been to the theatre at Rouen. Both 
 of these episodes are admirably put before us, and they 
 play a substantial part in the tale. The book is full of 
 expressive episodes ; the most successful in its hideous 
 relief and reality is the long account of the operation 
 performed by Charles Bovary upon the club-foot of the 
 ostler at the inn an operation superfluous, ridiculous, 
 abjectly unskilful and clumsy, and which results in the 
 amputation of the poor fellow's whole leg after he has 
 lain groaning under the reader's eyes and nose for a 
 dozen pages, amid the flies and dirt, the brooms and 
 pails, the comings and goings of his squalid corner of 
 the tavern. The reader asks himself the meaning of 
 this elaborate presentation of the most repulsive of 
 incidents, and feels inclined at first to charge it to a 
 sort of artistic bravado on the author's part a desire 
 to complete his theory of Realism by applying his re- 
 sources to the simply disgusting. But he presently sees 
 that the whole episode has a kind of metaphysical value. 
 It completes the general picture; it characterizes the 
 daily life of a community in which such incidents 
 assume the importance of leading events, and it gives 
 the final touch to our sense of poor Charles Bovary's 
 bungling mediocrity. Everything in the book is ugly ; 
 
266 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 turning over its pages, our eyes fall upon only this one 
 little passage in which an agreeable " effect " is rendered. 
 It treats of Bo vary 's visits to Emma, at her father's 
 farm, before their marriage, and it is a happy instance 
 of the way in which this author's style arrests itself at 
 every step in a picture. " Once, when it was thawing, 
 the bark of the trees was reeking in the yard, the snow 
 was melting on the roofs of the outbuildings. She was 
 upon the threshold ; she went in and fetched her um- 
 brella and opened it. The umbrella, of dove-coloured 
 silk, with the sun coming through it, lighted up her 
 white complexion with changing reflections. Beneath 
 it she smiled in the soft warmth, and he heard the 
 water-drops fall one by one upon the tense silk." To 
 many people "Madame Bovary" will always be a hard 
 book to read and an impossible one to enjoy. They will 
 complain of the abuse of description, of the want of 
 spontaneity, of the hideousness of the subject, of the 
 dryness and coldness and cynicism of the tone. Others 
 will continue to think it a great performance. They 
 will admit that it is not a sentimental novel, but they 
 will claim that it may be regarded as a philosophical 
 one ; they will insist that the descriptions are extra- 
 ordinary, and that beneath them there is always an idea 
 that holds them up and carries them along. We cannot 
 but think, however, that he is a very resolute partisan 
 
GUSTAYE FLAUBERT. 267 
 
 who would venture to make this same plea on behalf 
 of "L' Education Sentimentale." Here the form and 
 method are the same as in "Madame Bovary"; the 
 studied skill, the science, the accumulation of material, 
 are even more striking ; but the book is in a single word 
 a dead one. " Madame Bovary " was spontaneous and 
 sincere \ but to read its successor is, to the finer sense, 
 like masticating ashes and sawdust. " L'Education 
 Sentimentale" is elaborately and massively dreary. 
 That a novel should have a certain charm seems to us 
 the most rudimentaiy of principles, and there is no 
 more charm in this laborious monument to a treach- 
 erous ideal than there is perfume in a gravel heap. 
 To nothing that such a writer as Gustave Flaubert 
 accomplishes a writer so armed at all points, so 
 informed, so ingenious, so serious, can we be positively 
 indifferent ; but to think of the talent, the knowledge, 
 the experience, the observation that lie buried, without 
 hope of resurrection, in the pages of " L'Education 
 Sentimentale," is to pass a comfortless half hour. That 
 imagination, invention, taste and science should con- 
 centrate themselves, for human entertainment, upon 
 such a result, strikes us as the most unfathomable of 
 anomalies. The reader feels behind all M. Flaubert's 
 writing a large intellectual machinery. He is a scholar, 
 a man of erudition. Of all this " Salammbo " is a most 
 
268 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 accomplished example. " Salammbo " is not easy 
 reading, nor is the book in the least agreeable ; but 
 it displays in the highest degree what is called the 
 historical imagination. There are passages in it in 
 which the literary expression of that refined, subtilized 
 and erudite sense of the picturesque which recent years 
 have brought to so high a development, seems to have 
 reached its highest level. The " Tentation de Saint 
 Antoine " is, to our sense, to " Salammb6 " what 
 " L' Education Sentimentale "is to " Madame Bovary " 
 what the shadow is to the substance. M. Flaubert 
 seems to have had in him the material of but two 
 spontaneous works. The successor, in each case, has 
 been an echo, a reverberation. 
 
IYAN TURGENIEFF. 
 
 WE know of several excellent critics who to the 
 question, Who is the first novelist of the day ? would 
 reply, without hesitation, Ivan Turgenieff. Compari- 
 sons are odious, and we propose to make none that shall 
 seem merely invidious. We quote our friends' verdict 
 as a motive for this brief record of our own impressions. 
 These, too, are in the highest degree favourable ; and 
 yet we wish not to impose a conclusion, but to help 
 well-disposed readers to a larger enjoyment. To many 
 such Turgenieff is already vaguely known as an eminent 
 Russian novelist. Twelve years ago he was little more 
 than a name, even in France, where he perhaps now 
 finds his most sympathetic readers. But all his tales, 
 we believe without exception, have now been translated 
 into French several by the author himself ; an excellent 
 German version of the best is being published under his 
 own supervision, and several very fair English versions 
 have appeared in England and America. He enjoys what 
 is called a European reputation, and it is constantly 
 spreading. The Russians, among whom fiction flourishes 
 
270 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 vigorously, deem him their greatest artist. His tales 
 are not numerous, and many of them are very short. 
 He gives us the impression of writing much more for 
 love than for lucre. He is particularly a favourite with 
 people of cultivated taste ; and nothing, in our opinion, 
 cultivates the taste more than to read him. 
 
 He belongs to the limited class of very careful 
 writers. It is to be admitted at the outset that he is a 
 zealous genius, rather than an abundant one. His line 
 is narrow observation. He has not the faculty of rapid, 
 passionate, almost reckless improvisation that of 
 Walter Scott, of Dickens, of George Sand. This is an 
 immense charm in a story-teller ; on the whole, to our 
 sense, the greatest. Turgenieff lacks it ; he charms us 
 in other ways. To describe him in the fewest terms, he 
 is a story-teller who has taken notes. This must have 
 been a life-long habit. His tales are a magazine of 
 small facts, of anecdotes, of discriptive traits, taken, as 
 the phrase is, sur le vif. If we are not mistaken, he 
 notes down an idiosyncracy of character, a fragment of 
 talk, an attitude, a feature, a gesture, and keeps it, if 
 need be, for twenty years, till just the moment for using 
 it comes, just the spot for placing it. " Stachoff spoke 
 
IVAN TURGfiNIEFF. 271 
 
 French tolerably, and as he led a quiet sort of life, 
 passed for a philosopher. Even as an ensign, he was 
 fond of disputing warmly whether, for instance, a man 
 in his life might visit every point of the globe, or 
 whether he might learn what goes on at the bottom of 
 the sea, and was always of the opinion that it was 
 impossible." The writer o this description may some- 
 times be erratic, but he is never vague. He has a 
 passion for distinctness, for bringing his characterization 
 to a point, for giving you an example of his meaning. 
 He often, indeed, strikes us as loving details for their 
 own sake, as a bibliomaniac loves the books he never 
 reads. His figures are all portraits; they have each 
 something special, something peculiar, something that 
 none of their neighbours have, and that rescues them 
 from the limbo of the gracefully general. We 
 remember, in one of his stories, a gentleman who 
 makes a momentary appearance as host at a dinner- 
 party, and after being described as having such and 
 such a face, clothes, and manners, has our impression of 
 his personality completed by the statement that the 
 soup at his table was filled with little paste figures, 
 representing hearts, triangles, and trumpets. In the 
 author's conception, there is a secret affinity between 
 the character of this worthy man and the contortions of 
 his vermicelli. This habit of specializing people by 
 
272 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 vivid oddities was the gulf over which Dickens danced 
 the tight-rope with such agility. Eut Dickens, as we 
 say, was an improvisatore ; the practice, for him, was a 
 lawless revel of the imagination. Turgenieff, on the 
 other hand, always proceeds by book. What could be 
 more minutely appreciative, and at the same time less 
 like Dickens, than the following portrait ? 
 
 "People in St. Petersburg still remember the Princess 
 She appeared there from time to time at the period of which we 
 speak. Her husband was a well-bred man, but rather stupid, and 
 she had no children. The Princess used to start suddenly on 
 long journeys, and then return suddenly to Russia. Her conduct 
 in all things was very strange. She was called light, and A 
 coquette. She used to give herself up with, ardour to all the 
 pleasures of society : dance till she dropped with exhaustion, joke 
 and laugh with the young men she received before dinner in her 
 darkening drawing-room, and pass her nights praying and weep- 
 ing, without finding a moment's rest. She often remained till 
 morning in her [room stretching her arms in anguish ; or else she 
 remained bowed, pale and cold, over the leaves of a hymn-book. 
 Day came, and she was transformed again into an elegant creature, 
 paid visits, laughed, chattered, rushed to meet everything that 
 could give her the smallest diversion. She was admirably shaped. 
 Her hair, the colour of gold, and as heavy as gold, formed a tress 
 that fell below her knees. And yet she was not spoken of as a 
 beauty : she had nothing fine in her face except her eyes. This 
 even, perhaps, is saying too much, for her eyes were grey and 
 rather small ; but their deep keen gaze, careless to audacity, and 
 dreamy to desolation, was equally enigmatical and charming. 
 Something extraordinary was reflected in them, even when the 
 most futile speeches were passing from her lips. Her toilets were 
 always too striking." 
 
IVAN TURGfiNIEFF. 273 
 
 These lines seem to carry a kind of historical weight. 
 
 It is the Princess R and no one else. We feel as if 
 
 the author could show us documents and relics ; as if 
 he had her portrait, a dozen letters, some of her old 
 trinkets. Or take the following few lines from the 
 admirable tale called "The Wayside Inn": "He 
 belonged to the burgher class, and his name was Nahum 
 Ivanoff. He had a thick short body, broad shoulders, 
 a big round head, long waving hair already grizzled, 
 though he was not yet forty. His face was full and 
 fresh-coloured ; his forehead low and white. His little 
 eyes, of a clear blue, had a strange look, at once oblique 
 and impudent. He kept his head always bent, his neck 
 being too short ; he walked fast, and never let his hands 
 swing, keeping them always closed. When he smiled, 
 and he smiled often, but without laughing and as if by 
 stealth, his red lips parted disagreeably, showing a row 
 of very white, very close teeth. He spoke quickly, with 
 a snarling tone." When fiction is written in this 
 fashion, we believe as we read. The same vividly 
 definite element is found in the author's treatment of 
 landscape : " The weather continued to stand at set- 
 fair ; little rounded white clouds moved through the air 
 at a great height, and looked at themselves in the 
 water ; the reeds were stirred by movements and 
 murmurs produced by no wind ; the pond, looking in 
 
 T 
 
274 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 certain places like polished steel, absorbed the splendid 
 sunshine." There is an even greater reality, because it 
 is touched with the fantastic, without being perverted 
 by it, in this brief sketch of the Pontine Marshes, from 
 the beautiful little story of " Visions " : 
 
 " The cloud before my eyes divided itself. I became aware of 
 a limitless plain beneath me. Already, from the warm soft air 
 which fanned my cheeks, 1 had observed that I was no longer in 
 Russia. This plain, moreover, was not like our Russian plains. 
 It was an immense dusky level, overgrown, apparently, with no 
 grass, and perfectly desolate. Here and there, over the whole 
 expanse, glittered pools of standing water, like little fragments 
 of looking-glass. In the distance, the silent, motionless sea was 
 vaguely visible. In the intervals of the broad beautiful clouds 
 glittered great stars. A murmur, thousand-voiced, unceasing, and 
 yet not loud, resounded from every spot ; and strangely rang this 
 penetrating, drowsy murmur, this nightly voice of the desert. . . . 
 ' The Pontine Marshes,' said Ellis. ' Do you hear the frogs ? Do 
 you recognise the smell of sulphur ? ' " 
 
 This is a cold manner, many readers will say, and 
 certainly it has a cold side ; but when the character 
 is one over which the author's imagination really 
 kindles, it is an admirable vehicle for touching effects. 
 Few stories leave on the mind a more richly poetic 
 impression than "Helene"; all the tenderness of our 
 credulity goes forth to the heroine. Yet this exquisite 
 image of idealized devotion swims before the author's 
 vision in no misty moonlight of romance; she is as 
 
IVAN TURGllNIEFF. 275 
 
 solidly fair as a Greek statue; his dominant desire 
 has been to understand her, and he retails small facts 
 about her appearance and habits with the impartiality 
 of a judicial, or even a medical, summing up. The 
 same may be said of his treatment of all his heroines, 
 and said in evidence of the refinement of his art; 
 for if there are no heroines we see more distinctly, 
 there are none we love more ardently. It would be 
 difficult to point, in the blooming fields of fiction, to 
 a group of young girls more radiant with maidenly 
 charm than M. TurgeniefPs Helene, his Lisa, his Katia, 
 his Tatiana and his Gemma. For the truth is that, 
 taken as a whole, he regains on another side what he 
 loses by his apparent want of joyous invention. If 
 his manner is that of a searching realist, his temper 
 is that of a devoutly attentive observer, and the result 
 of this temper is to make him take a view of the great 
 spectacle of human life more general, more impartial, 
 more unreservedly intelligent, than that of any novelist 
 we know. Even on this line he proceeds with his 
 characteristic precision of method; one thinks of him 
 as having divided his subject-matter into categories, 
 and as moving from one to the other with none of the 
 magniloquent pretensions of Balzac, indeed, to be the 
 great showman of the human comedy but with a 
 deeply intellectual impulse toward universal apprecia- 
 
 T 2 
 
276 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 tion. He seems to us to care for more things in life, 
 to be solicited on more sides, than any novelist save 
 George Eliot. Walter Scott cares for adventure and 
 bravery and honour and ballad-figures and the humour 
 of Scotch peasants; Dickens cares, on an immense, 
 far-reaching scale, for picturesqueness ; George Sand 
 cares for love and mineralogy. But these writers care 
 also, greatly, and indeed almost supremely, for their 
 fable, for its twists and turns and surprises, for the 
 work they have in hand of amusing the reader. Even 
 George Eliot, who cares for so many other things 
 besides, has a weakness for making a. rounded plot, and 
 often swells out her tales with mechanical episodes, 
 in the midst of which their moral unity quite evapo- 
 rates. The Bulstrode-Raffles episode in " Middlemarch," 
 and the whole fable of " Felix Holt," are striking cases 
 in point. M. Turgenieff: lacks, as regards form, as we 
 have said, this immense charm of absorbed inventive- 
 ness ; but in the way of substance there is literally 
 almost nothing he does not care for, Every class of 
 society, every type of character, every degree of 
 fortune, every phase of manners, passes through his 
 hands ; his imagination claims its property equally, 
 in town and country, among rich and poor, among wise 
 people and idiots, dilettanti and peasants, the tragic 
 and the joyous, the probable and the grotesque. He 
 
IVAN TURGfiNIEFF. 277 
 
 has an eye for all our passions, and a deeply sympa- 
 thetic sense of the wonderful complexity of our souls. 
 He relates in " Mumu " the history of a deaf-and-dumb 
 serf and a lap-dog, and he portrays in "A Strange 
 Story " an extraordinary case of religious fanaticism. 
 He has a passion for shifting his point of view, but his 
 object is constantly the same that of finding an 
 incident, a person, a situation, morally interesting. 
 This is his great merit, and the underlying harmony 
 of his apparently excessive attention to detail. He 
 believes in the intrinsic value of " subject " in art ; 
 he holds that there are trivial subjects and serious 
 ones, that the latter are much the best, and that their 
 superiority resides in their giving us absolutely a 
 greater amount of information about the human mind. 
 Deep into the mind he is always attempting to look, 
 though he often applies his eye to very dusky apertures. 
 There is perhaps no better evidence of his minutely 
 psychological attitude than the considerable part played 
 in his tales by simpletons and weak-minded persons. 
 There are few novelists who have not been charmed 
 by the quaintness and picturesqueness of mental in- 
 valids ; but M. Turgenieff is attracted by something 
 more by the opportunity of watching the machinery 
 of character, as it were, through a broken window-pane. 
 One might collect from his various tales a perfect 
 
278 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 regiment of incapables, of the stragglers on life's march. 
 Almost always, in the background of his groups of 
 well-to-do persons there lurks some grotesque, under- 
 witted poor relation, who seems to hover about as 
 a vague memento, in his scheme, of the instability both 
 of fortune and of human cleverness. Such, for instance, 
 is Uvar Ivanovitsch, who figures as a kind of inarticu- 
 late chorus in the tragedy of "Helne." He sits 
 about, looking very wise and opening and closing his 
 fingers, and in his person, in this attitude, the drama 
 capriciously takes leave of us. Perhaps the most 
 moving of all the author's tales moving, not in the 
 sense that it makes us shed easy tears, but as remind- 
 ing us vividly of the solidarity, as we may say, of all 
 human weakness has for its hero a person made 
 imbecile by suffering. The admirable little story of 
 "The Brigadier" can only be spoilt by an attempt to 
 retail it ; we warmly recommend it to the reader, in 
 the French version. Never did Romance stoop over 
 a lowlier case of moral decomposition, but never did she 
 gather more of the perfume of human truth. To a 
 person able to read but one of M, Turge'nieiFs tales, 
 we should perhaps offer this one as a supreme example 
 of his peculiar power; for here the artist, as well as 
 the analyst, is at his best. All rigid critical formulas 
 are more or less unjust, and it is not a complete 
 
IVAN TURGMlEFF. 279 
 
 description of our author it would be a complete 
 description of no real master of fiction to say that 
 he is simply a searching observer. M. Turgenieff's 
 imagination is always lending a hand and doing work 
 on its own account. Some of this work is exquisite ; 
 nothing could have more of the simple magic of 
 picturesqueness than such tales as "The Dog," "The 
 Jew," "Visions," "The Adventure of Lieutenant 
 Jergounoff," "Three Meetings," a dozen episodes in 
 the " Memoirs of a Sportsman." Imagination guides 
 his hand and modulates his touch, and makes the 
 artist worthy of the observer. In a word, he is uni- 
 versally sensitive. In susceptibility to the sensuous 
 impressions of life to colours and odours and forms, 
 and the myriad ineffable refinements and entice- 
 ments of beauty he equals, and even surpasses, the 
 most accomplished representatives of the French school 
 of story-telling ; and yet he has, on the other hand, 
 an apprehension of man's religious impulses, of the 
 ascetic passion, the capacity of becoming dead to colours 
 and odours and beauty, never dreamed of in the 
 philosophy of Balzac and Flaubert, Octave Feuillet 
 and Gustave Droz. He gives us Lisa in "A Nest of 
 Noblemen," and Madame Polosoff in " Spring Torrents." 
 This marks his range. Let us add, in conclusion, that 
 his merit of form is of the first order. He is remark- 
 
80 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 able for concision; few of his novels occupy the 
 whole of a moderate volume, and some of his best 
 performances are tales of thirty pages. 
 
 II. 
 
 M. Turgenieffs themes are all Russian; here and 
 there the scene of a tale is laid in another country, 
 but the actors are genuine Muscovites. It is the 
 Russian type of human nature that he depicts; this 
 perplexes, fascinates, inspires him. His works savour 
 strongly of his native soil, like those of all great 
 novelists, and give one who has read them all a strange 
 sense of having had a prolonged experience of Russia. 
 We seem to have travelled there in dreams, to have 
 dwelt there in another state of being. M. Turgenieff 
 gives us a peculiar sense of being out of harmony 
 with his native land of his having what one may 
 call a poet's quarrel with it. He loves the old, and 
 he is unable to see where the new is drifting. American 
 readers will peculiarly appreciate this state of mind ; 
 if they had a native novelist of a large pattern, it 
 would probably be, in a degree, his own. Our author 
 feels the Russian character intensely, and cherishes, 
 in fancy, all its old manifestations the unemancipated 
 peasants, the ignorant, absolute, half-barbarous pro- 
 
IVAN TURGfiNIEFF. 281 
 
 prietors, the quaint provincial society, the local types 
 and customs of every kind. But Russian society, 
 like our own, is in process of formation, the Russian 
 character is in solution, in a sea of change, and the 
 modified, modernized Russian, with his old limitations 
 and his new pretensions, is not, to an imagination fond 
 of caressing the old, fixed contours, an especially 
 grateful phenomenon. A satirist at all points, as we 
 shall have occasion to say, M. Turgenieff is particularly 
 unsparing of the new intellectual fashions prevailing 
 among his countrymen. The express purpose of one 
 of his novels, " Fathers and Sons,' ' is to contrast them 
 with the old ; and in most of his recent works, notably 
 " Smoke," they have been embodied in various 
 grotesque figures. 
 
 It was not, however, in satire, but in thoroughly 
 genial, poetical portraiture, that our author first made 
 his mark. " The Memoirs of a Sportsman " were pub- 
 lished in 1852, and were regarded, says one of the 
 two French translators of the work, as much the same 
 sort of contribution to the question of Russian serf- 
 dom as Mrs. Stowe's famous novel to that of American 
 slavery. This, perhaps, is forcing a point, for M. 
 TurgenieiFs group of tales strikes us much less as a 
 passionate piece de circonstance than as a disinterested 
 work of art. But circumstances helped it, of course, 
 
282 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 and it made a great impression an impression that 
 testifies to no small culture on the part of Russian 
 readers. For never, surely, was a work with a polemic 
 bearing more consistently low in tone, as painters say. 
 The author treats us to such a scanty dose of flagrant 
 horrors that the moral of the book is obvious only to 
 attentive readers. No single episode pleads conclu- 
 sively against the "peculiar institution" of Russia; 
 the lesson is in the cumulative testimony of a multi- 
 tude of fine touches in an after-sense of sadness that 
 sets wise readers thinking. It would be difficult to 
 name a work that contains better instruction for those 
 heated spirits who are fond of taking sides on the 
 question of " art for art." It offers a capital example 
 of moral meaning giving a sense to form and form 
 giving relief to moral meaning. Indeed, all the author's 
 characteristic merits are to be found in the " Memoirs," 
 with a certain amateurish looseness of texture which 
 will charm many persons who find his later works too 
 frugal, as it were, in shape. Of all his productions, 
 this is indeed the most purely delightful. We es- 
 pecially recommend the little history of Foma, the 
 forest keeper, who, one rainy night, when the narrator 
 has taken refuge in his hut, hears a peasant stealing 
 faggots in the dark, dripping woods ; rushes forth and 
 falls upon him, drags the poor wretch home, flings him 
 
IVAN TURGfeNIEFF. 283 
 
 into a corner, and sits on in the smoky hovel (with 
 the author, whom we perceive there, noting, feeling, 
 measuring it all), while the rain batters the roof and 
 the drenched starveling howls and whines and im- 
 precates. Anything more dismally real in a narrower 
 compass we have never read anything more pathetic, 
 with less of the machinery of pathos. In this case, 
 as at every turn with M. Turgenieff, " It is life itself," 
 we murmur as we read, " and not this or that or the 
 other story-teller's more or less clever 'arrangement' 
 of life." M. Turgenieff . deserves this praise in its 
 largest application ; for " life " in his pages is very far 
 from meaning a dreary liability to sordid accidents, as 
 it seems to mean with those writers of the grimly 
 pathetic school who cultivate sympathy to the detri- 
 ment of comprehension. He does equal justice 
 joyous justice to all brighter accidents to everything 
 in experience that helps to keep it within the pale of 
 legend. Two of the Sportsman's reminiscences are 
 inexpressibly charming the chapter in which he spends 
 a warm summer night lying on the grass listening to 
 the small boys who are sent out to watch the horses at 
 pasture, as they sit chattering to each other of hob- 
 goblins and fairies ; and the truly beautiful description 
 of a singing-match in a village ale-house, between two 
 ragged serfs. The latter is simply a perfect poem. 
 
284 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Very different, but in its way as characteristic, is the 
 story of "A Russian Hamlet" a poor gentleman 
 whom the Sportsman, staying overnight at a fine house 
 where he has been dining, finds assigned to him as 
 room-mate, and who, lying in bed and staring at him 
 grotesquely over the sheets, relates his lugubrious 
 history. This sketch, more than its companions, 
 strikes the deep moral note that was to reverberate 
 through the author's novels. 
 
 The story of "Rudin," which followed soon after, 
 is perhaps the most striking example of his preference 
 for a theme which takes its starting-point in character 
 if need be, in morbid character. We have had no 
 recent opportunity to refresh our memory of the tale, 
 but we have not forgotten the fine quality of its 
 interest its air of psychological truth, unencumbered 
 with the usual psychological apparatus. The theme is 
 one which would mean little enough to a coarse 
 imagination the exhibition of a character peculiarly un- 
 rounded, unmoulded, unfinished, inapt for the regular 
 romantic attitudes. Dmitri Rudin is a moral failure, 
 like many of the author's heroes one of those fatally 
 complex natures who cost their friends so many 
 pleasures and pains ; who might, and yet, evidently, 
 might not, do great things ; natures strong in impulse, 
 in talk, in responsive emotion, but weak in will, in 
 
IVAN TURGMlEFF. 285 
 
 action, in the power to feel and do singly. Madame 
 Sand's " Horace " is a broad, free study of this type 
 of person, always so interesting to imaginative and so 
 intolerable to rational people ; M. Turgenieflt's hero is 
 an elaborate miniature-portrait. Without reading 
 Rudin we should not know just how fine a point he 
 can give to his pencil. But M. Turgenieff, with his 
 incisive psychology, like Madame Sand, with her ex- 
 pansive synthesis, might often be a vain demonstrator 
 and a very dull novelist if he were not so constantly 
 careful to be a dramatist. Everything, with him, takes 
 the dramatic form ; he is apparently unable to conceive 
 anything independently of it, he has no recognition of 
 unembodied ideas ; an idea, with him, is such and such 
 an individual, with such and such a nose and chin, 
 such and such a hat and waistcoat, bearing the same 
 relation to it as the look of a printed word does to 
 its meaning. Abstract possibilities immediately be- 
 come, to his vision, concrete situations, as elaborately 
 defined and localized as an interior by Meissonier. In 
 this way, as we read, we are always looking and 
 listening ; and we seem, indeed, at moments, for want 
 of a running thread of explanation, to see rather more 
 than we understand. 
 
 It is, however, in " Helene " that the author's closely 
 commingled realism and idealism have obtained their 
 
286 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 greatest triumph. The tale is at once a homely 
 chronicle and a miniature epic. The scene, the figures, 
 are as present to us as if we saw them ordered and 
 moving on a lamp-lit stage ; and yet, as we recall it, 
 the drama seems all pervaded and coloured by the light 
 of the moral world. There are many things in 
 " Helene," and it is difficult to speak of them in order. 
 It is both so simple and so various, it proceeds with 
 such an earnest tread to its dark termination, and 
 yet it entertains and beguiles us so unceasingly as it 
 goes, that we lose sight of its simple beauty in its 
 confounding, entrancing reality. But we prize it, as 
 we prize all the very best things, according to our 
 meditative after-sense of it. Then we see its lovely 
 unity melting its brilliant parts into a single harmo- 
 nious tone. The story is all in the portrait of the 
 heroine, who is a heroine in the literal sense of the 
 word; a young girl of a will so calmly ardent and 
 intense that she needs nothing but opportunity to 
 become one of the figures about whom admiring legend 
 clusters. She is a really elevated conception; and if, 
 as we shall complain, there is bitterness in M. Turge- 
 nieff's imagination, there is certainly sweetness as well. 
 It is striking that most of his flights of fancy are in 
 his conceptions of women. With them only, occa- 
 sionally, does he wholly forswear his irony and become 
 
IVAN TURGMlEFF. 287 
 
 frankly sympathetic. We hope it is not false eth- 
 nology to suppose that this is a sign of something, 
 potentially at least, very fine in the character of his 
 country-women. As fine a poet as you will would 
 hardly have devised a Maria Alexandrovna (in "A 
 Correspondence,"), an Helene, a Lisa, a Tatiana, an 
 Irene even, without having known some very admirable 
 women. These ladies have a marked family likeness, 
 an exquisite something in common which we may 
 perhaps best designate as an absence of frivolous 
 passion. They are addicted to none of those chatteries 
 which French romancers consider the " adorable " thing 
 in women. The baleful beauty, in " Smoke," who robs 
 Tatiana of her lover, acts in obedience to an impulse 
 deeper than vulgar coquetry. And yet these fair 
 Muscovites have a spontaneity, an independence, quite 
 akin to the English ideal of maiden loveliness. Di- 
 rectly, superficially, they only half please. They 
 puzzle us almost too much to charm, and we fully 
 measure their beauty only when they are called upon 
 to act. Then the author imagines them doing the most 
 touching, the most inspiring things. 
 
