CRITICAL STUDIES

BY OUIDA

SECOND IMPRESSION

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1900

[All Rights reserved]

PREFATORY NOTE

With exception of one, that on the poems of Mr Blunt, all these essays have previously appeared in The Fortnightly Review, The Nineteenth Century Review, or the Nuova Antologia. The two published in The Nuova Antologia were written by me in Italian. I have now turned them into English myself. The article on D'Annunzio, in the Fortnightly, was the first ever printed in English on a writer who is now well known to all. I do not think that he has, since it was published, created anything equal to the Trionfo. The character of his genius is not adapted to the theatre, to which he now chiefly devotes himself. It will be interesting to see if it can be adapted to political life, which has lately tempted him. Perhaps he may become a new Rienzi. One is greatly needed in Italy.

OUIDA.

CONTENTS

CRITICAL STUDIES

I

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO

In the world of letters the name of Gabriele d'Annunzio is now famous. There is no cultured society which does not know something at least of the author of the Innocente and the Trionfo, and is not aware that, in him, one of the ablest and most delicate of living critics believes that he has seen the personification of a renascence of Latin genius. Imprisoned as his novels were in the limits of a language which, however great its beauty, is but little known except in its own land, he has been extraordinarily fortunate in finding such sponsors in the outside world as he has obtained in M. Herelle, in René Doumic, and in the Vicomte de Vogüé. Never has any romance been so admirably heralded as the Trionfo in the Révue des Deux Mondes, and never certainly, since lyre was strung or laurels were woven, was any praise ever heard so dulcet and so lavish as that with which he, who has been called the second Chateaubriand, has welcomed and introduced the new Boccaccio.

The grace and beauty of the style of the Vicomte de Vogüé, and the culture of his intelligence, have gained him in literature this name of the second Chateaubriand. They are both incontestable. But they are apt to lead his readers away from the consideration of the value of his literary judgments. He is a critic of exquisite delicacy and fineness, but also of great enthusiasms, and these enthusiasms are at times much stronger than his judgment and overpower it. What he admires he admires toto corde, and is apt to lose in this generous ardour his power of selection, his accuracy of appraisement.

This fact has been always conspicuous in all his writings on Pasteur, and it has been equally conspicuous in the unmeasured idolatry with which he has dipped his pen in all the honey of Hymettus to sing the praises of the man he loves. But this adoption of D'Annunzio into French literature has, with its incontestable advantages, equal penalties and disadvantages for the author; for one reader outside Italy who will read him in the original text, ten thousand will know him only in the French version, and twenty thousand will accept De Vogüé's description of his works without attempting to judge those for themselves. In the French version the romances gain in certain points; their excessive detail is abridged, their crudities are softened down, their wearisome analyses and too frequent obscenities are omitted. The translations of M. Herelle are, as all must know, admirable in grace and elegance, but, though as perfect as translations which are guilty of continual excisions can be, they fail to render the genius of D'Annunzio as it is to be seen and felt by those who read the works in the original tongue. In the French version they are much milder, much more tempered, much less unbridled, and much less cynically nude; but they are also much less vigorous, virile, impassioned, and furiously scornful. Many fine passages have been esteemed longueurs, and have been omitted altogether, and entire chapters have been sacrificed to the exigencies of taste or of space.

In the French edition of the Trionfo, nearly the whole book, entitled La Vita Nuova, containing the pilgrimage to Casalbordino is omitted. But without perusal of this marvellous reproduction of a scene of Italian fanaticism and frenzy, and of similar portions of his works, it is impossible to estimate fully the real D'Annunzio, and judge of his magnificent powers of observation and description, as well as of his incessant search for what is loathsome, his cruel exultation in his examination of physical diseases and moral leprosies.

I know not why this pilgrimage was rejected, for it is not more indecent than other portions of the book, and it is singularly true to certain phases of Italian life, in which all the Paganism bred in the blood and bone of the people is displayed, mixed with the ferocity of Christian bigotry. Let me here translate the opening of it:—

'It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unexpected, unlike any other assemblage of men and things, composed of mixtures so diverse, cruel and strange, that it eclipsed the most dreadful visions of a nightmare. All the hideousness of the eternal idiot, all the filthiness of vice and its stupidities, all the spasms and deformities of baptized flesh, all the tears of penitence, all the laughter of license; the mania, the cupidity, the craft, the lust, the fraud, the imbecility, the silent desperation, the sacred choruses, the howls of the possessed, the shouts of the ambulatory vendors, the clanging of the bells, the squeal of the trumpets, the lowing, the neighing, the bleating; the fires crackling under the cauldrons, the heaps of fruits and sweetmeats, the display of utensils, of stuffs, of arms, of jewels, of rosaries; the obscene capers of the dancers, the convulsions of the epileptic, the blows of the quarrelsome, the rush of flying, frightened thieves through the crowd; the supreme froth of corruption poured forth from the filthy lanes of remote cities, and showered out on to an ignorant and astounded multitude, like horseflies on the flanks of beasts, shoals of parasites descended on a compact mass incapable of defending itself, all the base temptations of brutal appetites, all the treacheries playing on simplicity and stupidity, all the charlatanisms and the effronteries bared in full daylight; all the opposing contrasts were there, boiling and effervescing, around the House of the Virgin.'

What strength is here? What admirable choice of descriptive phrase, and truth of design, as in a Callot or Hogarth! what sense conveyed of press, of haste, of noise, of confusion, of stench, of uproar! We live in this crowd as we read.

De Vogüé asserts that the indecency of D'Annunzio is never 'polisonne ou grivoise'; that it is never vulgar, although it is unbridled. He admits the preference for the unclean, which almost amounts, indeed, to an hallucination, but he urges that in D'Annunzio it is always redeemed by art.

'A Rabelais, a Boccaccio, a Loti, or a D'Annunzio, give expression to a certain temperament, with the artistic resources which that temperament imposes on them,' writes De Vogüé, in his celebrated criticism,[1] 'they have nothing in common with tradesmen, who painfully produce the filth demanded by a publisher and a certain public. An abyss separates the former from the latter writers. This difference between them which our judgment perceives, we do not show by critical demonstration; our taste is conscious of it as our eyes distinguish a flower, venomous perhaps, but natural, from an artificial flower coloured by poisonous dyes.'

Now, in this passage there is much truth, but it is not equally true that D'Annunzio is at no time to be placed in the lower class. There is too frequently in his indecency a strain, an effort, a mannerism, an extravagance, sought, and unnecessary. The reader, if he desires to understand what I mean by this, can turn to page 320 in the Trionfo, or to Chapter X., in the Piacere (Italian version), in which there are ingenuities of indecency introduced which have no relation whatever to the narrative, nor any obligation to appear.

What is, I think, more offensive to taste, and more injurious to art than any sensual excess in description, is mere nastiness, mere filth; and of this D'Annunzio is as guilty as Zola is, and as Zola has been, always.

De Vogüé may pour out his scorn as he will on the industriel who composed La Bête Humaine, and may cover with the roses and lilies of his exquisite garlands of praise the creator of the Trionfo, the fact remains that the Satyr shows his cloven hoof as much in one as in the other; and the motives which move either of the writers we have no right to condemn or to appraise, for the entrance into personal motive is surely an intrusion which should never be attempted.

We may, nevertheless, suggest as probable that, however dissimilar be their atmosphere and circumstances, both Zola and D'Annunzio have been moved to study chiefly what is called immoral, and prurient, by a sincere desire to reach to the very depths of human nature, to shrink from no investigation, to deny no evidence, and to protest against the hypocrisy with which literary art has so frequently covered its eyes and turned away from the truth. 'Let us study life alone,' says D'Annunzio, as Zola said it; and if he seek life in its corruption, coming upon the corpse of putrid pleasure as the gay riders in the Campo Santo of Pisa check their startled steeds before the open biers, he does no more, and no less, offend art than Zola offends it in Nana.

Indeed, so little is De Vogüé's statement in this matter justified, that almost every Italian who has read D'Annunzio's works will, in speaking of him, regret his incessant recurrence to obscenity. Not from prudery, for Italians are never prudes, but from an artistic sense, that this perpetually intruded indecency is an error in taste, and becomes quite as tiresome as any other form of perpetual repetition.

The most conspicuous error of modern literature is, beyond doubt, its verbiage. It has completely forgotten the great canon of 'Ars est celare artem'; the supreme ability of conveying immeasurable suggestion in a mere word, in concentrating all the music of the soul in one brief note. All the arts err at this epoch in the same manner; literature has the common malady; it is prolix. The indecencies of D'Annunzio, like his other descriptions, are prolix; and the prolixity is not redeemed by the indecency, nor the indecency by the prolixity.

This tendency of redundancy is not his fault alone; it is that of his time. The enormous canvases and numerous figures of modern paintings, the crowded groups and tortured attitudes of modern sculpture, the elaborate scenic effects, and mechanical appliances, and endless acts, of modern opera and drama, are all forms of the same malady of repetition; of ignorance of how, and when, to break the laurel bough before it withers; of lack of skill to master the subtleties of concentration and suggestion. The descriptions of the modern writer are frequently mere inventories; they are painfully minute; they are like a mosaic, in which millions of little cubes are grouped to make a whole. As before a modern painting we are often unimpressed by the whole, but struck by the dexterity of the brush-work, so in modern literature we are little interested in the conception, but allured by the dexterity of the treatment. Too frequently, unappily, this multiplicity of words covers a sad poverty of ideas. But in D'Annunzio's works there is not a page without ideas; ideas which may displease or may disgust the reader at times, but which are, nevertheless, always worthy to arrest attention, even when they are only studies of depravity.

D'Annunzio is a greater writer than Zola, not because he has emulated or surpassed Zola's indecencies, but because he is what Zola never was—a scholar and a poet. His culture is of the most varied and classical kind, profound as well as brilliant; and his poetic powers were shown in his sonnets and lyrics before he wrote his romances. Zola is no scholar, and is not, either in temperament or expression, a poet. It would be impossible to conceive him creating such a poem as the Villa Chigi or the Riccordi di Ripetta of D'Annunzio. There are passages in Zola's works, notably in La Terre, which are, I think, as great as it is possible for prose to be, but they are never touched by any poetry of phrase or feeling.

Also, when De Vogüé states that the indecency of D'Annunzio is not indecency because the Italian language is never indecent, and alleges that what would be insupportable in any other tongue is possible in Italian, because Italian enjoys the privilege which pertained to its mother, Latin, i.e., to say with grace and impunity what in any other tongue would disgust the hearer, he says what is absolutely untrue; and one can only wonder if he knows anything of the Italian of the streets, of the fields, of the wine-houses, of the popular theatres. In this affirmation, as in others, he has imagined what he says to be the fact, and founded on the fabrications of his imagination a positive statement. It is a frequent habit with him, and makes the weakness of his arguments in many instances, on other themes than this.

We know that Italian is heard only occasionally by him during his visits to Italy, and is then heard by him only in its polished speech. To those by whom it is heard every day, as spoken by all classes, it certainly possesses nothing of this privilege which he claims for it. It can be, on the contrary, very coarse and crude; it has none of the subtleties and graces, and delicate gradations of French: it calls a spade a spade with the rudest frankness; and its curses are of an appalling ferocity and filthiness.

Nor can it be said that D'Annunzio ever tries to give it delicacy or veiled suggestion; his language is as broad and as gross as that of Ovid or Catullus. He never allows the smallest doubt about his meaning to exist at any time; and he is most especially explicit when treating of those subjects which in modern literature are generally considered forbidden. Indeed, this anxiety to paint the brothel and the madhouse as carefully and minutely as the miniaturist paints on the ivory, leads to his great defect, over-elaboration. He does not trust enough to the power of suggestion, which is so strong in a great writer over the mind of a reader. He does not remember that half a chord may fill the ear with melody, and that a hint may rouse the senses to nausea or to desire.

Paradoxical as it may appear to say so, I think his wide culture has injured his style. I think he would have been a greater Italian writer if he had known no language save Italian and, of course, Latin and Greek.

The extreme culture and over-variety of modern education tends to destroy, or at least disturb, originality; it encumbers the mind under too vast a load of riches, it enlightens, but it also obstructs; if Shakespeare had been less ignorant he might, perhaps, have been also less great.

Foreign influence is not beneficial to the Italian. It makes him unreal; it makes him lose his charming natural grace and abandonment, it renders him artificial; he never really becomes what is implied by the word cosmopolitan (such a cosmopolitan as Lord Dufferin or the late Prince Lobanoff), and he does lose much of his own national qualities. It is very rarely that an Italian can, like the late lamented scholar Enrico Nencioni, steep his mind deeply in all the riches of foreign literature without in the least losing his own Italian individuality. D'Annunzio, on the contrary, allows himself to be absorbed and assimilated by foreign influences, to be dominated by them, to so great an extent indeed that his style is frequently bastardised by them, and many of his sentences read as though they were translations from foreign sources. He claims to have greatly embellished and amplified the Italian language; he has certainly rendered it more colloquial and more copious; but he has often grafted foreign idioms upon it, and he has perhaps robbed it of some of its dignity and grace. He considers that the artist should always remodel the instrument he uses; but the figure will not hold good in other arts, for Sarasate does not carve the shell of his violin, Clausen does not weave the canvas he uses, Bartolomé does not blast the marble out of the hill-side. The writer should use the language he writes in as it comes pure from its natural springs; he will but contaminate it if he pour into it alien streams.

D'Annunzio would probably protest that the patchwork effects of the foreign languages he introduces, do but correctly represent the mixture of tongues common in our days in those phases of life which pass under the generic name of society. In such protest there would, no doubt, be truth; but it could only apply to certain social scenes in the Piacere, and my objection is less to the introduction of foreign phrases directly than it is to the foreign complexion and contour which he so frequently gives to his own language; a fault never before him known in an Italian writer. Many of his phrases are of foreign construction. But he is not on that account a plagiarist, as has been said of him; he is never a plagiarist, but is a too highly educated, and a too sensitively susceptible, mental organisation. The mean charge of plagiarism is one so easy to bring and so difficult to refute, that it is cast by envy and inferiority at all those whose genius, like that of D'Annunzio, is proud, passionate, and defiant of criticism. That which has in it the elements of true greatness has always these pellets of mud thrown at it. In some ways, on the contrary, he seems to seek an exaggeration of original idiosyncrasies, and to no writer would conscious imitation be more odious or impossible.

There is unhappily, in all his works, an absolute absence of wit, of mirth, of humour. There is not a laugh, scarcely even a smile, in any of his pages; if we except the cruel laughter of a lover at his mistress's physical defects. Over all his genius there broods that 'green melancholy,' which is the too-common hue of modern thought, that dull greyness of death which has spread from the laboratories of science over all the worlds of literature. Not only is no joyous laugh ever heard, there is not even the indulgent smile which relieves melancholy and bitterness in many writers whose views of life are gloomy. Nowhere is this more seen than in the almost savage cruelty with which the poor old dévote, Gioconda Aurispa, is drawn; the merciless description of her senile love of sweetmeats, of her disappointment when her nephew forgets to bring them, of her expectant eyes, 'almost impudent in their entreaty,' of her short breath with its fœtid odour, of her tottering steps amongst her flowers; all is cruel, merciless, without a grain of pity or of sympathy to redeem its biting satire of so feeble and harmless a creature.

Compare with such treatment the exquisite tenderness of Pierre Loti's Tante Claire, think with how gentle a respect Thackeray drew the death of an old man, remember the touch with which Maupassant makes us akin even to poor Boule de Suiffe. Tragedy is not necessarily cruelty, nor accuracy necessarily brutality. Shakespeare makes us indignant for Lear and sharers in his sorrows; but D'Annunzio would concentrate our thoughts only on his ridiculous thin hair blown by the winter winds, the tremor of his toothless jaws, and palsy of his bent, unsteady limbs. In the highest art there is always pity because there is always comprehension. D'Annunzio has as yet no more pity than the demonstrator in a physiological amphitheatre. But it is not impossible that such pity may come to him later on, for pity is rarely a passion of youth; it is usually the fruit of reflection, comparison, realisation of what is alien and impersonal. That sense which he already feels of the inner life of all things cannot leave him for ever insensible to the sufferings of that life.

At present he is absorbed in the sensual ecstasies of early manhood, and the fumes of voluptuous delights obscure his sight to much else which surrounds him, and which finds him callous and negligent of it. De Vogüé sees in him the leader of a new school, but there is as yet little that is new in his manner of judging life. It is the manner of Le Disciple, though touched with warmer tones, and placed in richer landscapes, and vibrating with stronger passions, because Italian in scene and in temper.

If ever there be a true Latin renascence, which is scarcely to be hoped for, it will come, not from a writer who is saturated with French, Russian, German, and English influences, but one who has the Latin genius, the Latin temper, unalloyed. But does this now exist anywhere? If it do, it is in remote mountain sides and by lonely lake waters, not in clubhouses and on racecourses. Such a writer will more probably come, if he come at all, from the extreme south than from the north, perhaps even from the great and almost virgin island of the west. In the dense cork woods and on the desolate shores of Sardinia, a Salvator Rosa of literature might well be begotten, for there is also there a companion whom the Muses fear not—Misery.

I imagine that De Vogüé does not know much of the popular songs of the south and the west of Italy. I venture to think that in those stornelli, cantileni rispetti, and the rest, there is more of the genuine spirit of the Italian soil than in any of the works hitherto written by D'Annunzio, because, despite their intensity of passion, they are full of a pure poetical beauty and an idealised tenderness, which in his pictures of love are absent.

Even in the views which De Vogüé holds of the characters of these romances, there seems frequently a curious misconstruction of their salient points. For instance, he sees in the tragedy, with which the Trionfo closes, the fact that Aurispa loved so intensely that he felt impelled to destroy what he possessed, as the only absolute means of fully possessing it. But I do not see this. I see in Aurispa a young man habitually self-indulgent and constitutionally feeble; who gradually passes from frantic adoration of a woman possessed, to the nausea which so frequently follows on such possession. The proof of this lies in the cruel cynical criticism with which he discovers and enumerates her physical and mental defects, with which he views the deformity of her feet as they push the warm sand of the beach to and fro, and with which he realises the growing disgust which she awakes in him physically and morally. He feels that he can neither live with her, nor live without her; that she will be his destroyer in one way or the other; it is in a frenzy of hatred and of impotence that he seizes her in his last embrace, and plunges with her over the cliff, into the starlit depths of the sea below. To ignore this is to miss the whole meaning of the final act, and the absolute veracity of the whole work.

I have seen such physical jealousy in the man of feeble health of the vigorous strength of the woman whom he loved, and there is no form of jealousy more cruel or more incurable, and it is likely to become frequent in modern life, which develops the physical strength and social liberties of the female to so vast an extent. This is a painful fact, but it is one which cannot be disputed. Go wherever a crowd of both sexes congregate, and there you will see an Ippolita in all her splendid vitality and magnificent growth, and beside her, nine times out of ten, there will be a Giorgio Aurispa, small, frail, half-blind, pallid, bloodless, beardless, sickly, and prematurely decrepit.

I should myself have preferred to trace the destroying influence of sensual passion eating its way gradually into the health and strength of a complete masculine sanity, and of a robust masculine health, like aquafortis biting into a copper plate. Aurispa is already mentally diseased before the fateful day on which he sees Ippolita in the dusk of the chapel in Rome. He views all things animate and inanimate, human and animal, real and ideal, through that distorted medium which the mentally deformed habitually see through as through a convex and smoked glass. He is more than feeble, he is not sane. If he had not sought death on account of his mistress, he would have done so because Demetrius Aurispa had died before by his own hand; or for some other reason which in his cerebral condition would have seemed to him imperative and irresistible, as imaginary conditions do seem to those not sane.

We are told throughout the book to realise this extreme weakness, physical and moral, which ultimately drives him to destroy himself and her.

'"You love life?" he murmured, with a veiled bitterness.

'"Yes, life delights me," she answered, almost with vehemence.

'She had, in her voice, in her attitude, in all her person, a brightness of unusual joy and pleasure. She had in her whole aspect that satisfaction which the living creature only feels in those hours when life runs harmoniously in all its currents, in which there is a perfect balance in all the vital forces in accord with the favour and fairness of all surrounding circumstances. As in other similar moments, her whole being seemed to unclose in the freshness of the sea air, in the coolness of the summer evening, like one of those magnificent night-blooming flowers which only open the heart of their petals as the sun passes and sets.'

This is one of the innumerable beautiful images in which D'Annunzio excels, and nothing can surely be finer of its kind than the whole passage which I have quoted. But it clearly proves, especially if compared with its context, that the passion which Aurispa once felt for her had now become a furious envy of her more abounding life, of her perennial and indestructible capacity of enjoyment.

And that night, indeed, he kills her, not from excess of love, but from envy of her exultant and exuberant vitality and hatred of its contrast to his own impotence; from the sense, as I have said, that he could neither live with her nor without her. In this, D'Annunzio has linked cause and effect with excellent precision. Every minutia of feeling described is correctly described, and such feeling is made to arise from a natural source, precisely as dislike follows on satiety in real life. But very frequently there is no such natural connection in his treatment of circumstance and character.

The Trionfo is admirably balanced from its opening to its closing pages; and the tragedy on the Pincio, with which the work opens, fittingly and perfectly strikes the keynote of the whole, and the motif of the opera is suggested in the overture. But in the other romances there is too often a want of unison between the action described and its motives or sources. There is, at times, even an absolute lack of any rational cause at all; so that, in some degree, all his characters have in them more or less of the irresponsibility and unconnectedness of the insane. He leaves too much unexplained; too many actions motiveless; too many portraits floating indistinct like the night and river studies of Whistler. It is curious that this vagueness, this uncertainty and obscurity, should exist in one who is on the other hand so frequently and wearisomely minute in microscopic details. He constantly calls on us to believe what he gives us no data for believing. Even in the Trionfo he constantly introduces persons and incidents having no connection with the narrative. The whole family of Giorgio, the whole action passing at Guardiagrele, so elaborately painted, lead to nothing; we neither see nor hear of them again; neither they nor Guardiagrele ever enter his pages any more; and the momentous scene with Giorgio's father leads to nothing, but ends in a blind alley. Now this is a great fault in composition, and one which disappoints and irritates the reader. Of Demetrius Aurispa, again, much is made, but nothing is explained or continued; and his long exposition of one of Tennyson's poems is as unnecessary as the long disquisition upon Wagner further on in the book.

D'Annunzio is so profoundly engrossed in the psychology of his characters, that he frequently forgets to make their antecedents and actions consistent or credible. For instance, few women have been drawn in fiction more lovable, more real, more refined, more profoundly interesting, or more truly feminine, than Giuliana Hermil, in the Innocente. There is nothing in her character or in her circumstances which can render it the least probable to us that such a woman as she is described to be, would have been led into the half-unconscious sensual impulse which makes her unfaithful to her conjugal vows without the smallest excuse of passion or temptation. Nor is it conceivable for an instant that Tullio Hermil, on hearing her confession of this inconsapevole adultery, would serenely submit to remain in ignorance of the name of this lover of an hour, merely suspecting who it was from an inscription found in a novel, and would merely answer with gentle irony to her apology that the soul had had no share in her undoing! 'Povera anima!' he murmurs with an indulgent smile!

