will cease to burn so fiercely, when the suppression of State or
Church will no longer be a daily question, and more modest and
practical measures of reform can be taken in hand. A committee of
lawyers has elaborated an important scheme for the reform of our
criminal procedure, long known to be seriously defective. Will there
be an opportunity of bringing it before the Chambers? Even more
interesting is the divorce question, which has found an able,
persevering, and eloquent advocate in M. Naquet. Of all others, this
reform is the most urgent. Those acquainted with family life in France
know the fatal moral consequences arising from judicial separation,
the only resource of ill-assorted couples. Not to speak of the
flagrant injustice which allows the man to separate from his wife on
account of offences she is obliged to tolerate in him, the two, though
separated, remain jointly and severally liable. The woman is obliged,
in a number of instances, such as the marriage of a child confided to
her care, to obtain the husband's authorization, whilst she, on her
part, can drag in the mire the name of her husband which she continues
to bear, or pass off children upon him which are not his. Separation
has all the drawbacks of divorce, besides others peculiar to it, which
divorce remedies. M. Naquet has treated the question from the tribune,
as also in a series of articles published in the _Voltaire_, wherein
he cites a number of heartrending cases in which divorce would be
the only possible remedy, and, finally, in the lectures he has been
holding in all the large towns. His campaign has been crowned with
success, and the law will, it is believed, be passed by the Chambers.
No small credit is due to M. Naquet, for he had to contend with
prejudices of several kinds--the religious prejudices of Catholicism,
which does not admit the power of the civil law to cancel a sacrament
of the Church; the political prejudices of Republican theorists, who
affect to attach a more sacred and indelible character to the civil
consecration of the magistrate than to the religious one of the
priest; the prejudices of immoral and unprincipled men, who form a
numerous class everywhere, who never having felt the restraints of
moral law are not troubled by the misfortunes springing from unhappy
marriages, but, on the contrary, are glad to take advantage of them;
finally, with the prejudices of some serious-minded persons, who are
afraid that in sanctioning divorce the Republic may appear to violate
the respect due to marriage. The last aspect of the question has
been ably supported by a deputy, M. Louis Legrand, in his interesting
study, "Le Mariage;" but M. Naquet finds no difficulty in proving
that marriage is more respected where divorce is possible than where
judicial separation only can be obtained, nor in showing religious men
that the Church has always recognised fourteen cases in which marriage
becomes void, whilst the French law only recognises one, mistaken
identity, which practically never occurs.
We have but to open a French novel, or visit the theatre, to convince
ourselves of the necessity of divorce. Mme. Gréville, in "Lucie Rodey"
(Plon), depicts a young woman reduced by her husband to the most
wretched condition, with no resource but resignation and a pardon
all but dishonourable to her; Mme. Bentzon, in "Georgette" (Lévy),
describes with exquisite delicacy the painful position of a woman who,
separated from her husband, and living on terms the world condemns
with a man of elevated character, is driven in the presence of her
innocent daughter to blush for a position the disgrace of which her
own elevation of sentiment had hitherto veiled from her. Half
the novels in France turn on the domestic misery arising from the
indissolubility of the marriage tie. Hackneyed as the subject is, it
presents so many aspects that new effects can always be derived
from it. Such dramas will ever remain the most touching source the
imagination of the novelist has to draw upon. From the princess to the
peasant, humanity is the same in its affections and sufferings. If you
want to know how the peasant suffers read "Un Coin de Village," by M.
Camille Lemonnier (Lemerre), a picturesque and piquant young writer,
who combines the touching grace of Erckmann-Chatrian with a power of
realistic observation quite his own. If you wish for something more
_recherché_, dealing with the richer and higher classes of society,
M. Gualdi, a young naturalized Italian, French in talent, provides
you with a drama of the most brilliant originality in his "Mariage
Extraordinaire" (Lemerre). A charming but poor girl, Elise, is on the
point of marrying a man she does not love to save her parents from
ruin. She is attached to a young man, Giulio, worthy of her, but poor
also; he has been obliged to expatriate himself, and Elise's mother
makes her believe that her _fiancé_ has forgotten and betrayed her.