 Helene' s loveliness is all in unswerving action. She 
 passes before us toward her mysterious end with the 
 swift, keen movement of a feathered arrow. She finds 
 her opportunity, as we have called it, in her sympathy 
 
288 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 with a young Bulgarian patriot who dreams of rescuing 
 his country from Turkish tyranny ; and she surrenders 
 herself to his love and his project with a tranquil 
 passion which loses none of its poetry in M. Turgenieff's 
 treatment. She is a supreme example of his taste for 
 " original " young ladies. She would certainly be pro- 
 nounced queer in most quiet circles. She has, indeed, a 
 fascinating oddity of outline ; and we never lose a 
 vague sense that the author is presenting her to us 
 with a charmed expectancy of his own, as a travelled 
 friend would show us some quaintly-feathered* bird 
 brought from beyond the seas, but whose note he had 
 not yet heard. To appreciate Helene's oddity, you 
 must read of the orthodoxy of the people who sur- 
 round her. All about the central episode the story 
 fades away into illimitable irony, as if the author 
 wished to prove that, compared with the deadly se- 
 riousness of H^lene and Inssaroff, everything else is 
 indeed a mere playing at life. We move among the 
 minor episodes in a kind of atmosphere of sarcasm : 
 now kindly, as where Bersenieff and Schubin are dealt 
 with ; now unsparingly comical, as in the case of her 
 foolish parents and their tardy bewilderment that 
 of loquacious domestic fowls who find themselves re- 
 sponsible for the hatching of an eagle. The whole 
 story is charged with lurking meanings, and to retail 
 
IVAN TURGfiNIEFF. 289 
 
 them would be as elaborate a task as picking threads 
 out of a piece of fine tapestry. "What is Mademoiselle 
 Zoe, for instance, the little German dame de compagnie, 
 but a humorous sidelight upon Helene's intensity 
 Mademoiselle Zoe, with the pretty shoulders, and her 
 presence in the universe a sort of mere general rustle of 
 muslin, accompanied, perhaps, by a faint toilet-per- 
 fume? There is nothing finer in all Turgenieff than 
 the whole matter of Bersenieff's and Schuhin's relation 
 to Helene. They, too, in their vivid reality, have a 
 symbolic value, as they stand watching the woman they 
 equally love whirled away from them in a current 
 swifter than any force of their own. Schubin, the 
 young sculptor, with his moods and his theories, his 
 exaltations and depressions, his endless talk and his 
 disjointed action, is a deeply ingenious image of the 
 artistic temperament. Yet, after all, he strikes the 
 practical middle key, and solves the problem of life 
 by the definite application of what he can. Bersenieff, 
 though a less fanciful, is perhaps, at bottom, a still 
 more poetical figure. He is condemned to inaction, not 
 by his intellectual fastidiousness, but by a conscious, 
 intelligent, intellectual mediocrity, by the dogged 
 loyalty of his judgment. There is something in his 
 history more touching than even in that of Helene and 
 Inssaroff. These two, and Schubin as well, have their 
 
 u 
 
290 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 consolations. If they are born to suffering, they are 
 born also to rapture. They stand at the open door of 
 passion, and they can sometimes forget. But poor 
 Bersenieff, wherever he turns, meets conscience with 
 uplifted finger, saying to him that though Homer may 
 sometimes nod, the sane man never misreasons and the 
 wise man assents to no mood that is not a working 
 mood. He has not even the satisfaction of lodging a 
 complaint against fate. He is by no means sure that 
 he has one ; and when he finds that his love is vain he 
 translates it into friendship with a patient zeal capable 
 almost of convincing his own soul that it is not a 
 renunciation, but a consummation. Bersenieff, Schubin, 
 Zoe, Uvar Ivanovitsch, the indigent house-friend, with 
 his placid depths of unuttered commentary, the 
 pompous egotist of a father, the feeble egotist of a 
 mother these people thoroughly animate the little 
 world that surrounds the central couple ; and if we 
 wonder how it is that from half a dozen figures we get 
 such a sense of the world's presence and complexity, 
 we perceive the great sagacity of the choice of the 
 types. 
 
 We should premise, in speaking of " A Nest of 
 Noblemen " (the English translation bears, we believe, 
 the simple title of " Lisa "), that of the two novels 
 it was the earlier published. It dates from 1858 ; 
 
IVAN TURGfiNIEFF. 291 
 
 "Helene" from 1859. The theme is an unhappy 
 marriage and an unhappy love. Fedor Ivanovitsch 
 Lavretzky marries a pretty young woman, and after 
 three years of confident bliss finds himself grossly 
 deceived. He separates from his wife, returns from 
 Paris, where his eyes have been unsealed, to Russia, 
 and, in the course of time, retires to his patrimonial 
 estates. Here, after the pain of his wound has ached 
 itself away and the health and strength of life's prime 
 have reaffirmed themselves, he encounters a young 
 girl whom he comes at last to love with the double 
 force of a tender heart that longs to redeem itself from 
 bitterness. He receives news of his wife's death, 
 and immediately presumes upon his freedom to express 
 his passion. The young girl listens, responds, and for 
 a few brief days they are happy. But the report 
 of Madame Lavretzky's death has been, as the news- 
 papers say, premature; she suddenly reappears, to 
 remind her husband of his bondage and to convict 
 Lisa almost of guilt. The pathetic force of the story 
 lies, naturally, in its taking place in a country un- 
 furnished with the modern facilities for divorce. Lisa 
 and Lavretzky of course must part. Madame Lavretzky 
 lives and blooms. Lisa goes into a convent, and her 
 lover, defrauded of happiness, determines at least to 
 try and be useful. He ploughs his fields and instructs 
 
 u 2 
 
292 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 his serfs. After the lapse of years he obtains entrance 
 into her convent and catches a glimpse of her as she 
 passes behind a grating, on her way across the chapel. 
 She knows of his presence, but she does not even look 
 at him ; the trembling of her downcast lids alone 
 betrays her sense of it. " What must they both have 
 thought, have felt 1 ?" asks the author. "Who can 
 know 1 who can say 1 There are moments in life, there 
 are feelings, on which we can only cast a glance without 
 stopping." With an unanswered question his story 
 characteristically closes. The husband, the wife, and 
 the lover the wife, the husband, and the woman loved 
 these are combinations in which modern fiction has 
 been prolific ; but M. Turgenieff's treatment renews 
 the youth of the well-worn fable. He has found its 
 moral interest, if we may make the distinction, deeper 
 than its sentimental one ; a pair of lovers accepting 
 adversity seem to him more eloquent than a pair of 
 lovers grasping at happiness. The moral of his tale, 
 as we are free to gather it, is that there is no effective 
 plotting for happiness, that we must take what we can 
 get, that adversity is a capable mill-stream, and that 
 our ingenuity must go toward making it grind our corn. 
 Certain it is that there is something very exquisite in 
 Lavretzky's history, and that M. Turg^nieff has drawn 
 from a theme associated with all manner of uncleanness 
 
IVAN TUEGfiNIEFPi 293 
 
 a story embalmed in a lovely aroma of purity. This 
 purity, indeed, is but a pervasive emanation from the 
 character of Lisaveta Michailovna. American readers 
 of Turgenieff have been struck with certain points 
 of resemblance between American and Russian life. 
 The resemblance is generally superficial ; but it does 
 not seem to us altogether fanciful to say that Russian 
 young girls, as represented by Lisa, Tatiana, Maria 
 Alexandrovna, have to our sense a touch of the faintly 
 acrid perfume of the New England temperament a 
 hint of Puritan angularity. It is the women and 
 young girls in our author's tales who mainly represent 
 strength of will the power to resist, to wait, to 
 attain. Lisa represents it in all that heroic intensity 
 which says so much more to M. Turgenieff 's imagination 
 than feline grace. The character conspicuous in the 
 same tale for feline grace Varvara Pavlovna, Lav- 
 retzky's heartless wife is conspicuous also for her 
 moral flimsiness. In the integrity of Lisa, of Helene, 
 even of the more dimly shadowed Maria Alexandrovna 
 a sort of finer distillation, as it seems, of masculine 
 honour there is something almost formidable : the 
 strongest men are less positive in their strength. In 
 the keenly pathetic scene in which Marfa Timofievna 
 (the most delightful of the elderly maiden aunts of 
 fiction) comes to Lisa in her room and implores her 
 
294 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 to renounce her project of entering a convent, we feel 
 that there are depths of purpose in the young girl's 
 deferential sweetness that nothing in the world can 
 overcome. She is intensely religious, as she ought 
 to be for psychological truth, and nothing could more 
 effectually disconnect her from the usual ingenue of 
 romance than our sense of the naturalness of her 
 religious life. Her love for Lavretzky is a passion 
 in its essence half renunciation. The first use she 
 makes of the influence with him which his own love 
 gives her is to try and reconcile him with his wife ; 
 and her foremost feeling, on learning that the latter 
 is not dead, as they had believed, is an irremissible 
 sense of pollution. The dusky, antique consciousness 
 of sin in this tender, virginal soul is a combination 
 wilich we seem somehow to praisB amiss in calling it 
 picturesque, but which it would be still more inexact to 
 call didactic. Lisa is altogether a most remarkable 
 portrait, and one that readers of the heroine's own 
 sex ought to contemplate with some complacency. They 
 have been known to complain on the one hand that 
 romancers abuse them, and on the other that they 
 insufferably patronise them. Here is a picture drawn 
 with all the tenderness of a lover, and yet with 
 an indefinable an almost unprecedented respect. 
 In this tale, as always with our author, the drama 
 
IVAN TURGNIEFF 295 
 
 is quite unconimented ; the poet never plays chorus ; 
 situations speak for themselves. When Lavretzky 
 reads in the chronique of a French newspaper that his 
 wife is dead, there is no description of his feelings, 
 no portrayal of his mental attitude. The living, 
 moving narrative has so effectually put us in the way 
 of feeling with him that we can be depended upon. 
 He had been reading in bed before going to sleep, 
 had taken up the paper and discovered the momentous 
 paragraph. He "threw himself into his clothes," 
 the author simply says, " went out into the garden, 
 and walked up and down till morning in the same 
 alley/' We close the book for a moment and pause, 
 with a sense of personal excitement. But of M. 
 Turgenieff s genius for infusing a rich suggestiveness 
 into common forms, the character of Gottlieb Lemm, 
 the melancholy German music-master, is a perhaps 
 surpassing example. Never was homely truth more 
 poetical ; never was poetry more minutely veracious. 
 
 Lavretzky, sorely tried as he is, is perhaps the hap- 
 piest of our author's heroes. He suffers great pain, but 
 he has not the intolerable sense of having inflicted it 
 on others. This is the lot, both of the hero of " Smoke " 
 and of the fatally passive youth whose adventures we 
 follow in the author's latest work. On "Smoke" we 
 are unable to linger, as its theme is almost identical 
 
296 FRENCH TOETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 with that of " Spring-Torrents," and the latter will be 
 a novelty to a greater number of our readers. " Smoke," 
 with its powerful and painful interest, lacks, to our 
 mind, the underlying sweetness of most of its com- 
 panions. It has all their talent, but it has less of their 
 spirit. It treats of a dangerous beauty who robs the 
 loveliest girl in Russia of her plighted lover, and the 
 story duly absorbs us ; but we find that, for our own 
 part, there is always a certain langour in our intellec- 
 tual acceptance of the grand coquettes of fiction. It is 
 obviously a hard picture to paint ; we always seem to 
 see the lady pushing about her train before the foot- 
 lights, or glancing at the orchestra-stalls during her 
 victim's agony. In the portrait of Irene, however, 
 there are very fine intentions, and the reader is charmed 
 forward very much as poor Litvinof was. The figure 
 of Tatiana, however, is full of the wholesome perfume 
 of nature. " Smoke " was preceded by "Fathers and 
 Sons," which dates from ten years ago, and was the 
 first of M. Turgenieff's tales to be translated in America. 
 In none of them is the subject of wider scope or capable 
 of having more of the author's insidious melancholy 
 expressed from it ; for the figures with which he has 
 filled his foreground are, with their personal interests 
 and adventures, but the symbols of the shadowy forces 
 that are fighting for ever a larger battle the battle 
 
IVAN TURGtiNlEFF. 297 
 
 of the old and the new, the past and the future, of 
 the ideas that arrive with the ideas that linger. Half 
 the tragedies in human history are born of this conflict ; 
 and in all that poets and philosophers tell us of it 
 the clearest fact is still its perpetual necessity. The 
 opposing forces in M. Turgcnieff's novel are an elder 
 and a younger generation ; the drama can indeed never 
 have a more poignant interest than when we see the 
 young world, as it grows to a sense of its strength 
 and its desires, turning to smite the old world which 
 has brought it forth with a mother's tears and a 
 mother's hopes. The young world, in "Fathers and 
 Sons," is the fiercer combatant ; and the old world in 
 fact is simply for ever the victa causa that even stoics 
 pity. And yet with M. Turgenieff, characteristically, 
 the gaining cause itself is purely relative, and victors 
 and vanquished are commingled in a common assent 
 to fate. Here, as always, his rare discretion serves 
 him, and rescues him from the danger of exaggerating 
 his representative types. Few figures in his pages are 
 more intelligibly human than Pavel Petrovitsch and 
 Eugene Bazaroff human each of them in his indefeas- 
 ible weakness ; the one in spite of his small allowances, 
 the other in spite of his brutal claims. In the elder 
 Kirsanoff the author has imaged certain things he 
 instinctively values the hundred fading traditions of 
 
298 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 which the now vulgarized idea of the " gentleman" 
 is the epitome. He loves him, of course, as a romancer 
 must, but he has done the most impartial justice to 
 the ridiculous aspect of his position. Bazaroffi is a 
 so-called " nihilist " a red-handed radical, fresh from 
 the shambles of criticism, with Biichner's Stoff und 
 Kraft as a text-book, and everything in nature and 
 history for his prey. He is young, strong, and clever, 
 and strides about, rejoicing in his scepticism, sparing 
 nothing, human or divine, and proposing to have de- 
 molished the universe before he runs his course. But 
 he finds there is something stronger, cleverer, longer- 
 lived than himself, and that death is a fiercer nihilist 
 than even Dr. Biichner. The tale traces the course 
 of the summer vacation that he comes to spend in the 
 country with a college friend, and is chiefly occupied 
 with the record of the various trials to which, in 
 this short period, experience subjects his philosophy. 
 They all foreshadow, of course, the supreme dramatic 
 test. He falls in love, and tries to deny his love as he 
 denies everything else, but the best he can do is only to 
 express it in a coarse formula. M. Turgenieff is always 
 fond of contrasts, and he has not failed to give Bazaroff 
 a foil in his young comrade, Arcadi Kirsanoff, who 
 represents the merely impermanent and imitative 
 element that clings to the skirts of every great move- 
 
IVAN TURGMlEFF. 299 
 
 ment. Bazaroff is silenced by death, but it takes a 
 very small dose of life to silence Arcadi. The latter 
 belongs to the nobility, and Bazaroff's exploits in his 
 tranquil, conventional home are those of a lusty young 
 bull in a cabinet of rococo china. Exquisitely imagined 
 is the whole attitude and demeanour of Pavel Petro- 
 vitsch, Arcadi' s uncle, and a peculiarly happy invention 
 the duel which this perfumed conservative considers it 
 his manifest duty to fight in behalf of gentlemanly 
 opinions. The deeper interest of the tale, however, 
 begins when the young Biichnerite repairs to his own 
 provincial home and turns to a pinch of dust the tender 
 superstitions of the poor old parental couple who live 
 only in their pride in their great learned son and have 
 not even a genteel prejudice, of any consequence, to 
 oppose to his terrible positivism. M. Turgenieff has 
 written nothing finer than this last half of his story ; 
 every touch is masterly, every detail is eloquent. In 
 Vassili Ivanovitsch and Arina Ylassievna he has shown 
 us the sentient heart that still may throb in disused 
 forms and not be too proud to subsist a while yet by 
 the charity of science. Their timid devotion to their 
 son, their roundabout caresses, their longings and hopes 
 and fears, and their deeply pathetic stupefaction when it 
 begins to be plain that the world can spare him, all 
 form a picture which, in spite of its dealing with small 
 
300 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 things in a small style, carries us to the uttermost 
 limits of the tragical. A very noticeable stroke of 
 art, also, is Bazaroff's ever-growing discontentment a 
 chronic moral irritation, provoked not by the pangs 
 of an old-fashioned conscience, but, naturally enough^ 
 by the absence of the agreeable in a world that he 
 has subjected to such exhaustive disintegration. We 
 especially recommend to the reader his long talk with 
 Arcadi as they lie on the grass in the midsummer 
 shade, and Bazaroff kicks out viciously at everything 
 propounded by his ingenuous companion. Toward him 
 too he feels vicious, and we quite understand the impulse, 
 identical with that which in a nervous woman would 
 find expression in a fit of hysterics, through which the 
 overwrought young rationalist, turning to Arcadi with 
 an alarming appearance of real gusto, proposes to fight 
 with him, " to the extinction of animal heat." We 
 must find room for the portrait of Arina Ylassievna : 
 
 She "was a real type of the small Russian gentry of the old 
 regime ; she ought to have come into the world two hundred years 
 sooner, in the time of the grand-dukes of Moscow. Easily im- 
 pressed, deeply pious, she believed in all signs and tokens, 
 divinations, sorceries, dreams ; she believed in the lourodivi [half- 
 witted persons, popularly held sacred], in familiar spirits, in those 
 of the woods, in evil meetings, in the evil eye, in popular cures, 
 in the virtue of salt placed upon the altar on Good Friday, in the 
 impending end of the world ; she believed that if the tapers at 
 the midnight mass in Lent do not go out, the crop of buckwheat 
 
IVAN TUKGMlEFF. 301 
 
 will be good, and that mushrooms cease to grow as soon as human 
 eye has rested on them ; she believed that the Devil likes places 
 where there is water, and that all Jews have a blood-spot on their 
 chests ; she was afraid of mice, snakes, toads, sparrows, leeches, 
 thunder, cold water, draughts of air, horses, goats, red-haired 
 men and black cats, and considered crickets and dogs as impure 
 creatures ; she ate neither veal, nor pigeons, nor lobsters, nor 
 cheese, nor asparagus, nor hare, nor watermelon (because a melon 
 opened resembled the dissevered head of John the Baptist), and 
 the mere idea of oysters, which she did not know even by sight, 
 caused her to shudder ; she liked to eat well, and fasted rigorously ; 
 she slept ten hours a day, and never went to bed at all if Vassili 
 Ivanovitsch complained of a headache. The only book that 
 she had read was called * Alexis, or The Cottage in the Forest ' ; 
 she wrote at most one or two letters a year, and was an excellent 
 judge of sweatmeats and preserves, though she put her own hand 
 to nothing, and, as a general thing, preferred not to move. . . . 
 She was anxious, was perpetually expecting some great misfortune, 
 and began to cry as soon as she remembered anything sad. 
 Women of this kind are beginning to be rare ; God knows 
 whether we should be glad of it." 
 
 The novel which we have chosen as the text of 
 these remarks was published some six years since. It 
 strikes us at first as a reproduction of old material, the 
 subject being identical with that of " Smoke " and very 
 similar to that of the short masterpiece called "A 
 Correspondence." The subject is one of the saddest in 
 the world, and we shall have to reproach M. Turgcnieff 
 with delighting in sadness. But "Spring-Torrents" 
 has a narrative charm that sweetens its bitter waters, 
 and we may add that, from the writer's point of view, 
 
302 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the theme does differ by several shades from that of the 
 tales we have mentioned. These treat of the fatal 
 weakness of will that M. Turgenieff apparently con- 
 siders the peculiar vice of the new generation in Russia ; 
 "Spring-Torrents" illustrates, -more generally, the 
 element of folly which mingles, in a certain measure, in 
 all youthful spontaneity, and makes us grow to wisdom 
 by the infliction of suffering. The youthful folly of 
 Dmitri Sanin has been great, the memory of it haunts 
 him for years and lays on him at last such an icy grip 
 that his heart will break unless he can repair it. The 
 opening sentences of the story indicate the key in 
 which it is pitched. We may quote them as an example 
 of the way in which M. Turgenieff almost invariably 
 appeals at the outset to our distinctively moral curiosity, 
 our sympathy with character. Something tells us, in 
 this opening strain, that we are not invited to lend ear 
 to the mere dead rattle that rises for ever from the 
 surface of life : 
 
 ". . . . Towards two o'clock at night, he came back into his 
 sitting-room. The servant who had lighted the candles he sent 
 away, threw himself into a chair by the chirnney-piece, and 
 covered his face with his hands. Never had he felt such a 
 weariness of body and soul. He had been spending the whole 
 evening with graceful women, with cultivated men ; some of the 
 women were pretty, almost all the men were distinguished for 
 wit and talent ; he himself had talked with good effect, even 
 brilliantly ; and yet with all this, never had that tcedium vitce, of 
 
IVAN TURGtiNIEFF. 303 
 
 which the Koinans already speak, that sense of disgust with 
 life, pressed upon him and taken possession of him in such an 
 irresistible fashion. Had he been somewhat younger, he would 
 have wept for sadness, for ennui and overwrought nerves : a cor- 
 roding, burning bitterness, like the bitterness of wormwood, filled 
 his whole soul. Something inexpugnable cold, sickening, oppres- 
 sive crowded in upon him from all sides like autumn dusk, and 
 he knew not how he could free himself from this duskiness and 
 bitterness. He could not count upon sleep ; he knew he should 
 
 not sleep He began to muse slowly, sadly, bitterly. 
 
 .... He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the common 
 
 falsity of the whole human race He shook his head, 
 
 sprang up from his seat, walked several times up and down the 
 room, sat down at his writing-table, pulled out one drawer after 
 the other, and began to fumble among old papers, mostly letters in 
 a woman's hand. He knew not why he did it he was looking 
 for nothing, he simply wished to seek refuge in an outward occu- 
 pation from the thoughts that tormented him He got up, 
 
 went back to the fireplace, sank into his chair again, and covered 
 
 his face with his hands ' Why to-day, just to-day ? ' he 
 
 thought ; and many a memory from the long-vanished past rose 
 up in him. He remembered this is what he remembered." 
 
 On his way back to Russia from a foreign tour he 
 meets, at Frankfort, a young girl of modest origin but 
 extraordinary beauty the daughter of an Italian con- 
 fectioner. Accident brings them together, he falls in love 
 with her, holds himself ardently ready to marry her, 
 obtains her mother's consent, and has only, to make 
 the marriage possible, to raise money on his Russian 
 property, which is of moderate value. "While he is 
 revolving schemes he encounters an old schoolfellow, 
 
304 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 an odd personage, now married to an heiress who, as 
 fortune has it, possesses an estate in the neighbour- 
 hood of Sanin's own. It occurs to the latter that 
 Madame Polosoff may be induced to buy his land, and, 
 as she understands " business " and manages her own 
 affairs, he repairs to Wiesbaden, with leave obtained 
 from his betrothed, to make his proposal. The reader 
 of course foresees ttje sequel the reader, especially, 
 who is versed in Turgenieff. Madame Polosoff under- 
 stands business and much else besides. She is young, 
 lovely, unscrupulous, dangerous, fatal. Sanin succumbs 
 to the spell, forgets honour, duty, tenderness, prudence, 
 everything, and after three days of bewildered resistance 
 finds himself packed into the lady's travelling-carriage 
 with her other belongings and rolling toward Paris. 
 But we foresee that he comes speedily to his senses ; the 
 spring-torrent is spent. The years that follow are 
 as arid as brooding penitence can make them. 
 Penitence, after that night of bitter memories, takes an 
 active shape. He makes a pilgrimage to Frankfort 
 and seeks out some trace of the poor girl he had 
 deserted. "With much trouble he obtains tidings, and 
 learns that she is married in America, that she is 
 happy, and that she serenely forgives him. He returns 
 to St. Petersburg, spends there a short, restless inter- 
 val, and suddenly disappears. People say he has gone to 
 
IVAN TURGtiNIEFF. 305 
 
 America. The spring torrents exhale themselves in 
 autumn mists. Sanin, in the Frankfort episode, is not 
 only very young, but very Russian ; how young, how 
 Russian, this charming description tells : 
 
 " He was, to begin with, a really very good-looking fellow. He 
 had a tall, slender figure, agreeable, rather vague features, kindly 
 blue eyes, a fair complexion suffused with a fresh red, and, above 
 all, that genial, joyous, confiding, upright expression, which at the 
 first glance, perhaps, seems to give an air of limitation, but by 
 which, in former times, you recognised the son of a tranquil aris- 
 tocratic family a son of the 'fathers,' a good country gentle- 
 man, born and grown up, stoutly, in those fruitful provinces of 
 ours which border on the steppe ; then a somewhat shuffling gait, 
 a slightly lisping way of speaking, a childlike laugh as soon as 
 any one looked at him, .... health, in short, freshness and a 
 softness, a softness ! . . . . there you have all Sanin. Along 
 with this he was by no means dull, and had learnt a good many 
 things. He had remained fresh in spite of his journey abroad ; 
 those tumultuous impulses that imposed themselves upon the 
 best part of the young men of that day were little known to him." 
 