I will not say that this is impossible, for nothing is so in the relations of the sexes; but it is certainly improbable and incongruous, since Giuliana is throughout described as the gentlest, most timid, and, despite the infidelity in which we are asked to believe, the purest of her sex, submissive to desertion as Griselda, and incapable of an impure thought. It is contrary to all truth to human nature to make such a woman err in so common, stupid, and unintelligible a manner, and to make Tullio Hermil continue under such circumstances to live in the same house with her until the time of her delivery.

D'Annunzio has also a total lack of perception when the ridiculous mars the pathetic. This is a very common defect in his countrymen, and is one frequently traceable to a want of the humorous faculty. There is something ridiculous, which goes far to spoil all which is intended to be tragic in the motive or action of the Innocente, in the details accompanying and explaining its culminating act. The idea of this act is fine, and the hatred of the man for the child is natural, whilst the conception and carrying out of the semi-crime are subtle and original. But the filthy description of the infant (almost identical with that of the new-born babe in Zola's Joie de Vivre) and the perpetual references to its swaddling clothes, and the tedious profusion of details with which the subject is elaborated, destroy in the mind of the reader all sense of pity for the victim, and all blame for the act which sends it to its grave. One feels that the little squalling, dribbling, shapeless creature, with its scabby head and cat-like miawling, is much better destroyed, and this is not the sensation which the author desires to arouse; he would wish us to feel at once horror at, and compassion for, Tullio Hermil, but we can feel nothing except a vague contempt for this helpless young man. Had the semi-murder of it followed immediately on its birth, or had it been found by him after absence a fair two-year-old child, with all the rosebud loveliness of that age, this bathos would have been avoided; and the stealthy sin of its effacement would have carried in it the force of a powerful tragedy undiminished, as it actually is, by gross and comic images, which may be realism but are none the less bathos. It is perfectly natural that Tullio Hermil's abhorrence of this spurious offspring should grow with every day until the desire to destroy it becomes at last an over-mastering impulse; but to make this act tragic, and to awaken that sympathy for the victim which all true tragedy excites, the latter should be so described that the heart of the reader should bleed for it when exposed to the icy air which kills it, and that its martyred infancy should seem fitly lamented by those echoes of the distant Novena, which at the supreme moment float through all the silent house.

The Innocente has many passages in its pages of perfect beauty like this episode of the Novena; its defects are due to its author's incapacity to perceive where the ludicrous damages the pathetic and destroys the terrible. The writer's artistic instinct moved him to create a situation unique, and full of the keenest interest, abounding in opportunity for the analysis of temptations and emotions; and of such analysis he is a master, if too prolix in his expositions of it. But a want of the perception which warns us off the line of demarcation dividing the dramatic from the grotesque, has allowed him to pass this line, and merge the dramatic in a flood of trivial and commonplace minutiæ. Nor is it natural that, loathing this new-born bastard as Tullio Hermil does, he should accompany his brother to invite an old peasant to be its sponsor. The beauty and simplicity of this passage are great, but they cannot reconcile us to the improbability of such an errand.

'As we drew near the place where Giovanni de Scordio dwelt, my brother saw in the field the tall figure of the old man.

'"Look! There he is. He is sowing. We bring our invitation in a solemn hour."

'We approached. I trembled within myself as though I were about to commit a profanation. I did indeed profane a thing in itself sacred and beautiful. I went to solicit the spiritual paternity of a venerable life for an adulterous creature.

'"Look at his height," exclaimed Frederigo, pointing to the sower. "He is no taller than other men, and yet he looks a giant."

'We paused under a tree, and watched the labourer from a distance. Giovanni had not perceived us.

'He came straightway towards us up the field with measured slowness. He wore a woollen cap, black and green, with two wings which covered his ears in the ancient fashion. A white sack hung by a leathern strap from throat to waist, the sack being full of grain. With his left hand he held the sack open, with the right he took the grain and scattered it. His gesture was large, easy, sweeping, moderated to a serene rhythm. The corn, flying from his hand, shone in the sun like gold dust, falling with regularity upon the wet furrows. He advanced slowly, his feet sinking in the moist soil, his head sometimes lifted to the holiness of the light; all his attitude was simple, noble, grand.

---

'We entered the glebe.

'"Good health, Giovanni," said Frederigo, going up to the old man. "Be your seed blessed. Be blessed your bread of the future."

'"Good health to you," I repeated.

'The peasant left off work; he uncovered his head.

'"Cover yourself, Giovanni, or we also must stand with bare heads in the sun," said my brother.

'The old man put on his cap, confused, almost shy, smiling.

'He asked humbly, "Why so much honour?"

'I said with a voice which vainly strove to be steady, "I am come to beg you to hold my son at the baptismal font."

'The peasant looked at me astounded, then at my brother. His embarrassment increased. He murmured:

'"Why to me so much honour?"

'"What do you reply?" I asked.

'"I am thy servant; God render the grace for the honour thou dost me to-day, and God be praised for the joy that He gives to my old age. All the benedictions of Heaven rest on thy son."'

Nothing can be finer, simpler, more effective than this scene, but when we are conscious that the son thus spoken of is the spurious offspring which Tullio Hermil loathes, our sympathies are turned aside by a sense of incongruity and disgust. We are conscious that the young man would never have gone on such an errand, never have consecrated by such expressions the spawn of his wife's incomprehensible and unexplained amour. It is impossible to bring one's self to believe in any part of the story of the Innocente, strong as the treatment is in realism of a certain kind, and seductive as is the admirable ease and limpidity of the narrative, which for smoothness of recital, and wonderful semblance of being a true narrative of real events, is not surpassed by any novelist and has been equalled by very few writers indeed.

In all his works D'Annunzio draws women with exquisite veracity and skill; and a rare intuition into the workings of their minds and the beatings of their hearts. Of men he has as yet only drawn one type, whatever they are called, Sperelli, Aurispa, Cantelmi, Hermil, they are always the same person: 'touched to fine issues,' steeped in scholarship, refined, susceptible, voluptuous, but all sick with the maladie du siècle; all infirm from the neurasthenia of too early and too unbridled self-indulgence. But his women are infinitely more varied and more intricate. They are wondrous presentments of breathing life. All the contradictions of feminine nature are portrayed with marvellous exactitude in the vicious, cruel, and frenzied sensualism of Ippolita, of which we watch the gradual growth as we watch Vesuvius on a summer night pass from slumber into fury. With what inimitable dexterity he makes us conscious of the plebeian grossness underlying her physical sorcery, the commonness of her base birth seen here and there through the dazzling sorcery of her attractions; and how natural she is in her buoyant spirits, in her gay sportiveness, in her rapid changes of mood and humour, in her mingling of cruelty and compassion! Equally does he convey to the reader the consciousness of the perfect high breeding in the Virgine delle Rocce, of the three sisters of sorrow, so alike yet so dissimilar; three figures stepped down from the canvas of the Veronese, but dimmed by solitude and long neglect. Not less admirably has he given the delicate distinction and infinite sweetness of the Siennese, Maria Ferrés (although she is indeed an almost exact reproduction of Giuliana Hermil), whilst that patrician courtesan Donna Elena Muti, shameless, lascivious, and conscienceless, is nevertheless always a high-bred woman. He has incarnated the incomparable charm of the Italian woman, the most graceful, the most impassioned, the most seductive woman on earth, although also perhaps the most imperious, pitiless, and fiercely exacting in her passions. Even Ippolita, vicious as she is, is 'l'adorable Ippolita,' as De Vogüé calls her, and her portrait is surely one which will become as precious to future generations as that of Manon Lescaut is to us.

I much fear that the only work of his which will become known to the English public in general will be the Virgine delle Rocce, because (as far as it has gone) it is not indecent. The other works could not be reproduced in English; and the Virgine delle Rocce unhappily gives no just measure of the talent and strength of the writer. At present it is but the first of a triune romance of which the two latter parts are as yet unpublished. It is the cleanest, the simplest, and the most romantic of his works, but it will probably be caviare to the crowd, and it wholly lacks the great qualities of its predecessors. It is not well-constructed like the Innocente, it is not daring and intense like the Trionfo; it is not brilliant like Il Piacere; it is rambling, and vague, and shadowy, and it is difficult to collect the threads of the narrative. It is published in a fragment, which is always an unwise method of publication, but it is to be feared that when entire it will never equal the Innocente or the Trionfo. Indeed when severed from the theme of sensual psychology D'Annunzio loses in strength and in colour; he becomes desultory, almost indifferent; and wanders through his own garden of romance with little interest in it, much as in this latest story his own Oddo and Antonello stray through the ruins of Linturno and drift through the water-lilies of the lonely stream.

But this story, defective though it be, has a great charm for those conversant with certain phases of Italian life. I have known just such a grand old palace in the solitude of a deserted country, just such young daughters growing up in stately poverty and perpetual joylessness; just such paternal obsession in clinging to ruined thrones and perished faiths; just such an interminable sequence of colourless, uninterested, imprisoned days where the life is the life of the Lady of Shalott, and no eyes are lifted to see that the almond-trees are in flower.

Every page of this short book, which Frederic Leighton would have delighted to illustrate, is impressed with Italian verity of a kind which few foreigners have ever occasion to verify. The vast stone stairs of the approach, the huge dim archways, the great fountains where the stone Tritons spout and the ghosts rise with the spray in the moonlight of midnight, the dry fish-ponds full of odorous plants self sown, the neglected, wild, beautiful, fragrant gardens, the immense halls and chambers frescoed, water-gilt, marble-encrusted; the silent corridors, the ceilings lofty as the cupolas of cathedrals, the fading tapestries, the soft grey dust, the abandonment, the poverty, the stateliness, the infinite pathos and charm of this splendour, 'which dies so slowly because born of true art and of what was once an heroic nobility.' All these are portrayed with perfect fidelity in this strange and too slight story of the three daughters of the fallen House of Montega, and no less true to the facts of Italian life is the destiny which weighs upon them, the insanity which dwells amongst them in the person of their mother, whom we see living before us as she passes, carried in her perfumed and painted sedan chair, with her strange fixed regard, her tiara of ebon hair, her pallid face, her jewelled hands. Madness is a frequent malady in Italy, and few noble families are without some insane member. The afflicted person is usually kept in his or her apartments in the palace, or in one of the villas of the family, and is courteously inquired for by all visitors as Claudio in this story asks after the health of Donna Aldoina. Italians are usually kind to their insane relatives and not at all ashamed of them, but il pazzo or la pazza lends a weird fantastic gloom to the ancient and stately houses which saw their birth, and shelter their infirmity, and will hold their coffins in their crypts.

Possibly there seems more to me in this story than there actually is, because I know so well the tenor of the life therein depicted; and the absence of all objective interest, of all care for nature and for art, of all perception of the consolations to be found in both, which render that life so much more barren than it need be.

D'Annunzio has typified such barrenness of thought, such narrowness of horizon, in the family which dwells in the grand old villa of Tregento, and many a time he must, no doubt, with his own mind filled by classic memories, and knowledge of the arts, and touched to impassioned appreciation of all natural beauty, have suffered acutely from the apathy, ignorance, and unconscious self-absorption of such a domestic atmosphere. He has no doubt constantly been met with the incapacity to understand, the wonder of ignorance, the blank dulness of unopened minds, such as he suggests in the following passage:—

'We were near Rebursa. The rocky chain, with its sharp and broken peaks turned to the right following the winding Saurgo, rising tier on tier towards the massive summit of Mount Caran. On the left of the road, the soil was smooth and undulating like the large dunes of a seashore, becoming further off a succession of hills, tawny and humped like camels of the desert.

'"Look, look!" I cried, seeing another silver cloud of blossom. "Can you not see it, Antonello?"

'He did not look at the almond trees with my eyes; he looked, but with a faint smile, wondering probably at the childlike joy awakened in me at the sight of the first flowers. Yet, what fairer spectacle could this rude and stony country offer to us?

'"If my sisters only were here!" cried Oddo, to whom my pleasure communicated itself. "Oh, if they were here!"

'His voice was full of regret.

'"They need to be brought where flowers bloom," said Antonello, softly.

'"Look, look!" I cried again, giving myself up to my delight with fuller ease, now that I saw some reflection of it at least awakened in these poor shut souls. "I am glad these flowers are mine, Oddo."

'"My sisters must come to them," sighed Antonello, like one who speaks in a dream of sleep.

'It seemed as if his feverish eyes refreshed themselves with that vision of things so pure....

'They both looked at me, somewhat confused, faintly smiling, as if they had been brought unexpectedly before some extraordinary sight which stupefied them, yet filled them with delicious sensations. They had shown me their malady, had revealed to me their suffering, had spoken to me of that melancholy prison whence they had come and whither they would return; and I, on the common highway open to all, had invited them to recognise and celebrate the spring—the spring which they had both forgotten, which they seemed to see now for the first time after many years, which they gazed at with a mingling of fear and joy as at a miracle.'

Is not this delicate in expression as the sprays of the almond blossoms themselves?

An Italian scholar, in writing to me to-day, does indeed say with considerable accuracy that the affectation in the style of D'Annunzio takes from it its freedom and sincerity, that when he is writing of almond boughs and nightingales he does not give us the impression that these things are dear to him, but rather that he is endeavouring to say the most beautiful things he can think of about them. 'His style,' says my Italian correspondent, 'is the one occupation of his life, the one absorbing interest of his work; he cares but little for nature or for human nature, except as these are strings to his lyre.' This is in a great measure a correct, if a too severe, censure. There is in him nothing of that genuine emotion which wells up in the heart of Pierre Loti as he writes; D'Annunzio is always outside that which he describes; there is in him much of the virtuoso; he reminds me of a friend of mine, a London celebrity, who once invited a party of artists to see a fine work of art in his London house. When the curtain was drawn aside, the work of art was found to be a young nude woman, of singularly beautiful proportions, extended on a rug of black bear-skins to set off the ambers and ivories and blue-vein traceries of her skin. D'Annunzio stretches his subject thus bare before him in a well-adjusted light, and calls the world to see: for the subject he has no compassion. This preciosità (Anglicè, affectation) is still more apparent in his prefaces than in his works which they precede. These prefaces are long, elaborate, ornate disquisitions, with much of the euphuism of pedantic scholarship; and when in the preface to the Trionfo the author claims that this licentious romance is intended to hasten and welcome the coming of the Uebermensch, it is impossible not to smile at such a pretension, and, as even De Vogüé admits, at this point we are driven to sigh for the return of the mandolinata. He confirms the justice of a charge of preciosità himself in his introduction to Il Piacere, in which he speaks of 'the long and grave fatigue, the disgust which follows the painful and capricious artifices of style.' This is not the language of a true artist, for in the beauties and intricacies of style which should all have one aim—simplicity—the writer who is a true artist finds the same intimate satisfaction as the musician, the painter, the sculptor, each finds in the pursuit of his art. In style is the sfogo of the writer's procreative passion. It should bring with it neither fatigue nor disgust, but the serene joys of a satisfied desire.

However, apart from this fault of preciosità which De Vogüé does not appear to have perceived, but which seems to many Italians incontestable, the style of D'Annunzio is very fine; finest of all when it is spent on the portraiture of natural scenes, and of characters unhampered by conventionality. Read this brief episode of the simplest kind; how alive with actuality it is! It is taken from the earlier part of the residence of Aurispa and Ippolita at the Hermitage.

'Hearing a rattle of plates, he asked, "Are you hungry?" And the question suggested by the little homely sound, put eagerly, with childlike insistence, made Ippolita smile.

'"Yes, a little," she answered, smiling; and both of them looked at the table ready spread under the oak tree. In a few minutes more their dinner was ready.

'"You must be content with what there is," said Giorgio. "It is very humble fare."

'"Oh, I should be satisfied with herbs."

'And with a gay air she drew near the table, examined curiously the tablecloth, the silver, the glass, the plates, finding everything charming, delighted like a child with the blue flowers which ornamented the fine white pottery.

'"Everything delights me here!"

'She bent over the big, round loaf, which was still warm under its golden and crisp crust.

'"Ah! what a good smell it has!" And, as if impelled by her childlike joy in the fresh bread, she broke off a piece of its crust.

'"What good bread!"

'Her strong, white teeth shone as they bit and closed, and all the movements of her curving lip expressed the pleasure which she felt; and from her whole person there seemed to emanate a rare, fresh grace, which attracted and amazed her lover with a new and unexpected charm.

'"Oh, how good! Taste, how good it is!"'

What can be more graphic, more simple, more radiant, than this picture painted in words so few?

Take this landscape, so true to the scenery of the Veneto:—

'It was afternoon. He explored the winding paths which went, now up, now down, leading towards the point of the Penna, on the seashore. He looked before him and around him with curiosity, but, perhaps, with some forced attention, as if he wished to understand obscure meanings hidden in these simple scenes, to wrest from them some unseizable secret. Rising in the heart of these hills of the coast the water of a brook, directed by a homely aqueduct made of hollowed trees, crossed the low-lying land between the two slopes. Other little rivulets were caught and guided by concave tiles to water the tilled earth grown with rich vegetation, and above these streams, ever bright and rippling, there leaned some beautiful purple flowers;[2] all these humble things seemed to him pregnant with profound life. All the merry waters ran down along the incline towards the pebbly beach, and passed under a little bridge. In the shadow of its arch some women were washing linen, and their gestures were mirrored in the stream. On the shingle other linen was already outspread, whitening in the sun. Along the path a man walked with bare feet, carrying his shoes swinging in his hand. Two children, laden with linen, ran along laughing and playing. An old woman hung up on a line a blue mattress.

'On the edge of the path there were little white shells, out of them frail tentacles trembled and stretched to the light. From a rock above hung twisted dead roots like entwined snakes. Farther on there was a large peasant's house, bearing on the summit of its roof a floral ornament in clay. An outside staircase led up to a covered terrace. Two women sat spinning at the head of the stair, and the flax shone in the sun like gold. You could hear the wheels turn. By a window sat another, weaving; you could see her rhythmical gestures in moving the shuttle. In the courtyard a huge grey ox was lying down; he shook his ears and moved his tail faintly but incessantly in war against the flies. The cocks and hens cackled and crowed around him. Farther on still another little river crossed the road; it laughed aloud, crisp, mirthful, vivid, limpid.

'Near another farmhouse a thick bay hedge shut in an orchard. The straight, shining stems rose immovable, crowned with their glistening foliage. One of the bay trees was enveloped in the embrace of a clematis, which lovingly conquered the martial bay with her blossoms of snow, the veil of her nuptial freshness. Underneath, the earth was dewy and fragrant. In an angle a black cross leaned over the hedge, the silence had the resigned sadness of a graveyard. At the end of a line there arose a flight of steps, half in shade, half in sunshine; they led to a door standing half open, protected by two branches of olive hung from its rustic architrave. On the lowest step sat an old man asleep, his head uncovered, his chin on his breast, his hands on his knees; the light touched his aged brow. From the half-open door there came, to soothe his senile sleep, the cadence of a rocking cradle, the rise and fall of a murmured lullaby.'

What can be more true or more beautiful than this? Mark the contrast of the old man sleeping on the stone steps, with the young mother, unseen within, singing sotto voce her cradle song. In totally different style and tone take these few lines on Orvieto:—

'A rock of tufa hanging above a melancholy valley; a city so silent that it seems empty: the windows are closed, in the grey lanes grass grows; a capuchin crosses a square; a bishop descends from a closed carriage before the gate of a hospital; a tower rises in a white and rainy sky; a clock strikes the hour slowly; all at once at the end of the street a miracle in stone—the Cathedral.'

Is not the city of Luca Signorelli set before you with those few lines? There is here something far beyond dexterity or ingenuity of style; there is the poet's, the painter's, power to embrace a world at a glance, and with a touch set before duller eyes that world in all its varieties and suggestions, all its past and its present, all its secrets of the grave and of the future.

Take again this very different picture:—

'He found the gorse.

'On a tableland the thickly-growing gorse had flowered so densely as to spread a vast golden mantle over all the soil. Five maidens were gathering the flowers and filling with them skips and baskets, singing as they worked. They sang a song of thirds and fives in perfect harmony. When one of them reached a special phrase she lifted her whole bust out of the yellow maze of blossom that the notes might go forth from her throat with fuller liberty, and held it long sustained in air, looking her companions in the eyes whilst they applauded with their hands of flowers.

'When they saw the stranger they stopped and bent again over the gorse. Stifled saucy laughter rippled under the yellow sea. Giorgio asked,—

'"Which of you is Favetta?"

'A girl, brown as an olive, raised her head in reply, amazed, almost terrified: "It is I, sir."

'"Are you not the finest singer of San Vito?"

'"No, sir. That is not true."

'"It is true. It is true!" cried her companions.

'"Sir! make her sing."

'"No, sir, it is not true. I cannot sing."

'She hid herself, laughing, her face all aflame; she twisted her apron whilst the others teased her. She was of short stature but well-formed; her bosom was high and large, swollen with songs. She had curly hair, dark eyebrows, aquiline profile; something in her carriage wild and free. After the first resistance she yielded.

'The others, taking her by the arms, held her in their circle. They were up to their waists in the flowering gorse, whilst round them the bees were humming.

'Favetta began unsteadily, but with each note her voice grew firmer. It was limpid, liquid, crystal, clear as a water spring. She sang a couplet and the others sang in chorus a ritornello. They prolonged the harmonies, putting their mouths close to form one single vocal flute; the song rose and fell in the light air with the slow regularity of a litany.

'Favetta sang:—

'"All the springs are dry,
O poor love of mine!
He dies of thirst.
Where is the water thou broughtest me?
We have brought thee an earthen jar,
But round it is a chain of gold!"

'The others sang:—

'"Long live Love!"

'It was the salutation of May to Passion, pouring from young breasts, which perchance as yet knew not its sweetness and perchance never would know its sorrow.'

Or take the following passage which is as essentially true in its accurate observation as it is beautiful in its expression. Tullio Hermil and Giuliana are listening at Villa Lilla to the first songster of that spring.

'The nightingale sang. At first it was like a burst of melodious glee; a jet of easy trills which fell through the air like pearls falling on the glass of a harmonium. Then came a pause. A shake arose, agile, marvellously prolonged, like a proof of strength, in an impulse of insolence, a challenge to some unknown rivals.