The Comte d'Astorre, an elegant and magnificent _viveur_, with a
generous soul under his frivolous exterior, is touched by Elise's
fate; to enable her to escape a hateful marriage he offers her the
shelter of his name and house, promising that he will consider himself
as a friend, not a husband. For a time the compact is kept, but the
Comte d'Astorre ends by falling in love with his wife; the quondam
_viveur_ becomes the timid, trembling, and naïf suitor. Elise ends
by allowing herself to be moved, and when poor Giulio comes back from
India, true to the faith he had sworn, she repulses him, first in
the name of duty, and soon, one is made to feel, in the name of a new
nascent love. This singular and delicate theme is treated by M. Gualdi
with a refinement of touch that indicates the acute psychologist, and
the passionate scene between Giulio and Elise on their meeting again
is really beautiful.
To ascend a step higher in the social hierarchy and learn what a
queen, wounded in her feelings as a woman and a mother, can suffer,
read M. A. Daudet's last novel, "Les Rois en Exil" (Dentu), in which
he continues to work the vein he opened so successfully in "Le Nabab,"
the portraiture of Parisian life, viewed from its most brilliant side
as from that most flecked with impurity, disorder, and adventure. In
the "Nabab," M. Daudet had the advantage of describing the world he
had been most familiar with, since his two chief personages were M. de
Morny, whose secretary he had been for several years, and M. Bravay,
his former friend. But this advantage was also a defect, for no true
novel is possible with very well-known contemporary personages for
the characters; and the "Nabab," marvellous as regards truth and vivid
detail, was poor as regards composition. In "Les Rois en Exil"
we again meet with a number of well-known personages: the King of
Hanover, the Queen of Spain, the Prince of Orange, the Queen of
Naples, Don Carlos. Elysée Méraut, the little prince's tutor, is
said to be the portrait of an excellent youth, by name Thérion, also
entrusted with a prince's education, and who was horrified to find
that he believed more firmly in the principles of legitimacy and
divine right than his pupil's parents. The father of Elysée Méraut,
the old Legitimist peasant who sees his son's future insured because
the Comte de Chambord promises to bear him in mind, is no other than
A. Daudet's own father. But all the real portraits are secondary
characters that form the background of the picture. The leading
personages of the drama, Christian II., the dethroned king of Illyria,
who takes his exile very lightly, and forgets it by wallowing in the
mire of Parisian dissipations; his wife, the noble Fréderique, who
lives but for one thing, the recovery of the throne of her husband and
son, and in that hope endures every affront; their trusty attendants,
the two Rosens; and finally John Lévis, the unscrupulous man of
business, who knows the tariff of all the vices, and with his wife
Séphora, takes advantage of the dissolute weakness of Christian
II.,--all these leading figures, though compounded of traits, if not
real at least profoundly true, are the author's own creation. They
are artistically superior, moreover, to those of the "Nabab," more
complete, more lifelike even, for they are stripped of such traits as
are too personal, secondary, fleeting, contrary to actual reality, and
wear rather the character of types. Types they truly are, this king
and queen, representative of all the grandeur and vileness, the
heroism and cowardice, the noble pride and foolish prejudice, dwelling
in the exiled sovereigns who came to Paris, some to weep for monarchy,
others to hold its carnival, some as to the centre of pleasure,
others to that of political intrigue; and is there not a philosophy,
historical and political, in M. Daudet's novel, in his picture
of Christian II. forced to abdicate his royal pretensions after
sacrificing them to the love of an unworthy woman who has fooled him,
and Fréderique bidding farewell to all the hopes that centred in
her little Zara, forgetting everything besides being a mother, and
devoting all her powers towards rescuing her child from the sickness
that is killing him? It is unfair to M. Daudet to say that he only
possesses the art of painting the _chatoyant_ lights, the picturesque
outside of Parisian life, the dresses, the furniture, and the scenery;
to represent him as merely a skilful manufacturer of _bimbeloterie_.