 If we place beside this vivid portrait the sketch, hardly 
 less expressive, of Madame Polosoff, we find in the mere 
 apposition the germ of a novel : 
 
 " Not that she was a perfect beauty ; the traces of her plebeian 
 origin were perceptible enough. Her forehead was low, her nose 
 rather thick and inclining to an upward inflection ; she could boast 
 neither of a fine skin nor of pretty hands and feet. But what did 
 all this signify ? Not before the ' sanctity of beauty 'to use Pusch- 
 kin's words would he who met her have stood lingering, but before 
 the charm of the powerful half-Russian, half- Bohemian, blooming, 
 womanly body and he would not have lingered without a purpose. " 
 
306 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Madame Polosoff, though her exploits are related in a 
 short sixty-five pages, is unfolded in the large dramatic 
 manner. We seem to be in her presence, to listen to 
 her provoking, bewildering talk, to feel the danger of 
 her audacious, conscious frankness. Her quite peculiar 
 cruelty and depravity make a large demand on our 
 credulity ; she is perhaps a trifle too picturesquely vicious. 
 But she is strangely, vividly natural, and our imagina- 
 tion goes with her in the same charmed mood as with 
 M. Turgenieff's other evil-doers. Not without an effort, 
 too, do we accept the possibility of Sanin's immediate 
 infidelity to the object of the pure still passion with 
 which his heart even yet overflows. But these are 
 wonderful mysteries ; its immediacy, perhaps, best ac- 
 counts for it ; spring torrents, the author would seem 
 to intimate, must flow, and ravage their blooming 
 channels. To give a picture of the immeasurable blind- 
 ness of youth, of its eagerness of desire, its freshness 
 of impression, its mingled rawness and ripeness, the 
 swarming, shifting possibilities of its springtime, and 
 to interfuse his picture with something of the softening 
 poetizing harmony of retrospect this has been but 
 half the author's purpose. He has designed beside to 
 paint the natural conflict between soul and sense, and to 
 make the struggle less complex than the one he has 
 described in " Smoke," and less brutal, as it were, than 
 
IVAN TURGfiNIEFF. 307 
 
 the fatal victory of sense in "A Correspondence." 
 " When will it all come to an end? " Sanin asks, as 
 he stares helpless at Maria Nikolaievna, and feels him- 
 self ignobly paralysed. " Weak men," says the author, 
 " never themselves make an end, they always wait for 
 the end." Sanin's history is weighted with the moral 
 that salvation lies in being able, at a given moment, to 
 bring one's will down like a hammer. If M. Turgenieff 
 pays his tribute to the magic of sense he leaves us also 
 eloquently reminded that soul in the long run claims 
 her own. He has given us no sweeter image of uncor- 
 rupting passion than this figure of Gemma, the frank 
 young Italian nature blooming in northern air from its 
 own mere wealth of joyousness. Yet, charming as 
 Gemma is, she is but a half-sister to Lisa and Tatiana. 
 Neither Lisa or Tatiana, we suspect, would have read 
 popular comedy with her enchanting mimicry ; but, on 
 the other hand, they would have been withheld by a 
 delicate, indefinable conscientiousness from caricaturing 
 the dismissed lover of the day before for the entertain- 
 ment of the accepted lover of the present. But Gemma 
 is a charming piece of colouring, and all this only proves 
 how many different ways there are of being the love- 
 liest girl in the world. The accessories of her portrait 
 are as happily rendered ; the whole picture of the little 
 Italian household, with its narrow backshop life in the 
 
 x 2 
 
308 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 German town, has a mellow enclosed light in which the 
 reader gratefully lingers. It touches the figure of the 
 usual half-fantastic house-friend, the poor old ex-bary- 
 tone Pantaleone Cippatola, into the most vivacious 
 relief. 
 
 II L 
 
 We always desire more information about the writers 
 who greatly interest us than we find in their works, 
 and many American readers have probably a friendly 
 curiosity as to the private personality of M. Turgenien 2 . 
 We are reduced, however, to regretting our own meagre 
 knowledge. We gather from his writings that our 
 author is much of a cosmopolitan, a dweller in many 
 cities and a frequenter of many societies, and, along 
 with this, an indefinable sense of his being of a so- 
 called "aristocratic" temperament; so that if a man's 
 genius were visible to the eye, like his fleshly integu- 
 ment, that of M. Turgenieff would be observed to have, 
 say, very shapely hands and feet, and a nose expressive 
 of the patrician graces. A friend of ours, indeed, who 
 has rather an irresponsible fancy, assures us that the 
 author of "Smoke" (which he deems his masterpiece) 
 is, personally, simply his own Pavel Kirsanoff. Twenty 
 to one our friend is quite wrong ; but we may neverthe- 
 
TURG^NIEFF. 309 
 
 less say that, to readers disposed now and then to risk a 
 conjecture, much of the charm of M. TurgeniefFs manner 
 resides in this impalpable union of an aristocratic tem- 
 perament with a democratic intellect. To his inquisi- 
 tive intellect we owe the various, abundant, human 
 substance of his tales, and to his fastidious temperament 
 their exquisite form. But we must not meddle too 
 freely with causes when results themselves are so sug- 
 gestive. The great question as to a poet or a novelist 
 is, How does he feel about life? what, in the last 
 analysis, is his philosophy 1 When vigorous writers 
 have reached maturity we are at liberty to look in their 
 works for some expression of a total view of the 
 world they have been so actively observing. This is 
 the most interesting thing their works offer us. 
 Details are interesting in proportion as they con- 
 tribute to make it clear. 
 
 The foremost impression of M. TurgeniefPs reader is 
 that he is morbidly serious, that he takes life terribly 
 hard. We move in an atmosphere of unrelieved sad- 
 ness. We go from one tale to the other in the hope 
 of finding something cheerful, but we only wander into 
 fresh agglomerations of gloom. We try the shorter 
 stories with a hope of chancing upon something pitched 
 in the traditional key of "light reading," but they 
 strike us alike as so many ingenious condensations of 
 
310 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 melancholy. " A Tillage Lear " is worse than " The 
 Antchar " ; " The Forsaken " is hardly an improve- 
 ment on "A Correspondence " ; " The Journal of a 
 Superfluous Man " does little to lay the haunting ghost 
 of "Three Portraits." The author has written several 
 short dramas. Appealing to them to beguile us of our 
 dusky vapours, we find the concentrated tragedy of 
 "The Bread of Charity," and, by way of an after- piece, 
 the lugubrious humour of " The Division." Sad begin- 
 nings, worse endings, good people ineffably wretched, 
 happy ones hugely ridiculous ; disappointment, despair, 
 madness, suicide, degrading passions, and blighted hopes 
 these seem, on first acquaintance, the chief ingredients 
 of M. Turgenieff's version of the human drama and to 
 deepen our sense of its bitterness we discover the 
 author in the background winding up his dismal 
 demonstration with a chuckle. We set him down forth- 
 with as a cold-blooded pessimist, caring for nothing in 
 life but its misery, and for nothing in misery but' its 
 picturesqueness its capacity for furnishing cynical 
 epigrams. What is each of the short tales we have 
 mentioned, we ask, but a ruthless epigram, in the 
 dramatic form, upon human happiness ? Evlampia 
 Charloff, in "A Village Lear," drives her father to 
 madness and death by her stony depravity, and then 
 joins a set of religious fanatics, among whom she plays 
 
IVAN TURG&STIEFF. 311 
 
 a great part as the "Holy Mother of God." In "The 
 Bread of Charity," a young heiress brings home to her 
 estates her newly-wedded husband, and introduces him 
 to her old neighbours. They dine with him, and one of 
 them, an officious coxcomb, conceives the brilliant idea 
 of entertaining him by an exhibition of a poor old 
 gentleman who has long been hanging about the place 
 as a pensioner of the late parents of the young wife, 
 and is remarkable for a dumb canine attachment to 
 herself. The heartless guest plies the modest old man with 
 wine, winds him up and makes him play the fool. But 
 suddenly Kusofkin, through the fumes of his potations, 
 perceives that he is being laughed at, and breaks out 
 into a passionate assurance that, baited and buffeted as 
 he is, he is nothing less than the father of the mistress 
 of the house. She overhears his cry, and though he, 
 horrified at his indiscretion, attempts to retract it, she 
 wins from him a confession of the fact that he had been 
 her mother's lover. The husband, however, makes him 
 swallow his words, and do public penance. He turns 
 him out of the house with a small pension, and the 
 curtain falls on the compliment offered this fine fellow 
 by the meddlesome neighbour on his generosity : " You 
 are a true Russian gentleman ! " The most perfectly 
 epigrammatic of our author's stories, however, is perhaps 
 that polished little piece of misery, " A Correspondence." 
 
312 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 A young man, idle, discontented, and longing for better 
 things, writes, for a pastime, to a young girl whom he 
 has formerly slightly known and greatly esteemed, who 
 has entertained an unsuspected and unrequited passion 
 for him, and who lives obscurely in the country, among 
 very common people. A correspondence comes of it, in 
 the course of which they exchange confidences and 
 unburden their hearts. The young girl is most pitiable, 
 most amiable, in her sadness, and her friend begins to 
 suspect that she, at last, may give a meaning to his 
 aimless life. She, on her side, is compassionately 
 interested, and we see curiosity and hope throbbing 
 timidly beneath the austere resignation to which she 
 has schooled herself, and the expression of which, 
 mingled with our sense of her blooming beauty of 
 character, makes of Maria Alexandrovna the most nobly 
 fascinating, perhaps, of our author's heroines. Alexis 
 Petrovitsch writes at last that he must see her, that he 
 will come to her, that she is to expect him at such a 
 date, and we imagine tenderly, in the unhastening 
 current of her days, the gentle eddy of her expectation. 
 Her next letter, after an interval, expresses surprise at 
 his non-appearance ; her next, several months later, is a 
 last attempt to obtain news of him. The correspondence 
 closes with his confession, written as he lies dying at 
 Dresden. Just as he was starting to join her, he had 
 
IVAN TURGfiNIEFF. 313 
 
 encountered another woman, a dancing-girl at the opera, 
 with whom he had fallen madly in love. She was low, 
 stupid, heartless ; she had nothing to recommend her to 
 anything but his senses. It was ignoble, but so it was. 
 His passion has led him such a life that his 'health is 
 gone. He has brought on disease of the lungs, by 
 waiting for the young lady at the opera-door in the 
 winter nights. Now his hours are numbered, and this 
 is the end of all ! And on this lugubrious note the 
 story closes. We read with intent curiosity, for 
 the tale is a masterpiece of narration ; but we wonder, 
 in some vexation, what it all means. Is it a piece of 
 irony for irony's sake, or is it a disinterested picture of 
 the struggle between base passion and pure passion 1 
 Why, in that case, should it seem a matter of course for 
 the author that base passion should carry the day? 
 Why, as for Rudin, for Sanin, for the distracted hero 
 of "Smoke," should circumstances also have been too 
 many, as the phrase is, for poor Alexis Petrovitsch ? If 
 we pursue our researches, in the hope of finding some 
 method in this promiscuous misery, examples continue 
 to seem more numerous than principles. The author 
 continues everywhere to imply that there is something 
 essentially ridiculous in human nature, something 
 indefeasibly vain in human effort. We are amazed, as 
 we go, at the portentous number of his patent fools ; no 
 
314 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 novelist has drawn a tenth as many. The large majority 
 of his people are the people we laugh at, and a large 
 fraction of the remainder the people we half disgustedly 
 pity. There is little room left, therefore, for the people 
 we esteem, and yet room enough perhaps, considering 
 that our very benevolence is tempered with scepticism. 
 What with the vicious fools and the well-meaning fools, 
 the prosperous charlatans and the grotesque nonentities, 
 the dead failures and the sadder failures that regret and 
 protest and rebel, the demoralized lovers and the jilted 
 maidens, the dusky pall of fatality, in a word, suspended 
 over all human things, it may be inferred that we are 
 not invited to a particularly exhilarating spectacle. 
 Not a single person in the novel of " Fathers and Sons " 
 but has, in some degree, a lurking ironical meaning. 
 Every one is a more or less ludicrous parody on what he 
 ought to have been, or an ineffectual regret at what he 
 might have been. The only person who compasses a 
 reasonable share of happiness is Arcadi, and even his 
 happiness is a thing for strenuous minds to smile at a 
 happiness based on the pot au feu, the prospect of 
 innumerable babies and the sacrifice of " views." 
 Arcadi 's father is a vulgar failure ; Pavel Petrovitsch 
 is a poetic failure ; Bazaroff is a tragic failure ; Anna 
 Sergheievna misses happiness from an ungenerous fear 
 of sacrificing her luxurious quietude ; the elder Bazaroif 
 
IVAN TURGEN1EFF. 315 
 
 and his wife seem a couple of ingeniously grotesque 
 manikins, prepared by a melancholy fantoccinista to 
 illustrate the mocking vanity of parental hopes. We 
 lay down the book, and we repeat that, with all the 
 charity in the world, it is impossible to pronounce M. 
 Turgenieff anything better than a pessimist. 
 
 The judgment is just, but it needs qualifications, and 
 it finds them in a larger look at the author's position. 
 M. Turgenieff strikes us, as we have said, as a man 
 disappointed, for good reasons or for poor ones, in the 
 land that is dear to him. Harsh critics will say for 
 poor ones, reflecting that a fastidious imagination has 
 not been unconcerned in his discontentment. To the 
 old Muscovite virtues, and especially the old Muscovite 
 naivete, his imagination filially clings, but he finds these 
 things, especially in the fact that his country turns to 
 the outer world, melting more and more every day into 
 the dimness of tradition. The Russians are clever, and 
 clever people are ambitious. Those with whom M. Tur- 
 geniefl: has seen himself surrounded are consumed with 
 the desire to pass for intellectual cosmopolites, to know, 
 or seem to know, everything that can be known, to be 
 astoundingly modern and progressive and European. 
 Madame Kukshin, the poor little literary lady with 
 a red nose, in "Fathers and Sons," gives up George 
 Sand as "nowhere" for her want of knowledge of 
 
316 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 embryology, and, when asked why she proposes to 
 remove to Heidelberg, replies with "Bunsen, you 
 know." The fermentation of social change has thrown 
 to the surface in Russia a deluge of hollow pretensions 
 and vicious presumptions, amid which the love either 
 of old virtues or of new achievements finds very little 
 gratification. It is not simply that people flounder 
 laughably in deeper waters than they can breast, but 
 that in this discord of crude ambitions the integrity of 
 character itself is compromised and men and women 
 make, morally, a very ugly appearance. The Russian 
 colony at Baden-Baden, depicted in "Smoke," is a 
 collection of more or less inflated profligates. Panschin, 
 in " A Nest of Noblemen," is another example ; Sitni- 
 koff, in "Fathers and Sons," a still more contemptible 
 one. Driven back, depressed and embittered, into his 
 imagination for the edification which the social spectacle 
 immediately before him refuses him, and shaped by 
 nature to take life hard and linger among its shadows, 
 our observer surrenders himself with a certain re- 
 actionary, irresponsible gusto to a sombre portrayal of 
 things. An imaginative preference for dusky subjects 
 is a perfectly legitimate element of the artistic tem- 
 perament ; our own Hawthorne is a signal case of its 
 being innocently exercised; innocently, because with 
 that delightfully unconscious genius it remained ima- 
 
IVAN TURGllNIEFF. 317 
 
 ginative, sportive, inconclusive, to the end. When 
 external circumstances, however, contribute to confirm 
 it, and reality lays her groaning stores of misery at its 
 feet, it will take a rarely elastic genius altogether to 
 elude the charge of being morbid. M. TurgeniefPs 
 pessimism seems to us of two sorts a spontaneous 
 melancholy and a wanton melancholy. Sometimes in 
 a sad stoiy it is the problem, the question, the idea, 
 that strikes him; sometimes it is simply the picture. 
 Under the former influence he has produced his master- 
 pieces; we admit that they are intensely sad, but we 
 consent to be moved, as we consent to sit silent in a 
 death-chamber. In the other case he has done but his 
 second best; we strike a bargain over our tears, and 
 insist that when it comes to being simply entertained, 
 wooing and wedding are better than death and burial. 
 "The Ant char," "The Forsaken," "A Superfluous 
 Man," "A Village Lear," "Toe ... toe ... toe," all 
 seem to us to be gloomier by several shades than they 
 need have been ; for we hold to the good old belief that 
 the presumption, in life, is in favour of the brighter side, 
 and we deem it, in art, an indispensable condition of 
 our interest in a depressed observer that he should have 
 at least tried his best to be cheerful. The truth, we 
 take it, lies for the pathetic in poetry and romance very 
 much where it lies for the "immoral." Morbid pathos 
 
318 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 is reflective pathos ; ingenious pathos, pathos not freshly 
 born of the occasion ; noxious immorality is superficial 
 immorality, immorality without natural roots in the 
 subject. We value most the " realists " who have an 
 ideal of delicacy and the elegiasts who have an ideal 
 
 f joy- 
 
 " Picturesque gloom, possibly," a thick and thin 
 admirer of M. Turgenieff's may say to us, "at least 
 you will admit that it is picturesque." This we heartily 
 concede, and, recalled to a sense of our author's 
 brilliant diversity and ingenuity, we bring our restric- 
 tions to a close. To the broadly generous side of his 
 imagination it is impossible to pay exaggerated homage, 
 or, indeed, for that matter, to its simple intensity and 
 fecundity. No romancer has created a greater number 
 of the figures that breathe and move and speak, in their 
 habits as they might have lived ; none, on the whole, 
 seems to us to have had such a masterly touch in 
 portraiture, none has mingled so much ideal beauty 
 with so much unsparing reality. His sadness has its 
 element of error, but it has also its larger element 
 of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point 
 optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and 
 strong ; beauty enchanting but rare ; goodness very 
 apt to be weak ; folly very apt to be defiant ; wicked- 
 ness to carry the day ; imbeciles to be in great places, 
 
IVAN TtfRGNIEFF. 319 
 
 people of sense in small, and mankind generally, 
 unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, 
 no phantasm, no evil dream of a night ; we wake up 
 to it again for ever and ever ; we can neither forget 
 it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome 
 experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, 
 in exchange for something which it is idle to pause 
 to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell 
 the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled 
 pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there 
 hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and 
 seek to understand. So much as this we seem to 
 decipher between the lines of M. Turgenieff's minutely 
 written chronicle. He himself has sought to under- 
 stand as zealously as his most eminent competitors. 
 He gives, at least, no meagre account of life, and 
 he has done liberal justice to its infinite variety. This 
 is his great merit ; his great defect, roughly stated, 
 is a tendency to the abuse of irony. He remains, 
 nevertheless, to our sense, a very welcome mediator 
 between the world and our curiosity. If we had space, 
 we should like to set forth that he is by no means 
 our ideal story-teller this honourable genius possessing, 
 attributively, a rarer skill than the finest required 
 for producing an artful rechauffe of the actual. But 
 even for better romancers we must wait for a better 
 
320 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 world. Whether the world in its higher state of 
 perfection will occasionally offer colour to scandal, we 
 hesitate to pronounce; but we are prone to conceive 
 of the ultimate novelist as a personage altogether 
 purged of sarcasm. The imaginative force now ex- 
 pended in this direction he will devote to describing 
 cities of gold and heavens of sapphire. But, for the 
 present, we gratefully accept M. Turgenieff, and reflect 
 that his manner suits the most frequent mood of the 
 greater number of readers. If he were a dogmatic 
 optimist we suspect that, as things go, we should long 
 ago have ceased to miss him from our library. The 
 personal optimism of most of us no romancer can 
 confirm or dissipate, and our personal troubles, gene- 
 rally, place fictions of all kinds in an impertinent light. 
 To our usual working mood the world is apt to seem 
 M. Turgenieff 's hard world, and when, at moments, 
 the strain and the pressure deepen, the ironical element 
 figures not a little in our form of address to those 
 short-sighted friends who have whispered that it is 
 an easy one. 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 
 
 WE have before us three volumes 1 which we have 
 read with extraordinary pleasure. They are the 
 records of the lives of a father and a son; they 
 contain a complete family history. In 1831 Alexis 
 de Tocqueville made in this country that tour which 
 was to be the prelude to the publication of his 
 " Democracy," the most serious book written on 
 America up to that moment by a foreigner. De 
 Tocqueville and Jean Jacques Ampere were united by 
 a passionate friendship (an amitie-passion Sainte-Beuve 
 calls it), and the latter, twenty years afterward, in 
 1851, followed in the footsteps of the author of the 
 " Democracy," and made a rapid journey from Canada 
 to Mexico. He, too, of course wrote a book, and his 
 " Promenade en Amerique " is a very genial and kindly 
 
 1 "Journal et Correspondance de Andre-Marie Ampere." 
 Publies par Mme. H. C. Paris, Hetzel, 1873. 
 
 "Andre-Marie Ampere et Jean- Jacques Ampere, Souvenirs 
 et Correspondance." Recueillis par Mme. H. C. Paris, Eetzel, 
 1875. 
 
322 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 composition. "We bestow at present a very much less 
 irritable attention upon the impressions of the foreign 
 promenader than at the very distant date of M. 
 Ampere's tour. We ourselves should say, indeed, that 
 tjbe European optimist on our shores would at present 
 find it convenient, as a general thing, to keep watch 
 upon his enthusiasm. But M. Ampere's amiable book 
 was certainly disinterested; it was the expression of 
 an eminently appreciative and sociable mind, and we 
 make no exaggerated claim for it in saying that it 
 introduces the author agreeably to American readers. 
 They may be advised, after a glance at it, to pass on 
 to the volumes whose titles are here transcribed and 
 which embody a mass of literary matter now more 
 entertaining to people in general than the author's 
 formal compositions. Jean-Jacques Ampere was an 
 accomplished scholar and a very clever man; but he 
 seems to us a rather striking illustration of the common 
 axiom that between two stools one falls to the ground. 
 He was at once a man of books and a man of the 
 world ; an ardent savant and an indefatigable traveller. 
 "He could read," says Sainte-Beuve, "a hieroglyphic 
 phrase on the sarcophagus of a Pharaoh ; it befell him 
 one evening before going to sleep to read a Chinese 
 book among the ruins of Ephesus. We must agree 
 that these are high dilettantisms of the mind, such 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 323 
 
 as are within the reach of a very select few." He 
 wrote so much, on questions of learning, that you 
 wonder he should ever have found a moment to leave 
 his study ; and he travelled so much, moved so much 
 in the world, formed so many personal and social ties, 
 had such a genius for conversation, for society, and 
 for friendship, that you wonder he found time to open 
 a book or mend his pen. The verdict of competent 
 criticism has been that Jean-Jacques Ampere sacrificed 
 erudition to observation and observation to erudition ; 
 that he lacked exactness as a savant and that he lacked 
 vividness as a tourist. Scholars find his " Histoire 
 Romaine a Rome" superficial, and, for what it attempts 
 to be, the profane find it dry. "In the middle of 
 June," he writes in 1862, "I went with Hebert to 
 Subiaco, a wild spot to which the artist-poet loved to 
 go in search of models. It was during this little jour- 
 ney, on the road to Tivoli, while the horses were rest- 
 ing, that I read to Hebert the first lines of ' L'Histoire 
 Romaine a Rome,' and he then told me frankly that 
 my picture of the Roman Campagna left him cold." 
 Ampere endeavoured to infuse a little more colour 
 into his sketch; but the opinion of the artist-poet 
 Hebert has, we imagine, remained that of the general 
 reader, while it is probable, on the other hand, that the 
 author's lighter touches have done little to mitigate the 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 severity of such an authority as Professor Mommsen 
 when, for instance, he finds his confrere exclaiming 
 with emotion, " I believe in Romulus ! " Sainte-Beuve 
 applies to Ampere's style a judgment which he had 
 heard passed upon another writer whose literary manner 
 was too undemonstrative. " He is like a man who has 
 made a drawing in black-lead. When he has done he 
 thinks it still too sharp, and he passes his coat-cuff over 
 it." But if Ampere as a historian falls short of being 
 a first-rate authority (as a philologist we believe he is 
 considered much sounder), and if, as a describer, he is 
 less brilliant and incisive than some men of greater 
 genius and (possibly) scantier conscience, he recovers 
 his advantages in his letters, in the things that reveal 
 the man himself. Then we see how intelligent, how 
 accomplished, how sympathetic, how indefatigable he 
 was. His letters are always entertaining and in the 
 highest degree natural. But what completes their 
 charm here is their graceful and harmonious setting 
 the fact that they are offered us in alternation with 
 a hundred other memorials of a singularly pleasing and 
 interesting circle. We gather from the whole collection 
 the complete picture of a society a society which by 
 this time has pretty well passed away and can know 
 no more changes. It is motionless in its place ; it is 
 sitting for its likeness. Best of all, the picture has one 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 325 
 
 episode as charming as any that was ever imagined by 
 an idyllic poet. Andre-Marie Ampere, the father of 
 Jean- Jacques, was an eminent man of science ; he was 
 the first French mathematician of his time and the 
 inventor of the electric telegraph in so far as the fol- 
 lowing statement, made in the presence of the French 
 Academy of Sciences, entitled him to the name. "As 
 many magnetized needles as letters of the alphabet, put 
 into movement by conductors communicating with the 
 electric battery by means of a key-board which might 
 be lowered at will, would make possible a telegraphic 
 correspondence that would traverse all distances and be 
 more prompt to transmit thought than either writing or 
 speech." Why this idea, was merely enunciated, and 
 never applied, we are unable to say ; if it had been at 
 that early day put into practice, Andre-Marie Ampere 
 would now enjoy a renown that would render these few 
 words of introduction quite superfluous. Invented in 
 time to be used at the battle of "Waterloo, the electric 
 telegraph might have given a very different turn to the 
 affairs of mankind. But this contingency having failed, 
 we are reduced to considering the elder Ampere in the 
 comparatively humble light of the extremely diffident 
 lover of Mademoiselle Julie Carron. He was the most 
 candid and artless of men, and the history of his court- 
 ship is one of the prettiest love-stories we know. 
 
326 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Jean-Jacques Ampere, as has been said, had a genius 
 for friendship. He never married, but in the course of 
 his life he had two extremely characteristic affections 
 for women. The object of one was Madame Recamier, 
 whose acquaintance he made in his twentieth year (in 
 1820) and to whom he remained devoted until her 
 death, in 1849. The object of the second was a certain 
 
 Madame L , with whom, he became intimate in 1853, 
 
 in Rome. This lady was a young widow, in feeble 
 health, obliged to spend her winters in the South, where 
 she was accompanied by her parents and her little girl. 
 Ampere had spent much of his life in Rome, and it was 
 about this time that he entered upon that long sojourn 
 of which the principal aim was the composition of a 
 history of the Latin Sta.te in relation to the present 
 local aspects, and which terminated only with his death. 
 
 Madame L died in Rome in 1859, in a temper of 
 
 mind which, as Ampere said, made him " touch with 
 his finger the immortality of the soul." His friendship 
 with her parents was intimate, and his affection for her 
 little girl almost paternal. Ampere died at Pau, in 
 March, 1864, leaving a will by which he bequeathed all 
 his literary remains to M. and Madame Cheuvreux, and 
 his private papers (those especially relating to his 
 father) to their young granddaughter. It is in this way 
 that the volumes before us have come to be put forth 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 327 
 
 by Madame Cheuvreux, for the benefit at once of 
 
 Mademoiselle L and of the public at large. We 
 
 do not know what this young lady has thought of this 
 mass of literature, but the public has given it a very 
 cordial welcome. Madame Cheuvreux is a most grace- 
 ful and intelligent commentator, and her publication 
 has rapidly passed through several editions. 
 
 It is unjust to say that we have here simply the 
 history of a father and a son. The Ampere stock was 
 apparently an excellent one, and the reader is interested 
 in taking it a degree farther back. The father of 
 Andre-Marie Ampere was a retired merchant at Lyons 
 when the French revolution broke out. Lyons in 1793 
 revolted from its Terrorist government and was be- 
 sieged by the National Convention. The victory of the 
 Convention was of course a harvest for the guillotine, 
 and Jean-Jacques Ampere the elder was one of the 
 most admirable of its victims. In prison, before his 
 death, he wrote his wife a letter, which we regret not 
 having space to quote ; it gives one a better opinion of 
 human nature. "Do not speak to Josephine," he says 
 at the end, "of her father's misfortune; take good 
 care that she does not know it ; as for my son, there is 
 nothing I do not expect from him. So long as you 
 possess them and they possess you, embrace each other 
 in memory of me. I leave my heart to all of you." 
 
328 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 For so pure an old stoic as this to say on the edge of 
 the scaffold that there was nothing he did not expect 
 from his only son, left the sole support of two desolate 
 women this was a great deal. Andre was at first 
 stupefied with sorrow, but in time he justified his 
 father's confidence. It seems most singular that in this 
 blood-drenched soil an episode so tender, so redolent of 
 youthful freshness, as the story embodied in the earliest 
 of these letters should so speedily have bloomed that, 
 with the hideous shadow of the scaffold still upon him, 
 Andre Ampere should make so artless, so ingenuous, 
 so innocently awkward a figure. His " adorable bon- 
 homie" that is the quality the editor chiefly insists 
 upon, and it certainly must have been of the purest 
 strain not to have been embittered by the contact of 
 wholesale massacre. It was indeed most genuine, and 
 the young man's notes and letters are full of it. The 
 story is a very simple one : he encountered Julie 
 Carron, he fell in love with her, he was put upon proba- 
 tion, he married her, she bore him a child, she died. 
 The charm is in the way the tale is told by himself, 
 by the young girl, and by her sister (the latter an 
 admirably graphic letter- writer). 
 