'A second pause. A phrase of three notes with a tone of interrogation passed on a chain of light variations repeating the interrogative phrase five or six times, modulated softly like a slender reed flute on which is played a pastoral. A third pause: the song becomes elegiac, turns to a minor key, tender as a sigh; it is almost a groan; it expresses all the grief of the lonely lover, a heartrending desire; a vain hope; it flings out a last appeal, improvised, acute as a scream of anguish: then it ceases. A longer pause, more ominous. Then one hears a new accent which scarcely seems to come from the same throat so humble is it, so timid, so slight; it resembles the twitter of scarce-fledged birds, the chirrup of sparrows; then, with a miraculous volubility, this noisy note changes into a breathless song, more and more rapid in its trills, vibrating in sustained shakes, turning in daring flights of sound, leaping, growing, bounding, attaining the highest heights of the soprano. The songster is drunk with his own song. With pause so brief that one note scarce ceases ere another succeeds it, he spends his delirium in ever-varied melody, impassioned and sweet, subdued and ear-piercing, light and grave, now interrupted by broken sighs, by lament and supplication, now by impetuous lyrical improvisation and supreme appeal. It seems that even the gardens are listening, that the sky stoops over the old tree from whose summit this poet, invisible to mortal eyes, pours out such floods of eloquence. The flowers breathe deeply and silently. A yellow glow lingers in the west. This last lingering glance of the dying day is sad. But a single star has risen, alone and tremulous like a drop of luminous dew.'

He who can write thus is a great writer; and the charm of this passage is not alone its poetry but its exact truth. The song of the nightingale varies much in accord with age, with species (for there are two species, Luscinia Philomela, and Luscinia Major), with climate, with the sense of security, and the want of security, but the song of a nightingale in its maturity, who is unalarmed and feels at home in the gardens of his choice, is precisely such a song as is described in this passage, and is more completely echoed in it than in the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven. This sympathy with the melody of birds is the more singular in D'Annunzio, because Italians are almost invariably indifferent to such melody, and snare the divine songster in the net, or shoot him whilst he shouts his nuptial Io Triumphe! with the most stolid indifference. And it may, perhaps, be that D'Annunzio does not care for the bird himself more than the rest of his countrymen, but only cares for his own eloquence concerning it. It may be said, without risk of injustice to him, that great tenderness is at no moment found in him. He has not 'the pathetic fallacy'; but he approaches it very nearly at times. When women shall have lost for him some of the intensity of their physical charm, nature in her wider and more profound meanings will, perhaps, become more visible and more dear to him. Perhaps, however, it will not, for the Italian is rarely impersonal.

Something of the affectation to which the delicate taste of my Italian correspondent justly objects must be admitted to mar, by its artificiality, the many magnificent pages dedicated by him to the sea. Magnificent they are, true also, entirely true; but some mannerism there is in them, some over-intricate embroidery of phrase. The sea he knows best, and remembers always, is the Adriatic, of which the extreme beauty of the colour, like the leaves of the silverweed, as wind and sun pass over the meadows, has always before him been too little noted except, I may venture to say, by myself.

'O, fair, clear seas of September!' he cries in the Piacere. 'The water is calm and innocent as a sleeping child, and lies outstretched under a pearl-like sky. Sometimes it is all green of the brilliant and intense green of malachite, and on it the small rosy sails seem like wandering fires. Sometimes it is all azure, of an intense blue, like the ultramarine which heralds use for blazonries, veined with gold like lapis-lazuli, and on it the painted sails seem like a procession of standards, of banners, of spears borne on a Catholic holy day. And yet again at other moments it takes on a metallic gleam, a silvery paleness, the hues of a ripening lemon, something indefinable and strange, and on this mystical surface the boats then glide and fade, and are seen no more as the illumined wings of cherubim sink into the faint fundamental hues of an old Giottesque fresco.

'The sea was not alone for him a delight for the eyes, but it was a perennial wave in which he steeped his thirsting thoughts; a magical fountain of youth in which his body recovered health and his mind nobility. The sea had for him the mysterious attraction of a native country, and he abandoned himself to it with filial confidence, as a weak child in the arms of an omnipotent father; and he derived consolation from it, for no one had ever confided his sorrows, his desires, or his dreams to the ear of the sea in vain.'

So, we are told by D'Annunzio, thinks Andrea Sperelli, and so thought also Giorgio Aurispa. But the sea has no permanent power on the soul of either; the one returns from his contemplations of it to his life of voluptuous pleasure, and the other drowns both himself and the woman, whom he has adored to frenzy, in its waves, whilst the dog mourns 'forsaken beneath the olive trees, and the waters murmur softly, rocking as in a cradle the reflections of the stars.'

Only once in D'Annunzio's work does genuine and yearning regret, of which it is impossible to doubt the spontaneity and sincerity, thrill through him, and move him to intense emotion and unstudied eloquence. It is when, in the person of Claudio Cantelmo, he speaks in furious invective of the modern desecration of Rome; in these passages he is strong without effort, eloquent without study, and veracious alike in sorrow and in scorn. His invective is poured from his heart's depths, and thrills with the force of the Latin orators of the ruined Forum.

'I have lived several years in Rome; in that third Rome which should have represented "Love reigning by Latin blood on Latin soil," and have seen radiant on its heights the wondrous lights of a new Ideal. I have been witness to its most ignominious evolutions, to the most obscene unions that have ever desecrated a sacred place. And I have understood the symbolism hidden in that act of an Asiatic conqueror, who cast myriads of human heads in the fountains of Samarcand, when he desired to create a capital. The wise and cruel tyrant meant to signify the necessity of merciless destruction in the creation of a new order of things.

---

'The ship which bore the Thousand of Marsala only set sail that the art of exchange and barter should be protected and covered by the State!

---

'It was the epoch of the most frenzied fury of the destroyers and contractors on the site of Rome. With the storms of dust there were propagated a sort of lunacy of gain, a malignant delirium, seizing not only on the tradesman and money-lenders, and the workers in brick and mortar, but also on the elect heirs of the papal majorat, who primarily had looked with scorn and disgust on the newcomers from the windows of their palaces of travertine, indestructible under the encrustations of ages.

'The magnificent patrician races founded there, renewed and strengthened by nepotism, and the strife of opposing houses, descended and abased themselves one by one, slid down into the new mud, sank, and vanished. The illustrious riches, amassed through centuries of gorgeous pillage and Mæcenic luxury, were thrown into the whirlpool of the speculations of the Bourse.

'And around them, on these patrician lawns, where, only the previous spring, the violets had blossomed more numberless than the blades of grass, there were now mounds of lime, heaps of bricks, the wheels of stone-laden carts creaked on the turf, on the air were the oaths of the drivers, the shouts of the overseers, while every hour hastened on the brutal work which was to efface and occupy the sacred soil once dedicated to Beauty and to Dreams. There passed over Rome a blighting blizzard of barbarism, menacing all that greatness and loveliness which were without equals in the memory of the world. Even the laurels and the rose trees of the Villa Schiarra, for so many nights of so many summers hymned by their nightingales, fell destroyed, or remained in their desecration behind the gates of little gardens parcelled out to the little cockney boxes of tradesmen. The gigantic Ludovisian cypresses, those of the Aurora, those which spread the clouds of their solemn and mystic antiquity above the Olympian brows of Goethe, were now laid prone in line one after another, with all their dishonoured roots stretching towards the pallid sky, the black dishonoured roots which still seemed to hold in their immense network the web of a life greater than our own.

'Even over the box alleys of the Villa Albani, which had seemed as immortal as their Caryatides and their Hermes, there hung that shadow of a vandal's ruin. The contagion of destruction spread everywhere. In the ceaseless combat of gain, in the savage fury of avaricious greed and passions, in the disordered haste of commercial activity, every sense of common decency was forgotten, all respect for the past was trampled under foot. The struggle for gain was carried on with blind fury, with neither check nor curb. The pickaxe, the shovel, and the cunning of fraud were the weapons employed. And week after week, with incredible velocity, there arose on the violated earth the huge foolish cages of brick and mortar, pierced with square holes, surmounted with sham cornices, encrusted with shameful stucco ornaments. A kind of immense white tumour rose and spread on the wounded and bleeding side of the great Urbs and drained away its life.

'And then, day after day, at sunset, along the princely avenues of the Borghese Park, we could see in gorgeous brand-new equipages the new elect of Fortune, from whom not barber, nor tailor, nor boot-maker, had power to take away the ignoble stamp. We could see them pass and repass with the sonorous trot of their shining bay and brown horses; they were recognisable at a glance by the insolence of their pose and the awkward carriage of their rapacious and vulgar hands; and they seemed to cry aloud,—

'"We are the new rulers of Rome. Bow down to us!"

'In truth such are its rulers; such the present masters of that Rome which prophets and poets once likened to the bow of Ulysses.'

Often have I myself written similar things, but in me they have been considered exaggerations. They cannot be so considered in Gabriele D'Annunzio of Francavilla.

All who love Rome and loathe her modern violation must thank him from their hearts for such passages, and must mourn with him that we cannot drive out the spoilers from our desecrated temples.

This is, indeed, his greatest strength, that, whilst still a young man, he yet has the courage to resist the intellectual tendencies of his contemporaries, to refuse to worship their gods, to see and despise the falseness of those scientific pretensions which enslave the multitude in modern life. His intellect, richly stored by learning, is, in a large measure, free of prejudice. This is a great and rare distinction in a generation which more completely than any which has preceded it, is the timid slave of formula and the credulous servant of professional bigotry.

He has kept a complete mental liberty; free from the superstitions of religion, which, in this day, it is easy to be; but also free from the superstitions of science, which is far harder, and incurs far greater obloquy and opposition.

In his study on Giorgione, he says what it needs much courage to say in these days:—

'The scientific spirit has invaded the generation of the second half of our century. Struck by the surprising results of physics and calculation, men were inclined to believe for a time, that by the aid of the one or the other, they would be able to penetrate into all mysteries and solve all problems. But to this proud exaltation has now succeeded a discouragement mingled with suspicion. They say to themselves, and not without reason: "Where is this certainty that science promised us?" If ever certainty were incomplete, deprived of solid criterion, it is that offered by natural science. As for the sciences called exact, some, like geometry, repose on a tottering base of arbitrary affirmations; others, like algebra, on mere methods of reasoning, and contain as much or as little certainty as the formula of a syllogism.'

This is emphatically true; but it is a fact which is by no means recognised by all, and which is still violently denied by those fanatics whose form of bigotry is either experimental or exact science.

The mind of D'Annunzio refuses all bondage. It is a law to itself, as the mind of the great writer should be. I imagine that the opinion of him held by others, is to him of the most absolute unimportance. His teaching is always to preserve the independence of the Ego, to live without attention to formula or usage, to be, both materially and spiritually, that which we were created to be by nature.

His morality is of the most primitive kind; or rather, he has none whatever, no more than has a South-Sea islander lying in the sun under a cocoa-nut tree whilst the surf bathes his naked limbs. It would be absurd to accuse him of immorality because the indulgence of the senses is as natural and as legitimate in his estimation, as Favetta's song amongst the golden furze, or the reapers' welcome of the purple wine. Yet by a not rare anomaly, this demand for perfect freedom of the passions is accompanied by a tendency to desire tyranny in political matters. He is disposed to deify force. In one or two expressions there is an echo of Carlyle which sounds oddly and jarringly amongst the amorous liberties and artistic debaucheries of the rest; and is not worthy of a writer who has so much courage in opposing scientific pharisaism and the thraldom of the schools. He is disposed to admire what is strong simply because it is strong, forgetful that such strength is sustained and nourished by the suffering of the weak. It is true that he has lived in an atmosphere in which the verities embodied in the aspirations, abortive but always noble, of the higher efforts of revolution have been received with fear and misunderstanding. The tendencies and training of the Codini are visible through the eloquence of the poet and the conclusions of the philosopher. The entire lack in him of all altruism comes from this. Mazzini must be as unintelligible to him as Tolstoi. The mass of humanity is always to him the filthy, surging, bestial multitudes of the crowd at Casalbordino. But even this absence of benevolence is better than the pitiful sycophancy of writers who are as fulsome in their flattery to Demos as to kings; is manlier than the nauseating self-worship of a Humanity at once its own pimp and pander, its own adorer and assassin.

In his scorn of the human flocks of sheep, he forgets, I admit, too entirely the justice to which the humblest unit amongst these flocks has right, but that scorn, even when misdirected, is fresh and bracing as the dash of his own Adriatic waves, when the east wind drives them hurrying on to the shingle beach. He has no fear; and he never stoops to that base flattery of his own species which is the most nauseous feature of modern politics and of modern science.

'This alone is your office,' he cries to his contemporaries, if they would resist the debasing influences of their time, 'defend the dream which is in you. Since in this day mortals no longer bring tribute of love and honour to the choristers of the Muses, defend yourselves, O poets, with all your weapons, steep the point of your rapiers in the most biting poisons. Let your satires bear such corrosive acid in them that they shall pierce to the very pith of the spine and destroy it. Brand to the very bone the stupid forehead of those fools who would mark every soul with the same label, and make every brain like another, as the heads of nails are beaten into a common likeness by the blows of the nailmaker. Let your mordant laughter reach to heaven when you hear the stablemen of the Great Beast shouting in the parliaments of the earth.... Defend the thought which they menace, defend the beauty which they outrage, defend the antique freedom of your masters and the future freedom of your disciples, against the insane assaults of drunken slaves. Despair not, though you be few in number. You have the supreme force of the world: the written word.'

The written word is indeed in his hand a scourge, a sword, a sheaf of arrows from the quiver of the divine Python Slayer.

And in no country more than in the Italy of his generation is such a scourge, such a sword, such flame-tipped arrows, needed to slay the courtiers, the usurers, the sycophants, the knaves, the brutes, the sellers of justice who fasten like leeches on her body.

This son of Italy is a great writer; a great poet. Read his works in the original text all ye who can, men and women for whom life has no secrets and truth has no terror.

He is young; the time will come, as it comes to all, when the joys of the senses will fade for him as the roses of the summer are scattered by autumn winds.

Let us hope that there will be later a second period of his creative art, in which there will be developed an original genius free of exotic influences, and untrammelled by the search for idioms and pruriencies. Genius, like the river at its source, takes the colour of the earth it springs from. It is only when it has reached its full volume, its deepest currents, that it becomes clear and reflects the sky alone.

Let us hope that such a future awaits him, and that more and more fully will he realise what he has already said in noble words:—

'Art! Here is the one faithful passion ever youthful, nay, immortal; here is the fountain of pure joy unknown to the multitude; here is the divine food which makes men like to gods. How could he have stooped to drink at other cups when he had once tasted of this?[3] How could he have bent to taste of other joys, once having known this ecstasy? How could his senses have let themselves be weakened and debased to lowest lusts when they had once been stirred to that highest sensibility which beholds the invisible, which touches the impalpable, which divines the most hidden secrets in the heart of nature?'

With these words, which are the greatest in meaning that he has hitherto written, I will, for the present moment, take my leave of him.

II

GEORGES DARIEN

Of all countries, France remains the land in which it is possible to tell the most truth. The nation of Montaigne and Molière is always the first to recognise and award the title of talent to lay bare the shoulders of her community and use the scourge upon them. If at its first appearance the strange and terrible revelations contained in the work entitled Biribi were met by official obstruction and attempted suppression, the book has conquered them, and has been allowed to carry the light of its torches into the dark places of military administration and oppression. In Italy, as in Germany and Austria, it would have been stopped by fine, exile, and seizure. In Russia it could never have been issued at all. In England it would have been as costly to the author as were his issues of Zola to the unhappy and martyrised Vizetelly. In France alone its pictures of the most terrible facts pass unarrested, by right of that literary liberty which the esprit gaulois has always awarded, however much government and law may have been alarmed.

It has been said that the accusations contained in the works of Georges Darien are a Rétrissure à la France, and as such should never have been made public by a patriotic writer and a ci-devant soldier. But here we merely meet again the hackneyed question whether the writer of talent is bound by patriotism or any other scruple to withhold truth, or whether he is not rather bound to disclose the truth as he believes it to be at all costs, whether to himself or to others. It is not necessary for me to say with which of these opinions I agree. The little which has been done towards any true progress of the human mind has been done by the expression of free thought, and by its fearless exposure of evils protected by the crystallisation of time, usage, and prejudice. Over the modern world which chatters of liberty, but does not anywhere possess it, or even know actually what it means, there hang, in heavy and icy weight, two ever-increasing despotisms: the scientific and the military. Of the former it is not necessary to treat in these pages; of the latter the yearly increase throughout Europe, ever since the war of 1870-71, must alarm every unbiassed thinker, bringing with it, as it does, the impoverishment of the people, the curse of youth and manhood, the endless strain of a fiscal burden, so enormous that every class groans under it, and the perpetual and diseased anxiety in which every nation lives, suspecting its neighbours, and turn by turn affronting them insolently and cringing to them obsequiously, according as it is made to feel the power of its own strength or the weakness of its own inferiority. Every syllable printed which tends to show the reality of military tyranny at this moment is valuable, and should be welcomed, however odious it may be to military authority and government; and especially valuable when it comes from one who has passed through the scenes which he depicts, and draws, not from imagination, but from memory.

Georges Darien has been the man whom he describes; treated as the worst of criminals, though wholly guiltless of breaking any criminal law. Georges Darien in using the first person, both in Biribi and in Bas les Cœurs, is but writing portions of his own autobiography; he was a boy of ten, like his young hero in the latter book, and a volunteer like the gunner of the second class in the 41st battery of artillery in the former work, and to this fact there are owing that directness, simplicity, and virility which are the distinguishing characteristics of both these volumes. They are alive with life. The reader may resent them, detest them, dread them and their revelations; but he must be impressed by them; he must receive from their perusal that thrill which can only come from reality. They are saturated with the tears of blood of a strong man who feels his own impotency to rouse his generation and to change humanity; who knows that his voice is the voice of the prophet crying in the wilderness, and echoing over a desert of dead bones and drifting sand. There are few greater pangs than to see the truth and know it, and feel that the salvation of others lies in it, and to tell it in vain to deaf ears, and offer its water of life to lips closed by pride and cruelty and folly.

The name Biribi sounds too light for such a subject; it sounds like a joke; but the joke is grim indeed, grim as the dance of skeletons round a gallows-tree. In actual fact Biribi is the nickname given by French and native soldiers in Algeria to the punishment-battalions of the Franco-African army; a slangy petit nom given in jest to one of the most awful hells that earth holds. The tortures which are suffered in every army, in the best army, and in the time of greatest peace, can scarcely ever be over-rated; and they are not the less, but the more terrible, because almost always endured in silence and ignored by authority. Now and then a voice is raised from the ranks, occasionally, very rarely, some punishment, or injustice, more brutal than usual, comes to light, and rouses public indignation. Biribi is one of those rare utterances rising from the sealed pits, in which uncared-for and unpitied lives are beaten into senseless pulp of bruised and bleeding flesh.

There is great originality in the literary talent of Georges Darien. His style is all his own. His manner of relation resembles no other. He has nothing of the modern school, except its hopelessness; he is strong, intense, virile, rough; he seeks no ornament, he strives for no effect; he writes as he feels, boldly, passionately, with that eloquence which is the offspring of simplicity and of veracity, and that potency which comes from wide knowledge of literatures and of mankind. Belonging by birth to the bourgeoisie, son of a Catholic father and a Calvinist mother, his early years were embittered by religious strife. He has later on travelled much; he has known the lowest classes and the hardest ways of life; he is still young in years, but old in the most varied experiences; and he has, certainly, uncommon powers, which have as yet not been duly recognised, for he offends the prejudices and vested interests of his generation, and even in France prejudice and vested interests are strong and close many channels.

He disdains, moreover, to appeal to that large class of readers who require a book, cast in the form of a story, to possess a story. Like the famous knife-grinder he has none to tell, if by story we understand, as most people do, a love-tale in some one of its forms. Biribi is the stern and terrible narrative of the career of an insoumis; Bas les Cœurs is the simple, domestic record of a boy's recollections of the Année Terrible. In neither is there any hint or fragment of romance. This fact at once limits his public to the restricted number who appreciate the skill which can afford to dispense with the elements of romance, and to rely solely on its own power of description and analysis of character. In this respect for literary excellence and harmonious treatment I should place Bas les Cœurs before Biribi. The relation of events at Versailles, before and after the Prussian occupation, as seen from the point of view of a family of the town, is told with such perfect naturalness that the reader follows it with the deepest interest, and remains fascinated by the admirable manner in which the most tragic and momentous events of history are reflected in the mind of a boy of ten years old.

The tranquillity and precision of his use of the etching-needle, with which he describes the daily life and street scenes in Versailles, contrasts curiously with the hot colour and broad charcoal marks with which he portrays the tortures of the punishment-battalions in Africa.

This testifies to the flexibility of Darien's talent, since nothing can be more different to the impetuous and turgid violence of Biribi than the restrained and delicate irony of Bas les Cœurs: the one is a battle-piece of Vereschagin, crowded with begrimed and panting figures, in which the dumb canvas seems to shriek with war and smoke with blood; the other is a cabinet picture of Meissonier's, finished, polished, small in measurement, illimitable in suggestion, fine as the point of a needle, cruel as the fork of a snake's tongue. For, undoubtedly, Darien is cruel; but he is cruel from the impotent rage which is in him, the powerless sorrow and scorn which his country, his generation, his fellow mortals, his vision of things as they are, awaken in his memory and in his desires.

The apathy and sheepishness of the general multitude fill him with wrath; he longs to pull down on the world its temple, like Samson, regardless of the fall of the column and the roof on himself. No one who loves received doctrines, crystallised commonplaces, undisputed formulæ, should open these books. Such persons will only see in them blasphemies against their honoured gods; for this author is not suited to the smug self-complacency of Philistinism, 'sanding its sugar and praising its Lord.'

To represent war as it is done in the terrible pages of La Débâcle, or in the heartrending sketch of the Attaque du Moulin, is not difficult to the novelist who has power and knowledge. To represent the effects of war on entirely uninteresting and commonplace persons, and yet keep the attention of the reader riveted to what is passing in one ordinary household during a frightful national calamity, is a far more difficult feat; especially when all the sympathies of the reader which would be easily roused by noble sentiments in the sufferers are voluntarily alienated, and the only motives and feelings depicted are sordid, egotistic, and miserable, except in the young narrator, whose childish intelligence is so slowly awakened to the baseness of those around him, but whose naturally honest and patriotic little soul burns and thrills with shame when once it becomes conscious of the meanness and cowardice of his family and of his neighbours. The highest literary faculty seems to me to show itself in the completeness with which the childlikeness of the young observer is retained, the vague apprehension, the slowly awakening comprehension, the gradually dawning horror with which the events around him impress themselves on a mind remaining instinctively loyal and just in the midst of corrupt and unworthy examples.

Take this as an example of its style:—

'Shouts are heard afar off in the woods.

'"Ah, my poor child!" says my aunt, weeping, "what a hideous thing is war!"

'She looks very feeble, very worn, my poor great-aunt Moreau. The sight of her thin face, her skeleton-like hands, moves me painfully. She sees this.

'"At my age," she murmurs, "these events, my dear, are hard to bear."

'However, she assures me the Germans are not very cruel. The Captain in command of those billeted on her, despite his rude exterior, is not uncivil.