We may tax him with abuse of description, and that habit of
_reportage_ peculiar to the daily press; and it would be vain to look
in him for the sobriety that enhances the beauty of some immortal
works of art; but such sobriety is incompatible with an art which aims
at painting human life in all its aspects, all its details, all its
colours. Neither Shakspeare, Dickens, nor Balzac is sober. To be
sure M. Daudet is neither a Dickens nor a Balzac, but his delicate
sensibility makes him penetrate far below the outer crust, to the
human ground of the characters, and the life they live is a real one.
On account of this, the first quality of a novelist, one forgives the
brutality and the pretentious passages, an imitation, the one of M.
Zola, the other of M. de Goncourt, and the inequalities of a style
which is, nevertheless, in wonderful harmony with the world he paints.
That which constitutes M. Daudet's great superiority over other
novelists of the realistic school, is that he has no contempt for
humanity, that he always loves it, often pities, and sometimes admires
it. Nothing can be more false, more unpleasant, or, we may venture
to say, more tiresome, than the view taken by a certain would-be
scientific pessimism of humanity, as being nothing but a compound of
vileness, vapidness, and folly. M. Zola is learning it to his cost.
After the immense success of "L'Assommoir," due to the great power of
the painter, as also to the horror inspired by scenes of unparalleled
crudeness, he wished to outdo himself and depict in "Nana" the
lowest depths of Parisian corruption. To make the impression the more
complete, he has not let in a single breath of pure air; or introduced
a single character which was not insipidly stupid and sensual,
enslaved by the lowest appetites, incapable of a single noble thought
or generous sentiment. The effect on the public was weariness rather
than disgust. _Le Voltaire_, which had expected to make its fortune by
bringing out the book in _feuilletons_, was greatly surprised to see
its circulation rapidly fail, actually on account of M. Zola's novel.
We are afraid the same thing will happen with regard to the work
announced by M. Flaubert. This great writer and conscientious
artist is unfortunately persuaded, in spite of his admiration for I.
Tourguéneff (that true painter of humanity, of its virtues as of its
vices), that the novel should confine itself to the portrayal of the
mediocre and uniform mass which makes up the majority of men. Already
in "L'Education Sentimentale" he sought to show the vulgarity and
coarseness that generally conceal themselves under what is called
love; in the novel he is now engaged on he shows us two men brutalized
by the mechanical routine of a bureaucratic career, studying every
human science, and finding in the study merely an occasion for the
better display of their incurable folly. Such mistakes committed
by men of genius cause us the better to appreciate less powerful
certainly, but more human, works, by writers who seek to render life
attractive to us, such as A. Theuriet, for instance, who has just
produced a new novel, "Le Fils Mangars" (Charpentier). M. Theuriet is
one of the few French writers of fiction who, instead of dealing
with the tragedies of guilty passion succeed in shedding a dramatic
interest over the affections and sufferings of pure young hearts.
In this he resembles the English novelists. Innocent love forms the
groundwork of his books, and constitutes their poetry and their charm.
"Le Fils Mangars" is the first of a series of studies entitled "Nos
Enfants," dealing with the various complications arising out of the
disagreement of parents and children. In "Le Fils Mangars" we are
introduced to a father, who has devoted all his efforts towards
amassing a fortune for his son, has to that end made use of dishonest
means, and finds his punishment in the loyalty of the one for whom
he committed the wrong. His son refuses to benefit by the wealth
dishonestly acquired, and falls in love with the daughter of one of
the men his father has ruined. This poignant theme is handled with the
airy and attractive delicacy that characterizes Theuriet's touch.