 At twenty-three Andre Ampere, stuffed with algebra 
 and trigonometry, felt in his own small way the lassi- 
 tude, the nameless yearnings of Faust. He had given 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 329 
 
 the measure of his scientific genius and his universal 
 curiosity. We have his own word for it that by the 
 time he was eighteen he knew as much mathematics as 
 he ever knew ; he had also pushed far into chemistry 
 and he had cultivated the muse. He had begun various 
 tragedies and he had placed upon the stocks an epic 
 poem with Columbus for hero and the "Americid" for 
 title. Many years afterwards his son found among 
 his papers an ancient yellow scrap, on which the 
 following lines were written : " Having reached the 
 age at which the laws rendered me my own master, 
 my heart sighed in secret at my still being so. Free 
 and insensible up to that time, it wearied of its idle- 
 ness. Brought up in almost complete solitude, study 
 and reading, which had long been my dearest delights, 
 suffered me to fall into an apathy that I had never 
 felt, and the cry of nature diffused through my soul 
 a vague, insupportable unrest. One day as I was walk- 
 ing after sunset beside a lonely brook .... ." 
 And here the fragment ends. What did he see beside 
 the brook ? Julie Carron, perhaps. If this is so, it 
 was on a Sunday in April, 1796, that he took that mo- 
 mentous stroll. He kept a record of his meetings with 
 the young girl, and either then or later he superscribed 
 it in large letters AMORUM. It is filled with small 
 entries like this, which mean little to us now, but 
 
330 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 which meant much to the poor trembling, hoping, fear- 
 ing young mathematician: "26th /September. I found 
 her in the garden, without daring to speak to her. 3d 
 October. I went there. I slipped in a few words more 
 to the mother. 6th October. I found myself alone with 
 her, without daring to speak to her ; they gave me the 
 iirst bouts-rimes. 10th October. I filled them out, and 
 slipped them adroitly into her hand. 13th October. I 
 had carried back the seventh volume of Sevigne; I 
 forgot the eighth and my umbrella. 2d November. I 
 went to get my umbrella. 7th November. I didn't 
 speak that day, on account of the death of M. Mont- 
 petit. Stk November. I spoke again ; Julie told me not 
 to come so often. 12th November. Mme. Carron was 
 out ; I said a few words to Julie, who regularly blew 
 me up and went off. Elise told me to spend the winter 
 without speaking again. 1 6th November. . . . Julie 
 brought me with grace the ' Lettres Provinciales.' 
 ( Jth December. She opened the door for me in her night- 
 cap and spoke to me a moment, tete-ct-tete, in the kitchen." 
 He stands there before us like an effigy of bashfulness, 
 tongue-tied, with his heart in his throat, a book under 
 his arm and the simple good faith of unspotted youth 
 upon his brow. Mademoiselle Julie was a trifle difficult, 
 as the phrase is ; she had already had an excellent 
 offer of marriage, but she had declined it because slu> 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 331 
 
 thought nothing could make up to her for leaving her 
 parents and her sister. These were plain people, with 
 little money, hut what one may call an excellent family 
 tone. They lived in the country, close to Lyons. They 
 thought well of Jean- Jacques, but they thought also 
 that there was no hurry, especially as he had as yet no 
 avocation, and it was their idea to keep him at arm's 
 length, though certainly not to let him go. Elise 
 Carron was Julie's elder, and a girl who seems to have 
 combined an excellent heart with the keenest, frankest 
 wit, and with a singular homely felicity of style. She 
 is shrewd, impulsive, positive, humorous, and we should 
 like to quote all her letters. During a part of the 
 winter which followed the entries we have just tran- 
 scribed Julie Carron was absent from home, and Elise 
 makes it her duty to entertain poor Ampere and to 
 report his condition to his mistress. She has a great 
 kindness for him and, though she wishes to amuse her 
 sister, she stops short of tempting her to laugh cruelly. 
 
 " Poor A is certainly frozen in some corner, or else 
 
 he is thawing near you, for I have seen him neither 
 through hole nor through window. . . . Will he 
 come to-morrow 1 I look always from my place and I 
 see nothing. If he comes and mamma goes out, he 
 will call me to an account ; I have prepared a thousand 
 little answers always the same ; I wish I knew some 
 
332 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 that would content him without bringing things on too 
 fast, for he interests me by his frankness and his soft- 
 ness, and especially by his tears, which come out 
 without his meaning it. Not the slightest affectation, 
 none of those high-strung phrases which are the lan- 
 guage of so many others. Arrange it as you will, but 
 let me love him a little before you love him ; he is so 
 good ! . . . Mamma insists that Providence will 
 arrange everything ; but I say that we must help Provi- 
 dence." Elise's next letter is in its natural vividness 
 almost a little genre picture. " At last he came yester- 
 day, trembling with cold, and still more with the fear 
 that mamma would be displeased at his having been to 
 see you, or rather to get letters for us. But this is 
 how the thing happened : I see that you want details. 
 You must know that mamma now sits in your place, 
 because she has closed up the door, which used to freeze 
 the room, and inconsequence we don't see a bit too well, 
 especially when the snow has been piled up. In short, 
 he comes in and doesn't see the little Pelagot who was 
 behind the nose of the stove. As soon as Claudine 
 went out he said : ' Madame, I saw mademoiselle your 
 daughter/ I stopped him short off, making more and 
 more signs ; and he, thinking to plaster it up, replied, 
 ' Claudine is gone out ; no one can hear us, I will speak 
 lower.' The child opened her eyes as wide as she was 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 333 
 
 able ; when I saw that signs didn't help me I spoke to 
 the wench about her work, about her stocking that was 
 not coming on. He was petrified and wanted to patch 
 it up again, but the piece wouldn't fit the hole." At 
 last the little Pelagot goes out with her dilatory stock- 
 ing, and Elise has a long talk with Ampere, which she 
 relates, verbatim, to her sister : " He perceived the first 
 that it was beginning to be late which he forgets so 
 easily when you are here. He went off and left me 
 quite amazed at his hat in lacquered cloth, at his 
 fashionable breeches and his little air, which, I assure 
 you, will change again." " Guess, dear Julie," she 
 writes later, " at what we pass our time. We make 
 verses, we scratch them out, and then begin again." 
 And she goes on to narrate that M. Ampere has been 
 with them and has filled them with the sacred fire. 
 She must close, for she has to help her mamma to begin 
 a play, a drama, perhaps a tragedy ! It sounds very 
 odd, hearing of those two little rustic bourgeoises sitting 
 down among their pots and pans, at their snow- 
 darkened windows, to literary compositions of this 
 heroic magnitude, and there certainly can be no better 
 illustration of the literary passion of the last century, 
 or of the universal culture of what was called 
 sensibility. 
 
 But the spring came, Julie was at home again, and 
 
334 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 in Andre's diary the idyllic strain is more emphasized : 
 " 24:th March. Mile. Bceuf came while I was reading 
 the tragedy of Louis XYI. ; we went into the orchard. 
 Elise sat upon the bench ; Julie upon a chair which I 
 brought to her, and I at her feet she chose my purse 
 to her own taste. 26th April. I went to carry back 
 La Rochefoucauld ; I found no one but Mme. Carron, 
 and asked her leave to bring mamma. I received only 
 a vague answer, but it was satisfactory enough. Julie, 
 Elise, my aunt, and my cousin came to lunch ; I served 
 the white wine and drank in a glass which she had 
 rinsed." A couple of months later he prefixes to an 
 entry a date in large capitals. The record deserved the 
 honour, for it has a charming quaintness. " MONDAY, 
 SD JULY. They came at last to see us, at three-quarters 
 past three. [His poor mother had called, and the 
 Carron ladies were returning her visit.] We went 
 into the alley, where I climbed into the great cherry- 
 trees and threw cherries to Julie. Elise, my sister, 
 all of them, came afterward. I gave up my place 
 to Francois, who lowered branches to us, from which 
 we picked ourselves, to Julie's great entertainment. 
 She sat on a plank on the ground with my sister and 
 Elise, and I sat on the grass beside her. I ate some 
 cherries which had been on her knees. We all four 
 went into the great garden, where she accepted, a lily 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 335 
 
 from my hand, and then we went to see the brook. I 
 gave her my hand to climb the little wall, and both 
 hands to get over it again ; I remained by her side on 
 the edge of the brook, far from Elise and my sister. 
 We went with them in the evening as far as the 
 windmill, where I sat down near her again, while we 
 all four observed the sunset, which gilded her clothes 
 with a charming light. She carried away a second lily 
 which I gave her in passing." Andre Ampere was a 
 man of genius and destined to be recognised as one ; 
 but he was a profoundly simple soul, and his naivete 
 seems to have been unfathomable. Tt would be im- 
 possible to enumerate with a homelier verity the 
 enormous trifles on which young love feeds. Andre 
 wrote verses; we know not what they were; certainly 
 there is as little attempt here as possible at elegance of 
 form ; the poetry is all in the spirit. There, however, 
 it is deep. The little narrative we have just quoted 
 might have been scratched with a clasp-knife on the 
 windmill tower ; but the passion it commemorates is of 
 classic purity. Extremes meet ; the whole man is in 
 it ; it is the passion of Petrarch for Laura, of Dante for 
 Beatrice, of Romeo for Juliet. Extremes meet, we say ; 
 and so it seems to us that this artless fragment is, by 
 a happy chance, as graphic, as pictorial, as if a con- 
 summate artist had retouched it. 
 
336 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 By the time the autumn had come round again 
 Julie knew her mind. When a certain M. Vial comes 
 in and urges Andre, if his family does nothing for 
 him, to go and seek his fortune in Paris, she pushes 
 him out by the shoulders, and tells him they have 
 no need of his advice. The day apparently has come 
 for Julie to feel the flutters of the heart ; we have 
 had no intimation until now that her pretty person 
 (the editor is happily able to establish that it was 
 pretty) was not even a trifle impertinently self-pos- 
 sessed. " 2Qth October. I carried there a little basket 
 of chestnuts. . . . Mme. Carron told me to go into 
 the orchard where they were. I found only Julie ? 
 who seemed as much embarrassed as I ; she called 
 Perisse, but I slipped in some words which had rela- 
 tion to my sentiments. ... I wanted to go back a 
 moment to the orchard, where she had gone to dry 
 some linen, but she avoided me with even more earnest- 
 ness than the first time. In the evening she told me to 
 read * Adele,' and this led to our talking again upon the 
 passions." He adds a few days later: "We went 
 into the orchard, where I helped to take up the wash- 
 ing ; in sport, after some jest of Elise, Julie gave me 
 a charming blow, with her fist, on the arm. We 
 supped on chestnuts and we came home very late." 
 Upon this the editor comments very happily: "The 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 337 
 
 orchard, the linen-drying, the reading of ' Adele,' which 
 provokes a conversation on the passions, Andre's basket 
 of chestnuts, the charming blow with the fist that he 
 gets in play, the frugal supper is not the picture 
 quite of another age 1 Only sixty-and- something year>i 
 separate us from the moment when Andre wrote his 
 journal, and yet we are far from that innocent idyll. 
 Ah, messieurs the realists, you have made us grow 
 old fast ! " 
 
 At last, in the spring of 1799, poor Andre's probation 
 terminates and Julie bestows her hand upon him. "We 
 have some of his letters after the betrothal, in which 
 he addresses his affianced ceremoniously as " Made- 
 moiselle." There is something very agreeable in this 
 observance of high courtesy in circumstances amid which 
 it might have been expected to be a trifle relaxed. 
 Mademoiselle Carron was a poor girl ; she helped in 
 the family washing. But she conversed upon the 
 passions and she was familiar with a superior standard 
 of manners. The young couple were married in the 
 month of August of the same year, and Andre's friend 
 M. Ballanche read a long prose rhapsody, by way 
 of an epithalamium, at the simple wedding-feast. 
 Andre Ampere obtained some pupils in mathematics 
 at Lyons, and his wife spent much of the first year 
 of her marriage with her mother in the country. She 
 
 z 
 
338 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 was at times, however, with her mother-in-law Madame 
 Ampere, at the latter's modest dwelling at Polcmieux, 
 near Lyons. While she is away her sister Elise writes 
 to her with inimitable vigour. Elise really makes the 
 dead things of the past live again. The Carron ladies 
 were hesitating as to where they should spend the 
 winter. In their actual quarters, the elder daughter 
 writes, " Mamma finds a great many diversions, and 
 her health is better. Our good neighbours tell us that 
 if we were to remain they wouldn't think of carting 
 themselves over to Charelet, where nevertheless they 
 have already hired lodgings and laid in a stock of wood, 
 which they would quickly sell again. In short, they 
 press us, offer us so heartily all the little distractions 
 that they might share with us. Mme. Darsay makes 
 much of her books and newspapers ; her daughter 
 puts forward all the people whom she would catch up 
 in one way or another. She says to me : ' We will 
 amuse our mothers, we will both make little caps for 
 the poor, and fritters and tarts ; we will pray God, we 
 will write, and then time passes so fast, so fast.' She 
 makes a hotch-potch of all this, and then kisses 
 me with such friendliness, and shows as much enthu- 
 siasm as if I were a being capable of inspiring it. 
 Formerly I shouldn't have been surprised at such 
 greetings ; I used with these ladies to put in my little 
 
THE TWO AMPfcRES. 339 
 
 word in the talk ; I was gay ; we were something for 
 them, because they didn't see many people. But at 
 present it is the reverse." I continue to quote Elise 
 Carron for her extreme reality : " There are moments 
 when we must not think of calculating very true. 
 But there is a time for everything. A propos of cal- 
 culations, I have reason to thank myself for the one 
 which made me decide not to buy a grey dress. What 
 should I have done with it 1 I should have spoiled it 
 nicely if I had wished to put it on on Sundays on our 
 pretty roads and among the peasant-women at mass, 
 who mount atop of you and surround you with 
 goloshes and muddy sabots. Mme. Mayeuvre herself 
 wouldn't have been so fine as I, and yet she always 
 comes to church in a carriage, but in such simple 
 gowns that I shouldn't have dared to wear mine. I 
 never saw her so much dressed as last evening at the 
 Darsay ladies'. She had been making visits in the 
 afternoon, and had exchanged her little dyed morning 
 dress for a very pretty blue calico, with white sleeves 
 and a hood like ours. Mme. Courageau is also very 
 simple, and if on Sundays I only put on a muslin 
 apron over my old petticoat in green cloth (I wear 
 it with my black spencer) they already cry out that 
 I am dressed up. Yet, since the cold weather, 
 it is only what I wear every day. All this, my 
 
 z 2 
 
340 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 sister, may very well not interest you. So much the 
 worse ! I must write to you and talk to you as if 
 you were here. Haven't I told you that my scribblings 
 don't oblige you to write a line 1 I send them to you for 
 nothing, and out of it all you can take your choice ; 
 you can fish out some things you may be glad to know, 
 as, for example, about our health." In December, 
 1801, Andre Ampere obtained the post of Professor of 
 Mathematics at the central school of the department 
 of the Ain, the seat of which was at Bourg. Julie, 
 who had a baby several months old and whose health 
 had begun visibly to decline, remained, for economy 
 and comfort, with her mother. The most charming 
 part of this volume is perhaps the series of letters 
 that passed, during this separation, between the ailing, 
 caressing, chiding, solicitous, practical young wife, and 
 the tender, adoring young husband, whose inadvertences 
 and small extravagances and wa_nt of worldly wisdom 
 are the themes of many a conjugal admonition. Poor 
 Ampere was for ever staining his clothes with chemi- 
 cals ; he had his coats and breeches doled out to him 
 like a boy at school. He begins his career at Bourg 
 by deciding not to lodge at the inn, on account of the bad 
 company that frequents it, and then makes himself 
 the joke of the town by going to live with a certain 
 M. Beauregard, whose wife was notoriously disreputable. 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 341 
 
 "I think you very pastoral," Julie writes, "to go 
 reading my letters in the fields ; I'm afraid that you 
 scatter them along the road, and that the first people 
 who pass pick them up. If I knew you were more 
 careful, how many pretty things I would confide to 
 you ! You would know that I love you, that I have 
 a great desire to see you again, that every evening I 
 have a thousand things to say to you that don't come 
 out, save in sighs ; you would know, in short, that 
 when one has gone so far as to take a husband one 
 loves him too much to be separated from him, and 
 that your absence vexes me." Her injunctions about 
 his taking care of her letters seem to have little effect ; 
 for shortly after this Andre writes to her gleefully 
 of another " pastoral " day : " How sweet your letters 
 are to read ! One must have your soul to write things 
 which go so straight to the heart without trying to, 
 it would seem. I remained till two o'clock sitting 
 under a tree, a pretty meadow on the right, the river, 
 with some amiable ducks floating on it, on the left 
 and in front of me ; behind was the hospital building. 
 You will understand that I had taken the precaution 
 of saying to Mme. Beauregard, when I left my letter 
 to go on this tramp, that I shouldn't dine at home. 
 She thinks I am dining in town ; but as I had made 
 a good breakfast, I only feel the belter for dining 
 
342 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 upon love. At two o'clock I felt so calm, and my 
 mind so at ease, in place of the weariness that op- 
 pressed me this morning, that I wanted to walk about 
 and botanize. I went up along the river in the 
 meadows, and arrived within twenty steps of a charm- 
 ing wood that I had seen in the distance at a half hour 
 from the town, and had desired to go through. When 
 I reached it the river, by suddenly coming between 
 us, destroyed every hope of going further, so I had 
 to give it up, and I came home by the road from 
 Bourg to Cezeyriat a superb avenue of Lombardy 
 poplars." 
 
 This gentle strain is intermingled with sadder notes 
 allusions to the extreme scarcity of money with the 
 young couple and to Julie's constantly failing health. 
 She had an incurable malady and her days were 
 numbered. But in the midst of her troubles she is 
 tenderly vigilant and practical. " Be careful to close 
 your bureau, your room, and my letters, or I shall not 
 dare to write to you. I know nothing of M. Eoux. 
 Don't you open yourself too much to M. Clerc ? He's 
 a very new acquaintance ; suppose he were to take your 
 ideas for himself. Send me your cloth trousers, so that 
 the rats don't eat them." "I don't burn my things," 
 he answers, "and do my chemistry only in my breeches, 
 my grey coat, and my green velvet waistcoat. . ..-. 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 3J3 
 
 I beg you to send my new .trousers, so that I may 
 appear before MM. Delambre and Villars. I don't 
 know what I shall do ; my nice breeches smell still of 
 turpentine. . . . You'll be afraid of my spoiling 
 
 my nice trousers, but I promise you to return them as 
 clean as I get them." Julie too visibly declines, and 
 the downright Elise, writing to Andre, breaks out into 
 an almost passionate appeal. " What a happiness if 
 among all the plants whose properties you know there 
 were one that could put all in order again in her 
 nature ! What is the use of science if there is none 
 that can restore health to Julie ? Make inquiries, talk 
 to the learned, to the ignorant ! Simple people often 
 have remedies as simple as themselves light which 
 God gives them for their preservation. . . ... Ah, 
 
 why, why did I push self-sacrifice so far as to advise 
 Julie to marry ? I admired myself then as I shed 
 my tears ; they were for me the triumph of reason ; 
 whereas it was to feeling alone that I ought to have 
 listened ! " Julie sank rapidly, and died in the summer 
 of 1803. 
 
 We have many of Andre Ampere's letters after the 
 death of his wife, but as he grows older, they naturally 
 lose much of their quaintness and freshness. He 
 becomes absorbed in scientific research and embarks 
 upon metaphysics, and it is with a certain sadness we 
 
344 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 learn that the image of Julie Carron fades from his 
 mind sufficiently to enable him, in 1807, to marry a 
 second time. There is a note from his sister -in law 
 Elise upon this occasion, in which, beneath the ex- 
 pression of an affectionate sympathy with his desire to 
 make himself happy again, we detect a certain proud dis- 
 appointment in his not finding the memory of her sister 
 a sufficient source of happiness. There is some poetic 
 justice in his second marriage, proving a miserable 
 delusion ; he was obliged to separate from his wife after 
 a few months. He had gone up to Paris after Julie's 
 death and become instructor in the Polytechnic School, 
 and from this time opportunity, prosperity, and fame 
 began to wait upon him. He was a signal example of 
 the almost infantile simplicity, the incorruptible moral 
 purity, that so often are associated with great attain- 
 ments in science, and the history of his courtship was 
 worth sketching because it shows this temperament in 
 its flower. 
 
 After the death of Jean-Jacques Ampere's young 
 mother, the interest of these volumes is transferred 
 to her son. The boy grew up among all -favouring in- 
 fluences, surrounded by doting grandmothers and aunts, 
 in an atmosphere of learning and morality. As he is 
 revealed in his own early letters and those of his friends 
 (there are many of these) he is quite the type of the 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 345 
 
 ingenuous and intelligent youth who feels, in an easy, 
 general way, that he is heir of all the ages. More than 
 anything else Jean-Jacques Ampere is sympathetic ; 
 he is versatile, spontaneous, emotional; in 1820 the 
 days of " sensibility " were hardly yet over and the 
 accomplished young man possessed this treasure. The 
 world was all before him where to choose. His father, 
 when he had resigned himself to his not being a 
 mathematician, wished him of all things to write a 
 tragedy ; for, next after algebra and chemistry, verses 
 were what the elder Ampere most prized. Jean-Jacques, 
 nothing loth, looked about for a subject, and mean- 
 while he fell in love with Madame Re'camier. His 
 devotion to this illustrious lady was the great fact of 
 thirty years of his life, and it is possible, in the letters 
 before us and in those of the lady herself, published with 
 a commentary by her niece, who was so many years at 
 her side, to trace even in detail the history of the affair. 
 Tt is difficult at this time of day to know just how 
 to speak of Madame Recamier, and it is a tolerably 
 plausible view of the case to say that there is no need 
 of speaking at all. History has rendered her enthu- 
 siastic justice, and in her present reputation there is 
 perhaps something a trifle forced and factitious. She 
 was very beautiful, very charming, and very much at 
 the service of her friends these are her claims to 
 
346 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 renown. To people of taste and fancy at the present 
 day, however much they may regret not having known 
 her, she can be little more than a rose-coloured shadow. 
 To hear her surviving friends say to each other with 
 a glance of intelligence, "Ah, there was a woman!" 
 simply makes us uncomfortably jealous; we feel like 
 exclaiming, with a certain asperity, that there are as 
 good fish in the sea as ever were caught. To know her 
 by literature is, moreover, not really to know her. We 
 cannot see her beauty, we cannot hear the gracious 
 inflections of her voice, we cannot appeal to her for 
 sympathy ; we can only read her letters, and her letters 
 are not remarkable. They have no especial wit or 
 grace ; they have only great good sense and, in certain 
 express directions, an immense friendliness. Her 
 history certainly is a remarkable one. Born in the 
 middle class, she married into the middle class and 
 lost early in life the wealth that her marriage conferred 
 upon her. She was never perceived to push or strive ; 
 no effort, no eagerness, were ever observable in her 
 career, and yet for fifty years she was literally a social 
 sovereign. She distributed bliss and bale ; she made 
 and unmade felicity. She might have unmade it, that 
 is, but fortunately she was incorruptibly kind ; her 
 instincts were constructive, not destructive. In 1829. 
 for instance, Prosper Merirnee, then a young man upon 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 347 
 
 the threshold of life, had a fancy to adopt a diplomatic 
 career, and, as a first step, to be appointed secretary 
 of legation in London. The simplest way to compass 
 his desire seems to him to be to apply through a friend 
 to Madame Recamier. Madame Recamier can apply to 
 the ambassador with the certainty of not meeting a 
 refusal. The striking thing is that it is a question not 
 at all of her doing what she can and taking what 
 comes, but of her simply uttering her gentle fiat. Of 
 course her remarkable influence was not simply an 
 accident ; she had exquisite gifts, and circumstances 
 favoured her ; but it seems rather a mistake to 
 attempt to make a woman whose action in the world 
 was altogether personal and destined to expire with her 
 person an object of lasting interest. None of the 
 various ministers of her renown not even the pos- 
 sessor of the infallible memory of Sainte-Beuve has 
 to our knowledge repeated any definite utterance of the 
 " incomparable Juliette " which seems at all noticeable. 
 To write about her is like attempting to describe a 
 perfume, and her clever niece, Madame Lenormant, in 
 the volumes she has devoted to her memory, has perhaps 
 run the risk of making her the least bit of a bore. 
 
 But of course she appeals to our imagination, and if 
 we are well-disposed that way she may live yet a while 
 by her picturesqueness. Seated every evening in her 
 
348 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 little economical secular cell at the convent of the 
 Abbaye-au-Bois, or, of a summer morning, under the 
 trees at the Yallee-aux-Loups, the natural accessories in 
 her portrait are the figures of the people who formed 
 the best society in Continental Europe. In her relations 
 with Jean-Jacques Ampere she is perhaps especially 
 picturesque, for they contain just that element of poten- 
 tial oddity which is considered essential to picturesque- 
 ness. Madame Recamier was forty-three years of age 
 when young Ampere was presented to her, he himself 
 being just twenty; she was exactly of the age which, 
 had she lived, his mother would have reached. Jean- 
 Jacques then and there fell in love with her. It was 
 one evening in her little drawing-room, which was full 
 of great people. She was, as Madame Cheuvreux says 
 (seeming in feminine fashion to have exactly divined it) 
 "sitting, almost reclining, half hidden in a cloud of 
 muslin, on a sofa of sky-blue damask of the old ' Em- 
 pire ' form, with the neck of a gilt swan for its arm." 
 It is not necessary to accuse Madame Recamier of inor- 
 dinate coquetry a charge which, although we are bound 
 to believe that she enjoyed her sway there is no other 
 evidence to support to explain the fact that two years 
 later, when she was forty- five, his passion was still 
 burning. Might she have quenched it ? These are of 
 course mysteries; but it is our duty to suppose that 
 
THE TWO AHPfiKE?. 349 
 
 what she did was wisely done. The event, in fact, 
 proved it. She was an expert in these matters and she 
 had learned the prudence of sacrificing a part to save 
 the whole. Ampere's flame flickered down in time to 
 the steady glow of friendship ; and if Madame Re'ca- 
 mier knew when the golden age ended and the silver 
 began it is very likely that, under her exquisite direc- 
 tion, the young man himself never did. But there was 
 certainly a prepossessing boldness in a young fellow of 
 two-and-twenty writing in this fashion to an extremely 
 distinguished woman of middle age : " Oh, tell me with 
 truth that there are moments in which it seems that 
 your soul is touched by my fate and takes an interest 
 in my future? sometimes I have even thought that 
 the sentiment so pure and tender with which you in- 
 spire me was not without a certain charm for yourself. 
 But I am so afraid of being in error ! Day by day my 
 life centres itself in this affection. How cruel would it 
 be to take the expression of your compassion for that 
 of your interest ! It is now especially, while I am 
 away from you, that I am agitated by these fears. A 
 few words, I entreat you, by way of consolation ; but 
 in heaven's name take care that in order to calm me 
 you don't let yourself go beyond that which you really 
 feel. What have I done, indeed, that you should love 
 me ? Ah, I have loved you with all my soul, without 
 
350 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 deceiving myself about our situation, without entertain- 
 ing for an instant the thought of disturbing the tran- 
 quillity of your existence. I have given myself up to 
 a hopeless sentiment, which has tilled all my heart. I 
 cannot live either without you or for you ; I see all that 
 is impossible in my fate, and yet how can I renounce 
 that which is my only joy 1 " Madame Recamier quietly 
 devised a modus vivendi for her ardent young friend, and 
 he adopted it so successfully that three years later, she 
 being at Rome and in the first glow of a friendship 
 with Madame Swetchine, the famous ultramontane 
 pietist, he found it natural to write to her, in allusion 
 to this lady : "In good faith, madame, is it not true 
 that my place is taken in your heart 1 I have no right 
 to complain of it ; it is not your fault if I have not 
 that sort of religious and romantic imagination which it 
 would be so natural to have. But I have it less than 
 ever ; the desire to please you made me force my nature ; 
 solitude and the law that punishes sacrilege have sent 
 me back to it. ... Madame Swetchine is worth much 
 more to your imagination than I. Bring me back some 
 friendship ; it is all that I deserve and all that I exact 
 of you." It seems an anomaly that five months after 
 this Ampere, taking fire at a few words uttered on 
 a certain evening by Madame Recamier, should be 
 writing to her to ask almost passionately whether their 
 
THE TWO AMPfiKES. 351 
 
 union is after all impossible. M. Recamier is still 
 living, but there had apparently been some allusion to 
 a divorce. Ampere demands an assurance that if, on 
 being at liberty, she should decide to marry, she will 
 bear him in mind. He wishes to feel that there is no 
 one else between them. The thing seems to be less 
 a serious proposal than a sudden, rather fantastic desire 
 on his part to fill out a certain intellectual ideal of the 
 situation. In the way of ideals that of the reader, at 
 this point, is that there should be a record that Madame 
 Recamier, forty-eight years old, and with a husband in 
 excellent health, was annoyed at having this marrying 
 mood attributed to her. 
 