'At that moment, indeed, this officer returns with his men; his heels ring on the bricks of the ante-chamber. He opens the door of the little room where we are sitting.

'"Do not be disturbed, Madame," he says, addressing my aunt, "on account of the firing you may have heard. There is nothing of any consequence. A wood-cutter, in whose hut we found arms, and whom we have shot: nothing more."

'He salutes and retires. My aunt shudders. She turns white, her eyes close, her head falls back against the chair. She is faint. I call her maid, who runs to my summons, with the cook and the servant just come to fetch me. The three women try and revive her. She remains so weak when again conscious, that they carry her to her chamber. She is grieved to have fainted.

'"When my dear little Jean came to see me," she murmurs! "It was the thought of that poor wood-cutter—"

'She trembles like a leaf as I leave her.

'Germaine, who has come from my grandfather's to fetch me, asks me to wait a moment; she has a message for the Prussian Captain from my grandfather. The officer is walking up and down, smoking, under the lime-trees. I hear his guttural voice as he answers, "Tell your master that I shall expect him here." What can this mean? When I reach my grandfather's house I rush to the dining-room to question the old man, but Germaine catches hold of my arm.

'"You must not disturb Monsieur. He is engaged with someone."

'Through the door, which I hold half-opened, I have seen that someone. He is a person dressed like a peasant, who looks not like a peasant, nevertheless. His large hat is worn too gracefully; his ragged blue blouse is too old to accord with his proud and delicate features. Is he an officer of franc-tireurs? A French spy, perhaps? Is my grandfather giving or receiving information? Is he not, as I hope, planning to surprise the Prussians? I question Germaine. She is astonished at my anxiety.

'"That man? He wanted to see the Mayor, and as the Germans have put the Mayor in prison, he was brought here. Do not trouble yourself about him, Monsieur Jean."

'I hear a sound of closing doors. It is, of course, the stranger going away.

'My grandfather joins me.

'"Well, how is your aunt?"

'I tell him what happened, the story of the wood-cutter and its effect upon her.

'"Ah! what a pity!—humph, humph!—I will go and see her. Germaine, my cloak."

'"Shall I come with you, grandpapa?"

'"No, no; not worth while. I shall be back in half an hour."

'In twenty minutes' time he returns.

'"You see I am as good as my word. I made haste, eh?"

'"Is my aunt better?"

'"Your aunt? Yes—no—that is, yes, much better."

'"Jean," he says to me after dinner, "you were to go back the day after to-morrow, but as I must go on business to Versailles in the morning early, I will take you with me. Does it disappoint you, eh?"

'"A little, yes."

'"Bah! you shall make up for it another time. You shall come again soon for several days, and send your lessons to the deuce."

'I laugh. I think I must have been mistaken. The man whom I saw must have been really a peasant. My grandsire could not be so gay if there were to be fighting at Maussy this evening. However, before going to bed I look out over the country, and when I lie down I strain my ear to catch a sound. All night long I cannot sleep; I can only listen. All at once a hand touches my elbow. I start up, screaming. Germaine laughs.

'"What is the matter, Monsieur Jean? Were you dreaming?"

'I stare round me in amaze. It is broad day.

'"Make haste and get up; the chocolate is ready; master is waiting."

'Half an hour later we leave the house. We are at the end of the street which opens on to the Versailles road, when a platoon of Prussian soldiers, with bayonets fixed, appears upon that road. My grandfather seizes me brutally and throws me down under a fence behind a hedge. I look through the branches. The Prussians pass at quick march. Amidst them marches a man, with his hands tied behind his back. I see a broad-leafed hat, a pale proud face, an old blue blouse. It is the man of yesterday. I know him at a glance.

'"Grandfather, who is that?"

'"Eh! Who? who? Some vagabond a Prussian patrol has picked up out of some ditch. The Prussians are very severe for—for—for wayfarers. It is better not to be seen in these affairs—it is better not to be mixed up—I mean—"

'My grandfather is lying, I am certain; I feel it. Why should he lie? Where are they taking this fettered man? Why force me to lie hidden under a hedge? From behind the village a loud volley thunders through the air.

'"Grandpapa, grandpapa, did you hear that?"

'The old man is livid.

'"It is the Prussians who practise—who practise at firing—in the morning. It is their custom—their custom—every morning—"

'His teeth chatter.'

Or see this description of the troops leaving for the frontier:—

'To-day the last regiment quartered here goes to the front; it is a regiment of the line.

'Léon and I wait in the market-place to go with the soldiers to the railway station.

'It is an epic, this departure of the troops. I have never felt what I feel now. There is a sense and scent of battle in the air; the midsummer sun shining on the musket-barrels and sparkling on the accoutrements sets fire to one's brain. The earth trembles under the passage of artillery which is about to vomit death; and one's heart dances in one's breast whilst the ponderous caissons, with their iron-circled wheels, shake the stones, and the mouths of the bronze guns display their yawning jaws. Bands play warlike tunes, men chant the Marseillaise, the gold of epaulets and the lace on uniforms glow in the light; the flags flap against the flagstaffs, on whose summits eagles spread their wings; the shoes of the chargers glitter like silver crescents; and one feels some mighty spirit of war soar above these hearts of flesh and of iron who are about to face the shock of battle. The blood steams in one's veins; the fever of the hour devours one; and one shouts louder and louder, faster and faster, not to become mad.

'It is market-day. The square is filled by country people who have brought in their vegetables and fruits for sale. Their stalls are under all the trees, and, here and there, take up the pavement. We are standing between a woman selling salads and an old man who has onions, and is on all fours beside his skips, because every moment or so an onion slides off the heap and rolls towards the gutter, unless he stops it. What a funny old fellow he is to take so much trouble for an onion! Ah! there goes another one! The old man hurries to catch it, but an officer, booted and spurred, steps on it; slips, slides, tumbles down. The onion-seller takes off his cap: "Oh, sir! a thousand pardons!"

'The officer gets up, takes his riding-whip by the whip-end, and brings it with all his force on the uncovered head of the old man, who falls backward on his skull. Blood bespatters his skips of onions.

'"Here comes the regiment!" screams Léon.

'The band sounds at the end of the street. We run towards it.

'"Did you see the poor old man?" I ask.

'"Yes. He deserved what he got. Only think! The officer might have broken his legs, eh?"

'I do not answer. I am absorbed in watching the soldiers whom we escort, walking on the pavement, keeping step with them.

'The soldiers do not all keep step with one another; emotion, enthusiasm, the delights of going to thrash the Prussians, the natural sorrow at leaving those they love—a thousand different feelings. There is an old soldier, a decorated soldier next to me, who is very unsteady on his legs. A young officer, very young, almost beardless, puts his musket straight on the old fellow's shoulder every second. It is admirable to see the harmony which reigns between privates and officers. The Colonel, a grey-beard, salutes with his sword when the people cheer him; and a trumpeter in the front rank has stuck a great bouquet of roses to the banner of his instrument, and carries it as a priest carries the host. Other nosegays are thrust into the barrels of muskets. Bottles of wine show their corks from under the piles of knapsacks, and two or three dogs are stretched out on the haver-sacks in the baggage-waggons. The crowd cheers the dogs.

'All the peasants throng to see, shouting their applause to the regiment. Before the chemist's shop at the corner, a knot of young men wave their caps in the air; the chemist waves his white handkerchief; behind him I see the blue blouse of the old onion-seller, who lies unnoticed on the ground.

'All at once the music breaks out into the Marseillaise.

'"Allons, enfans de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!"

'Oh, how beautiful it all is! The soldiers fall into line. The populace, shouting and cheering, accompanies them to the station. Through the bars of the station-gates a private passes me his drinking-cup, and asks me to get it filled at the wine-shop in front of the gates.

'"Wait; here is the money."

'But I do not wish for the brave fellow's money, I have a franc in my pocket. I will pay for his pint. In a moment I run back again.

'"Thanks, young sir," says the soldier. "It is perhaps the last drop I shall ever drink."

'"The last!" cries Léon, red as a turkey-cock; so proud is he to be able to rouse the spirit of a warrior. "The last? Ah! we shall give you floods of wine when you come back from victory."

'The townspeople, who are crowding round us, cheer. The soldier shakes his head dubiously.

'"Thanks all the same," he says sadly.

'He does not seem very confident of success.

'"Doubt that we shall be victorious?" says Léon in disgust as we go homeward. "Leave the town for the frontier with so little confidence! I would give—oh, what wouldn't I give?—to be old enough to go and beat the Prussians. My dear Jean, that soldier has no soul!"

'I am not sure. The soldier perhaps does not look on the campaign as a picnic. Perhaps he sees more clearly than we do? Perhaps? A great many things I had never thought of before crowd into my brain.'

A few days later, after Sedan, Jean sees the Germans enter Versailles.

'"Here they are!"

'It is the octroi-guards who cry out this as they come flying from the gates across the town. They brush me roughly as they pass, and their abject terror gains on me.

'I follow them. But as I run I see on the other side of the boulevard five or six inquisitive persons, who have stopped in their walk, and hide themselves behind the trees. If they stay to see, why may not I? I, too, get behind the stem of a tree, and I watch with staring eyes to see what will happen. On the road, fifty yards from the gates, a dozen horsemen are coming onward at a walk. They stop a moment before the octroi-officers; then they come on into the town in two lines, almost touching the pavement.

'"The Uhlans!" says someone behind me. Ah, I think with a thrill, these are the Uhlans!

'They draw near us; their pistols are cocked. They pass me close, and I feel that I shall fall from fright; my nails clutch the bark of the tree which screens me. These riders are covered with blood. There is blood on the pennons of their lances, on the hocks of their horses, on the rents in their torn uniforms, and one of the foremost has a white linen band stained with red on his forehead. Ah! it is hideous! I want to run away—I want to run away; it is impossible. Before me there are these Germans, riding slowly, searching with piercing glances the streets which open out to the left and to the right. Behind them comes on a dense dark mass. One can hear the tramp of feet. One can distinguish the spikes of helmets, the barrels of muskets, the little drums no bigger than tambourines, and the fifes which are playing a march. These drummers and pipers are followed by linesmen in dark blue, shod with boots drawn up above their trousers, the musket held straight on the shoulder, the cloak rolled.

'And these men, grey with dust and mud, black with powder, with their coats in rags—these men, who fought no doubt this morning, and who have just made a forced march—preserve the most marvellous exactitude, the most perfect regularity in the dressing of their ranks, and the rhythm of their steps keeps measure from the first line to the last of the whole column.

'They pass—they pass—they will never end. I have almost forgotten my fear. I am partly in front of my sheltering tree. The drums and the fifes cease to sound, and music replaces it from a band marching in front of a group of staff-officers. They play a warlike march, a battle-hymn, and all down the line of troops, from the foremost company which has reached the Chateau of Versailles, to the last which is leaving the Chesnay, shouts of triumph arise and drown the brazen voice of the cymbals. The victorious chant thunders down the wind. It is the Marseillaise—the Marseillaise which our own troops played as they left for the frontier, the hymn which was to render every French soldier invincible, which I had sung myself when we had been so sure of supremacy, and when I had planted my little tricolour flags on the map, all along the route from Paris to Berlin in a Via Triumphalis!

'Now the artillery comes on; its black cannon on their blue gun-carriages, with their attendants on foot and in saddle, wearing helmets surmounted with brass balls. There are flowers in the mouths of the cannon, and they are garlanded with ivy and green boughs. The cavalry follow on the artillery; dragoons, cuirassiers, hussars with white facings and a death's-head on their shakoes. Then come the carriages, the waggons, the vehicles with ladders, the baggage-carts.... All at once my heart sickens and stands still. Behind the wheels of the last waggons I seem to see some red cloth. Yes, it is our red cloth—our soldiers. Between two rows of Prussians, who have their bayonets fixed, our prisoners march without arms, dirty, ragged, miserable, and ashamed. There are at least two hundred of them, and I strain my eyes after these, my countrymen, who are destined to rot in German fortresses.'

It seems to me that in no contemporary fiction do we possess studies of spectacles, of sentiments, of street-life in a momentous hour, more accurate, more vivid, more simple in diction, more touching in suggestion, than in the above passages.

The sustained and withering irony and censure in this sketch, which yet never goes out of the selected orbit of a boy's observation and experiences, seem to me to be perfect in their kind. The incompleteness of the child's understanding gives only a keener incisiveness to the satire embodied in his narrative. The general reader will never forgive such portraits as that of the elder Barbier, who, after shouting, 'Sursum Corda! Prenons serment de défendre le sol sacré de la Patrie!' accepts the large Prussian orders, sets his steam-saws going in his timber yard, and furnishes the wood for the besiegers of Paris; or of that of the tobacconist Legros, who, after crying, 'Un soldat qui renie son drapeau? Qu'il crêve comme un chien!' stands bareheaded with bent spine to sell cigars to Bavarian officers. This is human nature: human nature as commerce and modern teaching and the cheap Press have made it; but Barbier and Legros will never pardon the limner who thus portrays them. To the reproach that such portraits are nearly always those which he selects, Darien would, no doubt, reply that it is not his fault if they are what have been in his path to the exclusion of finer and nobler figures. He is a realist in the full sense of that often-abused word, and he has the courage to represent the realities which he finds.

The Année Terrible casts its black shadows over the childhood of this writer, and as long as his life shall last the gloom it has left will stay with him. If France herself should ever forget, which Heaven forbid, he will not do so. His soul has been dipped in the Styx.

What will, no doubt, alienate from him a large number of readers will be his almost absolute want of human sympathy, or, at least, of expressions of such sympathy. It is exceedingly rare with him to give way to any sign of any emotion of pity. He sees human nature, in all its phases, with little compassion for it. He sees (and this is, too often, either through weakness or through policy, ignored by writers and thinkers) that the great majority of men are neither the martyrs nor the heroes, neither the victims nor the tyrants of their time, but a mass considerable alone by its numbers, inconsiderable by any mental or moral worth, and chiefly absorbed in different forms of selfishness and the desire of gain. It is probably an error, though one consecrated by usage and talent, to represent the generality of human beings as worthy subjects either of blessing or of curse. But the author who says so will never be forgiven by that mass of mediocrity which forms nine-tenths of the population of the world. Darien says it, and shows it, and it is this which will always make his works appear dreary and depressing to the general reader, who cannot accept and pardon this manner of looking at life for the sake of its veracity and courage.

Of course, also, in the Press generally, the accusation of exaggeration is always brought against exposures and delineations which are unwelcome and embarrassing. But the writer's word may certainly be taken for it that nothing in his descriptions is exaggerated or invented, and many recent inquiries into the causes of deaths in the ranks, and of executions after summary, and almost secret, court-martial in Algeria, have confirmed the veracity of the statements made in Biribi. The French Government, indeed, was, as I have said, so apprehensive of the effect of these on the public mind that, although it did not suppress the book, it forbade large coloured cartoons of the events described in it to be posted up on the boulevards. In all nations the public is treated like a child by authority; and as a child who will only walk straight and submissively if its eyes be bandaged and its feet hobbled.

But in these pages we are not so much concerned with the political and military side of these works as with their literary qualities; and these are considerable and of a strong and rare originality of style. Il vous empoigne, and it is impossible to read either of his two works without recognising their courage and ability, if we feel pained by their withering scorn and rugged wrath. They are at times hard as the stones over which the sick and swooning soldier is dragged, tied to the tail of a mule. They are at times ferocious as the licensed torturer with the three stripes on the sleeve, who throws his helpless prisoner, gagged and bound, on the burning sands. Terrible they always are, with all the terror of truths which have been lived through by the person who chronicles them. It is not any betrayal of confidence to say that the author of Biribi has experienced in his own person the tortures of which the dread record is made under this little playful-sounding word. After such scenes as are herein described, and such sufferings as these, the blood in a man's veins cannot be rose-water. 'La haine c'est comme les balles; en la machant on s'empoisonne.' And it is impossible that the military system can beget any other than hatred, violent, unforgiving, imperishable, in the victims of that system.

'A young soldier, a conscript, a chasseur à cheval, has lost two cartridges as the battalion is about to leave for Tunis.

'The Corporal informs the Captain in command, who turns and looks in silence. The boy Loupat gazes at him with the eyes of an animal watching the descent of the club which is about to brain it, and from which it knows not how to escape.

'In passing through Tunis the Corporal says to him, "We shall leave you here. That will teach you to sell your cartridges."

'The boy understands. The council of war, the sentence as a thief, the indelible shame stamped on the brow of a youth because he has lost two of the cartridges of the State! The following morning the bugle sounds the réveil at four o'clock. It is still dark. At twenty minutes to five the company, with knapsacks on their backs, is drawn up in line on the road which runs through the camp. The trumpets sound the roll-call, and all down the line each man answers "Present" as his name is spoken.

'"No one is missing?"

'"Yes, Loupat, my Captain."

'"Loupat is absent?"

'"Yes, my Captain."

'"The scoundrel! He has slunk off in the night to escape court-martial, but we will find him. Go on. No one else missing?"

'"Look there!" A soldier points to the gymnasium. All the men look where he points. Under the portico, on the great architrave on the left, a body is swinging, black, at the end of a cord.

'A lieutenant runs to the place, climbs to the body takes hold of it, lets it go, returns.

'"Dead?" says the officer in command. "Is it Loupat?"

'"He is already cold."

'"The scoundrel!" says the Captain again. "Well! he has done justice on himself. Right flank, march!"

'We are crowded pell-mell into the railway waggons which are bound for Tunis. I look through the opening in the door and see far away below me—already far away—a small dark shape which swings in the wind as on a gibbet, and which is lighted solely by the first rays of the rising sun.

---

'Another soldier, Barnaux, has had some liqueurs given him by a comrade; Barnaux is drinking with the men of his marabout, when a sergeant enters, espies the irregularity, takes the offender before the officer in command.

'Barnaux refuses to say who the giver of the liqueur was. The Captain orders him to be put in irons. They have put him à la crapaudine, that is, with his arms bound behind him and chained to his ankles. He is cast down thus on the sand of the camp. Because he moans with pain they gag him with a dirty rag, they tie his chin to his head with a cord. He remains all the night thus, tied up into a shapeless packet. In the morning when they change sentinels they perceive that he is dead. The gag has stifled him.

---

'Then the horror of the hospital; those hells which these men so dread that they will tear the bandages off their wounds, or cut their veins with a bit of broken glass, rather than live to enter them.

'The muleteers set us down at a great tent which serves as an infirmary; within there are planks on trestles and large pails filled with reddened water.

'"You see that," says Palot, who has divined with the instinct of the dying the destination of those sinister planks. "Well, that will be my last bed."

'An assistant, a filthy apron round his body, signs to us to enter.

'The great tent is an unutterably miserable place; it has been battered about by wind and weather; the currents of air blow unchecked through it, and clouds of dust arise from the ground. Some twenty iron beds are there, not more; and beyond those a pile of mattresses, on which men are lying, rolled up in rough counterpanes. There are not sheets enough for all. They make a sick man rise and give up his place to Palot, whose pulse the surgeon feels.

'"Done for," says the doctor, between his teeth, without heeding whether Palot hears him or not.

'To the rest of us they assign the mattresses lying on the earth; these are full of vermin; they throw on us some covering, stained with the vomit of our predecessors.

'How wretched it is, this hospital! How weary are the days passed, with no other companions than the dying, whose characters are poisoned by suffering and whose cries of horror and anguish ring in one's ears! When, moved by the disgust and despair which comes over you in this fœtid hole filled with filth and misery, you drag yourself out on your trembling limbs into the sun, you feel so feeble, so exhausted, so helpless, you cannot walk a step. You sit down in the torrid heat; you are chilly, despite the high temperature; your teeth chatter, your body is drenched with sweat. And at evening you are obliged to return to the tent, where you pass such hideous nights, troubled by such frightful nightmares, by such vague sudden shapeless terrors, which seem to seize you by the throat and freeze the blood in your veins. Oh! those horrible nights when you see the dying shake off their covering with shrunken fingers and try to raise their haggard faces, lighted by the yellow-green rays of a lanthorn!

'These nights in which the living, who so soon will be the dead, clutch at the rags which cover them, and shriek with rage and fear as though they saw an enemy descend on them! These nights in which one hears the childlike sobs of young Palot, who is delirious, and who in his long agony calls on his mother, "Mamma! Mamma!"

'They will ring for ever in my ears those two piteous words which through three whole nights fill that wretched place with their unpitied lament. A lament, low and tender at first, broken with choking tears, ending in screams which make one's hair stand up on one's skull with horror. The desperate screams of a perishing life which has lost all sense and measure of things or of time, of one who knows only that he will die, and in one supreme appeal protests against his severance from those he loves.'

And the youth Palot dies in that appeal, and they dig a hole in the red clay under a low wall beside a Barbary fig-tree.

'Ah! poor little soldier, who breathe your last, calling on your mother; you who, with your glazing eyes, saw the vision of your home; you who are laid there, at twenty-three years of age, to be devoured by the worms of that foreign soil on which you have suffered so much, and where you have met your death alone, forsaken, without a friend to soothe your last struggle, without a hand to close your eyelids, except the brutal hand of the hospital servant, which shut on your mouth like a muzzle when your desperate cries disturbed his sleep. Ah, I know why your sickness was mortal; I know it much better than the surgeon whose steel dissected your emaciated body; and I pity you, poor victim of the State, with all my heart and soul as I pity your mother who waits for you, counting the days of your absence, and who will only receive in her solitude the dry official notice of your death!

---

'Ah, no! I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne away from them? Do you not understand that it would be better to tear your new-born creatures limb from limb than to bring them up for one-and-twenty years, only to throw them into the hands of those who want their flesh to feed the cannon?... And you would ask our pity when, in some dark hour, the end comes, and the bones of your children are gnawed by hyænas and whitened by the sun in some forgotten corner of the earth?'