 In the autumn of 1823 she had gone to Italy with a 
 little retinue of friends, of whom Ampere was not the 
 least assiduous. She passed the winter in Rome, and the 
 young man, remaining near her, formed, with the stimu- 
 lus of her sympathy, that attachment for the Eternal 
 City which was to increase from year to year and be 
 the motive of his principal literary work. To be with 
 Madame Recamier was to be socially on a very agreeable 
 footing, for wherever she established herself she was 
 speedily surrounded by brilliant people. This winter and 
 the following summer, which the party spent at Naples, 
 must have been for young Ampere a supremely happy 
 season. To enjoy in Rome the society of the woman 
 
352 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 whom one considers the embodiment of everything 
 admirable, to have that delightful city offer at every 
 turn its happy opportunities and suggestions this is to 
 an appreciative spirit a particular refinement of bliss. 
 Madame Recamier remained a second winter in Italy, 
 and Ampere came home at the summons of his father, 
 who appears at this time to have " worried " greatly, in 
 vulgar phrase, about the young man's future, and who 
 was especially impatient to see his tragedies coming 
 forward at the Theatre Fran^ais. During his son's 
 absence in Rome the elder Ampere constantly writes to 
 him on this question, and reports upon the MS. readings 
 that have been given in his own circle one, for in- 
 stance, of all places in the world, at the Veterinary 
 School and upon the corrections and alterations that 
 have been proposed. Andr6 Ampere, as he grew older, 
 developed some rather uncomfortable eccentricities ; he 
 was in his private life and conversation the most un- 
 practical and ill-regulated of men ; and this persistent 
 desire to make a third-rate playwright of a young man 
 really gifted in other directions seems to indicate no 
 little inconsequence of mind. Jean-Jacques's pieces 
 were accepted, or half accepted, at the great theatre, 
 but they were never played, and they are sleeping at 
 this day in its dustiest pigeon-holes. He had indeed 
 a passion for writing verses, and produced, first and 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 353 
 
 last, a prodigious quantity of indifferent rhyme. Often, 
 after having hammered all day at recondite philology, 
 he would sit up half the night scribbling at the 
 dictation of a rather drowsy muse. He wrote in 
 general, thanks to his roving habits, which made odd 
 scraps and snatches of time of value, at all sorts of 
 hours and in all sorts of places. He would begin a 
 chapter of his " Histoire JRomaine " on the edge of 
 a table at a cafe in the Corso ; in one of his later letters 
 he speaks of having written a comedy in a railway 
 carriage. 
 
 The editor of these volumes gives a great number of 
 his letters to Mme. Hecamier, both during the year that 
 followed his separation from her at Naples and at later 
 periods. " It rains," he writes to her from Rome on 
 his way northward ; " I am writing this in a dark room, 
 looking out on a dismal little street. At Naples, at 
 least, when it rains, you have before your eyes a great 
 expanse. Instead of the sea and the island of Capri 
 I see an ugly white wall, four feet off. I should have 
 found a certain consolation in going to sit in the Villa 
 Pamfili, on that rock on the edge of the lake where we 
 read about the gardens of Armida and found them 
 again, or on the grass, near Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, 
 where we went on Easter day, or in wandering in Saint 
 Peter's, in the Coliseum, or on the edge of the Tiber." 
 
 A A 
 
354 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 There is little we could quote from these letters, how- 
 ever, even if we had space ; they are charming, they 
 speak equally well for the writer and for the sweet 
 sagacity of the woman who inspired them, they denote 
 a delightful relation, but they lack salient points, and 
 in their quality of love-letters they are liable sometimes 
 to weary the cold-hearted third person. Here, never- 
 theless, is a noteworthy paragraph : " You like me to 
 tell you of my work to describe my studies as a school- 
 boy does to his mamma. Well, then, this is what seems 
 to me at this moment the most delightful thing in the 
 world, and an infallible means of arriving at almost 
 universal knowledge. It's very simple. It is to note 
 in every book I read the very important points, to con- 
 centrate all my attention upon these and to try to 
 completely forget all the rest and to join to this 
 another observance, namely, that of reading on every 
 subject and in every language only the best that there 
 is. In this way, it seems to me, without uselessly 
 overloading one's mind, one can acquire a deal of very 
 positive and very various knowledge." This was 
 written in 1825, and it may at that moment have 
 been true ; it doubtless, indeed, will always have a 
 certain measure of truth. But the march of mind 
 has been so rapid these last fifty years that it is to be 
 feared that no particular method of study, however 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 355 
 
 ingenious, will carry one very far on the way to " uni- 
 versal knowledge." To read even the best only, 
 nowadays, is a task beyond the compass of indivi- 
 duals. But in one way on another Ampere was bent 
 upon superior science, and in pursuit of it he went in 
 the autumn of 1826 to Germany, and spent the winter 
 at Bonn, under the inspiration of Niebuhr and Wilhelm 
 von Schlegel. Madame de Stael had discovered Ger- 
 many, earlier in the century, for the French at large 
 Ampere discovered it afresh for the younger generation. 
 Schlegel was an old adorer of Madame Recamier, and a 
 word from her ensured her young friend a prompt 
 and impressive greeting. " At our first interview," 
 Ampere writes, "I admit I was rather disconcerted 
 by his affectation of fine manners and of the French 
 tone ; he seemed to avoid speaking of literature, as if 
 it were pedantry. This was not in my account, but 
 I was not discouraged ; I let him play the fine gentle- 
 man, and now that he has fairly set himself up before 
 me as a man of the world, that I have seen his yellow 
 livery and his order of Sweden, he begins to talk of 
 Sanscrit and the Middle Ages. By a happy chance he 
 is going to begin a course on the German language 
 and literature. What a master of German ! This 
 attraction, and that of a magnificent country, will 
 keep me here some time. The mountains which 
 
 A A 2 
 
356 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 edge the Rhine before reaching this place," he adds 
 and the writer of these lines has made the same obser- 
 vation " recall in a striking manner the horizon of 
 Rome." From Niebuhr he got what he could. " I have 
 done very well," he says, "to take no great trouble to 
 learn the old history of Rome ; I should have to begin 
 it afresh." For the rest of Ampere's life, it was always 
 a feather in his cap that on leaving Bonn he paid a 
 visit to Weimar and spent three weeks with Goethe. 
 He must himself have recalled this episode complacently, 
 for the great man had made much of him and of the 
 intelligent articles .which Ampere had written about 
 his works in the "tirlobe" newspaper, the organ of 
 serious young France at that time. Wherever he went 
 Madame Recamier's recommendation was of service to 
 him; she had ci-devant admirers stationed here and 
 there on purpose, as it were. In Berlin it was the 
 Prince Augustus of Prussia he who in 1811 had 
 very seriously wished to marry her. Here, in conclu- 
 sion, are Ampere's impressions of the German mind : 
 " Up to this time Germany inspires me with the 
 greatest respect for its superior men, but with little 
 interest in the common life. Their true superiority 
 resides in imagination and learning ; the men who are 
 without these two gifts, who make neither systems nor 
 poems, appear to me plain good people, with little 
 
THE TWO AMPERES. 357 
 
 cleverness or sensibility; you need to make an effort 
 of will to talk with them. But a German in whom 
 learning has not extinguished imagination, in whom 
 imagination does not lead learning astray, if good 
 luck wills it that he have lived in Italy to thaw out 
 his senses, and that he have gained experience of 
 practical life by affairs that man is a man such as 
 one can find only in Germany. There is such a one 
 here Niebuhr, of whom you must not speak in your 
 letter to Schlegel." 
 
 On leaving Germany Ampere went to Sweden and 
 Norway, and for the rest of his life he usually spent 
 half the year in foreign lands. To travel was a passion 
 with him, and though he had little money and was 
 famous for his awkward management of his personal 
 affairs, he appears to have been able to satisfy every 
 impulse of his restlessness. His father's house was not 
 a comfortable home, not because Andre Ampere was 
 not an extremely affectionate parent, but because 
 extreme naivete, when the character has taken a 
 melancholy turn, is not always identical with geniality. 
 Jean-Jacques once posted back to Paris from a distance 
 in response to an urgent summons from his sire. The 
 two sat down to dinner, and in a moment " It's very 
 odd," cried the elder, " but I should have thought 
 that it would give me more pleasure to see you ! " 
 
358 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 This was the lover of Julie Carron at fifty. From the 
 third of these volumes we have left ourselves space to 
 quote nothing. We can only recommend the whole 
 work to curious readers. The letters contained in the 
 third volume are more and more the record of a busy 
 life. Ampere was professor at the College de France, 
 member of the Academy of Inscriptions and the 
 Academie Francaise, and a frequent contributor to the 
 "Revue des Deux Mondes." He was 'no politician, but 
 he was a consistent anti-imperialist. The letters 
 which Madame Cheuvreux has gathered together throw 
 light here and there on many agreeable and interest- 
 ing figures the most pleasing, perhaps, being that 
 very superior man and, in temperament and turn of 
 mind, half Anglican Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. 
 But the whole society represented here the cultivated 
 liberal France of before the Empire of outside the 
 Empire makes, intellectually and morally, a very 
 honourable show. We said just now that it -seemed 
 to be sitting for its likeness; we only meant that 
 the portrait was not blurred. We see it at all its 
 hours and in all its moods, and we may believe that, 
 taken by surprise, observed unawares, no group of 
 people could on the whole have supported publicity more 
 gracefully than the two Amperes and their many friends. 
 
MADAME DE SABKAN. 
 
 THE present century in France has been the golden age 
 of editors. It might have been supposed that the mine 
 of literary wealth bequeathed to that country by the 
 eighteenth century had been exhausted, and that the 
 occupation of the exhibitory fraternity was gone. The 
 mine has been worked with extraordinary industry and 
 with the most perfect appliances of erudition and 
 criticism, and its contents have been brought to light 
 in particles of all dimensions in massive boulders, such 
 as only the more skilled engineers might safely trans- 
 port, in fragments convenient for immediate use, and in 
 barely ponderable powder and dust. More even than 
 our own time the eighteenth century was an age of 
 scribbling. This indeed is untrue if taken in the sense 
 that the amount of published writing, in proportion to 
 the size of society, was larger than in our own day; 
 but it is true if we speak with an eye to the quality of 
 
360 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 production. In proportion to the size of society, we 
 suspect that tfcere were more things written in private 
 between 1720 and 1790 which might go to press with- 
 out professional revision (save in the matter of ortho- 
 graphy) than between 1800 and 1875. There was in 
 other words, so far as form was concerned, less merely 
 wasted and squandered literary effort than we witness 
 nowadays. The distinction between padding and sub- 
 stance had not then been invented ; and it is not only 
 more charitable but more accurate to say that all the 
 writing (so far as it went) was substance rather than 
 padding. There are vast quantities of it that we can- 
 not read that we should not be able to read even if 
 our own age made no appeal to us ; but this is in a 
 great measure because the whole body of civilisation 
 has taken a jump, and we are wofully out of relation 
 with our ancestors. We are a thousand times more 
 clever ; but it may be questioned whether, just as the 
 Venetians in the sixteenth century knew something 
 about the art of painting that all our cleverness will 
 not put us into possession of, the ladies and gentlemen 
 who sowed the ultimate seeds of the French Revolution 
 had not a natural sense of agreeable literary expression 
 which is quite irrecoverable by our straining modern 
 wit. Comparisons, however, are odious, and it is certain 
 that our ancestors had their bores and that we have our 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 361 
 
 charmers. What we may say is that people of the 
 eighteenth century wrote much and wrote well so much 
 that some lost or unsuspected yellow manuscript is still 
 constantly drawn from hiding, and so well that the pre- 
 sumption is always in favour of its being very readable. 
 The best society at least wrote in those days more 
 than it does now, and the obvious reason is that it had 
 vastly more time on its hands. It had nothing to do 
 with trade; the men who composed it had no daily 
 duties in " stores " and counting rooms. The gentlemen 
 of the eighteenth century were either in the Army, the 
 Church, the diplomatic service, or the civil service ; and 
 these are all eminently sociable professions. The occu- 
 pations of women were proportionately less exacting, 
 for women's lives have always been fashioned in that 
 portion of the piece, as one may say, which remains 
 after men's have been cut out. Ladies, therefore, wrote 
 a great deal, and at a first glance at the field it seems 
 as if every woman of good fashion had produced certain 
 volumes of letters, of reminiscences, of memoirs, of 
 maxims, or of madrigals. Since Madame de Sevigne 
 French gentlewomen have been excellent letter writers, 
 and those lessons in easy style to which allusion was 
 made above may often be culled from their ill-spelled 
 gossip with their absent friends. (They all spelled 
 very much at random. Even Madame du Chatelet, the 
 
362 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 learned coquette with whom Voltaire lived so many 
 years, and who edited Newton and competed for the 
 prizes of the Academy of Sciences, gained appreciably 
 as a correspondent by being charitably read aloud.) 
 French society in the eighteenth century was indeed 
 very small, and we know it nowadays with surprising 
 minuteness ; we know it almost as well as if a brilliant 
 Balzac of that age had laboriously constructed it and, 
 with all the pains in the world, had not been able to 
 make his people seem really more multitudinous than 
 a pre-Raphaelite painter does the leaves of his trees. 
 It is a multitude, but it is a multitude that we can 
 count. For an historic group its outlying edges have 
 very little nebulosity or mystery very little of the 
 look of continuity with the invisible. The fierce light 
 that beats upon the subject-matter of French etudes 
 critiques has illumined every corner and crevice of it. 
 The people who are fond of remarking that, after all, 
 the world is very small, must make their assertion with 
 emphasis after a course of French memoirs, with an eye 
 to the notes, or simply after reading Saint e-Beuve's 
 "Causeries." The same names, the same figures, the 
 same anecdotes, the same allusions, constantly recur ; 
 it is a dense cross web of relations, distinctly cir- 
 cumscribed. It is hardly too much to say that for 
 all purposes save those of specialists the time is all 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 363 
 
 contained in Sainte-Beuve's forty volumes. A collection 
 of newspaper articles fairly comprehends it, even to 
 many of its minutice. 
 
 The situation has a certain resemblance to those por- 
 tions of modem Rome and Athens in which there are 
 still chances of disinterring Greek statues. Excava- 
 tion has been so systematically pursued that we may 
 reasonably suppose there are now many more maimed 
 divinities above ground than beneath it; and yet the 
 explorer's spade still rings against a masterpiece often 
 enough to maintain us in hopeful attention. It was 
 but the other day compared to the duration of its 
 mouldy concealment that the beautiful mailed Augus- 
 tus of the Vatican was restored to the light, and it was 
 but yesterday that MM. de Magnieu and Prat put 
 forward, in a beautiful and substantial volume, the 
 letters of Madame de Sabran. 1 This excellent publica- 
 tion belongs to a class to which there is good reason for 
 expecting more recruits. Madame de Sabran's letters 
 are love-letters, and in such missives the female hand 
 has at all times been prolific. The author was not in 
 her day a woman of eminent distinction; she moved 
 in the best society, she was known to be clever, 
 and those who corresponded with her had a high 
 
 1 " Correspondance Inedite de la Comtesse de Sabran et du 
 Chevalier de Boufflers." Paris, Plon. 1875. 
 
364 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 appreciation of her epistolary talent. But she never 
 published anything (although she alludes to a work on 
 the Conduct of Life which she has in hand), and you 
 will not find her name in the " Biographic Universelle." 
 She was one of the multitudinous minor satellites of 
 the French court; she represents the average clever 
 woman of quality of her time. Many other women 
 were presumably esteemed equally clever, and many 
 others must have left letters as voluminous and, on 
 some grounds, as valuable as hers. Many such, as we 
 know, have already seen the light. This is not said to 
 depreciate the merit of Madame de Sabran's epistles, 
 but simply to note the fact that, charming as they are, 
 they belong to a numerous family. Madame de Sabran's 
 letters were piously preserved by her son, recently 
 deceased (of whose childhood they contain much 
 mention), and are published in execution of his testa- 
 mentary injunctions. For him at least his mother 
 had claims to renown. Few readers of the volume 
 before us will fail to agree with him. In France it has 
 been highly relished, and the relations of Madame de 
 Sabran and the Chevalier de Boufflers have taken their 
 place as one of the most touching episodes in the 
 history of the old French society. The writer of these 
 lines has read the book with extreme pleasure, and he 
 cannot resist the temptation to prolong his pleasure 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 365 
 
 and share it with such readers as have a taste for 
 delicate things. 
 
 Madame de Sabran, who was born in 1750, married 
 with the usual docility of the young women of her 
 country. M. de Sabran was an officer in the navy, fifty 
 years his wife's senior, and possessed of a meagre for- 
 tune, though also of what we call nowadays a handsome 
 " record." She speaks of her marriage in the very 
 charming account which she gives, in 1787, of her 
 daughter's wedding : " My heart has never beaten so 
 hard as at the moment I placed her on the prie-dieu 
 where she was going to utter that famous yes that one 
 can never unsay when once it is said, much as one may 
 sometimes wish it. My own did not produce such an 
 effect upon me \ and yet what a difference ! I was 
 about to marry an infirm old man, of whom I was to be 
 rather the sick-nurse than the wife, and she a young 
 man full of grace and merit. But it is that then I felt 
 the consequences so little; everything seemed to me 
 equally well, equally good ; as I loved nothing, every- 
 thing seemed to me worthy of being loved, and I felt 
 toward my bonhomme de mari veiy much as toward my 
 father and my grandfather a feeling very sweet at 
 that time, and that my heart found sufficient. Time 
 has undeceived me ; I have lost my faith in happiness ; 
 so in spite of myself, during the whole service, I wept 
 
366 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 a flood of tears." Her married life lasted but a short 
 time ; M. de Sabran died of apoplexy, leaving his wife 
 among social ties that might have beguiled an even less 
 consolable widowhood. The Abb6 Delille, the horti- 
 cultural poet, taught her Latin, and the great Turgot 
 prized her conversation. Several years later she made 
 the acquaintance of the Chevalier de Boufflers, and her 
 first letter, in the volume before us, is of the date of 
 1778. Madame de Sabran was a woman of culture and 
 M. de Boumers was a patron of arts and letters ; he 
 also passed for one of the most agreeable men of his 
 time, and he figures not infrequently in its chronicles. 
 They became intimate, and Madame de Sabran's friend- 
 ship ripened into a passion of which the present letters 
 are the flickering but always ardent utterance. At 
 a certain moment (apparently in 1781) she begins to 
 address her correspondent with the thou and to call him 
 "my child." Up to this moment it had been "my 
 brother." M. de Boufners was altogether a man of the 
 world, and of the gayest world, and his roving disposi- 
 tion was a constant interruption to his attentions to his 
 friend. In 1785 he was appointed governor of the colony 
 of Senegal, and during his sojourn in Africa Madame de 
 Sabran continued her letters in the form of a journal. 
 He was absent but eighteen months, but after a short 
 visit to France he returned to his post and remained there 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 367 
 
 two years. Madame de Sabran resumed her diary, and 
 M. de Boufflers also kept, for her entertainment, a journal 
 which is hardly less charming than that of his mistress. 
 He married Madame de Sabran in 1797, when he was 
 sixty years old and his bride was forty-seven. This 
 long delay is but insufficiently accounted for by his 
 desire to be able to offer his wife a fortune and a great 
 position. M. de Boufflers enjoyed many of the ad- 
 vantages of matrimony without its encumbrances. 
 The division was not equal, for Madame de Sabran 
 seems to have had all the anxieties of a wife and none 
 of the guarantees. The couple emigrated during the 
 Revolution and their marriage took place in Germany. 
 The Chevalier de Boufflers died in Paris in 1815, 
 and his widow survived him twelve years. A certain 
 reticence on the part of the editors prompts the adven- 
 turous reader to wonder whether, in its later stages, 
 this intimacy was not touched by the ravages of time ; 
 but the conjecture is almost impertinent, decidedly 
 cynical and, inasmuch as there is no visible answer to 
 the question, utterly vain. 
 
 What have we here, then, is something very light 
 the passionate, unstudied jottings of an amiable and 
 intelligent woman who loves a man whose affection she 
 is conscious of possessing, but whose absences and 
 delays and preoccupations and admirations and social 
 
368 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 dissipations, and duties of all kinds, are a constant 
 irritant to the impatience, the jealousies, the melan- 
 choly, of which her own affection, in its singularly 
 delicate texture, is all indi visibly composed. It is hard 
 to say why we should be interested in these very per- 
 sonal affairs of an obscure French lady of a hundred 
 years ago, and if a stern logician should accuse us of 
 frivolous tastes we should find it difficult to justify 
 our enthusiasm. Madame de Sabran's letters have in 
 the direct way but a slender historical value, for they 
 allude to but few of the important events of the time. 
 They throw no very vivid light on contemporary 
 manners for there is little in them to refer them to 
 their actual date. Their psychological and dramatic 
 interest cannot be said to be profound ; they have none 
 of the dignity of tragedy. Their compass of feeling 
 is not wide, and the persons concerned in them are not, 
 in any very striking way, at the mercy of events- 
 They portray no terrible suffering, no changes of for- 
 tune ; the most important event related is that Madame 
 de Sabran marries her daughter. If they are passionate, 
 it is passion in the minor key, without any great volume 
 or resonance. Yet for all that they are charming, simply 
 because so far as they go they are perfect. Madame 
 de Sabran had an exquisite talent for the expression 
 of feminine tenderness, and a gift like this has an 
 
MADAME DE SABRAK 369 
 
 absolute value. Two appreciable causes throw it here 
 into a sort of picturesque relief. One is the fascination 
 of the background our sense of the peculiar atmo- 
 sphere of the eighteenth century; the other is the 
 extremely dramatic form in which, in this case, the 
 usual contrast between the man's life and the woman's 
 is presented to us the opposition between the heart 
 for which any particular passion was but one of many 
 and the heart for which all passion resolved itself into 
 a single unquenchable flame. As regards the eighteenth 
 century, it is rather late in the day, perhaps, to talk 
 about that ; but so long as we read the books of the 
 time, so long will our sense of its perplexing confusion 
 of qualities retain a certain freshness. No other age 
 appeals at once so much and so little to our sympathies, 
 or provokes such alternations of curiosity and repug- 
 nance. It is near enough to us to seem to partake of 
 many of our current feelings, and yet it is divided from 
 us by an impassable gulf. For many persons it will 
 always have in some ways an indefinable charm a 
 charm that they will entertain themselves in looking for 
 even in the faded and mouldering traces of its material 
 envelope its costumes, its habits, its scenic properties. 
 There are few imaginations possessed of a desultory 
 culture that are not able to summon at will the dim 
 vision of a high saloon, panelled in some pale colour, 
 
 B B 
 
370 FKENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 with oval medallions over the doors, with a polished, 
 uncarpeted floor, with thin-legged chairs and tables, 
 with Chinese screens, with a great glass door looking 
 out upon a terrace where clipped shrubs are standing in 
 square green boxes. It is peopled with men and women 
 whose style of dress inspires both admiration and mis- 
 trust. There is a sort of noble amplitude in the cut of 
 their garments and a richness of texture in the stuff ; 
 breeches and stockings set off the manly figure, and 
 the stiffly-pointed waists of the women serve as a stem to 
 the flower-like exuberance of dazzling bosoms. As we 
 glance from face to face the human creature seems to 
 be in an expansive mood \ we receive a lively impres- 
 sion of vigour of temperament, of sentimental fermen- 
 tation, of moral curiosity. The men are full of natural 
 gallantry and the women of natural charm, and of 
 forms and traditions they seem to take and leave very 
 much what they choose. It is very true that they by 
 no means always gain by minute inspection. An acute 
 sense of untidiness is brought home to us as we move from 
 group to group. Their velvets and brocades are admir- 
 able, but they are worn with rather too bold a confidence 
 in their intrinsic merit, and we arrive at the conviction 
 that powder and pomatum are not a happy combination 
 in a lady's tresses, and that there are few things less 
 attractive than soiled satin and tarnished embroidery. 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 371 
 
 In the same way we gather an uneasy impression of 
 
 moral cynicism; we overhear various phrases which 
 
 make us wonder whither our steps have strayed. And 
 
 yet, as we retreat, we cast over the threshold a look 
 
 that is on the whole a friendly one ; we say to ourselves 
 
 that after all these people are singularly human. They 
 
 care intensely for the things of the mind and the heart, 
 
 and though they often make a very foolish use of them 
 
 they strike here and there a light by whose aid we are 
 
 now reading certain psychological mysteries. They 
 
 have the psychological passion, and if they expose 
 
 themselves in morbid researches it is because they wish 
 
 to learn by example as well as precept and are not 
 
 afraid to pay for their knowledge. " The French age 
 
 par excellence" an acute French critic has said, "it 
 
 has both our defects and our qualities. Better in its 
 
 intelligence than in its behaviour, more reasoning than 
 
 philosophical, more moralistic than moral, it has offered 
 
 the world lessons rather than examples, and examples 
 
 rather than models. It will be ever a bad sign in 
 
 France when we make too much of it or too little ; 
 
 but it would be in especial a fatal day were we to 
 
 borrow its frivolity and its corruption and leave aside 
 
 its noble instincts and its faculty of enthusiasm." A 
 
 part of our kindness for the eighteenth century rests on 
 
 the fact that it paid so completely the price of both 
 
 B B 2 
 
372 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 corruptions and enthusiasms. As we move to and fro in 
 it we see something that our companions do not see 
 we see the sequel, the consummation, the last act of 
 the drama. The French Revolution rounds off the 
 spectacle and renders it a picturesque service which has 
 also something besides picturesqueness. It casts back- 
 ward a sort of supernatural light, in the midst of 
 which, at times, we seem to see a stage full of actors 
 performing fantastic antics for our entertainment. 
 But retroactively, too, it seems to exonerate the gene- 
 rations that preceded it, to make them irresponsible and 
 give them the right to say that, since the penalty was 
 to be exorbitant, a little pleasure more or less would 
 not signify. There is nothing in all history which, to 
 borrow a term from the painters, (t composes ;; better 
 than the opposition, from 1600 to 1800, of the audacity 
 of the game and the certainty of the reckoning. "We 
 all know the idiom which speaks of such reckonings as 
 " paying the piper." The piper here is the People. 
 We see the great body of society executing its many- 
 figured dance on its vast polished parquet ; and in a 
 dusky corner, behind the door, we see the lean, gaunt, 
 ragged Orpheus filling his hollow reed with tunes in 
 which every breath is an agony. 
 
 The opening lines of the first of Madame de Sabran's 
 letters are characteristic both of the time and of the 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 373 
 
 woman. The time was sceptical and priests were out 
 of fashion, except for such assistance as they might 
 render at a lady's toilet; but Madame de Sabran's 
 most amiable quality is a certain instinctive moderation. 
 " I really need to talk with you to-day, my brother, 
 to cheer myself up and divert myself from a certain 
 visit I have been making. And what a visit ! A visit 
 that one makes only at certain times, to the knees of 
 a certain man, to confess certain things which I won't 
 tell you. I am still very weary and ashamed with it. 
 I don't at all like that ceremony. They tell us it is 
 very salutary, and I submit, like a respectable woman." 
 It is not in our power to say what sins Madame de 
 Sabran had to confess; she gives an account of her 
 life at Anisy, the residence of her uncle the Bishop 
 of Laon, where she regularly spent her summers, 
 which seems to allow a margin for none but venial 
 aberrations : "I get up every morning at eight, and 
 read and write till eleven ; then I set myself at paint- 
 ing till dinner time. I am doing a superb oil picture 
 which I have composed for myself and which I will 
 show you. ... I read in Latin the original letters of 
 Heloise and Abelard, and I have a good mind to trans- 
 late some of the most coherent ones not those of 
 Aboard, for they are most tiresomely dry and pedantic, 
 but those of poor Heloise." In everything that Madame 
 
374 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 de Sabran says there is a certain closely personal accent, 
 and at last we have a complete portrait, formed by a 
 multitude of desultory touches. The total is something 
 we like so much that we do not feel disposed to call the 
 weak spots by their specific names. Is it vanity when 
 she frankly pronounces her oil painting " superb " 1 
 " Apropos, I have not yet spoken to you of the portrait 
 of the Countess Auguste that I made while she was 
 staying here ; it is a little masterpiece. It is a perfect 
 likeness. It is full length, a table beside her, with 
 books and papers. It is a charming picture, and it will 
 be a pleasure to me to show it to you." Is this vanity, 
 or is it the unaffected frankness of a person who is 
 conscious of genuine talent? We have no means of 
 taking the measure of Madame de Sabran's talent ; but 
 she was a very clever woman, and it is not hard to 
 believe that her pictures were charming and that the 
 musical airs which she is constantly composing and send- 
 ing to M. de Bouffiers were infinitely sweet. But in deal- 
 ing with people of this race and society, especially at that 
 time, we Anglo-Saxons are constantly reminded of the 
 necessity of weighing virtues and vices in an adjusted 
 scale. Words and things, ideas and feelings, have a 
 different value. There are French vanities that are very 
 innocent and English humilities that are not at all so ; 
 French corruptions that, mutatis mutandis, are by no 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 375 
 
 means damning. For instance, M. de Eoufflers, writing 
 from Africa, tells Madame de Sabran of the condition of 
 her portrait, which she has given him. "As by a special 
 grace, I have been left alone a moment. I have just 
 left my letter to go and kiss you. You are behind 
 certain cross-pieces of wood, intended to fix the picture 
 in its case, and you look like your pretty Delphine in 
 her convent parlour though if there is a difference, 1 
 know very well to whose advantage it is." Here is a 
 gallant gentleman trying to be agreeable to a superior 
 woman by telling her that she is prettier than her 
 own daughter. The inference is, that M. de Boufflers 
 thought he was saying something very charming and 
 that Madame de Sabran received his compliment in 
 a sympathetic spirit. And yet Madame de Sabran 
 was a devoted mother. M. de Boufflers in the next 
 sentence speaks with the tenderest solicitude of Made- 
 moiselle de Sabran, and in the following letter he sends 
 a most graceful message to his friend's children. " Kiss 
 your charming children for me. My heart bleeds when 
 I think that I cannot press them against my breast and 
 prove to them what it is in my eyes to be born of you." 
 The portrait mentioned by M. de Boufflers is apparently 
 not the charming picture by Mme. Vigee le Brun of which 
 a capital reproduction in aqua-fortis is prefixed to the 
 Correspondence. Madame de Sabran was called a 
 
376 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 beauty, but we should say that, if this picture is to be 
 trusted, this was just what she was not. It is an 
 intensely French physiognomy and quite the one that 
 shapes itself in our mind's eye out of the perusal of the 
 letters. But half its interest is in the way it pleases in 
 spite of its irregularity. It is extraordinarily sympathetic, 
 and offers a singular combination of wit and amiability. 
 In the letter but one preceding that one which has 
 been mentioned as indicating the moment of expansion, 
 as it were, in Madame de Sabran's friendship, she 
 evidently defends herself against such contingencies. 
 She has been scolding her friend for delay in writing. 
 " You can have no idea what I have suffered, and I am 
 so frightened at it myself that there is nothing I 
 wouldn't do to recover my reason, even to going to the 
 moon in search of it on the back of a hippogriff. But 
 meanwhile I take the firm resolution to trouble myself 
 no more about your silence, your absence, and even your 
 indifference ; to live a little for you, a great deal for 
 myself, and to be always gay and contented whatever 
 befalls me. In the midst of all this fine philosophy, 
 however," she adds, "I rejoice in your return"; and 
 her philosophy henceforth was destined to play a very 
 secondary part. There are times when she summons 
 it to her aid for as regards all things in which M. 
 de Boufflers was not concerned it was very alert and 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 877 
 
 competent ; but when she plays at resignation or 
 indifference, stoicism or epicureanism, she hardly even 
 pretends that she deceives herself. She had indeed a 
 strain of melancholy in her disposition which is con- 
 stantly cropping up; she was afraid of the deeper 
 cm-rents of life, and she thought that when one felt 
 one's feet touching bottom it was the part of wisdom 
 to stand still. "I don't rejoice as you do in the 
 discovery of truth. I am afraid it will hurt me. All 
 those people will turn your head and, in conducting you 
 to happiness, they will spoil this happiness of ours. 
 We are comfortable j let us rest upon that ; what do 
 we need more 1 I don't care for a science which is of 
 no use to our love and which may on the contrary be 
 injurious to it." M. de Boufflers had sent home a little 
 blackamoor as a present to a friend who had taken the 
 interesting stranger to see the aunt of the donor. 
 Shortly afterward Madame de Sabran called upon this 
 lady, who denounced the little negro as an ill-bred 
 monster. " As soon as he saw her he uttered horrible 
 cries and threw himself upon the ground with signs of 
 the greatest fright, while he had been caressing every 
 one else. On his being asked why, he replied that she 
 made up a face at him. The Marechale never suspected 
 that he had reasons for finding her different from other 
 people, and ;she has given him no thanks for his 
 
378 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 frankness. It makes one shudder to see how little we 
 know ourselves. Is it a good ? is it an evil ? I can't 
 decide. But I believe that illusion is useful in all 
 things, and for myself all that I fear in this world is 
 the truth. The truth is almost always sad and she leaves 
 almost no consolation behind her. Happily every 
 individual has a common interest in being cheated, and 
 the human race in this respect doesn't spare itself. 
 What is most to be desired is to be well cheated, till 
 one's last day." In one place, however, she relates how 
 her mind has taken a flight into the very empyrean of 
 philosophy. " At the degree of elevation at which my 
 spirit travelled, objects grew so small to my imagination 
 that you also seemed no more to me than a worm, and 
 I was indignant that so little an animal could do me 
 so much harm and make me see things so crookedly." 
 
 One feature of this correspondence and I suppose we 
 may dignify it with the name of historical, for it is 
 probable that in love-letters exchanged in aristocratic 
 circles at the present day such allusions are rare is the 
 manner in which both Madame de Sabran and M. de 
 Boufflers expatiate on the state of their health and 
 upon their drugs and doses. " Meanwhile," the former 
 writes, " I will take no more pills, since they make you 
 so sick at your stomach" ; and she adduces this conces- 
 sion as a proof of her lover's empire over her mind. 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 379 
 
 Could there be a more touching illustration of intimate 
 union than this phenomenon of a lover being acted 
 upon by his mistress's medicine ? Madame de Sabran's 
 health was delicate and she paid frequent visits to 
 various healing springs. " These two days," she writes 
 from Spa, " I have been in my bed with fever. I shall 
 get off with a bad cold, which I owe to the Princess of 
 Orange, who did me the honour I don't know by what 
 fantasy to choose me out of a thousand to accompany 
 her in a ride on horseback, which she performed 
 throughout at a great gallop, beneath a fearful sun, and 
 with an abominable wind. I came back tired half to 
 death, coughing, with my ribs and thighs broken, cursing 
 all the princesses on earth, who never do anything like 
 other people." On leaving Spa on this occasion 
 Madame de Sabran made an excursion into the Low 
 Countries, of which she gives a most humorous and 
 entertaining account. " We are making this journey 
 like plain goodwives, by the public vehicles, under 
 assumed names ; whereby it will cost us almost nothing, 
 we shall be much better, and be restored to Spa within 
 a week. But don't go and speak to any one of this 
 project ; I wish to tell it to you alone for a thousand 
 thousand reasons. You must know that I am called 
 Mme. de Jobert, and Mme. d'Andlau Mme. Bertin. We 
 came hither from Brussels in a barge which was quite 
 
380 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 like Noah's ark, as regards all that it contained. I 
 amused myself all day with sketching the queer people 
 who were with us, and among others two Capuchins, 
 whom I painted so like life that every one admired 
 them ; which gave me a great reputation and success in 
 the assembly. I effected immediately the conquest of a 
 young English merchant, who never left us during the 
 voyage, and who, from time to time, treated my 
 companion and me to beer, to refresh us, almost making 
 us tipsy, for in politeness we were afraid to refuse it." 
 " The journey to Holland," she writes later, "was not a 
 success [as regards her health], but it vastly amused us. 
 No one knew who we were ; we were taken now for 
 saleswomen on their way to the Haarlem fair, now for 
 ladies from Friesland, now for singing- women. We were 
 treated sometimes very well and sometimes very ill ; we 
 often dined at the public table. We travelled some- 
 times on foot, sometimes in a phaeton, sometimes in a 
 sail-boat. We passed one night on the highway and 
 another at the city -gate. It would be impossible to see 
 and do more things in a week. We went as far as 
 Amsterdam, where the sight of the port amazed us ; for 
 neither of us had ever seen a ship. They are superb 
 contrivances, but I should be very sorry to be shut up 
 in one, unless it were with you." 
 
 Madame de Sabran's letters are so vaguely dated that 
 
MADAME BE SABRAK 381 
 
 we are often in ignorance of her whereabouts ; but 
 considering that in theory she led a very quiet life 
 she seems to have spent a good deal of time on the 
 road. She made excursions if not journeys. To meet 
 M. de Boufflers away from home was often the purpose 
 of her wanderings. It would be part of the entertain- 
 ment afforded by these letters to understand the logic 
 of Madame de Sabran's goings and comings ; to know to 
 what extent it was part of her scheme to conceal from 
 the world the extent of her intimacy with her friend. 
 Such intimacies may in those days have been conceal- 
 able, but they certainly were not generally concealed. 
 Madame de Sabran lived half the year, however, with a 
 great clerical dignitary. She was a bishop's niece, and 
 this doubtless put her somewhat in the position of 
 Caesar's wife. It is not unfair to M. de Boufflers, 
 however, to imagine that his society was often to be 
 enjoyed only on his own terms, and that there were 
 moments when he would rather go ten miles to meet his 
 friend than thirty. Was it not in his character to 
 com mingle a due appreciation of the bird in the hand 
 with a lively attention to the bird in the bush? 
 Madame de Sabran, who professed in general a high 
 relish for illusions, appears to have judged her friend in 
 some points without them. We cannot say whether she 
 was jealous of the past : if she was, she gave a very 
 
382 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 amiable turn to her jealousy. Writing in 1787 from 
 Nancy, where M. de Boufflers had formerly been in 
 garrison, " I have not stopped thinking of you all day," 
 she says, " and I am tired to death with it. It must be 
 that the air of this place is impregnated with certain 
 little atoms that come and fasten themselves to me by 
 sympathy. I don't pass through a street without 
 thinking how often you have walked there. I don't see 
 a house without imagining it is inhabited by one of the 
 Dulcineas who formerly vied .with each other for the 
 happiness of pleasing you. I was present at the session 
 of the Academy on the day of Saint Louis, where I saw 
 all kinds of these same Dulcineas and was greatly enter- 
 tained. I tried to read in their faces and their eyes 
 some traces of love for you ; for at present, contrary to 
 old times, I want every one to love you. But I saw in 
 them the traces of time much more than of love ; they 
 were all frightfully old and ugly." Madame de Sabran 
 is generous, and this little scratch at the end is the least 
 possible tribute to human weakness. She saw another 
 indubitable Dulcinea at the theatre at Yalenciennes. 
 "Looking at her with other eyes than mine, she has 
 really very few charms. . . . She amused me a thousand 
 times more than the play. She was extremely occupied 
 with two officers, who kept her in continual motion from 
 right to left, to make neither jealous ; she laughed and 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 383 
 
 talked louder than the actors. This time I was jealous, 
 not of her successes, but of her happiness, and I said to 
 myself, ' She knew that poor African ; she loved him ; 
 she did more, and yet she has been able to forget him 
 and love others. How can she do it ? ' I should like to 
 have her receipt pauvre bete that I am, consuming 
 myself in vain regrets and, a thousand leagues away from 
 him, seeing only with his eyes, hearing him only, able to 
 think of him only, making the past the present for the 
 love of him, and giving up the present to sadness and 
 despair. My life will not be longer than hers ; yet she 
 turns hers to profit and I throw mine out of the window." 
 The reader, as he goes, marks certain passages as 
 signs of the times; the first thunder-growls of the 
 French Revolution affect one as the strokes of the bell 
 that rings up the curtain at a tragedy. " People talk of 
 nothing but taxes and cutting down pensions : it is the 
 paying the piper le quart d'hevre de Rabelais. People 
 live with the edge of their teeth." And elsewhere : 
 "The poor Marshal [de Soubise] died this morning. 
 His sister the devote is in despair all the more that he 
 died without confession and without consciousness to 
 ask pardon of God for his millions of mortal sins. He 
 was the Solomon of our age, minus the wisdom. His 
 whole seraglio is at present in tears and misery, even to 
 the sultana Yalide. The King inherits five hundred 
 
384 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 thousand livres of income ; it comes in the nick of time, for 
 in spite of the notables and their sage counsels, he doesn't 
 know where to thrust his head." Madame de Sabran was 
 in the tree that the tempest had begun to shake ; she was 
 on an honourable footing of familiarity at court. Her 
 little son Elzear was at Versailles with his uncle. " He 
 has already," she writes, "great success at court. The 
 Queen found him on her passage and kissed him on 
 his two little pink cheeks. This morning she said to 
 me, ' Do you know that I kissed a gentleman yesterday ? ' 
 1 1 know it, madame, for he boasts of it.' " 
 
 The journal kept by M. de Boufflers during his second 
 sojourn in Senegal is appended to these letters of his 
 friend. M. de Boufflers is known on other evidence, 
 but this charming record of homeward thoughts in exile 
 completes his portrait completes it very favourably. 
 He is not positively an edifying figure, but he is, in his 
 way, a decidedly interesting one. He was an eminent 
 specimen of the " charming man," as this fortunate 
 mortal flourished in favourable social conditions. 
 Those of the last century in France placed him much 
 more in relief, and enabled him to develop on a more 
 imposing scale, than the pre-occupied, democratic, 
 commercial society of our own day. M. de Boufflers 
 was a gentleman in the large picturesque sense ; it is 
 striking at what a cost his gentility was kept up on 
 
MADAME DE SABRAK 385- 
 
 what a copious diet it had to be fed. He had an 
 admirable vigour of temperament and he was thoroughly 
 at home in the world. He was the son of a king's 
 mistress and the incumbent of an ecclesiastical living of 
 forty thousand livres, by the bounty of the king him- 
 self (the deposed Stanislaus I. of Poland, to whom as a 
 comfort for his old age Louis XY. his son-in-law 
 made over the duchy of Lorraine, where the little court 
 of Luneville was a vastly less splendid, but an easier 
 and cosier, Versailles). Boufflers had signalized his 
 period of probation at the seminary of Saint Sulpice by 
 the production of certain contes galants, which, though 
 abbes in those days could go far, transgressed even the 
 ecclesiastical licence. So he turned from priest to 
 knight of Malta, went to the German wars, amused 
 himself on a great scale, squandered his money, and at 
 middle age, to repair his wasted substance, had to 
 solicit a colonial governorship. In Africa, character- 
 istically, his vigour and vivacity did him service ; he 
 took his duties in hand and really administered his 
 government. All this time he dabbled in letters and 
 made love ct, Venvi. There are several anecdotes about 
 him in Grimm's " Correspondance," but all that I 
 know of his literature is a short tale in verse, in two 
 alternating rhymes, quoted by Grimm, and chiefly 
 remarkable for its frank indecency. On his return from 
 
 c c 
 
386 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS 
 
 Africa he went as deputy to the States-General and, after 
 the Revolution, entered the French Academy and 
 completed the circle of his activity by composing a very 
 dull book on Free Will. The Boufflers of these letters 
 is the full-blown Boufflers of middle life, largely versed 
 in men, women and things, and possessed of a great 
 acquired flexibility of sentiment and wit. He strikes 
 one as a shrewd epicurean, with a decided mind to eat 
 his cake and have it. It is nothing new to observe that 
 when men and women spin the web of sentiment 
 together, the finest threads are generally the woman's, 
 and it doubtless cannot be said, in this particular case, 
 that M. de Boufflers abused the lover's usual right to be 
 less exquisite than his mistress. Certain however it is 
 that the reader cannot rid himself of the feeling that 
 no,t a little of what is exquisite in Madame de Sabrari 
 is wasted, given simply to the air, exhaled into the 
 elements. M. de Boufflers balanced his account in the 
 gross, and of a certain proportion of this amiable 
 woman's articulate heartbeats no note was ever made. 
 But probably we make these reflections simply because 
 we are jealous of the extravagant Chevalier. The reader 
 is himself in love with Madame de Sabran and he 
 judges M. de Boufflers but grudgingly. Speaking 
 impartially, these two hundred pages of his journal are 
 delightful reading. His gaiety, his wit ; his ardour, his 
 
MADAME DE SABRAST. 387 
 
 tenderness, his mingled impatience and resignation, his 
 marital invocations and ejaculations, his delicate natural 
 compliments, make the tone of this fragmentary diary a 
 real model of manly grace. 
 
 There is a sketch of M. de Boufflers in one of Madame 
 de Sabran's letters which should already have been 
 quoted : " No, my child, I have no use for illusion on 
 your part ; our love has no need of it ; it was born 
 without it and it will subsist without it ; for it was 
 surely not my charms, which had ceased to exist when 
 you knew me, that fixed you near me ; neither is it 
 your manieres de Huron, your absent, surly air, -your 
 stinging, truthful sallies, your great appetite, and your 
 profound sleep when one wishes to talk with you, that 
 have made me love you to distraction ; it is a certain 
 nameless something that puts our souls into unison, a 
 certain sympathy that makes me feel and think like you. 
 For beneath this rude envelope you conceal the spirit 
 of an angel and the heart of a woman You unite all 
 contrasts and there is no being in heaven or on earth 
 more lovable and more loved than you. Come and see 
 me, & cause de cela, as soon as you can. " It implies no 
 want of sagacity to imagine that the unflattering lines 
 in this picture are only finer and subtler caresses. M. 
 de Boufflers could at times express himself with an 
 implicit tenderness of which an angel, since Madame de 
 
 c c 2 
 
388 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Sabran would have it so, need hardly have been 
 ashamed. " A thing that no one suspects, not even you, 
 is that I am forty-eight years old to-day. Here is a 
 vast amount of time lost ; for there have been nothing 
 but minutes well spent. I leave you to guess them. 
 But, ma fille, this number of forty -eight doesn't it 
 impress you with respect ? I let you off of the respect 
 iij advance, for it seems to me that I leave half of my 
 years here, as I leave half of my luggage, not wanting it 
 all on my voyage. Besides, I have grown so used to 
 the idea of being loved by you, in spite of youth, in spite 
 of old age, that I think much less of my age as it goes 
 on. You remember, perhaps, that portrait that I loved 
 so before I dared to speak to the original ; that widow's 
 dress which I wished you to retain in my honour. My 
 age makes me think of it, but it doesn't make me think 
 of your change ; it is only matter that changes in us, 
 and there is so little in you that it seems to me that 
 I have nothing to fear. Farewell, my daughter. I 
 have struck out two or three lines which would have 
 saddened you. Let us love life and not fear death, 
 for souls don't die, but love for ever." This was 
 written on his ship, as he was approaching the shores 
 of France, and he adds the next day : "I see France 
 drawing near, and I am like the little girl of a fairy 
 story when they told her, There is a kingdom ; in the 
 
MADAME DE SABRAN. 389 
 
 kingdom there is a town ; in the town there is a 
 house; in the house there is a room. . . . Here are 
 forty days thrown overboard," he says later, recording 
 adverse winds. " Forty days ! that is almost the life 
 of a man, if one counts in life only the moments 
 worth counting." It is to be hoped that he found 
 reason to reckon time less wastefully after his reunion 
 with his friend. 
 
 These few extracts from Madame de Sabran's letters 
 can have given but an imperfect idea of those things 
 by which she irresistibly pleases. Her grace, her 
 tempered vivacity, her softened intensity, her admir- 
 able mixture of passion and reason, her happy, natural, 
 flexible style, are all forcible appeals to our sympathy. 
 It seemed in place just now to say that some of these 
 charming qualities had been squandered ; but I must 
 hasten to unsay it when I reflect that, in this foreign 
 land and in this alien age, we restlessly appreciative 
 moderns are almost reverently inhaling their faint, 
 sweet perfume. 
 
MtfRIMEE'S LETTERS. 
 
 THE many readers who take pleasure in clever French 
 books have found themselves of late deploring the 
 sadly diminished supply of this commodity. The past 
 few years have brought forth no new literary names 
 of the first rank in France and have witnessed the 
 decline and extinction of most of the elder talents. 
 It is a long time now since a French book has made 
 a noise on valid grounds. Here, at last, however, is 
 a publication which, in six weeks, has reached a fourth 
 edition and which most people of taste are talking 
 about. But, though new in subject, the two volumes 
 to which we allude belong to the literature of thirty 
 years ago. They are the last contribution to literature 
 of a writer whose reputation was made in the early 
 part of the century. We recently heard it declared 
 by a competent critic that they contain the best writing 
 (as simple writing) that has appeared in France since 
 Voltaire. This is strong language ; but the reader of 
 
MRIMfiE'S LETTERS. 391 
 
 the easy, full-flavoured, flexible prose to which Merimee 
 treats his correspondent will certainly feel the charm 
 that prompted it. Prosper Meriuiee's title to fame 
 has hitherto consisted in a couple of dozen little 
 tales, varying from ten to a hundred pages in length. 
 They have gradually come to be considered perfect 
 models of the narrative art ; and we confess our own 
 admiration for them is such that we feel like declaring 
 it a capital offence in a young story-teller to put pen 
 to paper without having read them and digested them. 
 It was a very handsome compliment to pure quality 
 (to the sovereignty of form) when Merimee, with his 
 handful of little stories, was elected to the French 
 Academy. The moral element in his tales is such 
 as was to be expected in works remarkable for their 
 pregnant concision and for a firmness of contour 
 suggesting hammered metal. In a single word they 
 are not sympathetic. Sympathy is prolix, sentiment 
 is diffuse, and our author, by inexorably suppressing 
 emotion, presents his facts in the most salient relief. 
 These facts are, as a general thing, extremely disagree- 
 able murder and adultery being the most frequent 
 and the catastrophe being always ingeniously tragical. 
 Where sentiment never appears, one gradually con- 
 cludes that it does not exist; and we had mentally 
 qualified this frigid artist as a natural cynic. A 
 
392 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 romancer with whom bloodshed and tears were so 
 abundant and subjective compassion so rare had pre- 
 sumably a poor opinion of the stock from which heroes 
 and heroines spring. Many years ago M. Merimee 
 ceased to publish stories and devoted himself to archae- 
 ology and linguistics. We -have often wondered how 
 during all these years he employed his inciswe imagi- 
 nation. The "Lettres a une Inconnue" inform us. 
 
 They consist of a series of familiar often singularly 
 familiar epistles, addressed during more than thirty 
 years to a lady of whom nothing is generally known. 
 The letters begin apparently about 1838 ; the last 
 is written in September 1870, two hours before the 
 anthor's death, in the prime of his country's recent 
 disasters. Love-letters we suppose they are properly 
 to be called ; but the reader may judge from a few 
 extracts whether they seem superficially to belong 
 to this category. In his private as well as his public 
 compositions Merirnee was an enemy to fine phrases; 
 and here, instead of burning incense at the feet of 
 his beloved, he treats her to such homely truths as 
 these : " The cakes you eat with such appetite to 
 cure you of the backache you got at the opera sur- 
 prised me still more. But it isn't that among your 
 defects I don't place coquetry and gluttony in the first 
 rank." " The affection that you have for me is only 
 
LETTERS. 393 
 
 a sort of jeu d'esprit. You are all e#prit. You are 
 one of those ' chilly women of the North.' You only 
 live by your head." He is forever accusing her of 
 coquetry, heartlessness, duplicity, mendacity. "Why, 
 after we have been what we are to each other so 
 long, do you take several days to answer the simplest 
 question ? " After her marriage 'he tells her it is 
 all nonsense for her to say that she is a better person 
 than she was before. " You seem to me prettier ; 
 but you have acquired, on the other hand, a pretty 
 dose of selfishness and hypocrisy." It is true that 
 in the beginning of their acquaintance he disclaims 
 the ambition of being her lover. "Perhaps you'll 
 gain a real friend ; and I, perhaps, shall find in you 
 what I have been looking for so long a woman with 
 whom I am not in love and in whom I can have 
 confidence." One doubts whether he was gratified. 
 " You grow every day more imperious and you have 
 scandalous refinements of coquetry." And yet one 
 wonders, too, whether to attribute to friendship or 
 love this vigorous allusion to a walk with his corre- 
 spondent : " For myself, contrary to my habit, I 
 have no distinct recollections. I am like a cat who 
 licks his whiskers a long time after drinking milk." 
 We owe our knowledge of these letters to the lady 
 herself, who has published them with a frankness more 
 
394 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 common in France than among ourselves. She has, 
 however, taken every pains to draw the veil about her 
 identity, and it may be said on her behalf that it is 
 none of our business who she was or what she was. 
 But only a very unimaginative reader will spare his 
 conjectures. There is something extremely provoking 
 to curiosity in the image, however shadowy, of a woman 
 clever enough to have all this cleverness addressed to 
 her. The author tells her early in the book that she 
 has "a nature so raffinee" something more than our 
 " refined" "as to be for him the summing-up of a 
 civilization." It is not, apparently, without reason that 
 he writes to her : "Between your head and your heart 
 I never know which is to carry the day. You don't 
 know yourself ; but you always give the victory to your 
 head." She had a head worth favouring. Constantly 
 busy himself with philological studies, he recommends 
 her to learn Greek as a pastime, and tells her how to 
 set to work. It soon appears that she has taken his 
 advice, and in the course of time we find her enjoying 
 Homer and the tragedians. Later, when, with the 
 privilege of a twenty years' friendship, he utters all the 
 crudities that come into his head and they grow very 
 numerous as he grows older he scolds her for being 
 alarmed at what she finds in Aristophanes. The burden 
 of his complaint from the first is her reserve, her 
 
MfiRDIEE'S LETTERS. 395 
 
 calculations, her never obeying the first impulse. She 
 had carried so far refusing to see him, for fear of 
 getting tired of him, that he estimates that they have 
 spent but three or four hours together in the course 
 of six or sevea years. This is Platonism with a 
 vengeance and Merimee makes an odd figure in it. He 
 constantly protests, and begs for a walk in the Champs 
 Elysees or a talk in the gallery of the Louvre. The 
 critic to whom we just alluded and whose impression 
 differs from our own in that these volumes have made 
 him like the writer more than before, rather than less, 
 maintains that we have a right to be very severe 
 toward the heroine. She was cold, he affirms ; she was 
 old-maidish and conventional ; she had no spontaneous 
 perceptions. When Merimee is not at hand to give 
 her a cue her opinions are evidently of the flimsiest. 
 When she travels he exhorts her almost fiercely to 
 observe and inquire, to make a note of everything 
 curious in manners and morals, and he invariably scolds 
 her for the inefficiency of her compte-rendu. This is 
 probably true enough. She had not the unshrinking 
 glance of her guide, philosopher and friend. But we 
 confess that our own sentiment with regard to her 
 partakes of vague compassion. Merimee's tone and 
 general view of things, judged in a vivid moral light, 
 were such as very effectually to corrupt a pliable and 
 
396 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 dependent nature; and what we perceive in his cor- 
 respondent's reserve her reluctance, in common phrase 
 to make herself cheap is the natural effort to preserve 
 a certain ideal dignity in her own eyes. " Each time 
 we meet/' he declares, in 1843, "it seems as if there 
 were a new formation of ice to break through. Why 
 don't I find you the same as I left you? If we met 
 oftener, this wouldn't happen. I am like an old opera 
 for you, which you need to forget to hear it again with 
 any pleasure." He numbers this annoying self- 
 possession, apparently, among the machinations of what 
 he calls her "infernal coquetry." His conception of 
 the feminine character, though it had sunk a deep shaft 
 in a single direction, was strikingly narrow. In the 
 later letters, where he appears altogether in his dressing- 
 gown and slippers, he is for ever berating his old friend 
 for her "prudery." He can think of no other name 
 for the superficiality of her investigation of certain 
 points of harem-life, during a sojourn in Algiers; and 
 he showers the same accusation upon her when, on his 
 having lent her books unfamiliar to most women, she 
 alludes to their peculiar character in returning them. 
 One is anxious to know where he drew the line between 
 "prudery" and modesty, or whether he really thought 
 the distinction not worth making. And yet it was not 
 that his friendship had not a masculine delicacy of its 
 
LETTERS. 397 
 
 own. He says innumerable tender things, in which his 
 ardour is anything but cynical. Here is an allusion to a 
 Spanish greeting with which she had begun a letter : 
 " I wish I had seen you when you were writing amigo 
 de mi alma. When you have your portrait taken for 
 me, say that to yourself, instead of 'petite pomme d'api,' 
 as the ladies say who wish to make their mouths look 
 pretty." The nearest approach in the book to the stuff 
 that love letters are generally made of is an allusion to 
 the pains of the tender passion. " Several times it has 
 come into my head not to answer you and to see you no 
 more. This is very reasonable and a great deal can be 
 said for it. The execution is more difficult." 
 