There are many such passages in Biribi, burning with truth and with pain; and it would be well if they could be stamped into the mind and the memory of the peoples of this epoch, who go meekly and stupidly as sheep to the slaughter, under the pressure of their sovereigns and statesmen. Of course, such a teaching as this carries with it its own condemnation by what is called authority, and by all those classes of which I have spoken, to whom war is a necessity and a standing army is the ark of the Government. But it would be well if the populace of every country could read, learn, and digest it, and realise its truth and its justification. As I have said, I place Bas les Cœurs higher, in a purely literary sense, than Biribi, in the sense of construction and of concentration. For Biribi is abrupt, at times confused; is rather a series of terrible records and tragical incidents than a consecutive and harmonious narrative, although it relates the career of the same soldier from the time when he enters the ranks, to the last day in which he flings from him for ever the grey coat and kepi of the punishment-battalion. In that punishment-battalion he has been placed, let the reader remember, for no especial crime against law or decency, but for those offences against the military code (the unwritten code) which make the offender more guilty in the eyes of a court-martial than any actually criminal accusation: to have lost a regimental article, to have forgotten to salute a superior, to have stopped to drink at a brook on a march, to have omitted to put the regulation number on a clothes brush or a pewter platter, to have been out without leave, to have lost cartridges or buttons—any one of those innumerable and incessantly recurring actions or omissions which make a soldier an insoumis to his military superior, whether sergeant or general, corporal or colonel, which to the military mind constitute crimes too heinous to be named, offences which fill a punishment-book with accusations of acts in which only the semi-insanity of perverted authority could see any provocation. Read only of the punishment of the tombeau for simple sins of negligence or thoughtless mirth. The tombeau is a canvas cover, stretched on stakes, making a cage a mètre long by sixty centimètres wide, into which the soldier condemned to this torment is obliged to creep on his stomach as best he can. In this cage he spends days, weeks, months, at the caprice of his tyrants, with a litre of water as his only drink, and nothing but the canvas between him and scorching heat or icy rain, or blinding desert dust. On hot days the water in his little can evaporates rapidly; and at the will of the corporals in charge of him he may be kept thirty-six hours without other drink and without food at all. Remember, as you read these lines, that the tombeau has been the home for months of the man who describes it; a home on the scorching Algerian sand in the parching African weather; a home in which he envied the jackal its lair and the vulture its wings; a home in which his flesh rotted and his manhood swooned.

It is, perhaps, the finest compliment one can pay to an author to be so much impressed by his theme that one almost forgets to speak of his purely intellectual qualities. It is difficult to treat of either of these works in a coldly critical spirit. For they are written with tears of blood—such tears as are wrung from the heart's depths of all those by whom France is beloved.

For if militarism be her only armour, her only resource against her foes, then must we tremble for her indeed; and tremble no less for the whole of Europe, of which all the male youth is bruised and crushed under militarism as in a mortar. The charge of want of patriotism has been brought against Georges Darien for both these volumes. But it is the flaw in human nature, not in French nature only, which he exposes; the cynicism, the selfishness, the cowardice, the meanness, which are so conspicuous in all modern society, in all nations and in all grades. Were there a German invasion of Italy or of England next year, there would probably be as many Italians or English ready to succumb to, to cringe before, and to profit by, the conquerors as there are Versaillais ready to do so in the volume called Bas les Cœurs. There is a moral motor ataxy in the spinal marrow of modern nationalities; the love of money, the fear of poverty, and the continual concentration of the mind on personal interests taught by modern education and by modern commerce make up a large percentage of human beings, who are mere time-servers, always ready to hold the stirrup-leather of the strongest. It is not alone the French bourgeois of 1870 who is satirised in these pictures of Versailles under German domination; it is the whole modernity of the last quarter of the nineteenth century under the teaching of modern science, modern trade, and modern morality. All humanity has been inoculated with the serum of concentrated cowardice and egotism; some are robust enough to resist the contagion, but the majority absorb it and develop the disease. That which Darien calls not cowardice, but fear, is enormously developed by modern influences, and will probably continue to increase in the coming century. He asks himself and his reader of what elements is it composed that discipline, that blind obedience, which is enforced in military life (and which is already demanded in civil life by the scientific and medical tyrannies). He replies, and it is a subtle distinction which will escape the comprehension of many, that the soldier who thus cringes to base orders is not a coward but a craven (pas un lâche; un peureux).

'This craven would throw himself into fire or flood to-day to save a comrade's life; but he would blow his comrade's brains out to-morrow at the word of command of a non-commissioned officer. He is not base: he is frightened. His courage disappears before a watch-word: his boldness shrinks and vanishes under a regimental order. What cows him is the apprehension of punishment, the fear of the men set above him. Fear is the keystone of the ark of the temple of Janus. The army is a laundry where they throw the consciences of men into a tub of soap-suds, and where the characters of men are wrung and twisted like wet linen, and are placed, shapeless, under the wooden beater of a brutalising discipline. It is only by means of fear that the military system has been able to establish itself. It is only by such fear that it maintains its position. It is obliged to affect the imagination by terror, as it must extinguish the soul and sense of nations to prevent each from seeing farther than the stupid limit of a frontier. It is obliged to surround itself with a mysterious ceremony, with a religious pomp in which horror is united to magnificence; in which the trumpet-blast joins in the death-shrieks; in which one can see confused together the blood-stained robe of glory, the plume of generals, the handcuffs of gendarmes, the marshal's baton, and the dozen balls of the execution-volley, the golden palms of triumph and the shattered bones of the dead. It must present this spectacle to the crowds which stare and tremble before it as they stand open-mouthed before a charlatan quack doctor at a fair, whose tinsel and feathers attract them, but from whom they shrink alarmed as soon as they see a forceps or a lancet glitter ominously in his hand. It must do this in order that the people, always in ecstasy before the marvellous, which it does not attempt to analyse, shall be seized before it with awe and admiration: even as a savage who prostrates himself in terror and respect before the shooting-iron which he does not understand, but which he knows possesses the power to strike him to the earth.'

Many will protest against this figure as an insult to the general public, but like many other insults which carry an intolerable sting in them, it may claim that it is merited, and does not overpass the truth.

Darien writes with that force which can, indeed, only come from the intimate persuasion that what it tells mankind is true, and should be told.

'"It is commonly said," he continues, "that the army incarnates the nation. History puts this into our heads by means of all her subtlest lies. Ten martial anecdotes sum up a century; a boast describes a reign. History preaches hatred of the people, respect for the pillager, the sanctification of carnage, the glorification of slaughter. The weak, the sensitive, the timid succumb beneath it, and are buried in the red clay or left on the sand for the vultures and jackal. The strong (sometimes, not always) lives to have his whole future poisoned by these memories, his whole temperament warped and embittered; or he forces his tormentors to shoot him by some unpardonable breach of discipline; some blow to a superior, or some intentionally insolent reply; death is the continually recurring sentence in the military code; if the man does not bend he must be broken: broken in two with a volley which smashes his spine. The punishment-battalions, the workshops of the Travaux Forcés, are the immediate consequences of the standing armies. Society, to protect its interests, makes of a young citizen a soldier, and of the soldier a galley slave at the first effort in him to shake off the yoke of that discipline which degrades and brutalises him, requiring like all tyrants and usurpers to support its rule by terror, to make itself dreaded that its prestige may dazzle and its tottering throne be secured. What society requires is an obedience passive and blind, a total imbecility, a humiliation which has no limit or hesitation; the response of the machine to the mechanic, of the dancing dog to the stick of his teacher. Take your man, make him surrender all free will, power of choice, liberty, and conscience, and you create and possess a soldier. To-day, at the end of the nineteenth century, there is as much difference between the two words, soldier and citizen, as there was in the time of Cæsar between two similar words—Milites and Quirites. The standing army is the corner-stone of the actual social structure; it is a force which sanctions and secures the conquests of force; it is a barrier raised much less to combat foreign invasion than to resist and paralyse the just claims of nations. Soldiers, those sons of the people armed against their fathers, are nothing more or less than gendarmes in disguise."'

This is surely absolute truth—that truth which is of all others most feared by those in authority; those who, whether as sovereigns, ministers, financiers, professional men, or tradesmen, live on and by the servility and gullibility of the nations.

'What is discipline except fear? The soldier is reared to dread what is behind him more than what he is forced to face; he must be more afraid of the fellow-trooper who will be told off to shoot him in the back, than of the adversary whom he is ordered to attack. The army is the incarnation of fear. The soldier must dread his commanders as a burnt child dreads the fire. He must never laugh at their absurdities, nor raise a voice against their injustice or their tyrannies. He must never speak. He must not even think. His superiors do both for him. If he laugh, or resent, or speak, or think, if he be neither a coward nor a dolt, he is a mutineer: he must be tamed, beaten, broken à Biribi.'

And when the dreamer, Queslier, says that it will not be long before the people will become awake to this abuse of them, and will see that the military caste is established on prejudices and interests hostile to them, and will arise and destroy it, Darien replies, with equal truth:—

'There will flow much water under all the bridges of the world before the people will have ceased to adore their vain idols bathed in blood and tears.'

Vain idols, indeed! For thousands of years the Juggernaut of military despotism has rolled over the living pavement of the prostrate multitudes, and there is no sign as yet that those multitudes will arise and shiver the blood-stained car to atoms. Darien has but little hope in the resistance of the people. He fears that the majority of them will always continue to be daunted, dazzled, made dumb and helpless by the powers which ruin and slay them. William of Germany makes his insolent and inhuman declaration that the soldier must slaughter his own progenitors if his 'war-lord' bid him do so; and yet William of Germany is allowed to continue his reign.

What are we to look for from nations which lie down to be stamped on thus? which lick the spurred boots of those who outrage them?

Biribi, and what Biribi represents, has its prototype in every country of Europe; and wherever Europe introduces her 'civilisation' there she introduces also her quick-firing cannon, her numbered battalions of slaves, her organised butchery, her pulverisation of virility and of volition, her destruction of initiative and of liberty.

England considers that such arguments as those contained in this book do not concern her because she has no conscription. But how long will she be able, or be allowed, to be free from enforced service? The present field-marshal, commanding-in-chief, Lord Wolesley, desires conscription. It may well be that events, in the not far distant future, may strengthen his hands and enable him to enforce it.[4]

'Ah, Mascarille! who wished to put history into madrigals!' cries Darien. 'History has given us Chauvinism (Jingoism), that epidemic which makes a nation run headlong like the Gadarene swine, to fall into the pit of absolutism! The army incarnates the nation, you say? No. It diminishes it. It incarnates nothing but force, brutal and blind, which lies at the service of whoever most pleases it; or—sad to say—whoever pays it highest. The army is the social cancer; is the octopus of which the tentacles drain the blood of the nations; the hundred arms and feelers which the people should sever with blows of their hatchets if they desire themselves to live.'

Such language is very strong, and will rouse strong opposition in those who have long been cradled in conventional opinions, and believe that the established order of society, now existing, is admirable, and intangible, because it has had the force and the cunning to so establish itself. It is language which may, of course, be challenged by adverse argument, which may at anyrate be met by counter-statements deserving to be weighed against it; but it is language which is more needed than any other in the present state of Europe, with every nation armed to the teeth and every country an arsenal.

III

THE ITALIAN NOVELS OF MARION CRAWFORD

I believe that the novels of Mr Crawford of which the scene and the characters are Italian are not among those of his works which are the most generally popular. This fact, if it be a fact, must be due to the general inability of his English and American public to appreciate their accuracy of observation and lineation. Nearly all of them have qualities which cannot be gauged by those to whom the nationality of his personages in these works is unknown. In my own works, of which the scene is in Italy, I have dealt almost exclusively with the Italian peasantry. Mr Crawford has devoted his attention to the middle and the higher classes. I do not think his portraiture of the Italian aristocracy always redolent of the soil, but that of the lower and middle classes is faithful to a wonderful degree. That side of Italian life which is given in Marzio's Crucifix, for instance, is drawn with an accuracy not to be surpassed. The whole of this story indeed is admirable in its construction and execution. There is not a page one would wish cancelled, and nothing could be added which would increase its excellence. It is to my taste the capo d'opera of all which he has hitherto done.

I think in his studies of the Italian aristocracy he has given them less charm and more backbone than they possess. He has drawn their passions more visible and furious than they are, and their wills less mutable and less feeble than they are in general. He seems to have mistaken their obstinacy for strength, while, if he have perceived it, he has not rendered that captivating courtesy and graceful animation which are so lovable in them, and which render so many of their men and women so irresistibly seductive. According to him they are a savage set of berserkers, always cutting each other's throats, and he does not in any way render that extreme politeness which so effectually conceals the real thoughts of the Italian gentleman, and which never deserts him except in rare moments of irresistible fury. No one remembers so constantly as the Italian of all classes that language is given us to conceal our thoughts, and no one lives so completely as the Italian does from the cradle to the grave in strict concealment of his thoughts even from his nearest and his dearest.

But in his Italian genre pictures, and in portraiture of the people whom we meet every day in society, Mr Crawford has a delightful pencil; little side studies also of more humble persons, which many writers would neglect, are charming in his treatment; take, for instance, the old priest of Aquila in Saracinesca; with how few touches he is made to live for us. We only see him once, but he will always remain in our memory; in his whitewashed room with its sweet smell from the pot of pinks, and his touching regret that he has never seen Rome, and at his age cannot hope to do so.

His priests, by the way, are always excellently drawn, from the humble village vicar to the learned and imposing cardinal. He has penetrated alike their interiors and their characters with that skill which is only born of sympathy, and it is therefore perhaps only natural that he has not the faintest conception of the motives and views of the socialist and republican whom he dreads and hates.

All these charming little details, like the pot of pinks, can only be thoroughly appreciated by those who know intimately Italian character and habits; but they abound, and show so much of fine observation and delicate discernment in the author that one cannot forgive him for ever beating the big drum of florid sensation.

Let me not be understood to mean that crime, or the impulse of crime, is not a perfectly legitimate subject for the novelist; both can be made so, but they are only so when treated as Mr Crawford himself treats them in Marzio's Crucifix. When treated as he treats them in To Leeward and Greifenstein and Casa Braccio they are merely coarse and inartistic. He has a leaning towards melodrama which is chiefly to be regretted because it mars and strains the style most natural to him, and does not accord with his way of looking at life, which is not either poetic or passionate, but slightly sad, and slightly humorous, modern and instinctively superficial, superficial in that sense in which modern society itself is so.

In Marzio's Crucifix he is perfectly natural, and one cannot but wish that he had never left that manner of treatment. Every motive therein is natural, every character consistent with itself. This naturalness in his characters is Mr Crawford's greatest attraction, and when he departs from it, as he does in such detestable melodramas as the Witch of Prague and Greifenstein, he is no longer himself. It is hard to understand that the same author can create the most delicate of aquarelles and the most glaring of posters, or why one who can draw so well and finely in silver-point can descend to daub with brooms in such gross distemper. If this be the price of versatility, it were best not to be versatile. But it is not versatility, because true versatility consists in possessing a many-sided power which flashes like a jewel of which all the facets are equally well cut. True versatility, moreover, does not consist in the mere change of subject, but in the change of style, of treatment of thought, in fact, the mutation of the entire mind of an author, such as brings it into entire harmony with its fresh field and its new atmosphere. There is no such change in these novels. Mr Crawford is Mr Crawford always. As he never loses himself in his creations, so he is always present in them to the reader; and his style never varies, whether he treats of horrible psychological mysteries in Prague or of pleasant carnival seasons in Rome.

He is not strong or forcible in tragedy. When it is incidental in his stories like the murder of Montevarchi, or the attempted assassination of Ser Tommaso, it is admirably sketched in; but when it forms the structure and essence of a romance he fails entirely to give it sublimity; it becomes in his hands a mere scarecrow, which makes us only smile as its wooden hands beat the empty air. One feels that it is not his natural element, that he does not like it or feel at home in it, and has merely lent himself to it from some wrong impression that the public requires it; due, perhaps, to the suggestion of some unwise publisher or friend. The coarse melodrama with which some of his novels ends is not in unison with the characters or the scope of his work. It is quite true that, as murder is, in some circumstances, justified in actual life, so in some circumstances it may be used as a dénouement in fiction with perfect accuracy; yet it is always a violent ending which fully accords with romance of wild life or peasant life, but always jars, unless introduced with the most perfect skill, in stories of men and women of the world; because the evil passions of this latter class of persons are of a different quality, and find different modes of relief, from the primitive and barbarous satisfaction of killing enemies or rivals. All the influences and habits of society make it almost impossible for men and women of society to become assassins.

Now Mr Crawford can draw men and women of the world so well that it is a pity he so often goes out of his way to spoil his portraits of them with the bowl and dagger taken from a different phase of life from that in which they move.

He is always a gentleman, and he is at his best when writing of gentlemen in the society which he knows so well. Duels are quite natural in good society everywhere, except in England, and no one since Charles Lever ever described them so well as Mr Crawford; but murders are not general in the world of well-bred people, indeed are not very often heard of out of the lowest strata of plebeian life.

In Casa Braccio a fine motive, that of the peasant of Subiaco's long-cherished vengeance, with its final satisfaction, both based on a mistake, is wasted, because no one can care in the least for the man who is slain, and the original sin committed by this victim (marriage with a nun), although it seems so great to Mr Crawford, appears to us no sin at all; so that his tragic end neither moves us nor satisfies in us any sense of justice. What are admirably rendered and true to life in Casa Braccio are not Griggs and Gloria, or Angus Dalrymple and Maria Addorata, but the peasants of Subiaco, Stefanone, with his long-cherished vendetta, and his wife, Sora Nanna, who wears her lost daughter's shoes because it would have been a sin to waste them. One regrets that two persons so perfectly natural and well drawn should be set on a pyre of flaring melodrama which obscures their portraits in its smoke and flame. Why could he not give us a story of Subiaco, passionate but natural, in which the action would have passed entirely in that interesting and little-known part of the Sabine mountains?

When I use the term melodrama, I mean by it that which mimics the tragic, but falls short of it; the tragic, imitated but so environed, that it loses dignity and has something of the inflated and grotesque. The melodrama in Pietro Ghisleri, in Taquisara, and in The Children of the King is this kind of melodrama; it does not move us for a moment; we are, on the contrary, impatient of it in a modern period and history, with neither of which it has any harmony. In the latter story the conception of Rughero, though by no means new, is fine; but the frame in which this mariner is set lacks all fitness for such a figure; and the man whom he murders is not sinner enough, nor serious enough in his actions, for the reader to be moved to pardon the act as the author himself pardons it. If violent delights have violent endings, violent endings need strong provocation and clear explanation; they should appear to the reader to be inevitable, the offspring of an unavoidable result. To the reader such a crime as this should appear to be the inexorable justice of an inevitable retribution. But in the violent dénouement of The Children of the King the cause is trivial, the act under the circumstances improbable, and the rude shock of it is not in accordance with any of the other characters and with the light, careless modernity of the setting of this story.

This defect of consistency, which is grave in literature, would be ruinous on the stage where action is so much quicker, and where the idiosyncrasies of each personage are so visible to the audience; and such a fault is the more vexatious because it shows that the author was never really absorbed in his own creations, was never so possessed with them that they dominated him and made him do what they chose, as Bulwer Lytton has said that the characters of every true novelist must do, because a character once conceived is like a child, being once begotten, it becomes what it must, we cannot control the subsequent shape it takes.

Another defect of Mr Crawford's works is usually that their interest flags towards the close, that this close is too abrupt, and that it gives the reader the impression of the narrative being brought to an untimely end because the writer no longer cared about narrating it. This defect may be noticed in nearly all his stories, beginning with Mr Isaacs, in which it is conspicuous; and is startlingly and irritatingly visible in one of his latest, Adam Johnstone's Son; indeed, in the last-named story the conclusion is obviously totally different from what it was intended to be in the opening chapters. Now, a well-constructed novel may please you or not, may be attractive or offensive, but it will always be accurately conceived and harmoniously balanced; and nothing animate or intimate will be introduced into it which has not some bearing direct or indirect upon the plot. Nothing can be more incorrect than to excite the expectations of the reader by indications which result in nothing, sign-posts on a road which do but lead to a blank wall.

A grave violation of this rule is frequently to be found in the Crawford stories, no worse one than that in this story of Adam Johnstone's son, where a long chapter is occupied by an incident with a brutal Neapolitan carter on the Sorrento road. The man is knocked down by the hero, and endeavours in return to stab him; carabineers arrive and arrest the carter and not the Englishman (as in real life they unquestionably would have done). The whole incident, related with much spirit, is obviously only in its place, only pardonable as an episode, if the carter be destined to appear again and sate his thirst for vengeance on the hero. But he disappears from the scene for ever as the carabineers handcuff him. We neither see nor hear any more of him, nor does the Englishman hear any more of the matter, which in actual life certainly would have caused him much annoyance at the local tribunal. The appetite of the reader should not be tempted by dishes, which become a mere Barmecide's feast, in this manner. Some intention must have been in the author's mind when he created this scene. Why did he not carry out his intention?

In this manner many combinations and situations of the most interesting and uncommon kind are deliberately thrown away unused. He frequently introduces personages about whom he excites our liveliest interest, and whom he then forsakes or dismisses with an indifference which the reader does not share. It is as though a painter painted into his canvas numerous figures which he has never finished, though he sends out his picture as a finished work. The only novels of his which are entirely free from this defect are the Cigarette Maker, the Three Fates, and Marzio's Crucifix, and here I cannot resist (though it is not within the scope of this article, since its venue is America) pointing out how delicate, subtle, and clever is that story entitled the Three Fates. There is little movement in it, no incident of any note, its interest lies entirely in the development of character and in the evolution of feeling, but these are so treated that they suffice to hold the reader's charmed attention, and the study of the man whose hesitations and tergiversations make the subject of it is one which may be caviare to the general, but which may be read again and again with sympathy and curiosity by those who can appreciate psychological problems. The persons in it are such as we may have known to-day or may know to-morrow; and the working of their minds and inclinations is traced with a masterly skill, and is as correct as a physiologist's diagram of the nervous system.

What to me is especially attractive in Mr Crawford's novels is the atmosphere of good breeding which one breathes in them. One feels in the company of a well-bred man. Their philosophy, their experiences, their views, are all those of a man of the world; and there is in them a tolerance and a total absence of prejudice (except in religious and political matters) which are refreshing, and which are a fair approach to, if not an actual attainment of, unbiassed liberality. There is in them no enthusiasm for anything, no altruism, no deep emotion. They are unfortunately entirely lacking in any perception of those myriads of other lives not human, but as sentient as the human, such as vibrates in every line of Pierre Loti's works. We have never in his novels any profound tenderness like that with which the Frères Rosny speak of the semi-humanity of inanimate things, or show us the dog gambolling on the wayside turf in all the simple joy of its youth and its pleasure in existence. To Mr Crawford as to Peter Bell, a primrose by the river's side is a primrose, and it is nothing more, and the thrush or the linnet which sings in the hawthorn above the primrose roots for him has no existence. He has the American's indifference to all created things which are not human. There are no animals in his books except two poor terriers (who have their necks broken by the odious lover in To Leeward), and the unhappy cat, introduced only to be poisoned in Taquisara. There is nothing which indicates that he cares for nature in any of its phases, and he calls the cicala a locust.

In Italy he lives only for the people around him as he would live in Pall Mall, or Broadway, or the Champs Elysées. That passion with which Italy has inspired Shelley, Byron, George Sand, De Musset, Owen Meredith, even the calm analytic mind of Taine, has never touched him. He has never felt the ecstasy which is embodied in that single phrase of Taine's, 'On nage dans la lumière.' One would say that the moonlight shining on the waters of Tiber, under the bridge of St Angelo, is no more to him than a flash-light illumining a grain-elevator on the Hudson. All which is still Italy, of colour, of perfume, of light, of legend, of rapture, of emotion, has wholly escaped him; he has never felt its hysterica passio; he has never known its eternal youth, he has never seen its lost gods rise and walk through its blossoming grass as the star rays shine in the white cups of the narcissus of its fields. But of the people who pass him in the Corso and on the Chiaja, who shake hands with him at Montecitorio and on the Lung' Arno, who lounge and talk with him at the cafés, and the legations, and the public gardens, he is an admirable student, and an admirable photographer.