 Gradually, however, sentiment of the tenderer sort 
 disappears but by absorption, as one may say, and not 
 by evanescence. After a correspondence of ten years 
 the writer's devotion may be taken for granted. His 
 letters become an irremissible habit, an intellectual 
 need, a receptacle for his running commentary on life. 
 The second volume of the "Lettres k une Inconnue " 
 contains less that is personal to the lady, and more 
 allusions to other people and things, more anecdotes and 
 promiscuous reflections. Mlrimee became more and more 
 a man of the world. He was member of two Academies, 
 inspector and conservator of national monuments (a very 
 active post, apparently), a senator of the Empire and an 
 
398 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 intimate friend of his sovereigns. He travels constantly 
 from Moscow to Madrid, makes regular archaeological 
 surveys through the length and breadth of France, and 
 pays frequent visits to England. He meets every one 
 and knows most people most great people, at least. In 
 the midst of these things he despatches constant notes 
 to his correspondent, flashing his lantern fitfully over 
 his momentary associates and over events of the hour. 
 There is a multitude of entertaining opinions, charac- 
 terizations and anecdotes ; but we lack space for quota- 
 tions. Everything he says is admirably said ; his 
 phrase, in its mingled brevity and laxity, is an excellent 
 "fit" for his thought. He tells anecdotes as vividly 
 as Madame de Sevigne* and in much fewer words. His 
 judgments are rarely flattering and his impressions 
 rarely genial ; and, as proper names have been retained 
 throughout, with unprecedented audacity, many of his 
 opinions must have aroused a sufficiently inharmonious 
 echo. He goes again and again to England ; but fami- 
 liarity seems to breed something very much akin to 
 contempt. "I am beginning to have enough of ce 
 pays-ci. I am satiated with perpendicular architecture 
 and the equally perpendicular manners of the natives. 
 I passed two days at Cambridge and at Oxford in the 
 houses of ' reverends,' and, the matter well considered, 
 I prefer the Capuchins. I gave (at Salisbury) half-a- 
 
LETTERS. 3P9 
 
 crown to a person in black who showed me the cathe- 
 dral, and then I asked him the address of a gentleman 
 to whom I had a letter from the Dean. It turned out 
 that it was to him the letter was addressed. He looked 
 like a fool, and I too ; but he kept the money." The 
 most interesting thing throughout the later letters is 
 not, however, the witty anecdotes and the raps at the 
 writer's confreres, but the development of his scepticism 
 and cynicism. He took his stand early in kfe on his 
 aversion to florid phrases (one must remember, in 
 palliation, that he was a Frenchman of the so-called 
 generation of 1830), and he fell a victim ultimately to 
 what we may call a dogmatization of his temperament. 
 His dislike for fine names led him at last to a total 
 disbelief in fine things. He had found a great many 
 pretty puppets stuffed with sawdust or nothing at all ; 
 so he concluded that all sentiment was hollow and flat- 
 tered himself that he had pricked the bubble. We have 
 noted but a single instance of his speaking of a case of 
 moral ardour without raillery more or less explicit ; and 
 even here it is a question to what extent the ardour is in 
 fact moral. " Since there have been so many romances 
 and poems of the passionate or would-be passionate sort 
 every woman pretends to have a heart. Wait a little 
 yet. When you have a heart in good earnest, you will 
 lat me know. You will regret the good time when you 
 
400 FKEtfCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 lived only by your head, and you will see that the evils 
 you suffer from now are but pin-pricks compared to the 
 dagger-blows that will rain down on you when the 
 time of passions comes." M. Taine, in a masterly 
 preface to these volumes, has laid his finger on the weak 
 spot in Merimee's character. " For fear of being dupe, 
 he mistrusted in life, in love, in science, in art ; and he 
 was dupe of his mistrust. One is always dupe of some- 
 thing." This latter sentence may be true ; but 
 Merimee's fallacy was, of all needful illusions, the least 
 remunerative while it lasted, for it eventually weakened 
 an intellect which had every reason for being strong. 
 The letters of his latter years are sad reading. His 
 wit loses none of its edge; but what the French call 
 secheresse had utterly invaded his soul. His health 
 breaks down, and his short notes are hardly more than 
 a record of reiterated ailments and contemptuous 
 judgments. Most forms of contempt are unwise; but 
 one of them seems to us peculiarly ridiculous contempt 
 for the age one lives in. Men with but a tithe of 
 Merimee's ingenuity have been able, and have not 
 failed, in every age, to make out a deplorable case for 
 mankind. 
 
 Poor Merimee, apparently, long before his death, 
 ceased to enjoy anything but the sunshine and a good 
 dinner. His imagination faded early, and it is certainly 
 
MflRIMfiE'S LETTERS. 401 
 
 a question whether this generous spirit, half-sister, at 
 least, to Charity, will remain under a roof in which the 
 ideal is treated as uncivilly as Merimee treated it. He 
 was constantly in the Imperial train at Fontainebleau, 
 Compiegne and Saint Cloud; but he does little save 
 complain of the discomforts of grandeur in general and 
 of silk tights in especial. He was, however, as the 
 event proved, a sincere friend of the Emperor and 
 Empress, and not a mere mercenary courtier. He 
 always speaks kindly of them and sharply of every one 
 else except Prince Bismarck, whom he meets at Biarritz 
 and who takes his fancy greatly. The literature of the 
 day he considers mere rubbish. Half a dozen of hii 
 illustrious contemporaries come in for hard knocks ; but 
 M. Renan and his passages are his pet aversion. The 
 manners of the day are in his opinion still worse and 
 the universal world is making a prodigious fool of itself. 
 The collapse of the Empire, in which he believed as 
 much as he believed in anything, set the seal to his 
 pessimism, and he died, most consentingly, as one may 
 suppose, as the Germans were marching upon Paris. 
 His effort had been to put as little as possible of his 
 personal self into his published writings; but fortune 
 and his correspondent have betrayed him, and after 
 reading these letters we feel that we know him. This 
 fact, added to their vigour, their vivacity and raciness, 
 
 D D 
 
402 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 accounts for their great success. There had been lately 
 a great many poems and novels, philosophies and 
 biographies, abounding in more or less fantastic simu- 
 lacra of human creatures ; but here is a genuine, visible, 
 palpable man, with a dozen limitations but with a 
 most distinct and curious individuality. 
 
THE THEATRE FRANCAIS. 
 
 M. FEANCISQUE SARCEY, the dramatic critic of the Paris 
 " Temps." and the gentleman who, of the whole journal- 
 istic fraternity, holds the fortune of a play in the 
 hollow of his hand, has been publishing during the 
 last year a series of biographical notices of the chief 
 actors and actresses of the first theatre in the world. 
 " Comediens et Comediennes : la Comedie Frangaise ' ' 
 such is the title of this publication, which appears in 
 monthly numbers of the "Librairie des Bibliophiles," 
 and is ornamented on each occasion with a very prettily 
 etched portrait, by M. Gaucherel, of the artist to whom 
 the number is devoted. By lovers of the stage in 
 general and of the Theatre Frangais in particular the 
 series will be found most interesting; and I welcome 
 the pretext for saying a few words about an institution 
 which if such language be not hyperbolical I pas- 
 sionately admire. I must add that the portrait is 
 
 D D 2 
 
404 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 incomplete, though for the present occasion it is more 
 than sufficient. The list of M. Sarcey's biographies is 
 not yet filled up; three or four, those of Madame 
 Favart and of MM. Febvre and Delaunay, are still 
 wanting. Nine numbers, however, have appeared the 
 first being entitled "La Maison de Moliere," and 
 devoted to a general account of the great theatre ; 
 and the others treating of its principal societaires and 
 pensionnaires in the following order : 
 
 Regnier, 
 
 Got, 
 
 Sophie Croizette, 
 
 Sarah Bernhardt, 
 
 Coquelin, 
 
 Madeleine Brohan, 
 
 Bressant, 
 
 Madame Plessy. 
 
 (This order, by the way, is purely accidental ; it is not 
 that of age or of merit.) It is always entertaining to 
 encounter M. Francisque Sarcey, and the reader who, 
 during a Paris winter, has been in the habit, of a 
 Sunday evening, of unfolding his " Temps " immediately 
 after unfolding his napkin, and glancing down first of 
 all to see what this sturdy feuilletoniste has found to his 
 hand such a reader will find him in great force in the 
 
THE THMTRE FRANOAIS. 405 
 
 pages before us. It is true that, though I myself 
 confess to being such a reader, there are moments when 
 I grow rather weary of M. Sarcey, who has in an 
 eminent degree both the virtues and the defects which 
 attach to the great French characteristic the habit of 
 taking terribly au serieux anything that you may set 
 about doing. Of this habit of abounding in one's own 
 sense, of expatiating, elaborating, reiterating, refining, 
 as if for the hour the fate of mankind were bound up 
 with one's particular topic, M. Sarcey is a capital and 
 at times an almost comical representative. He talks 
 about the theatre once a week as if honestly, between 
 himself and his reader the theatre were the only thing 
 in this frivolous world that is worth seriously talking 
 about. He has a religious respect for his theme and 
 he holds that if a thing is to be done at all it must be 
 done in detail as well as in the gross. 
 
 It is to this serious way of taking the matter, to his 
 thoroughly businesslike and professional attitude, to his 
 unwearying attention to detail, that the critic of the 
 " Temps" owes his enviable influence and the weight of 
 his words. Add to this that he is sternly incorruptible. 
 He has his admirations, but they are honest and dis- 
 criminating ; and whom he loveth he very often chasten- 
 eth. He is not ashamed to commend Mile. X., who has 
 only had a curtsy to make, if her curtsy has been the 
 
406 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 ideal curtsy of the situation ; and he is not afraid to 
 overhaul M. A., who has delivered the tirade of the play, 
 if M. A., has failed to hit the mark. Of course his 
 judgment is good ; when I have had occasion to measure 
 it I have usually found it excellent. He has the scenic 
 sense the theatrical eye. He knows at a glance what 
 will do, and what will not do. He is shrewd and 
 sagacious and almost tiresomely in earnest, and this is 
 his principal brilliancy. He is homely, familiar and 
 colloquial ; he leans his elbows on his desk and does 
 up his weekly budget into a parcel the reverse of 
 coquettish. You can fancy him a grocer retailing 
 tapioca and hominy full weight for the price; his 
 style seems a sort of integument of brown paper. But 
 the fact remains that if M. Sarcey praises a play the 
 play has a run ; and that if M. Sarcey says it will not do 
 it does not do at all. If M. Sarcey devotes an encourag- 
 ing line and a half to a young actress, mademoiselle is 
 immediately lancee ; she has a career. If he bestows a 
 quiet " bravo " on an obscure comedian, the gentleman 
 may forthwith renew his engagement. When you 
 make and unmake fortunes at this rate, what matters it 
 whether you have a little elegance the more or the less ? 
 Elegance is for M. Paul de St. Victor, who does the 
 theatres in the " Moniteur," and who, though he writes 
 a style only a trifle less pictorial than that of Theophile 
 
THE THEATRE FRAXCAIS. 407 
 
 Oautier himself, lias never, to the best of my belief, 
 brought clouds or sunshine to any playhouse. I may add, 
 to finish with M. Sarcey, that he contributes a daily 
 political article generally devoted to watching and 
 showing up the " game " of the clerical party to 
 Edmond About's journal, the " XIX itme Siecle " ; that 
 he gives a weekly conference' on current literature ; that 
 he "confers" also on those excellent Sunday morning 
 performances now so common in the French theatres, 
 during which examples of the classic repertory are 
 presented, accompained by a light lecture upon the 
 history and character of the play. As the commentator 
 on these occasions M. Sarcey is in great demand, and he 
 officiates sometimes in small provincial towns. Lastly, 
 frequent playgoers in Paris observe that the very 
 slenderest novelty is sufficient to insure at a theatre the 
 (very considerable) physical presence of the conscientious 
 critic of the " Temps." If he were remarkable for 
 nothing else he would be remarkable for the fortitude 
 with which he exposes himself to the pestiferous climate 
 of the Parisian temples of the drama. 
 
 For these agreeable " notices " M. Sarcey appears to 
 have mended his pen and to have given a fillip to his 
 fancy. They are gracefully and often lightly turned ; 
 occasionally, even, the author grazes the epigrammatic. 
 They deal, as is proper, with the artistic and not with 
 
408 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the private physiognomy of the ladies and gentlemen 
 whom they commemorate ; and though they occasionally 
 allude to what the French call " intimate " matters, 
 they contain no satisfaction for the lovers of scandal. 
 The Theatre Franyais, in the face it presents to the 
 world, is an austere and venerable establishment, and a 
 frivolous tone about its affairs would be almost as much 
 out of keeping as if applied to the Academie herself. 
 M. Sarcey touches upon the organization of the theatre, 
 and gives some account of the different phases through 
 which it has passed during these latter years. Its chief 
 functionary is a general administrator, or director, 
 appointed by the State, which enjoys this right in virtue 
 of the considerable subsidy which it pays to the house ; 
 a subsidy amounting, if I am not mistaken (M. Sarcey 
 does not mention the sum) to 250,000 francs. The 
 director, however, is not an absolute but a constitutional 
 ruler ; for he shares his powers with the society itself, 
 which has always had a large deliberative voice. 
 
 Whence, it may be asked, does the society derive its 
 light and its inspiration? From the past, from pre- 
 cedent, from tradition from the great unwritten body 
 of laws which no one has in his keeping but many 
 have in their memory, and all in their respect. The 
 principles on which the Theatre Frangais rests are a 
 good deal like the Common Law of England a vaguely 
 
THE THMTRE FRANAIS. 409 
 
 and inconveniently registered mass of regulations which 
 time and occasion have welded together and from which 
 the recurring occasion can usually manage to extract 
 the rightful precedent. Napoleon I., who had a finger 
 in every pie in his dominion, found time during his 
 brief and disastrous occupation of Moscow to send 
 down a decree remodelling and regulating the constitu- 
 tion of the theatre. This document has long been a 
 dead letter, and the society abides by its older traditions. 
 The traditions of the Comedie Franyaise that is the 
 sovereign word, and that is the charm of the place 
 the charm that one never ceases to feel, however often 
 one may sit beneath the classic, dusky dome. One feels 
 this charm with peculiar intensity as a newly arrived 
 foreigner. The Theatre Franyais has had the good 
 fortune to be able to allow its traditions to accumulate. 
 They have been preserved, transmitted, respected, 
 cherished, until at last they form the very atmosphere, 
 the vital air, of the establishment. A stranger feels 
 their superior influence the first time he sees the great 
 curtain go up; he feels that he is in a theatre that 
 is not as other theatres are. It is not only better, it 
 is different. It has a peculiar perfection something 
 consecrated, historical, academic. This impression is 
 delicious, and he watches the performance in a sort of 
 tranquil ecstasy. 
 
410 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Never has he seen anything so smooth and harmo- 
 nious, so artistic and complete. He has* heard all his 
 life of attention to detail, and now, for' the first time, 
 he sees something that deserves the name. He sees 
 dramatic effort refined to a point with which the English 
 stage is unacquainted. He sees that there are no limits 
 to possible "finish," and that so trivial an act as taking 
 a letter from a servant or placing one's hat on a chair 
 may be made a suggestive and interesting incident. 
 He sees these things and a great many more besides, 
 but at first he does not analyse them ; he gives himself 
 up to sympathetic contemplation. He is in an ideal and 
 exemplary world a world that has managed to attain 
 all the felicities that the world we live in misses. 
 The people do the things that we should like to do; 
 they are gifted as we should like to be ; they have 
 mastered the accomplishments that we have had to give 
 up. The women are not all beautiful decidedly not, 
 indeed but they are graceful, agreeable, sympathetic, 
 ladylike ; they have the best manners possible and 
 they are delightfully well dressed. They have charming 
 musical voices and they speak with irreproachable 
 purity and sweetness ; they walk with the most elegant 
 grace and when they sit it is a pleasure to see their 
 attitudes. They go out and come in, they pass across 
 the stage, they talk, and laugh, and cry, they deliver 
 
THE THEATRE FRANCAIS. 411 
 
 long tirades or remain statuesquely mute ; they are 
 tender or tragic, they are comic or conventional ; and 
 through it all you never observe an awkwardness, a 
 roughness, an accident, a crude spot, a false note. 
 
 As for the men, they are not handsome either; it 
 must be confessed, indeed, that at the present hour 
 manly beauty is but scantily represented at the Theatre 
 Francais. Bressant, I believe, used to be thought 
 handsome ; but Bressant has retired, and among the 
 gentlemen of the troupe I can think of no one but 
 M. Mounet-Sully who may be positively commended 
 for his fine person. But M. Mounet-Sully is, from the 
 scenic point of view, an Adonis of the first magnitude. 
 To be handsome, however, is for an actor one of the 
 last necessities ; and these gentlemen are mostly hand- 
 some enough. They look perfectly what they are 
 intended to look, and in cases where it is proposed that 
 they shall seem handsome, they usually succeed. They 
 are as well mannered and as well dressed as their 
 fairer comrades and their voices are no less agreeable 
 and effective. They represent gentlemen and they pro- 
 duce the illusion. In this endeavour they deserve even 
 greater credit than the actresses, for in modern comedy, 
 of which the repertory of the Theatre Fran^ais is largely 
 composed, they have nothing in the way of costume to 
 help to carry it off. Half-a-dozen ugly men, in the 
 
412 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 periodic coat and trousers and stove-pipe hat, with blue 
 chins and false moustaches, strutting before the foot- 
 lights, and pretending to be interesting, romantic, 
 pathetic, heroic, certainly play a perilous game. At 
 every turn they suggest prosaic things and the usual 
 liability to awkwardness is meantime increased a thou- 
 sand fold. But the comedians of the Theatre Frangais 
 are never awkward, and when it is necessary they solve 
 triumphantly the problem of being at once realistic to 
 the eye and romantic to the imagination. 
 
 I am speaking always of one's first impression of 
 them. There are spots on the sun, and you discover 
 after a while that there are little irregularities at the 
 Theatre Frangais. But the acting is so incomparably- 
 better than any that you have seen that criticism for a 
 long time is content to lie dormant. I shall never 
 forget how at first I was under the charm. I liked the 
 very incommodities of the place ; I am not sure that I 
 did not find a certain mystic salubrity in the bad 
 ventilation. The Theatre Frangais, it is known, gives 
 you a good deal for your money. The performance, 
 which rarely ends before midnight, and sometimes 
 transgresses it, frequently begins by seven o'clock. The 
 first hour or two is occupied by secondary performers ; 
 but not for the world at this time would I have missed 
 the first rising of the curtain. No dinner could be too 
 
THE THMTRE FRANCAIS. 413 
 
 hastily swallowed to enable me to see, for instance, 
 Madame Nathalie in Octave Feuillet's charming little 
 comedy of "Le Village." Madame Nathalie was a 
 plain, stout old woman, who did the mothers and aunts 
 and elderly wives; I use the past tense because she 
 retired from the stage a year ago, leaving a most 
 conspicuous vacancy. She was an admirable actress 
 and a perfect mistress of laughter and tears. In " Le 
 Village" she played an old provincial bourgeoise whose 
 husband takes it into his head, one winter night, to 
 start on the tour of Europe with a roving bachelor 
 friend, who has dropped down on him at supper-time, 
 after the lapse of years, and has gossiped him into 
 momentary discontent with his fireside existence. My 
 pleasure was in Madame Nathalie's figure when she 
 came in dressed to go out to vespers across the place. 
 The two foolish old cronies are over their wine, talking 
 of the beauty of the women on the Ionian coast ; you 
 hear the church-bell in the distance. It was the quiet 
 felicity of the old lady's dress that used to charm me ; 
 the Comedie Fran9aise was in every fold of it. She 
 wore a large black silk mantilla, of a peculiar cut, which 
 looked as if she had just taken it tenderly out of some 
 old wardrobe where it lay folded in lavender, and a 
 large dark bonnet, adorned with handsome black silk 
 loops and bows. Her big pale face had a softly 
 
414 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS 
 
 frightened look, and in her hand she carried her neatly 
 kept breviary. The extreme suggestiveness, and yet tho 
 taste and temperance of this costume, seemed to me 
 inimitable ; the bonnet alone, with its handsome, decent, 
 virtuous bows, was worth coming to see. It expressed 
 all the rest, and you saw the excellent, pious woman 
 go pick her steps churchward among the puddles, while 
 Jeannette, the cook, in a high white cap, marched 
 before her in sabots with a lantern. 
 
 Such matters are trifles, but they are representative 
 trifles, and they are not the only ones that I remember. 
 It used to please me, when I had squeezed into my 
 stall the stalls at the Frangais are extremely uncom- 
 fortable to remember of how great a history the large, 
 dim salle around me could boast ; how many great 
 things had happened there ; how the air was thick 
 with associations. Even if I had never seen Rachel, 
 it was something of a consolation to think that those 
 very footlights had illumined her finest moments 
 and that th*e echoes of her mighty voice were sleeping 
 in that dingy dome. From this to musing upon the 
 "traditions" of the place, of which I spoke just now, 
 was of course but a step. How were they kept? by 
 whom, and where 1 Who trims the undying lamp and 
 guards the accumulated treasure ? I never found out 
 by sitting in the stalls ; and very soon I ceased to 
 
THE THMTRE FRASTCAIS. 415 
 
 care to know. One may be very fond of the stage 
 and yet care little for the green-room; just as 
 one may be very fond of pictures and books and yet 
 be no frequenter of studios and authors' dens. They 
 might pass on the torch as they would behind the 
 scenes ; so long as during my time they did not let it 
 drop I made up my mind to be satisfied. And that one 
 could depend upon their not letting it drop became a 
 part of the customary comfort of Parisian life. It 
 became certain that the " traditions " were not mere 
 catchwords, but a most beneficent reality. 
 
 Going to the other Parisian theatres helps you to 
 believe in them. Unless you are a voracious theatre- 
 goer you give the others up ; you find they do not 
 " P a y " 5 the Fianrais does for you all that they do 
 and so much more besides. There are two possible 
 exceptions the Gymnase and the Palais Royal. The 
 Gymnase, since the death of Mademoiselle DescU'e, 
 has been under a heavy cloud ; but occasionally, when 
 a month's sunshine rests upon it, there is a savour of 
 excellence in the performance. But you feel that you 
 are still within the realm of accident; the delightful 
 security of the Eue de Richelieu is wanting. The 
 young lover is liable to be common and the beautifully 
 dressed heroine to have an unpleasant voice. The 
 Palais Royal has always been in its way very perfect ; 
 
416 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 but its way admits of great imperfection. The ac- 
 tresses are classically bad, though usually pretty, and 
 the actors are much addicted to taking liberties. In 
 broad comedy, nevertheless, two or three of the latter 
 are not to be surpassed, and (counting out the women) 
 there is usually something masterly in a Palais Koyal 
 performance. In its own line it has what is called 
 style, and it therefore walks, at a distance, in the 
 footsteps of the Fran9ais. The Odeon has never seemed 
 to me in any degree a rival of the Theatre Frangais, 
 though it is a smaller copy of that establishment. It 
 receives a subsidy from the State, and is obliged by 
 its contract to play the classic repertory one night in 
 the week. It is on these nights, listening to Moliere 
 or Marivaux, that you may best .measure the supe- 
 riority of the greater theatre. I have seen actors at 
 the Odeon, in the classic repertory, imperfect in their 
 texts ; a monstrously insupposable case at the Come die 
 Frangaise. The function of the Odeon is to operate 
 as a ptpiniere or nursery for its elder to try young 
 talents, shape them, make them flexible and then hand 
 them over to the upper house. The more especial 
 nursery of the Frangais, however, is the Conservatoire 
 Dramatique, an institution dependent upon the State, 
 through the Ministry of the Fine Arts, whose budget 
 is charged with the remuneration of its professors. 
 
THE THEATRE FRANC AIS. 417 
 
 Pupils graduating from the Conservatoire with a prize 
 have ipso facto the right to debuter at the Theatre 
 Francois, which retains them or lets them go, according 
 to its discretion. Most of the first subjects of the 
 Frangais have done their two years' work at the Con- 
 servatoire, and M. Sarcey holds that an actor who has 
 not had that fundamental training which is only to be 
 acquired there never obtains a complete mastery of 
 his resources. Nevertheless some of the best actors 
 of the day have owed nothing to the Conservatoire 
 Bressant, for instance, and Aimee Desclee, the latter of 
 whom, indeed, never arrived at the Franais. (Moliere 
 and Balzac were not of the Academy, and so Mile. 
 Desclee, the first actress after Rachel, died without 
 acquiring the privilege which M. Sarcey says is the 
 day-dream of all young theatrical women that of 
 printing on their visiting-cards, after their name, de 
 la Comedie Frangaise.) 
 
 The Theatre Francais has, moreover, the right to do 
 as Moliere did to claim its property wherever it 
 finds it. It may stretch out its long arm and break 
 the engagement of a promising actor at any of the 
 other theatres ; of course after a certain amount of 
 notice given. So, last winter, it notified to the Gymnase 
 its design of appropriating Worms, the admirable 
 jeune premier, who, returning from a long sojourn in 
 
 E 
 
418 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 Russia and taking the town by surprise, had begun to 
 retrieve the shrunken fortunes of that establishment. 
 
 On the whole, it may be said that the great talents 
 find their way, sooner or later, to the Theatre Frangais. 
 This is of course not a rule that works unvaryingly, 
 for there are a great many influences to interfere with 
 it. Interest as well as merit especially in the case 
 of the actresses weighs in the scale ; and the ire 
 that may exist in celestial minds has been known to 
 manifest itself in the councils of the Comedie. More- 
 over, a brilliant actress may prefer to reign supreme 
 at one of the smaller theatres ; at the Frangais, ine- 
 vitably, she shares her dominion. The honour is less, 
 but the comfort is greater. 
 