One of the most admirable of his portraits is that of the young Don Orsino, the hero of the novel of that name. Sant' Ilario, like his gallant old father, might be a North German, a Hungarian, or a Scottish noble, his temperament is, indeed, much more northern than southern; but Don Orsino,[5] his son, is exactly that which he is represented to be, a youthful Italian of high rank, who has been educated at an English public school, and has all the vanity, and egotism, and sècheresse de cœur of modern youth in him. The type of the modern youngster of rank was never so well drawn as in this story of his début in speculation and his failure in it. His character is one very difficult to draw, that coldness, that self-reliance, that self-sufficiency, which are something at once harder and less contemptible than conceit, the qualities which will make him successful later on but will never make him lovable or tender; the instincts of race which hold him back from meanness but are not strong enough to raise him to nobility, attenuated as they have been by modern education, all these are rendered with the utmost skill till the boy, in his sterile and self-satisfied modernity, lives before us, and vain and selfish though he be, we are loth to part from him, and curious to know what his future will become. In his history that one supreme charm of Mr Crawford's, of which I have previously spoken, his naturalness, is conspicuous; nothing can be more natural than the relations of Don Orsino with his mother and father and those who surround him, and the crafty affaristi who get him into their meshes of speculation.

What is not natural in this story is the character of Madame d'Aranjuez. She comes before us instinct with all which goes to make up an unscrupulous adventuress. She is that, or she is nothing. She does her uttermost to fascinate and capture the son of Saracinesca. She succeeds; and lo! with one of those volte-faces which are so frequent and so irritating in Mr Crawford's works, she gives up the game when she has won it, does nothing that we expect her to do, and marries the speculator who has beggared Don Orsino on condition that this gentleman shall restore to Don Orsino all he has lost. Nothing more improbable or inconsistent, given the character of the woman, could possibly be conceived; nor is it more probable that the haughty and irascible young man would endure to be served by her mediation, however it might be veiled. Everything surrounding this lady promises us passion, intrigue, perhaps tragedy, certainly peril, but we are balked of them all. The mysteries concerning her turn out to be very tame ones indeed, she appears a wholly innocent and harmless person, and even a very large paper-knife shaped like a dagger, which we are told always lies beside her and which has no raison d'être, unless it is to be ultimately used in killing or defending somebody, does nothing whatever and disappears from the story, leaving us in tantalising ignorance of why we were ever introduced to it.

Now no French writer of any degree would have created that remarkable paper-knife, and kept it lying beside the heroine, and laid stress on its unusual size and splendour, unless he intended to turn it to account as a deus ex machina. To draw the reader's attention to a conspicuous object, and then to cheat the expectations raised concerning it, is a great fault in art; but it is one of which English and American writers are continually guilty. It is true we are told casually, towards the end, that her husband had hit her with this paper-knife, and that for this blow the famous fencer Spicca had killed him; but this is mentioned incidentally, and does not sufficiently account for the interest we have been excited to take in this weapon. Spicca is, on the contrary, admirably drawn, and the regard we feel for the merciless old duellist is roused in us with true art. We have that sense of Spicca having really lived, and really been that which he is described, which can only be aroused in a reader by life-like accurate and sympathetic portraiture.

There are many pathetic touches in this portrait of Spicca, and little incidents entirely true to the life of an Italian gentleman of aristocratic race and straitened means, as when in his distress of mind his servant persuades him to eat 'a little mixed fry' with a fresh salad, 'the salad is very good to-day'; and Spicca, touched and refreshed, examines his meagre purse and takes out a ten-franc note which he gives to the man, remarking that it will buy him a pair of boots, and this ten-franc note is, when his purse lies on the table at night, slipped back into it by the servant, who knows that his master 'never counts.'

I think the most exquisitely drawn of all Mr Crawford's many characters is this Count Spicca; because the character of a noted duellist who invariably kills, and kills how and in what way he chooses, with profound indifference and unerring accuracy, is one very hard to make sympathetic to the general reader, and especially to the English reader, by whom duelling is abhorred. But Spicca is so perfect a gentleman, so sad and simple and calm, so natural and unassuming despite his deadly power, that no one can regard him without interest and even affection, and see him without sorrow ill-treated by a woman so extremely unpleasant as Consuelo Aranjuez, for whom he has done and suffered so much.

The fencing of Mr Crawford is always very accurate, and we hold our breath when Leone Saracinesca acts as his son's second. All this is quite true to life in Italy, where duels with the sabre or rapier are still of daily occurrence, and are resorted to after any insult, and after a mere difference of opinion or trivial impoliteness.

It is wonderful that these stories have not been appropriated for the stage by those unscrupulous thieves the London dramatists, for they are full of dramatic situations and of duologues in which the give and take is brilliant. Some have indeed the dramatic effect of inconsistency of which I have spoken, but all are full of fine suggestions for the theatre. Saracinesca, or Sant' Ilario, for instance, would be transferable to the stage with scarcely any alteration. It is full of incidents which would be most effective on the stage; and the strong emotions and sensational scenes which it offers would most certainly thrill and charm an audience.

One wonders also that their author himself does not write for the stage, for his command of incident and of intricacies of circumstance would raise him high above many playwrights of the London theatre. There are scenes in nearly all his works which might be put upon the boards with scarcely any alteration, such as the duel between Don Giovanni and Del Ferice in Saracinesca, and the death scene of the librarian Meschini in Sant' Ilario, while the whole story of The Children of the King would furnish matter for a romantic drama were the causes for the crime in it made more credible.

Here let me note a small but irritating fault in these works, i.e., the childish habit (common to writers of the last century) of naming characters after their calling, or after some moral characteristic. Meschini is the plural of the Italian adjective mean, cowardly, or contemptible, and is given to a man with these defects; while a very interesting person, a French artist famous in portraiture, is unfortunately burdened with the ridiculous and impossible name of Gouache. Mr Crawford is indeed frequently infelicitous in names. In Casa Braccio, the American lover of Gloria, a stagey sort of person, but one whom we are invited to regard with admiration and sympathy, is weighted with the shocking name of Griggs. Mr Crawford does not see that were Othello or Hamlet called Griggs, either would try to move the souls of men in vain. If a name does not matter to a rose, it does matter immensely to a character in a book; and there are so many euphonious names in use in the world that it is wholly unpardonable to select a ludicrous or ugly one. The poor little natural child of Gloria in this same novel is also burdened at its birth by the name of Walter Crowdie, which, for a baby, has such a comical effect that the very pathetic position of this poor infant is rendered ridiculous by it. It is perhaps under the idea of being realistic that these droll names are selected to jar on tragic circumstances, but then Mr Crawford's stories are not realistic, and cannot be made so by this one expedient.

He has also another fault which is visible in nearly all his works, and is a grave one. He forgets at times the attributes which he has given to his chief characters. Thus Giovanni Saracinesca is described as a man of strong, noble, and reticent nature, and of intellect so superior that his wife tells him he will be very great some day; and he resembles, indeed, precisely, one of those men who become great leaders of other men. But in the sequel (where he is called Sant' Ilario) all this changes, and he behaves like an idiot, and of his great qualities we hear no more and certainly see nothing. And where we still farther follow his fortunes in the subsequent sequel of Don Orsino, he has sunk into complete self-effacement, so complete that he allows his son to be the associate and the debtor of that very Del Ferice whose utter baseness and vileness he knows so well, and who tried in the famous duel to murder him by foul play. Sequels are always ill-advised trials of the author's consistency and the reader's memory, and it would have been unquestionably better to have made Don Orsino stand alone in his history and not figure as the son of Giovanni Saracinesca and of Corona d'Astrardente. When a reader has followed with interest and sympathy the fortune of an impassioned lover it is trying to see him standing in St Peter's 'a middle-aged man,' talking to a son taller than himself. Great art is required to make a character 'grow' quite consistently. The continuation of histories, thus, greatly pleased Anthony Trollope and Thackeray, but I cannot consider it a desirable thing in fiction.

Mr Crawford misses many opportunities of developing the capacity for analysis and deduction which he undoubtedly possesses. He is very observant but he is content to note a fact, he does not trouble himself to seek its origin or the influences which have made it the fact it is. When the two young people who wish to marry in Marzio's Crucifix discuss what their house shall be like, and what colour the walls and furniture, their biographer adds, 'Italians have lost all sense of colour.' This is true, but it is one of the most amazing, grievous, and extraordinary truths that exist; it is one for which I search in vain and in perplexity for an explanation. But Mr Crawford does not seek for any explanation. He states the fact and passes to another subject.

Again, in this sentence he begins well: 'It is of no use to deny the enormous influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the present day. Something might be gained indeed if we could trace the causes which have made gambling especially the vice of our generation. But I do not believe this is possible.' That is to say, he does not care to be at the trouble of such an investigation, even though he adds the acute sentence that most of the men and women of the world of pleasure in our times exhibit 'the peculiar and unmistakable signs of physical exhaustion, chief of which is cerebral anæmia. They are overtrained and overworked, in the language of training they are "stale."'

He says in another place, 'Italians have no imagination.' This is but partially true; I am not sure that it is true at all. Their modern poetry is beautiful, more beautiful than that of any other nation. Their popular songs are poetic and impassioned as those of no other nation are, and one may hear among their peasantry expressions of singular beauty of sentiment and phrase. A woman of middle age, a contadina, said to me once, 'So long as one's mother lives, one's youth is never quite gone, for there is always somebody for whom one is young.' A rough, rude man, a day labourer, who knew not a letter, and spent all his life bent over his spade or plough, said to me once, one lovely night in spring, as he looked up at the full moon, 'How beautiful she is! But she has no heart. She sees us toiling and groaning and suffering down here, and she is always fair and calm, and never weeps!' Another said once, when a tree was hard to fell, 'He is sorry to come away, it has been his field so long.' And when a flock of solan geese flew over our lands, going from the Marches to the mountains on their homeward way, and descended to rest, the peasants did not touch them: 'They are tired, poor souls,' said one of the women; 'one must not grudge them the soil for their lodging.' Surely such ideas as these in people wholly uneducated indicate imagination in the speakers?

And what can he possibly mean by no poets, which he says in another place? Has he never read a line of Carducci? Much as we may mourn and resent Carducci's turncoat and reactionary politics, no one can deny that he is a poet of the purest kind. Has he never heard the ringing stanzas of Cavallotti which sound like a clarion through the land? Has he never studied the exquisite if too erotic odes of D'Annunzio, or the touching verse of Stecchetti? There are others besides these who are true and fine poets also; and even in the ordinary verses written for newspapers (which in other countries are so poor and tawdry) there is frequently in Italy a true and delicate feeling and an adorable lyrical harmony which make one mourn to see things so fair wasted on so ephemeral a life.

It is through their imagination still more than by their vanity that Italians are led by unscrupulous political flattery and cajoled into disastrous political enterprises. They will believe anything if it be sufficiently captivating to their self-admiration and their fancy, and will dance blindfold on the brink of a bottomless pit. It is only an imaginative people who love so wildly, and kill themselves so madly for affection's sake, as the Italian people do. The other day, because a young soldier was sent to Africa, his brother killed himself in despair, and the father of the two youths then killed himself also. It is an inflammable imagination which makes the nation so easily led away by the promises and the phantasmagoria of glory with which unscrupulous statesmen have enticed it to the brink of ruin. It was its imagination which made it so credulous that when told by its victors that the disgraceful surrender of Makale was a victory, it believed and rejoiced, illuminated and hung out flags, and never saw what a dupe it was being made until cruelly awakened from its delusions by the déroute of Abbu Carima.

Mr Crawford has lived chiefly in cities, and in the cities, even in Rome, the Italian is much debased by contact with foreigners; the influence of foreigners on Italians is excessively bad, especially American and English influence; and in the cities also the preponderance of Jews is great. Innumerable persons who call themselves by Italian names and speak of Italy as their country are Jews and nothing else. A Finnish Jew known to me buys an Italian estate, and with the estate a title, which, by the payment of a large sum to a complaisant Government, he is allowed to adopt; he is decorated by the king for his munificent 'charities' in the land of his adoption; he marries an English woman, and their children masquerade as Italian nobility with not a single drop of Italian blood in their veins. Such 'Italian nobles' are numerous, unhappily, in modern Italy, and do immeasurable discredit to the nationality which they assume. In a generation or two their origin will be forgotten, and they will be taken by society in general to be what they pretend to be. Thus, unhappily, are great nations caricatured, old titles prostituted, and Italy accredited with sons not her own, with pretended offspring who are not even her bastards; persons who impudently affect her name and boast of her blood, when not one single hair of their head or fibre of their flesh has any affiliation to her.

What stifles Italian imagination, and kills the Italian soul, is the passion for money; pure acquisitiveness or avarice, for the desire is to get, little or no pleasure is taken in spending. It is often alleged that this passion is due to their poverty; but poverty is not necessarily accompanied by avarice; the Irish people are very poor, but they are extremely generous; the Spanish people are so also. A comical instance of this stinginess occurred the other day at Milan: a rich tradesman had built himself a fine set of new premises, and opened his new establishment with much feasting; he sent fifteen francs to the municipality to be divided among the poor, and everyone applauded his liberality! This love of money, acquisitiveness, niggardliness, or whatever we call it, is too general not to be injurious to the Italian character; and it enters into all daily life and personal acts, and is frequently the chief motor power of marriage, of career, of education. And then added to this injurious power there is another which is more deleterious still, which weakens, debases, and falsifies the character from infancy: it is the direful influence of the Church. But to treat of this matter would occupy too much space, and would lead too far away from the stories of Mr Crawford, in which there is an unfortunate tendency towards approval of what he calls hierarchical government, although a tendency not strongly enough insisted on by him for it to demand minute examination. The powers of Mr Crawford, however, are limited by the narrowness of what is called religion, and the inability to see the higher side of these subversive opinions which he dreads, and which he has done his best to turn into ridicule by putting them into the mouth of the half-mad artist Marzio.

Indeed, his bigotry on religious subjects is very droll to see in these days; and he speaks of 'unbelievers' in a tone worthy of Puritans in the days of the Mayflower pilgrims. It does not agree with the tone of his books, which is invariably the tone of a man of the world; as such he should possess that liberality of thought which is the chief, perhaps the only, virtue of his generation; and if he had possessed it he would undoubtedly have reached a much higher level, a much finer ideal, than he has actually done. It would seem as if he distrusted and checked the larger intelligence in him, as an over-cautious rider distrusts and checks a horse which only asks to be given a free rein to go at speed over a wide pasture; it would seem as if some extraneous 'influence' were always at his elbow to keep his reason cribbed, cabined and confined.

His religious prejudices have contributed to arrest his intellectual development, for they are puritanical and antiquated in a singular and lamentable degree. He speaks of liberi pensatori as the Church elders of Maine or Massachusetts might have done in the days of witch-torturing and atheist-burning. He thinks that the future great war will be between what he calls believers and unbelievers; and he looks forward with joy to the coming conflict when men shall again fly at each other's throat for the glory of God. This kind of mental cecity has its inevitable results: it makes him step lamely where he would otherwise walk with manly alacrity, and it makes him afraid to face the light of facts which his truer instincts tell him are existing and incontrovertible. Is this the result of early education, of hereditary inclinations, of female or ecclesiastical influence? I do not know; but come whence it may, this taint of bigotry obscures his intelligence and stops his progress, and is matter of profound regret to those who see what he would have been without it.

Many passages in his works show that he has perceived and grasped the universal dominance of that corruption which so fatally exists in all Italian life, and one could wish that he would make a more complete exposure of it. Take this account of how the banker, Del Ferice, obtained the decoration for a syndic who was one of his political supporters:—

'Del Ferice, left to himself, returned to the question of the mayor's decoration. If he failed to get the man what he wanted, the fellow would doubtless apply to someone of the opposite party, would receive the coveted honour, and would take the whole voting population with him at the next general election, to the total discomfiture of Del Ferice.

It was necessary to find some valid reason for proposing him for the distinction. He could not decide what to do just then, but he ultimately hit upon a successful plan. He advised his correspondent to write a pamphlet upon the rapid improvement of agricultural interests in his district under the existing Ministry, and he even went so far as to compose and send some notes on the subject. These notes proved to be so voluminous and complete, that when the mayor had copied them he could not find a pretext for adding a single word or correction. They were printed upon excellent paper with ornamental margins under the title of Onward, Parthenope! The mayor got his decoration and Del Ferice was re-elected, but no one has ever inquired into the truth of the statements contained in the pamphlet.'

These passages and others similar give one the conviction that Mr Crawford, if he had 'let himself go,' might have been a satirist of no slight force. He has preferred to write charming stories, ingenious in construction, but slight in development, to amuse his generation; yet there is, I think, abundant evidence that he might have done stronger things, perhaps may do them still. He has preferred to lead a seagull's life, skimming the surface of the deep and shunning its storms. But he might have led the petrel's. Probably all the influences of an agreeable social existence have tended to make him indolent and unwilling to raise tempests in it. Few resist the pressure of a social atmosphere. His book called With the Immortals, marred as it is by the incongruity and impossibility of its setting, shows that he can reflect if he likes, and can express his reflections. If this work had been cast in such a form as Mr Mallock's New Republic, or Sir Arthur Helps' Friends in Council, or Christopher North's Noctes Ambrosianæ it would have been remarkable for the arguments and dialogues contained in it. But the ghost-element, the supernatural scenic effects, kill its excellence. Dr Johnson, Heine, Pascal, Bayard, François de Valois and Cæsar are too ill-assorted for us to accept them in each other's company, and the idea of these dead men being all able to converse in English, and all doomed to wear through ages the clothes they wore in life, is so comical that it destroys all interest and illusion which their conversation otherwise might excite. There is a regrettable inability in Mr Crawford to perceive the ridiculous. He lacks humour, and the perception of the incongruous is not alive in him; nor is there either any poetic feeling in his way of regarding life. He is essentially a citizen of the world as the world exists in this last quarter of the fast-fading century, and the Sirens sing not for him, though he dwells upon their shores.

Let him, therefore, appreciate more thoroughly his own very admirable powers, and confine himself to painting the men and women of his time and class, with all that cosmopolitan knowledge of them which he possesses. I should like to see from him an Italian novel of modern political life. He has, I make no doubt, had ample opportunities of studying its machinery and its intrigues. He can dissect with so much subtlety and correctness the brain and the temper of such a man as Del Ferice, that there can be no doubt a political novel from him, placed in Rome, would have alike accuracy and interest and irony. But he must clear his mind of some of its cobwebs, and he must realise that the 'unbelievers' and revolutionists, who at present horrify him, constitute the keenest intellectual element in Italy, indeed, the only healthy one, and contain the only hope there is, if this be but a feeble one, of any attainment by the nation in the future to any true liberty and cleanliness in political aims.

I cannot conclude these few remarks upon his Italian stories without a word of thanks to him for the pleasant hours he has often given me, and the gallery of interesting portraits with which he has enriched the memory of all those who read his novels.

IV

LE SECRET DU PRÉCEPTEUR

At the opening ceremony of a new free library at Lambeth in London, not many weeks ago, Sir John Lubbock is reported to have made the following remarks regarding fiction:—

'Sir J. Lubbock, in moving a vote of thanks to the Prince of Wales and the Princess Louise, remarked that the free libraries of London now contained more than 250,000 books, whilst last year over 100,000 people borrowed volumes, and on more than 2,500,000 occasions books were used in the libraries themselves. It was a fallacy to suppose that public libraries were only used by novel readers. The proportion of works of fiction used in the Camberwell libraries was only 65 per cent., and, of course, in this percentage were included nearly all the books used by children. It must also be borne in mind that it took a great deal longer to read a history or a work of science than it did to run through a story. Under these circumstances he thought it might fairly be said that the people of London exercised a very good choice in the books they read. He himself should be very sorry to undervalue novels. Even nonsense was extremely refreshing, and he thought the English people had learnt more of their history from novels and from Shakespeare's plays than from books of history.'

In these few sentences there are embraced the views entertained in general by the English nation with regard to the art of fiction. By the English nation it is, and probably always will be, regarded as on a par with chromo-lithography, the use of the kodak, and tight-rope dancing.

'Even nonsense is refreshing,' says this kind defender of romance. He might have added that this depends very much on the character of the nonsense; there is dull nonsense, strained nonsense, self-conscious nonsense, vulgar nonsense, which is duller than a dull sermon and heavier than heavy bread; the nonsense which dilates and delights the heart of the coarse and common fool, is as a stagnant and stinking pond to the cultured mind; and true nonsense, i.e., jeux d'esprit, caricatures, parodies, 'exquisite fooling,' does not come under the head of novels at all.

Someone had apparently been objecting to the creation of free libraries on the score that they were chiefly used by readers of fiction, and in support of such libraries Sir John Lubbock (not venturing to make so heterodox an assertion as that the perusal of fiction per se is valuable and desirable) pleads that only sixty-five per cent. of the books borrowed were novels, and refers to the rapidity with which a novel can be 'run through,' as he phrases it, and proceeds, as an excuse for the perusal of fiction, to state that the English public chiefly derives its knowledge of history from novels and from Shakespeare's plays. This declaration, which is enough to make Mr Freeman turn in his grave, and Mr Froude writhe in his professorial chair, is, I believe, based on an exact truth, but it never appears to occur to the speaker that while the history to be learned from fiction and the drama is not of the purest kind, the fine art of an admirable book, as of an admirable play, contains many another lesson more valuable than even those of correct history to the reader who is capable of assimilating and appreciating it.

Sir John Lubbock kindly adds that he should be 'very sorry to undervalue novels.' Sweet and gracious condescension! He would be sorry to 'undervalue' Boccaccio, Cervantes, Guerrazzi, Théophile Gautier, Merimée, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, Walter Scott, Fielding, Octave Feuillet, Georges Sand, and Bulwer Lytton! Admirable benevolence! A treatise on the ways of ants or bees must, of course, rank as an infinitely higher work than a mere study of the manners, characters, and passions of mankind. To peruse the former work is education; to read the latter work is recreation, not absolutely injurious, perhaps, but scarcely beneficial. Sir John Lubbock on an ant-hill has the sublimity of the scientist: Alphonse Daudet on human nature is a mere trumpery trifler.

It does not appear even to occur to Sir John Lubbock that a fine novel contains intellectual qualities of the highest kind, and combines in itself the widest effects and the most delicate minutiæ of creative art. A fine novel should be no more 'run through' than the sculptures of the Vatican or the pictures of the Uffizi should be run through in ignorance and haste: common readers, like common tourists, may do so, but to do so is as gross and unpardonable an insult to the book as it is to the sculptures and the paintings.