 Nevertheless, at the Frangais, in a general way, 
 there is in each case a tolerably obvious artistic reason 
 for membership ; and if you see a clever actor remain 
 outside for years, you may be pretty sure that, though 
 private reasons count, there are artistic reasons as well. 
 The first half dozen times I saw Mademoiselle Fargueil, 
 who for years ruled the roost, as the vulgar saying is, 
 at the Vaudeville, I wondered that so consummate 
 and accomplished an actress should not have a place 
 on the first French stage. But I presently grew wiser, 
 and perceived that, clever as Mademoiselle Fargueil 
 is, she is not for the Rue de Richelieu, but for the 
 
THE THMTRE FRANCAIS. 419 
 
 Boulevards ; her peculiar, intensely Parisian intonation 
 would sound out of place in the Maison de Moliere. 
 (Of course if Mademoiselle Fargueil has ever received 
 overtures from the Frangais, my sagacity is at fault 
 I am looking through a millstone. But I suspect 
 she has not.) Frederic Lemaitre, who died last winter, 
 and who was a very great actor, had been tried at the 
 Francais and found wanting for those particular 
 conditions. But it may probably be said that if 
 Frederic was wanting, the theatre was too, in this 
 case. Frederic's great force was his extravagance, his 
 fantasticality ; and the stage of the Rue de Richelieu 
 was a trifle too academic. I have even wondered 
 whether Desclee, if she had lived, would have trod 
 that stage by right, and whether it would have seemed 
 her proper element. The negative is not impossible. 
 It is very possible that in that classic atmosphere her 
 great charm her intensely modern quality, her super- 
 subtle realism would have appeared an anomaly. I 
 can imagine even that her strange, touching, nervous 
 voice would not have seemed the voice of the house. 
 At the Frangais you must know how to acquit yourself 
 of a tirade; that has always been the touchstone of 
 capacity. It would probably have proved Desclee's 
 stumbling-block, though she could utter speeches of six 
 words as no one else surely has ever done. It is true 
 
 E E 2 
 
420 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 that Mademoiselle Croizette, and in a certain sense 
 Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, are rather weak at 
 their tirades ; but then old theatre-goers will tell you 
 that these young ladies, in spite of a hundred attrac- 
 tions, have no business at the Fran^ais. 
 
 In the course of time the susceptible foreigner 
 passes from that superstitious state of attention which 
 I just now sketched to that greater enlightenment 
 which enables him to understand such a judgment 
 as this of the old theatre-goers. It is borne in upon 
 him that, as the good Homer sometimes nods, the 
 Theatre Franais sometimes lapses from its high 
 standard. He makes various reflections. He thinks 
 that Mademoislle Favart rants. He thinks M. Mounet- 
 Sully, in spite of his delicious voice, insupportable. 
 He thinks that M. Parodi's five-act tragedy, "Home 
 Vaincue," presented in the early part of the present 
 winter, was better done certainly than it would have 
 been done upon any English stage, but by no means 
 so much better done as might have been expected. 
 (Here, if I had space, I would open a long paren- 
 thesis, in which I should aspire to demonstrate that 
 the incontestable superiority of average French acting 
 to English is by no means so strongly marked in 
 tragedy as in comedy is indeed sometimes not strongly 
 marked at all. The reason of this is in a great 
 
THE THMTRE FRANCAIS. 421 
 
 measure, I think, that we have had Shakespeare to 
 exercise ourselves upon, and that an inferior dramatic 
 instinct exercised upon Shakespeare may become more 
 flexible than a superior one exercised upon Corneille 
 and Racine. When it comes to ranting ranting even 
 in a modified and comparatively reasonable sense 
 we do, I suspect, quite as well as the French, if 
 not rather better.) Mr. G. H. Lewes, in his enter- 
 taining little book upon " Actors and the Art of 
 Acting," mentions M. Talbot, of the Francais, as 
 a surprisingly incompetent performer. My memory 
 assents to his judgment at the same time that it pro- 
 poses an amendment. This actor's special line is the 
 buffeted, bemuddled, besotted old fathers, uncles and 
 guardians of classic comedy, and he plays them with 
 his face much more than with his tongue. Nature 
 has endowed him with a visage so admirably adapted, 
 once for all, to his role, that he has only to sit in 
 a chair, with his hands folded on his stomach, to look 
 like a monument of bewildered senility. After that 
 it does not matter what he says or how he says it. 
 
 The Comedie Fran^aise sometimes does weaker things 
 
 than in keeping M. Talbot. Last autumn, 1 for instance, 
 
 it was really depressing to see Mademoiselle Dudley 
 
 brought all the way from Brussels (and with not a 
 
 1 1876. 
 
422 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 little flourish either) to " create " the guilty vestal 
 in " Rome Yaincue." As far as the interests of art 
 are concerned, Mademoiselle Dudley had much better 
 have remained in the Flemish capital, of whose lan- 
 guage she is apparently a perfect mistress. It is 
 hard, too, to forgive M. Perrin (M. Perrin is the 
 present director of the Theatre Francais) for bringing 
 out " L'Ami Fritz " of M. Erckmann-Chatrian. The 
 two gentlemen who write under this name have a 
 double claim to kindness. In the first place, they have 
 produced some delightful little novels ; every one 
 knows and admires " Le Consent de 1813 " ; every 
 one admires, indeed, the charming tale on which the 
 play in question is founded. In the second place, they 
 were, before the production of their piece, the objects 
 of a scurrilous attack by the "Figaro" newspaper, 
 which held the authors up to reprobation for having 
 " insulted the army," and did its best to lay the train 
 for a hostile manifestation on the first night. (It 
 may be added that the good sense of the public out- 
 balanced the impudence of the newspaper, and the 
 play was simply advertised into success.) But neither 
 the novels nor the .persecutions of M. Erckmann-Cha- 
 trian avail to render " L'Ami Fritz," in its would-be 
 dramatic form, worthy of the first French stage. It 
 is played as well as possible, and upholstered even 
 
: THE THMTRE FRANgAIS. 423 
 
 better; but it is, according to the vulgar phrase, 
 too " thin " for the locality. Upholstery has never 
 played such a part at the Theatre Frangais as during 
 the reign of M. Perrin, who came into power, if I 
 mistake not, after the late war. He proved very 
 early that he was a radical, and he has introduced 
 a hundred novelties. His administration, however, has 
 been brilliant, and in his hands the Theatre Franais 
 has made money. This it had rarely done before, 
 and this, in the conservative view, is quite beneath 
 its dignity. To the conservative view I should humbly 
 incline. An institution so closely protected by a rich 
 and powerful State ought to be able to cultivate art 
 for art. 
 
 The first of M. Sarcey's biographies, to which I 
 have been too long in coming, is devoted to Regnier, 
 a veteran actor, who left the stage four or five years 
 since, and who now fills the office of oracle to his 
 younger comrades. It is the indispensable thing, 
 says M. Sarcey, for a '"young aspirant to be able to 
 say that he has had lessons of M. Regnier, or that 
 M. Regnier had advised him, or that he has talked 
 such and such a point over with M. Regnier. (His 
 comrades always speak of him as M. Regnier never 
 as simple Regnier.) I have had the fortune to see 
 him but once ; it was the first time I ever went to 
 
424 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 the Theatre Francois . He played Don Annibal in 
 Emile Augiers romantic comedy of " L'Aventuriere," 
 and I have not forgotten the exquisite humour of 
 the performance. The part is that of a sort of 
 seventeenth century Captain Costigan, only the Miss 
 Fotheringay in the case is the gentleman's sister 
 and not his daughter. This lady is moreover an 
 ambitious and designing person, who leads her thread- 
 bare braggart of a brother quite by the nose. She 
 has entrapped a worthy gentleman of Padua, of 
 mature years, and he is on the eve of making her 
 his wife, when his son, a clever young soldier, be- 
 guiles Don Annibal into supping with him, and 
 makes him drink so deep that the prating adventurer 
 at last lets the cat out of the bag and confides to 
 his companion that the fair Clorinde is not the virtuous 
 gentlewoman she appears, but a poor strolling actress 
 who has had a lover at every stage of her journey. 
 The scene was played by Bressant and Regnier, and 
 it has always remained in my mind as one of the 
 most perfect things I have seen on the stage. The 
 gradual action of the wine upon Don Annibal, the 
 delicacy with which his deepening tipsiness was in- 
 dicated, its intellectual rather than physical mani- 
 festation, and, in the midst of it, the fantastic conceit 
 which made him think that he was winding his fellow 
 
THE THEATRE FRANOAIS. 425 
 
 drinker round his fingers all this was exquisitely 
 rendered. Drunkenness on the stage is usually both 
 dreary and disgusting ; and I can remember besides 
 this but two really interesting pictures of intoxication 
 (excepting always, indeed, the immortal tipsiness of 
 Cassio in " Othello," which a clever actor can always 
 make touching.) One is the beautiful befuddlement 
 of Rip Yan Winkle, as Mr. Joseph Jefferson renders 
 it, and the other (a memory of the Theatre Frangais) 
 the scene in the " Due Job," in which Got succumbs 
 to mild inebriation, and dozes in his chair just boosily 
 enough for the young girl who loves him to make it out. 
 It is to this admirable mile Got that M. Sarcey's 
 second notice is devoted. Got is at the present hour 
 unquestionably the first actor at the Theatre Francais, 
 and I have personally no hesitation in accepting him 
 as the first of living actors. His younger comrade, 
 Coquelin, has, I think, as much talent and as much 
 art ; as the older man Got has the longer and fuller 
 record and may therefore be spoken of as the master. 
 If I were obliged to rank the half-dozen premiers sujets 
 of the last few years at the Theatre Fran^ais in their 
 absolute order of talent (thank Heaven, I am not so 
 obliged !) I think I should make up some such little 
 list as this : Got, Coquelin, Madame Plessy, Sarah 
 Eernhardt, Mademoiselle Favart, Delaunay. I confess 
 
426 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 that I have no sooner written it than I feel as if 
 T ought to amend it, and wonder whether it is not 
 a great folly to put Delaunay after Mademoiselle 
 
 Favart. But this is idle. 
 
 
 
 As for Got, he is a singularly interesting actor. 
 I have often wondered whether .the best definition of 
 him would not be to say that he is really a philosophic 
 actor. He is an immense humorist and his comicality 
 is sometimes colossal ; but his most striking quality is 
 the one on which M. Sarcey dwells his sobriety and 
 profundity, his underlying element of manliness and 
 melancholy, the impression he gives you of having a 
 general conception of human life and of seeing the 
 relativity, as one may say, of the character he 
 represents. Of all the comic actors I have seen 
 he is the least trivial at the same time that for 
 richness of detail his comic manner is unsurpassed. 
 His repertory is very large and various, but it may be 
 divided into two equal halves the parts that belong to 
 reality and the parts that belong to fantasy. There is 
 of course a great deal of fantasy in his realistic parts 
 and a great deal of reality in his fantastic ones, but the 
 general division is just ; and at times, indeed, the two 
 faces of his talent seem to have little in common. The 
 Due Job, to which I just now alluded, is one of 
 the things he does most perfectly. The part, which 
 
THE THMTRE FRANgAIS. 427 
 
 is that of a young man, is a serious and tender one. 
 It is amazing that the actor who plays it should 
 also be able to carry off triumphantly the frantic 
 buffoonery of Maitre Pathelin, or should represent the 
 Sganarelle of the " Medecin Malgre Lui " with such an 
 unctuous breadth of humour. The two characters, per- 
 haps, which have given me the liveliest idea of Got's 
 power and fertility are the Maitre Pathelin and the 
 M. Poirier who figures in the title to the comedy which 
 fimile Augier and Jules Sandeau wrote together. M. 
 Poirier, the retired shopkeeper who marries his daugh- 
 ter to a marquis and makes acquaintance with the 
 incommodities incidental to such a piece of luck, is 
 perhaps the actor's most elaborate creation ; it is diffi- 
 cult to see how the portrayal of a type and an individual 
 can have a larger sweep and a more minute complete- 
 ness. The bonliomme Poirier, in Got's hands, is really 
 great ; and half a- dozen of the actor's modern parts 
 that I could mention are hardly less brilliant. But 
 when I think of him I instinctively think first of some 
 role in which he wears the cap and gown of a period 
 as regards which humorous invention may fairly take 
 the bit in its teeth. This is what Got lets it do 
 in Maitre Pathelin, and he leads the spectator's 
 exhilarated fancy a dance to which the latter's aching 
 sides on the morrow sufficiently testify. 
 
428 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 The piece is a rechauffe of a mediaeval farce which 
 has the credit of being the first play not a "mystery" 
 or a miracle -piece in the records of the French drama. 
 The plot is extremely bald and primitive. It sets forth 
 how a cunning lawyer undertook to purchase a dozen 
 ells of cloth for nothing. In the first scene we see 
 him in the market-place, bargaining and haggling with 
 the draper, and then marching off with the % roll of 
 cloth, with the understanding that the shopman shall 
 call at his house in the course of an hour for the money. 
 In the next act we have Mattre Pathelin at his fireside 
 with his wife, to whom he relates his trick and its 
 projected sequel, and who greets them with Homeric 
 laughter. He gets into bed, and the innocent draper 
 arrives. Then follows a scene of which the liveliest 
 description must be ineffective. Pathelin pretends to 
 be out of his head, to be overtaken by a mysterious 
 malady which has made him delirious, not to know 
 the draper from Adam, never to have heard of the 
 dozen ells of cloth and to be altogether an impossible 
 person to collect a debt from. To carry out this 
 character he indulges in a series of indescribable antics, 
 out-Bedlams Bedlam, frolics over the room dressed out 
 in the bed-clothes and chanting the wildest gibberish, 
 bewilders the poor draper to within an inch of his own 
 sanity and finally puts him utterly to rout. The 
 
THE THEATRE FRANC AIS. 429 
 
 spectacle could only be portentously flat or heroically 
 successful, and in Got's hands this latter was its 
 fortune. His Sganarelle, in the " Medecin Malgre Lui," 
 and half-a-dozen of his characters from Moliere besides 
 such a part, too, as his Tibia, in Alfred de Musset's 
 charming bit of romanticism, the "Caprices de Mari- 
 anne" have a certain generic resemblance with his 
 treatment of the figure I have sketched. In all these 
 things the comicality is of the exuberant and tremendous 
 order, and yet in spite of its richness and flexibility 
 it suggests little connection with high animal spirits. 
 It seems a matter of invention, of reflection and irony. 
 You cannot imagine Got representing a fool pure and 
 simple or at least a passive and unsuspecting fool. 
 There must always be an element of shrewdness and 
 even of contempt ; he must be the man who knows and 
 judges or at least who pretends. It is a compliment, 
 I take it, to an actor, to say that he prompts you to 
 wonder about his private personality ; and an observant 
 spectator of M. Got is at liberty to guess that he is 
 both obstinate and proud. 
 
 In Coquelin there is perhaps greater spontaneity, 
 and there is a not inferior mastery of his art. He is 
 a wonderfully brilliant, elastic actor. He is but thirty- 
 live years old, and yet his record is most glorious. He 
 too has his " actual" and his classical repertory, and 
 
430 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 here also it is hard to choose. As the young valet de 
 comedie in Moliere and Regnard and Marivaux he is 
 incomparable. I shall never forget the really infernal 
 brilliancy of his Mascarille in "L'Etourdi." His 
 volubility, his rapidity, his impudence and gaiety, his- 
 ringing, penetrating voice and the shrill trumpet-note 
 of his laughter, make him the ideal of the classic 
 serving- man of the classic young lover half rascal 
 and half good fellow. Coquelin has lately had 
 two or three immense successes in the comedies of 
 the day. His Due de Sept-Monts, in the famous 
 " iStrangere " of Alexandre Dumas, last winter, was 
 the capital creation of the piece ; and in the revival 
 this winter, of Augier's " Paul Forestier," his Adolphe 
 de Beaubourg, the young man about town, consciously 
 tainted with commonness, and trying to shake off the 
 incubus, seemed while one watched it and listened to it 
 the last word of delicately humorous art. Of Coquelin's 
 eminence in the old comedies M. Sarcey speaks with a 
 certain pictorial force : " No one is better cut out to 
 represent those bold and magnificent rascals of the old 
 repertory, with their boisterous gaiety, their brilliant 
 fancy and their superb extravagance, who give to their 
 buffoonery je ne sais quoi depique. In these parts one 
 may say of Coquelin that he is incomparable. I prefer 
 him to Got in such cases, and even to Regnier, his 
 
THE THEATRE FRANC AIS. 431 
 
 master. I never saw Monrose, and cannot speak of 
 him. But good judges have assured me that there 
 was much that was factitious in the manner of this 
 eminent comedian, and that his vivacity was a trifle 
 mechanical. There is nothing whatever of this in 
 Coquelin's manner. The eye, the nose, and the voice 
 the voice above all are his most powerful means of 
 action. He launches his tirades all in one breath, with 
 full lungs, without troubling himself too much over 
 the shading of details, in large masses, and he possesses 
 himself only the more strongly of the public, which 
 has a great sense of ensemble. The words that must 
 be detached, the words that must decisively 'tell,' 
 glitter in this delivery with the sonorous riog of a 
 brand new louis d'or. Crispin, Scapin, Figaro, Mas- 
 carille have never found a more valiant and joyous 
 interpreter." 
 
 I should say that this was enough about the men at 
 the Theatre Francais, if I did not remember that 
 I have not spoken of Delaunay. But Delaunay has 
 plenty of people to speak for him ; he has, in especial, 
 the more eloquent half of humanity the ladies. I 
 suppose that of all the actors of the Comedie Francaise 
 he is the most universally appreciated and admired; 
 he is the popular favourite. And he has certainly earned 
 this distinction, for there was never a more amiable 
 
432 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 and sympathetic genius. He plays the young lovers of 
 the past and the present, and he acquits himself of his 
 difficult and delicate task with extraordinary grace and 
 propriety. The danger I spoke of a while since the 
 danger, for the actor of a romantic and sentimental 
 part, of being compromised by the coat and trousers, 
 the hat and umbrella of the current year are reduced 
 by Delaunay to their minimum. He reconciles in a 
 marvellous fashion the love-sick gallant of the ideal 
 world with the " gentlemanly man " of to-day ; and his 
 passion is as far removed from rant as his propriety is 
 from stiffness. He has been accused of late years of 
 falling into a mannerism, and I think there is some 
 truth in the charge. But the fault in Delaunay's situa- 
 tion is certainly venial. How can a man of fifty, to 
 whom, as regards face and figure, Nature has been 
 stingy, play an amorous swain of twenty without taking 
 refuge in a mannerism ? His mannerism is a legitimate 
 device for diverting the spectator's attention from cer- 
 tain incongruities. Delaunay's juvenility, his ardour, 
 his passion, his good taste and sense of fitness, have 
 always an irresistible charm. As he has grown older 
 he has increased his repertory by parts of greater 
 weight and sobriety he has played the husbands as 
 well as the lovers. One of his most recent and bril- 
 liant " creations " of this kind is his Marquis de Presles 
 
THE THEATRE FRANCAIS. 433 
 
 in '*Le Gendre de M. Poirier" a piece of acting 
 superb for its lightness and desinvolture. It cannot be 
 better praised than by saying it was worthy of Got's 
 inimitable rendering of the part opposed to it. But 
 I think I shall remember Delaunay best in the pic- 
 turesque and romantic comedies as the Due de Riche- 
 lieu in "Mile. De Belle-Isle"; as the joyous, gallant, 
 exuberant young hero, his plumes and love knots flut- 
 tering in the breath of his gushing improvisation, of 
 Corneille's "Menteur"; or, most of all, as the melo- 
 dious swains of those charmingly poetic, faintly, natu- 
 rally Shakespearian little comedies of Alfred de Musset. 
 To speak of Delaunay ought to bring us properly to 
 Mademoiselle Favart, who for so many years invariably 
 represented the object of his tender invocations. Made- 
 moiselle Favart at the present time rather lacks what 
 the French call " actuality." She has recently made an 
 attempt to recover something of that large measure of 
 it which she once possessed ; but I doubt whether it 
 has been completely successful. M. Sarcey has not yet 
 put forth his notice of her ; and when he does so it will 
 be interesting to see how he treats her. She is not one 
 of his high admirations. She is a great talent that has 
 passed into eclipse. I call her a great talent, although 
 I remember the words in which M. Sarcey somewhere 
 speaks of her : " Mile. Favart, who, to happy natural 
 
 p F 
 
434 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 gifts, soutenus par un travail acharne, owed a distin- 
 guished place," etc. Her talent is great, but the im- 
 pression that she gives of a travail acharne and of an 
 insatiable ambition is perhaps even greater. For many 
 years she reigned supreme, and I believe she is accused 
 of not having always reigned generously. However 
 that may be, there came a day when Mesdemoiselles 
 Croizette and Sarah Bernhardt passed to the front and 
 the elder actress receded, if not into the background, at 
 least into what painters call the middle distance. The 
 private history of these events has, I believe, been rich 
 in heart-burnings ; but it is only with the public his- 
 tory that we are concerned. Mademoiselle Favart has 
 always seemed to me a powerful rather than an interest- 
 ing actress ; there is usually something mechanical and 
 overdone in her manner. In some of her parts there 
 is a kind of audible creaking of the machinery. If 
 Delaunay is open to the reproach of having let a man- 
 nerism get the better of him, this accusation is much 
 more fatally true of Mademoiselle Favart. On the 
 other hand, she knows her trade as no one does no 
 one, at least, save Madame Plessy. When she is bad 
 she is extremely bad, and sometimes she is inter- 
 ruptedly bad for a whole evening. In the revival of 
 Scribe's clever comedy of "Une Chaine," this winter 
 (which, by the way, though the cast included both Got 
 
THE THMTRE FRANCAIS. 435 
 
 and Coquelin, was the nearest approach to mediocrity 
 I have ever seen at the Theatre Francais), Mademoiselle 
 Favart was, to my sense, startlingly bad. The part had 
 originally been played by Madame Plessy; and I re- 
 member how M. Sarcey in his feuilleton treated its 
 actual representative. " Mademoiselle Favart does 
 Louise. Who does not recall the exquisite delicacy 
 and temperance with which Mine. Plessy rendered that 
 difficult scene in the second act ? " etc. And nothing 
 more. When, however, Mademoiselle Favart is at her 
 best, she is remarkably strong. She rises to great 
 occasions. I doubt whether such parts as the desperate 
 heroine of the "Supplice d'une Femme," or as Julie in 
 Octave Feuillet's lugubrious drama of that name, could 
 be more effectively played than she plays them. She 
 can carry a great weight without flinching ; she has 
 what the French call " authority " ; and in declamation 
 she sometimes unrolls her fine voice, as it were, in long 
 harmonious waves and cadences the sustained power of 
 which her younger rivals must often envy her. 
 
 I am drawing to the tlose of these rather desultory 
 observations without having spoken of the four ladies 
 commemorated by M. Sarcey in the publication which 
 lies before me ; and I do not know that I can justify 
 my tardiness otherwise than by saying that writing 
 and reading about artists of so extreme a personal 
 
436 FRENCH POSTS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 brilliancy is poor work, and that the best the critic can 
 
 do is to wish his reader may see them, from a quiet 
 
 jfapttuil, as speedily and as often as possible. Of 
 
 Madeleine Brohan, indeed, there is little to say. She 
 
 is a delightful person to listen to, and she is still 
 
 delightful to look at, in spite of that redundancy of 
 
 contour which time has contributed to her charms. 
 
 But she has never been ambitious and her talent has 
 
 had no particularly original quality. It is a long time 
 
 since she created an important part; but in the old 
 
 repertory her rich, dense voice, her charming smile, her 
 
 mellow, tranquil gaiety, always give extreme pleasure. 
 
 To hear her sit and talk, simply, and laugh and play 
 
 with her fan, along with Madame Plessy, in Moliere's 
 
 " Critique de 1'^cole des Femmes," is an entertainment 
 
 to be remembered. For Madame Plessy I should have 
 
 to mend my pen and begin a new chapter; and 
 
 for Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt no less a ceremony 
 
 would suffice. I saw Madame Plessy for the first time 
 
 in Emile Augier's " Aventuriere," when, as I mentioned, 
 
 I first saw Eegnier. This is considered by many 
 
 persons her best part, and she certainly carries it off 
 
 with a high hand ; but I like her better in characters 
 
 which afford more scope to her talents for comedy. 
 
 These characters are very numerous, for her activity 
 
 and versatility have been extraordinary. Her comedy 
 
THE THMTRE FRANgAIS. 437 
 
 of course is " high " j it is of the highest conceivable kind, 
 and she has often been accused of being too mincing 
 and too artificial. I should never make this charge, 
 for, to me, Madame Plessy's minauderies, her grand airs 
 and her arch-refinements, have never been anything but 
 the odorous swayings and queenly tossings of some 
 splendid garden flower. Never had an actress grander 
 manners. When Madame Plessy represents a duchess 
 you have no allowances to make. Her limitations are 
 on the side of the pathetic. If she is brilliant, she is 
 cold ; and I cannot imagine her touching the source of 
 tears. But she is in the highest degree accomplished ; 
 she gives an impression of intelligence and intellect 
 which is produced by none of her companions except- 
 ing always the extremely exceptional Sarah Bernhardt. 
 Madame Plessy's intellect has sometimes misled her 
 as, for instance, when it whispered to her, a few 
 years since, that she could play Agrippine in Racine's 
 " Britannicus," on that tragedy being presented for 
 the debuts of Mounet-Sully. I was verdant enough to 
 think her Agrippine very fine. But M. Sarcey reminds 
 his readers of what he said of it the Monday after the 
 first performance. "I will not say" he quotes him- 
 self "that Madame Plessy is indifferent. With her 
 intelligence, her natural gifts, her great situation, her 
 immense authority over the public, one cannot be 
 
438 FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 
 
 indifferent in anything. She is therefore not indiffer- 
 ently bad. She is bad to a point that cannot be expressed 
 and that would be distressing for dramatic art if it were 
 not that in this great shipwreck there rise to the surface 
 a few floating fragments of -the finest qualities that 
 nature has ever bestowed upon an artist." 
 
 Madame Plessy retired from the stage six months 
 ago and it may be said that the void produced by this 
 event is irreparable. There is not only no prospect, 
 but there is no hope of filling it up. The present 
 conditions of artistic production are directly hostile to 
 the formation of actresses as consummate and as com- 
 plete as Madame Plessy. One may not expect to see 
 her like, any more than one may expect to see a new 
 manufacture of old lace and old brocade. She carried 
 off with her something that the younger generation of 
 actresses will consistently lack a certain largeness of 
 style and robustness of art. (These qualities are in a 
 modified degree those of Mademoiselle Favart.) But if 
 the younger actresses have the success of Mesdemoiselles 
 Croizette and Sarah Bernhardt, will they greatly care 
 whether they are not "robust"? These young ladies 
 are children of a later and eminently contemporary 
 type, according to which an actress undertakes not 
 to interest but to fascinate. They are charming 
 " awfully" charming; strange, eccentric, imaginative. 
 
THE THMTRE FRANCAIS. 439 
 
 It would be needless to speak specifically of Mademoi- 
 selle Croizette ; for although she has very great attrac- 
 tions I think she may (by the cold impartiality of 
 science) be classified as a "secondary, a less inspired 
 and (to use the great word of the day) a more " brutal " 
 Sarah Bernhardt. (Mademoiselle Croizette's " brutality ' ' 
 is her great card. ) As for Mademoiselle Sarah Bern- 
 hardt, she is simply, at present, in Paris, one of the 
 great figures of the day. It would be hard to imagine 
 a more brilliant embodiment of feminine success ; she 
 deserves a chapter for herself. 
 
 December 1876. 
 
 THE END. 
 
LONIXJN : 
 
 R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOft, 
 BREAD STREET HILL, B.C. 
 
 

 
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