Reflect but a moment upon all the divers and numerous qualities which are of necessity existent in the creator of a fine novel before it can be produced; not only imagination but wit, not only wit but scholarship, not only scholarship but fancy, not only fancy but discrimination, observation, knowledge of the passions, sympathy with the most opposite temperaments, the power to call up character from the void, as the sculptor creates figures from the clay, and, for amalgamating, condensing, and vivifying all these talents, the mastery of an exquisite subtlety, force, and eloquence in language. All these various gifts must be united in one writer before a fine novel can be produced; and when it is produced it requires (to be duly estimated) as cultured and as respectful a study of it as an educated traveller would take to the Vatican or to the Uffizi.

I have derived month by month, as it has appeared in the Révue des Deux Mondes, the most delicate and acute pleasure from the perusal of Le Secret du Précepteur, yet it is a pleasure which can only be obtained from it by a serene, leisurely, artistic enjoyment of its exquisite literary qualities. It is like a wine of which the bouquet can only be appreciated by educated palates. There is but little movement in it; the incident is slight, the situations derive their fascination for the reader not from their violence or their singularity, but from their perfect probability, and from their psychological interests; and the whole tone of it is kept carefully throughout to the smooth bantering semi-gouailleur tone of the opening recital. Ah, that style!—clear as water, delicate, full of grace, limpid, harmonious, exquisite! It has all the polished charm of the man of the world, and all the eloquence and brilliancy of the artist. I have heard a great ambassador in a beautiful tapestried chamber play the music of Schumann and Chopin and Bach with admirable and sympathetic maestria; the style of Cherbuliez reminds me of that diplomât-virtuose. We hear incessantly of the magical style of Paul Bourget; but beside the style of Cherbuliez that of Bourget is strained, tortuous, affected, artificial. The supreme excellence of that of Cherbuliez is its consummate ease, like the ease of a perfect manner in society. To employ all the resources of such a style is as great a delight to the master of it as the use of the rapier to the master of fencing, as the handling of the plastic clay to the sculptor. To relate a narrative in such a style is as warm and full a pleasure to the possessor of it as it is to the painter to create a winter's night or summer's day, youth or age, dawn or moonlight, a dance of nymphs, or a frolic of fauns, out of a few ground earths, a little oil, and a square of canvas. But to appreciate it the reader of it must bring with him some qualities on his own behalf.

There are in it none of those Anglicisms so irritating in the works of Bourget and others, such as Henry for Henri, Francis for François, 'window' for 'fenêtre,' 'le cab stoppait' for 'le fiacre s'arrêtait,' and so many similar disfigurements of the most polished and elegant language of the world. The temptation to use a foreign language is great when its expressions are such as no other language can equally well render. But who can think that 'cab' is better than 'fiacre,' or 'window' than 'fenêtre'? The French of Cherbuliez is the French of an elegant writer, of a man of the world, and is, beside that of 'les jeunes,' as a pure and limpid river beside a crooked and choked-up stream. Without their professorial jargon of psychology or their strained analysis, which so greatly fatigues the reader and resembles nothing so much as the efforts of a cyclist to run smoothly on a stony road, Le Secret du Précepteur is full of delicate and interesting studies of the human mind and character. Its especial triumph is to excite and retain the interest of the reader in a character which in the hands of most writers would have been either insignificant or absurd.

The teller of the story is the preceptor himself, who, unlovely in face and form, filling a subordinate and somewhat absurd position, frankly confessing his own follies and errors, is yet the most lovable and the most dignified of men; the intellectual grace of the scholar and the philosopher wholly atoning for and effacing the inferiority of place and the deformity of features. He tells us of his own extreme ugliness, so that we are not deluded into thinking it a belle laideur, but accept it as what he calls it, an ugliness which, coupled with poverty, would scare all women away from him all the years of his life; but, despite of it, we feel the irresistible charm of his personality, we admire his tact, we adore his unselfishness, we are as delighted by his self-restraint as by his courage and his will, and we take leave of him with the regret which we feel when we part for an indefinite period from a companion of the finest culture and the warmest sympathies. We regret also that, like most unselfish persons, he is forced to be content with the crumbs of happiness instead of its bread. It is strictly true to life that he should receive no more; it proves the author a true artist that he has been able to resist the temptation of giving so attractive a character a happy and unnatural fate, and we who know how the awards of life are proportioned, know that it is entirely in keeping both with art and truth that the bon chien should receive no more than the good dog usually gets in recompense for his fidelity. We know that it could not be otherwise; yet we regret the necessity for leaving the good dog with his dry broken crusts.

I regard the extreme interest and attachment with which this character inspires us as one of the greatest triumphs of fiction, because its attraction is stripped of all the adventitious aids to interest which accompany beauty, rank, or position. We have a plain, poor man, in a paltry and invidious situation, who conquers all which is against him as a hero of romance, and arrives at the highest place in the reader's esteem and affection by mere force of natural dignity, excellence of heart, and the irresistible superiority of wit and intellect. He is throughout all his actions, moreover, entirely natural. It is difficult, in reading his account of them, to believe that he is a fictitious character; all that he does and says is so real, so human. No one who reads Terre Promise or Cœur de Femme is ever for an instant tempted to think that the characters ever did live or ever could have lived; they are cartonnages, lay figures, draped in clothes from the costume maker's, and moving in obedience to the hand of their manipulator. But as Maupassant's Pierre et Jean are living, as Loti's Gaud and Fatougay live, as Rod's Michael Teissier lives, as the delicious Yette lives, so, and with even more vitality than they, the tutor Tristan lives in this admirable novel. And all the people around him live in this country house near Epernay, which is the scene of nearly all his joys and sufferings. We wish, indeed, that this scene never changed; so well does its landscape accord with the narrative, that one wishes the unities could have been preserved to the end. One regrets the change of venue when the story is carried to Paris. It is perhaps probable that the end is not what was originally intended by Cherbuliez.

It is a story which it is very difficult to end artistically. In point of fact it is not ended at all; it is only broken off at a certain crisis, and leaves the reader in the persuasion that Monique will have many adventures, and her 'bon chien' and her husband many anxieties. The fault in it, if fault there is, seems to me to be that, if this crisis had been contemplated from the beginning, the character of Louis Moufrin, extremely natural as far as it goes, should have been rendered a little more heroic, so that more interest would have attached to his transformation under the stings of jealousy. If this were not done the coup de pistolet should have been given, not by him, but by the preceptor; indeed, since Tristan tells us early in his story that he is a very fine pistol-shot, we are always expecting him to prove his skill on someone, and one could wish that he had exercised it as he desired to do on the odious coxcomb, Triguères. The impression is irresistibly made on the reader's mind that this was the dénouement originally contemplated by the author, and it would have been one stronger and more satisfactory. But perhaps he renounced it from the feeling that tragedy as a climax would have jarred on the harmony of a book which is throughout kept to the good-humoured and jesting tone of cultured society.

It would take many pages to do justice to the other persons of the novel; all are admirably drawn; there is only some exaggeration in that of Madame Moufrin, mère. But the cheery and generous merchant Brogues, the high-bred, high-born dévote who is his wife, the charming priest Verlet, the shy, silent, tender-hearted and timid Moufrin, the inimitable portrait of the learned, excellent and insufferable Sidonie, and lastly, the entirely uncommon conception of the captious and provoking petite Japonaise, who rules her faithful two-legged dog with a rod of iron; all these are admirably pourtrayed, even if they yield in importance to the central figure of the preceptor himself. The finest and most complicated study of them all is that of Madame Brogues, with her piety, her sensuality, her instinctive patrician revolt against the monotony of a bourgeois interior, her complex and scornful nature, her mingled indifference and tenderness for her daughters, the union of touching maternal sadness and devotion to the superior claims of chiffons, which traits are so admirably depicted in her last meeting with her younger daughter Monique.

Cherbuliez has, it is plain to see, been much struck with the large place which chiffons occupy in the lives of women of the world, and with the power of consolation which the interests of the toilette possess for them. The mother and daughter are both extremely touched by their accidental meeting (the first since the elopement of the former and the marriage of the latter); but this meeting takes place in the Exhibition building in Paris, and their emotions do not prevent them from studying, discussing, and purchasing beautiful fabrics. It is exactly the union of conflicting feelings which is really to be observed in life: the mingling of deep sentiment and sincere regret with interests of a totally different kind which appear trivial but are really absorbing distractions, perhaps frivolous, but entirely natural, arising from those cares and pleasures of personal appearance which are indestructible in the élégante by anything short of death.

There is also another passage which equally illustrates the ability and insight of the author in his perception and representation of that dual motive, that twin yet conflicting sentiment, which so frequently moves us and so especially characterises the modern mind, which is frequently complex and artificial, trivial and analytic, and thereby incapable of a single, or of a simple, emotion. Sidonie, a very proud, chaste, and implacable maiden, is stung to the core by her discovery of her mother's flight; the thought of what the neighbours and the servants will think is torture to her, and a generous and genuine grief for the blow to her father moves her to the first tears which she has ever shed. But still the idea, the knowledge that since she means never to marry, she is now and will be for ever supreme mistress of her father's house is a source of irresistible pleasure and consolation, and as she goes upstairs she cannot resist, even on this terrible night, exercising her first despotic and unshared power. Her mother, who loved softness and shadow, had always insisted on the electric lamp at the foot of the staircase being shaded and softened by folds of rose-coloured stuff, Sidonie had the rose-coloured stuff taken away, and even on this first evening of her reign the undimmed and intense radiance of the unveiled light proclaims the change of domestic government, and the absolute authority of the new ruler. This is one of the many exquisite finenesses of touch which reveal the delicacy of observation in the writer throughout this novel, and can be only appreciated by a reader who brings to it that attention and capacity which Sir John Lubbock and his audience would think it only worth while to devote to a treatise on the stalk-eyed crustacea or a monograph upon the household flea.

M. Jules Lemaitre, in his story of Les Rois, says with a sneer that one of his personages was 'née pour gouter Auber, Cabanel, et les romans de la Révue des Deux Mondes.' Now in his own volume, entitled Les Rois, published this season, and received with great curiosity in Paris, M. Jules Lemaitre has merely mixed up the tragedy of Meyerling, the mystery of Johann Orth, and recent well-known card and debt scandals concerning living princes; and, having reproduced with these the individuality of Louise Michel, the life of Kropotkine, and the career of a well-known financier, he has introduced some essays on social and political problems into his reproductions of these personages, dated the whole 1900, and called it a novel. But it is not a novel, for the imagination does not enter into it. It is a photograph, or a travesty, whatever the reader may please to call it, of actual recent modern events, thinly disguised, but unjustly exaggerated, and an almost impudent imitation in many ways of Daudet's Rois en Exil. There is some brilliant writing in it, and some fine thoughts and expressions, which is, of course, always the case when the writer is so intelligent a man as Lemaitre, but a novel it is not; it is a series of scenes, almost all borrowed or imitated from well-known events; it is a patchwork with little harmony in its arrangement, and it has the supreme fault of introducing long descriptions of anterior events, and bringing in new characters, at the close of the action. There is also one suggestion, if not more, concerning a royal person, so horrible that it seems unfair and even cruel to make it of one who cannot resent it or defend herself. The date of the story may be called 1900, but the events on which it is built have already been lived through by conspicuous characters.

It is not becoming, therefore, in so immature a story-teller as M. Lemaitre proves himself to be, and one who is obliged to go for his incidents to the scandals of courts, to sneer at the novels of the Révue des Deux Mondes, in which, to go no further back than last year, such admirable works as La Vie Privét de Michael Teissier and Le Secret du Précepteur have first seen the light. To be a critic of it is much easier than to be a creator of fine fiction; to pull to pieces requires lesser qualities than to construct.

In the past twenty months there have been some very fine novels in French literature. A l'Abîme, by Paul Vassili, is a masterpiece of originality, and the character of the great egoist, who is its hero, is matchless in its intuition, its philosophy, and its realism; it is a narrative of intense interest without its having any other source for its interest than that which lies in following the evolution of a type wholly new in literature, and the crystallisation of a naturally generous nature into a complete philosophic selfishness through circumstances which lead to its moral isolation amidst the full success of a triumphant career. Amants and La Force des Choses, of Paul Margueritte, are beautiful novels, remarkable for originality of conception, correctness of observation, and the talent of interesting the reader in perfectly natural events. The former in especial is full of truth, poetic feeling, and novelty of situation and of character; it is entirely a story of love, but it is love pourtrayed with equal sympathy and comprehension, and embracing scenes entirely dramatic whilst entirely natural. If Sir John Lubbock will read these three books and end with Le Secret du Précepteur, he will, I think, feel bound to admit that such works require for their due appreciation quite as much attentive respect in their perusal, and quite as many intellectual and perceptive qualities in their reader, as the analysis, however interesting, of a wasp's social habits, and the diary, however delightful, of a caged bluebottle's appetite. The study of earthworms demands, no doubt, the exercise of much higher faculties than are necessary for the study of human nature. Still it is difficult to believe that the earthworm can afford such varied and complicated interest as man, and nowhere are the portraiture and analysis of man so ably depicted as in a fine novel.[6]

V

L'IMPÉRIEUSE BONTÉ.[7]

A French critic has ranked the Frères Rosny amongst the 'authors of to-morrow,' and in a certain sense they, no doubt, belong to the class called les jeunes, often wrongly, since amongst these jeunes there are men of middle age. Les jeunes is an expression which is rather intended to indicate new methods and new views than to describe the actual age of the writers. In a sense everyone belongs to les jeunes who is emancipated from conventional tradition; but too much stress, too much importance, has been attached to this name; true art is always natural, and this new school is seldom natural; there is more eccentricity of manner in it than there is genuine originality of thought; there is too great an effort, too perpetual a strain in its productions; frequently, as in the case of Maurice Barrés, subtlety of language is employed to conceal absolute poverty of idea; or, as in the case of Georges Ohnet, to clothe mere wooden puppets with a semblance of life by skill in depicting incident; or, as in the case of Paul Bourget, to eke out a slender modicum of incident and idiosyncrasy with charm of style and an imposing psychology, and disarm criticism by euphuism.

In the two Rosnys there are some of the affectations of these writers, but there is none of their poverty of idea. They are full of ideas; full of meditation, of observation, of sympathy, of experience; the narrow limits to which custom confines the novel are far too small for their abundant powers. In portions of their work there is that more artificial mode of treatment, that strain after recondite words and tortuous and archaic methods of expressions, which are the blemish of les jeunes; but in many other portions their true insight, their deep feeling, and their artistic instincts raise them above this pedantry and enable them to produce certain passages which have few equals in any literature. L'Impérieuse Bonté is a very long book, but the reader would be dull indeed who did not wish it were longer, and who would not feel that the writers had been forced to renounce many scenes and many reflections and descriptions with which their minds were teeming. They convey to their reader their own attachment to their personages; willingly, we feel sure, they could have filled a hundred volumes with the story of their fate; the fountain of their sympathies is fed by an eternal spring. What is most admirable also in them is their remarkable equity; they can see the injustice done to the rich by the poor, as well as that done to the poor by the rich; and this quality of impartial sympathy is very rare. There is abundance in the world of that one-sided sympathy which springs from a parti pris, but that which is many-sided and perfectly just is very unusual. The Rosnys are capable of it.

The language indeed is at times tortuous, inflated, archaic, after the manner of the modern school; but at other times it loses this mannerism and becomes the clear, limpid, polished French so dear to us. It is never clearer or simpler than in the passages concerning the Lamarques and other sufferers which touch the heart.

The first portion of the book is the finest; the scenes which treat of this family are the greatest as they are the simplest of the whole. Was there ever any passage more pathetic and more real than this description of the last drive in the poor hired vehicle of the dying man and his children?

'Lamarque drew a deep breath under the delicious weight of the freshened air. Strength and peace brushed his tired, sickly frame.

'"Ah! I was sure that this would make me well."

'A smile came around his diaphanous nostrils, his lips parted with childlike pleasure. Albert felt that heaven and earth were born again in endless life. His soul shone through his blue eyes; he began to laugh and jest with nature. But his mother and Georges only saw more plainly in the luminous light the deadly thinness of Lamarque, and could think of nothing except how they should be able to make up for the expense of the five francs for the cab. They had driven out towards a road which looked mysterious and poetic; limes, acacias, young elms, all kinds of shades of green, were lit by a descending sun. There were flocks of slender trunks; a dainty philosophy of verdure; high above, pale foliage seemed to drink in the light; then depths where the sun-rays seemed to flow and stream like the nebulæ of comets, where they lay like vapour on which some fragile insect life floated like medusæ on the sea. Already dead leaves were on the ground like the tanned flesh, or the brown fur, of forest creatures. Spiders' webs had the colours of the rainbow; in these birdless trees butterflies lent an illusion of winged life and figured the flight of nestlings. Happiness seemed crystallised in the figure of a woman knitting; in the cry of a distant railway train; in the joy of two children munching pears with their crusts; in the sport of a dog who rolled on the grass with a youthful bark and the eyes of one in love with life. The red frock of a young girl passing by lent a note of force, of splendour, of intensity, to the golden afternoon.

'"It is so nice here!" said Albert.

'Georges, watching the silvery gossamer webs of the spiders, remembered all the visions he had ever had of liberty and space for kind animals and kind people.

'"I am young again!" murmured Lamarque.

'He was still pale, but his pallor was less corpse-like. Even the little François listened and enjoyed with a mute delight—mute because shut within himself—and loved his parents, his brothers, the driver, the trees, and the buzzing flies.

'"Stop," said the sick man suddenly. It was before a high gate, through which was visible a spectacle of Eden, a large garden.

'They could see a great pond, over which there could float whole broods of delicate dreams; there were tall Lombardy poplars, and the grace of weeping willows. Drooping larches also hung over the water-lilies; there were the thick shade of Canadian poplars, and also the timid murmurs, the sensitive sighs, of aspens. Then there was the charm of woodland life reflected in the water; of the landscape repeated below, symmetrical, and sombre in an abyss of oxidised silver. Then came grassy walks and gentle slopes of turf; further off were clearings in which beautiful trees were half seen, half hidden in misty distance like a promise of abundance and of happiness. The felicity of the place entered into the souls of the poor family who looked on it; they had at once the anguish of feeling that nothing like this would ever be theirs, and the ecstasy of knowing that such beauty did exist.

'Standing up in their sorry hired carriage, they gazed in rapture, saying but few words.

'"One little corner of this garden would be wealth to us!" sighed the mother.

'"That corner—there," said Lamarque.

'"One could not eat one's garden," said Albert.

'Georges, hypnotised, followed with his eyes the flight of an insect. Poised in the sunlight, the creature was motionless awhile; then descended, ascended, then, swift as a sped arrow, vanished in the shadows. One would wish for such an atom, taking so small a place in creation, the joys, the instincts, the intelligence of a great animal. At anyrate, it symbolises all the enjoyments of life, repose on a leaf, movement, ecstasy of travel through space and towards mystery.

'"Ah!" thought Georges, in distress, "even to come and see this, one must have money!"

'The hard and heavy thought was like a blow on the tender heart of the boy. Soon this bitterness entered into the souls of all, even of the youngest child.'

What I have translated as 'oxidised silver' is in the original 'blackened nickel,' one of those unfortunate, grotesque, inharmonious expressions of which there are many in this work. To compare water, the liquid, the mobile, the translucent, to any metal is a strange and unfitting comparison. In this passage, which is serious and poetical, the intrusion of such words as 'blackened nickel' seems offensive, and mars all the impression of the phrase. But it is in this kind of offence to the ear and the intelligence that les jeunes unhappily revel; they see in such offences signs of emancipation, of realism, of originality, when, in truth, the usage is no sign of anything except of a faulty ear and a lack of judgment.

Throughout the work, however, despite these occasional blemishes, every episode connected with the Lamarques is a masterpiece of pathos and of simplicity, until the last scene of all, when the three children with their mother are about to light the charcoal collected by the little François as it dropped from the waggons when they passed along the quay, and kept in a corner of the miserable room, in readiness for the last hour of all.

The characters of the three boys, so dissimilar and yet united by the vague likeness of race, are drawn with a life-like distinctness: Georges, pensive and philosophic, proud, gentle, observant; Albert, sceptic and scornful, with his passionate sense that, since death killed his father through serving others, there can be no God; and the youngest, François, timid, imaginative, devoted, hiding himself under the table, to still the pangs of hunger with fancies of a lonely fairy isle where neither want nor death should come. These three children offer one of the most perfect pictures of innocent and unmerited suffering which literature can offer, and the limner of them and of their sorrows is a fine writer. Jacques Fougeraye, the central figure of the romance, yields his place to them as its chief interest; and is also perhaps inferior in interest to his unhappy and generous patron Dargelle. One would desire to know through what circumstances a man of the talent and character of Fougeraye comes to be destitute in the streets of Paris; something also of the parentage, education, influences which have gone towards making him what he is. In the same way one would wish to know how Lamarque fell into poverty, how his children became so cultured and refined, how the whole family is aloof in every way from their common and odious kindred. Les jeunes do not deign to throw light on the antecedents of their dramatis personæ; they are wrong, for two reasons: one because they thus baulk the natural and legitimate curiosity of their readers; the second, that there is no true psychology (the word they worship) without study of the causes which have contributed to make a man or woman what the observer of them finds them to be. A writer like Gyp may with airy grace jump, as through a circus-hoop, into the middle of the lives of her personages without further explanation, but in a philosophic student of human nature in its sad seriousness such saltatory pranks are unbecoming.

One could well spare the hundreds of pages devoted to long and, one must say, tiresome descriptions of moral and mental states, for a few pages of lucid and graphic information as to the causes which brought the characters of the book to the pass in which we find them at their first appearance. But this is a method of composition too simple, direct, and natural to commend itself to les jeunes. And when on rare occasions they do furnish personal descriptions, these are so wrapped up in anatomical and physiological language that we can conjure up from them little or no real likeness. The characteristic of this new school is an extreme vagueness, an intentional nebulosity. Their personages are never introduced to the reader, nor are they given any pedigree; even personal description of them is of the slightest. They come abruptly on the scene as though they came up through a trap-door. It is left to the intelligence of the reader to supply all the details which the author disdains to furnish. In a book, as in life, one likes to have people duly presented before making their acquaintance; but this is a prejudice which the new school scorns to gratify.

There is a certain tedium in some of the experiences of Fougeraye, such as in his visits to the hospitals and the asylum of misshappen human creatures; and the young woman Louise, a medical student, who has learned to look on death with professional indifference, is so virtuous and self-satisfied that one is indisposed to share the admiration which Fougeraye feels for her. He himself is so unpretentious, so warm-hearted, so single-minded, and so manly that he deserves a more sympathetic and less vain helpmeet than this female doctor, with her too prosy platitudes and her chill philosophies.

Jeanne Dargelle, whom he rejects, is the least truthful, the most artificial, figure in the book. We are never interested in her. The breath of life has not been breathed into her; and when she kills herself we remain indifferent; we know that in her world women do not kill themselves, and a very proud woman would have found the idea of dying, because her husband's secretary had no love for her, altogether unendurable. We feel also that in real life Fougeraye would probably have shared her passion, and the struggle it would have caused between his temptation, and his loyalty and gratitude to Dargelle, would have been of profound interest. The chapter following on her death, in which Dargelle is alone with her dead body, is very fine, and reflects exactly that strange mixture of emotions and sensations which sway the survivor who passes long hours of solitude beside the corpse of one once dear to him—the trivial incongruities which force themselves in amidst intense regret, the eccentric fancies which dance like marsh-lights over the sombre swamp of a deep despair. Who amongst us has not cried, like Dargelle, 'Pardon, pardon!' from the depths of an aching heart, looking on the dead features of one to whom, in the eyes of the world, we had no fault?

There is in the Rosnys the distressing habit, common to all the more recent French writers, with few exceptions, of endeavouring to be pedantic, to be involved, to express an idea barbarously and bewilderingly instead of harmoniously and clearly; to say épiderme instead of peau, véridique instead of vrai, prunelles instead of yeux; to use the jargon of science, the abomination of foreign or technical idioms; to turn away from the natural, the direct, the usual, the obvious, and seek an appearance of profundity in what is merely a confusion of sounds. These affectations, these efforts, spoil many of the pages, and weary the most attentive reader in many of the chapters; as does also the incessant tendency to find similes of the most bizarre and eccentric kind, such as the comparison of dead leaves to the fur of animals; of a simile 'frail as the downy blow-ball of dandelion-seed'; of a sky 'of a powdery blue, with the horizon of an aquarium'; of a heart beating 'like a pear oscillating in a breeze,' and many others as far-fetched, as incongruous, and as grotesque. The excessive use of simile, however apt and exact, is always a fault; but similes as absurd and as strained as are most of those employed by the Rosnys, become a deformity of style, annoy the mind, and disagreeably abstract and distract the thoughts.

A too long, too technical, and too involved description is an inventory which leaves no concrete whole upon the reader's mind; it is a mere conglomeration of items. Take, as an instance, this description of Dargelle's physiognomy; and be it remembered that we never know who or what Dargelle is, how he came by his vast fortune, or anything, indeed, about him, except that he is un pauvre riche, a capitalist, one supposes, rich by inheritance. Here is the personal description of him:—

'A fat face, sad, meditative; his cheeks fell in; they were flabby. The forehead was a half-circle, with three deep wrinkles, the temples inflamed. The brow was vast but undecided, despite heavy eyebrows above violent eyes. The lips of a wild beast; a short beard which had never grown; flat hair, forming a little patch behind the brow and advancing laterally to the ears. The whole a Finnish face, very pale, with a disposition of the skin to become scaly. The nose long, broad, very irregular, between the snub and the aquiline, the end raised, the bridge bowed. Hardly any back to the head; the neck, like a Celt's, running straight up to the crown. The ears folded backward, stiff, cartilaginous,' etc., etc., etc.

This long and disagreeable description merely conveys the impression of a monster; and it does not in any way agree with the character of Dargelle, magnanimous, tender, generous, and sensitive; suffering acutely from a sense of utter loneliness amidst the parasites, who trade on his kind feelings. A man of this temperament would not have violent eyes or wild-beast lips; and the elevation of his sentiments would certainly have given some beauty of expression to his features.

Of Jacques Fougeraye, the hero of the work, we are given no description whatever. On the other hand, the portraiture of the frightful occupant of a monsters' asylum is traced in fullest and most minute detail, with an ostentation of technical knowledge, in that passion for what is horrible and abnormal which is characteristic of this school.

Dargelle, morally, is throughout consistent and lovable, from his first movement of suspicion and distrust, feeling that his new favourite will only use him and cheat him, as all the other dispensers of his charities have done, to the last frank smile with which, though jealous of the happiness he has himself created, he says: 'Allons donc! Je vois bien que vous m'aimez aussi.'

The rich man will only have the crumbs of the bread of the soul which is called love, but his generosity is content with it. 'Le pauvre riche!' say the Rosnys, with rare insight into the small consolation which, to those in full possession of them, the powers of wealth can give. Dargelle is unique, and it is almost to be regretted that he should occupy but a secondary place in the narrative. The description of his physical malady is perhaps exaggerated; deafness would scarcely cause such violent moral and mental torture; but the pathos of his last appearance is unexaggerated, and goes to the heart of the reader. By his mere word so many people are made happy, and yet, to secure happiness, even relief, for himself his millions are powerless! This is what many a rich and generous man must have felt. The irony of fate is more cruel in a sense to the heirs, than to the disinherited, of fortune. But the pain which the rich suffer is purely sentimental, and there are very few indeed who have nobility of nature enough to feel this at all.

The rich man has always material comfort, freedom from daily and hourly anxieties; he is at liberty to go wherever he likes, to do whatever he pleases; he enjoys, if he have the true faculty for enjoyment; he can make himself obeyed, if the obedience be but eye-service; he can surround himself with beautiful objects; and he can freely indulge the luxury of generosity, although it is the one luxury of which the rich are not enamoured, the rich man in general never gives except to see his name in print in the newspapers. The compassion of the Rosnys for the rich is scarcely justified, since their greatest burden is ennui, and this is an artificial kind of suffering due to defective sympathies, as cold feet are due to sluggish circulation. The statement, put in the mouth of Dargelle, that suicide is much more general amongst the rich than the poor, is certainly not based on fact or on statistics. The rich man, moreover, has one great and most precious exemption: he is free from petty, carking bodily cares; he never knows the greatest agony possible, that of seeing those dear to him hungry and homeless; he can be always warm in cold weather, cool in hot weather; in illness he has every palliative and assistance; his home is his own if he care for it, intangible and immutable; the whole world is his if he possess perception enough to enjoy it; his sufferings may be considerable from dyspepsia and discontent, and, if he be of a high nature, from irritation at the ingratitude and insincerity of human nature, but it is absurd to compare his pains with those of the poor—above all, when the poor are of fine temper, sensitive nerve and cultured intellect like the Fougeraye and Lamarque of the Rosnys. It is well to remind society that there are sorrows of the soul from which the rich may suffer more acutely than the poor; but it is to exceed this truth to represent the rich as often suffering from this cause. The rich man is usually a complete egotist, whose philanthropy has a political purpose or a social ambition as its mainspring. A Dargelle may exist, does exist; but he is one in ten millions. He is legitimate in his place as a character in romance, but as a character in real life he is met with but very rarely.

There are many social questions and many philosophic theories discussed in L'Impérieuse Bonté. An unkind critic might say that it is rather a social and philosophic essay than a romance. But in much it conforms to and fulfils the highest demands of fiction, and the naturalness and lovableness of the chief personages lend to it throughout the interest of romance. The mission of Fougeraye in the expenditure of Dargelle's money introduces, perforce, many phases of social misery. It was probably to do this that the book was written; but the harmony and interest of the action of the novel, as a novel, are not sacrificed to this intention. In these chapters all affectation, all artifice drop from the style, and the writers become masters of strong, simple and infinitely touching prose. It is to be regretted that the influence of their time should ever mislead them into tortuous and strained exaggerations and archaisms when it is possible for them to write thus simply and eloquently:—

'The few precious things—the brooch and earrings of Madame Lamarque, even her wedding-ring, alas! then the china service, saved with such effort from the fire, with a little rosewood secrétaire, and two Sèvres vases won at a lottery for charity, the gift to it of the Empress Eugénie—all disappeared, all were devoured by the monster Misery. Georges suffered as much as his parents; his nature was inclined towards the adoration of relics, of frail things, of the semi-vitality of objects.

---

'It rained a little; in the shadow of the fortifications the lamps trembled under gusts of wind; the reflections touched the wet grass, which seemed for the moment as fresh as the turf of meadows. Everywhere solitude—solitude filled with a sense of near and hidden human life in the closed houses from which came the subdued light of unseen chambers in vague suggestion of mysterious joys. But there was no living creature out of doors except in the openings of the ramparts; on the grass, a dog looking as furtive as a hunting wolf. The boy's eyes gazed at the sky, at the grass, at the long vista of burning lamps, at the grey stony road under his feet. A sense of beauty came into his soul, but a beauty sombre as the psalms of All Saints' Day.

'Beside him his mother carried the mattress which had been sold; he bore one side of it on his shoulder.

'They walk thus, beaten, conquered, the child full of suffocating revolt, the mother humble and resigned, like the meek beasts of the stall, with occasional flickers of wrath soon extinguished. They go thus, saying to each other a few words, muffled and heavyhearted, which are the mere dull echoes of their souls. "We must turn down that street. How will it end?—why does not the family help?" At a corner they stop, and suddenly Georges is overwhelmed with pity for his mother, as he sees her profile wet with rain in the light of the street lamp.

'He gazes at her. He remembers, in his earliest childhood, a time when there had been two servants in their house; when his mother had been a gentlewoman, going out for a walk with his father, while the bonne pushed the little carriage of the baby François. And here she was, his own mother, with a mattress for sale on her shoulder, on foot in the mud at this time of night. "Mamma! mamma! dear little mamma!" he cried, sobbing, without a single selfish thought, caring only for her, so profoundly, so intensely!'

Again, there is the same intense sympathy in the author with the suffering of the spirit when the two Sèvres vases are taken to their new home, sold for twenty francs, the poor, pretty, familiar things which look so elegant, so slender, so aristocratic amongst the coarse, vulgar ornaments of their new owners, that Georges is proud of their superiority amidst the anguish with which he thinks of them, lost for ever:

'Frail penates, saturated with the soul of home. Ah! how many birthday mornings, how many twilights of study, how many long rainy days and gentle suns of springtime, how many dreams of future voyages in far lands, how many nights fearful with storm or mute with falling snow, had these objects seen! They had been always there, fixing themselves inalienably on the retina in their unalterable attitude of delicacy and art: and now they were lost for ever, given over to an alien hand for a coin of gold which would last two days!'

Nothing can be more touching, more sincere, more eloquent than this episode.

Take again the magnificent opening chapter of the fire at which Lamarque contracts the illness which ultimately kills him. It is too long to quote here, but its description is of a force incomparable, and of a truth as great. No one of his contemporaries could have written this chapter; its sobriety and veracity, united to its splendour of diction and its terror of suggestion, make it a magnum opus.

It has only one defect; it gives the reader the impression that it cost great effort to the author. It does not convey that sense of the author's spontaneous fertility and joy in creation which Pierre Loti, François Coppée, Anatole France, feel and give. L'Impérieuse Bonté is a great work, but its greatness must have cost painful thought and unremitting labour.

One feels that there is nothing of improvisation, of careless and happy inspiration, about it. It is the matured fruit of profound observation, and of complicated doubt, of an unselfish sorrow, and of a noble altruism. It is a work which must impress and elevate all readers who are capable of comprehending its teaching. But there is no laughter in it, nor is there even a smile, save that sad divine smile which accompanies the tears of pity.

VI

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

There are few men of our time more interesting than the man who bears this name. Fresh with English air, and dark with desert suns, passionately liberal in thought and nobly independent in opinion, spending his winters on the shores of the Nile, on the edge of the desert, and his summers between the vale of Shoreham, and the alder-shaded water of the humble Mole, he touches, and has always touched, life at its most different facets. Not without knowledge has he written of the green Sussex weald, and of the woodcocks and the thrushes, the oak trees and the yew trees, of 'Evelyn's land'; not without love as though he were also a son of the soil has he written of that other far-off country where—

'We may make terms with Nature, and awhile
Put as it were our souls to grass, and run
Barefooted and bareheaded in the smile
Of that long summer which still girds the Nile.'

His private life, likewise, is equally of interest to the most indifferent, since he is the husband of Byron's granddaughter, the father-in-law of Neville Lytton, the companion in youth of Owen Meredith, the friend of the Arab, the champion of the dumb, and the standard-bearer of all lost causes. In few personalities is there united so much which is uncommon, and idiosyncrasies which are so varied. He has been so fortunate, often-times, in his friends and his fortunes, that it is perhaps only to be human that he should, in his editor who is his friend, fail to be so fortunate as one could wish. Mr Henley, who selected his poems, has excluded many; one is disposed to resent and to rebel; Mr Henley is apt at all times to arouse that sensation in the reader of his somewhat too condescending criticisms.

Many of the verses excluded were political; now it is precisely in politics that Mr Blunt is most delightful to those amongst us who abhor actual governments.

I wish that these poems had come before the public without this species of apology with which Mr Henley heads them. They do not need so uncertain a prefatory note. They are certainly not likely to be popular. They will not be recited over a little tambourine, and used to collect monies for woollen socks and chocolate. They will be little appreciated by the lovers of ballads of blood and fury, and odes of war which scream like a steam-hooter. They are made to be read in quiet places where daffodils blossom, and the black-cap sings; where lake waters lie calm in mountain shadows, or where, through the stillness of a studio or study, a summer breeze blows dropped rose-leaves across the threshold.

Mr Henley raises one standard of great verse: Milton's: and below that nothing to him is great. I know not where he places Shelley, but does Milton ever touch the heart except perhaps in the Lycidas? Who can care for the exiles of Eden?

I do not think that it was necessary for Mr Henley to say that Mr Blunt is not John Milton. It would not occur to anyone that he was. But then, neither to my thinking is he Byron or Burns, whom Mr Henley thinks that he is, nor is he either Owen Meredith, to whom Mr Henley likewise compares him. He is, to my thinking, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; alone in his verse as he is also alone (or almost alone) in his opinions and his politics. I dislike comparisons in criticisms. It is a meagre way to define what is, this habit of declaring what it is not; and I love not either the diminution of the living for the exaltation of the dead, or the praise of the living for the depreciation of the dead. Nor is it to me either wit or wisdom to say that Byron 'followed.' Who did he follow? Who was his precursor? Who showed him his matchless double rhymes? Who before him struck the splendid chords of his Juan? Who crowded into a few years of life such accomplishment, such eloquence such romance of existence? Who resembled Byron before Byron lived?

Poets who are not great, and do not aspire to be so, may touch the chords of memory, may unseal the fountains of tears, may make dead loves arise and smile, and the springs of dead years return, and do this with a line, a verse, a suggestion. This is what Owen Meredith did in his song; so does his friend and comrade in his. There is a strongly virile quality in his verse: it is not epicene, nor ever effeminate; the thoughts are always the thoughts of a man who has felt the hoof of the desert horse cast up the sand of the desert, and seen the circle of the waiting vultures poised in the blue air; and heard 'God's thunder upon Horeb'; who has read his Augustine and Chrysostom on the shores of the Dead Sea, and his Horace and his Herrick lying on the short sheep-cropped grass of Sussex; who knows many a bank whereon the wild thyme grows in lowly Kentish lanes, and has walked with the shades of Dante and of Byron in the marble streets of Ravenna, and under the dying pines of its forest; who has loved and laughed in the artificial passions and mocking mirth of Paris, and has dwelt in the solitudes where the hair tents of the sons of Shem are dark against the east.

Mr Henley, in his somewhat autocratic manner, says that a man lives for posterity in proportion as he figures the gestures and sets forth the emotions of his own time. We can none of us judge what posterity may do or say. I fear it will be too engrossed with itself to take much heed of anything which went before it. Or, possibly, there will be no posterity at all, but only a shattered earth; scattered into space by some exploit of that boastful Icarus called Science. But taking Mr Henley's dictum as it stands, is it true, seeing (as its context shows) that he means an Englishman must be judged by what he writes of England? If this were true, where would go the Juan and the Parisina, the Anactoria and the Atalanta in Calydon, the Cenci and the Adonaïs, the Lucille and the Clytemnestra? Scott would be greater than Shelley, and Cowper than Coleridge. The theory will not hold water. Which is the greater play of Shakespeare—'King John' or 'The Tempest'? 'Henry the Fifth' or 'Romeo and Juliet'? 'Richard the Third' or 'Hamlet'? What are esteemed the greatest epics of the human race—Milton's and Dante's—are located in no known province of our narrow sphere, but, in worlds, heavenly and infernal, whither no traveller has gone, save in the spirit. 'Country' is but a restricted boundary for whoever has the vision which sees beyond the ordinary range of men. To the true poet his native land lies wherever what is beautiful can be beloved, or that which is sorrowful needs solace.

The only thing that personally I regret in these verses is their author's tendency to be too careless in his rhymes. Many of them grate upon one's ear, and such as sun and stone vex one's sense of melody, indeed, are not rhymes: whilst some words used, such as for instance Revenue, accord ill with verse at all. He deems himself quit of obligation to observe these delicacies of metrical beauty, because he says peevishly that he is no poet. But he is a poet; and is so strongly one in feeling that there is no excuse for him not to be more observant of style.

For style is the reed-pipe through which the singer's breath blows music, and he should take heed that his syrinx be well chosen, and well cut, so that each air played on it be clear as the throstle's note.

But rough though many of his compositions are—rough and unstudied—yet, when read in fitting atmosphere, they will be beloved, and in the mind of the reader they will linger like the lilt of a moorland song heard on an autumn eve. There is the vox humana in their melody. They come from the heart of a man who has suffered. They are unequal, extremely unequal; the poet has gone through the woods and gathered together grass and orchis, and gorse, and the sceptered meadow sweet and the bearded barley, all together, just as they happened to come in his path; common things sometimes, or such as seem so to those who do not see the sun shine through and the dew tremble on them.

They are not put together with great care. I should not think that they were turned, and returned, and pondered over, and doubted about. They are too spontaneous, or seem so, to be the subject of great meditation. They are the natural children of a forest-lover. As you read them you receive the irresistible impression that they were written involuntarily as a full heart sighs, as a glad heart sings, but the sigh is more frequent than the song.

He has a great love of rural things. He says:—

'You cannot know,
In your bald cities where no cowslips blow,
How dear life is to us. The tramp of feet
Brushes all other footsteps from the street
And you see nothing of the graves you tread.
With us they are still present, the poor dead.
Being so near the places where they sleep
Who sowed these fields, we in their absence reap.'

Again:—

'This ridge
Is only thirty miles from London Bridge,
And when the wind blows north, the London smoke
Comes down upon us, and the grey crows croak,
For the great city seems to reach about
With its dark arms, and grip them by the throat.
Time may yet prove them right. The wilderness
May be disforested, and Nature's face
Stamped out of beauty by the heel of man
Who has no room for beauty in his plan.'

Again:—

'The dove did lend me wings. I fled away
From the loud world which long had troubled me.
Oh, lightly did I flee when hoyden May
Threw her wild[8] mantle on the hawthorn tree.
I left the dusty highroad, and my way
Was through deep meadows, shut with copses fair,
A choir of thrushes poured its roundelay
From every hedge and every thicket there;
Mild, moon-faced kine looked on, where in the grass
All heaped I lay, from noon till eve.
And hares unwitting close to me did pass
And still the birds sang....'

A certain similarity there is in his verse to Owen Meredith's, but this is due to the fact that they were friends and companions always, in youth and manhood, and that Wilfrid Blunt had an intense and adoring sentiment for his friend which made him regard the other with a feeling which was almost religious in its strength and sincerity.

The following sonnet might have come out of 'The Wanderer,' and I imagine the house called here Palazzo Pagani is the villa in Bellosguardo which in 'The Wanderer' shelters the lovers of the 'Eve and May.'

'This is the house where twenty years ago
They spent a spring and summer. This shut gate
Would lead you to the terrace, and below
To a rose-garden long since desolate.
Here they once lived. How often I have sat
Till it was dusk among the olive trees,
Waiting to hear their coming horse hoofs graze
Upon the gravel, till the freshening breeze
Bore down a sound of voices. Even yet
A broken echo of their laughter rings
Through the deserted terraces. And see,
While I am speaking, from the parapet
There is a hand put forth, and someone flings
Her very window open overhead.
How sweet it is, the scent of rosemary,
These are the last tears I shall ever shed.'

Here the influence of Owen Meredith is very strong, but it is the influence due to sympathy, not to imitation.

But where he is entirely unlike Owen Meredith is in his passion of pity, which is his dominant instinct, and which in the other is rarely perceptible. Owen Meredith was entirely personal; Wilfrid Blunt is strongly impersonal. The sorrows of man, and of one man in especial, constituted the be all, and end all, of the former; the woes of all creation lie heavy on the soul of the latter. The bird with a broken wing is to Wilfrid Blunt as pitiful a tragedy as the human lover with his ruined joys was to the author of 'The Wanderer'; the chained eagle dying in an iron cage is to him as cruel a captive as his own soul pining to be free from the limits of sense and the blindness of mortality. He reaches a high level in altruism, which is in him of a very pure kind.

Such pity thrills through these lines on the stricken hart:—

'The stricken hart had fled the brake,
His courage spent for life's dear sake,
He came to die beside the lake.

'The golden trout leaped up to view,
The moorfowl clapped his wings and crew,
The swallow brushed him as she flew.

'He looked upon the glorious sun,
His blood dropped slowly on the stone,
He loved the life so nearly won,

'And then he died. The ravens found
A carcase couched upon the ground,
They said their god had dealt the wound.

'The Eternal Father calmly shook
One page untitled from life's book—
Few words. None ever cared to look.

'Yet woe for life thus idly riven,
He blindly loved what God had given,
And love, some say, has conquered Heaven.'

What Wilfrid Blunt perceives and feels more keenly than greater English poets, more keenly indeed than any English poet except Shelley and Matthew Arnold, are the pathos, the value, the infinite sadness, of these free forest, or desert, lives struck down in the fulness of their strength and beauty by the brutal pursuit of that ravenous and insatiable brute which is Man. It is this emotion which has inspired in him the strange poem named 'Satan Absolved.'

'Satan Absolved' was not written when Mr Henley edited the books of earlier poems, and I imagine that it has scared Mr Henley and displeased him. I do not know this, I have not asked, but I imagine that 'Satan Absolved' must make Mr Henley extremely uncomfortable.

Briefly, the motive of 'Satan Absolved' is the accusation brought by Satan against Man; and against God, as the Creator and Authoriser of Man. This will sound in many ears a profanity; but it is not so, and Satan has sad reason in his arguments. It was a fine and lofty courage which made the author produce it at a moment when the English people are drunk and delirious with the lust of carnage and of conquest, and the great thinker Herbert Spencer has accepted its dedication, whilst the great painter Watts has given it its frontispiece.

It is a poem which will alienate many, affright many, and to many no doubt will appear blasphemous; but it is absolutely true in its hardy and original conception of the sins of mankind against the other races of the earth, and of the hypocrisy, brutality, and avarice of man, clothed and cultured, against man primitive and helpless. It is a cri de coeur, breaking almost involuntarily from a heart swollen with indignation, and scorn, and pain, before the emptiness of creeds, the impudence of prayer and praise, the vileness of aggression and of war-lust.

'Hast Thou not heard their chanting? Nay, Thou dost not hear,
Or Thou hadst loosed Thy hand, like lightning in the clear,
To smite their ribald lips with palsy!'