Were the surly critics to be trusted, we should not be leaving the
domain of fiction in turning to the new volume M. Renan has devoted
to the history of the sources of Christianity, entitled "L'Eglise
Chrétienne" (Lévy). It deals with the definitive constitution of the
Church, at the moment when dogma forms itself by contact with, and
in opposition to, the various heresies, and the organization of
the hierarchy takes place. It is true that M. Renan could, if he so
wished, be a wonderful writer of fiction. With what art he brings on
his personages, how admirably he infuses life into the thousand dry
and scattered fragments collected by erudition, and forms them into a
co-ordinate and complete whole! With what psychological penetration
he enters into the minds of his personages, and makes us familiarly
acquainted with the Roman Cæsars or the Church Fathers! What wealth
of imagination! what witchery of style! At times he is, no doubt, led
away by his imagination; too often the desire to invest old facts with
life and reality leads him to compare, or even assimilate, the present
with the past, and, in his exposition of ancient ideas, to mix them up
with his own, ideas so peculiar to our time and to M. Renan himself,
that the intermixture produces a false impression. It is daring to
ascribe the Fourth Gospel to Cerinthus, and still more so to regard
the letter of the Lyons Church on the martyrdom of Pothin and his
companions as a proof of the Lyonnese being false-minded, and to
connect the fact with the Socialist tendencies of modern Lyons. From
his comparing Hadrian in some respects to Nero, we gather that M.
Renan has yielded to the indulgence he had already testified towards
Nero in his volume on "L'Antechrist," an indulgence grounded on the
artistic tastes, or rather pretensions, of the royal stage-player. But
these blemishes, and occasional breaches of historical truth or good
taste, ought not to blind us to the historical value of a work which,
if it be the work of a great artist, is likewise that of a scholar of
the first order. Numbers of men can pore over texts and critics, but
to revive the past, and introduce into the domain of history, and
make the general public familiar with subjects reserved hitherto to
theologians and critics by profession, is the work of a genius only.
Scholars find much to censure in Michelet's "Histoire de Franceau
moyen Age;" but whatever its inexactitudes, he is the only man who has
succeeded in restoring to life the France of bygone days. And is not
life one of the most important elements of reality? Even an imperfect
acquaintance with a living man enables one to form a truer notion
of the man than the most minute autopsy of a dead body. Moreover,
as regards the past we have not the whole body, but only
scattered fragments; the breath of genius must pass over these dry
bones--restore to them flesh, blood, colour, movement, and voice.
But genius can only do her magic work when the materials that are
to serve for this wonderful transformation have been collected
by erudition. M. Renan would not have been able to construct his
historical monument had not German criticism prepared the way for
him. Erudition occasionally arrives at astonishing results by digging,
either in the earth which has swallowed up the ancient buildings or
in the dust of the archives. Here is an individual who played a very
important part in the fifteenth century in the struggle between France
and England, who, though a stranger and fighting more especially as an
adventurer greedy of spoil, helped to restore France to independence,
who was almost unknown, whose name was not mentioned in any of our
histories. M. I. Quicherat has brought him to life, and "Rodrigue de
Villandrando" (Hachette) will see his name cited in all the histories
of the reign of Charles VII. The book is a model of historical
reconstruction. It is wonderful to see how, with a series of scattered
indications, most of them the very driest of documents, not only the
incidents of a life, but the features of a character, can be pieced
together again.
Such a character as Rodrigue's is not very complicated, it is true.
There are historical personages to penetrate the depths of whose
nature an accumulation of documents and testimony would be necessary.
Such is Napoleon, whom each day throws some new light upon, and on
whom, after his having been magnified beyond all measure, posterity
will, no doubt, be called to pass severe judgment. Never was such
overwhelming testimony pronounced against him as in the "Mémoires de
Madame de Rémusat," the first volume of which is just out. Mme. de
Rémusat was so placed as to be more thoroughly acquainted than any one
with the character of Napoleon. Lady-in-waiting to Josephine, and wife
of one of Napoleon's "Maîtres du palais," she bowed for a long while
to the ascendancy of Napoleon's genius, and the liking he testified
for her was sufficiently strong to awaken, though unjustly, the
momentary jealousy of Josephine. The speaker is not an enemy,
therefore, but an old friend who tries to explain at once her
adherence to the imperial régime and the motives that caused her to
alter her political creed. She is thus in the best state of mind,
according to M. Renan, for judging a great man or a doctrine, that of
having believed and believing no longer. Add to this the sweetness of
mind natural to a woman, and the kind of indulgence peculiar to times
when sudden political changes lead to frequent changes of opinion. All
these considerations only render Mme. de Rémusat's testimony the more
overwhelming for Napoleon, and its value is singularly increased on
its being seen to agree with that which all the sincere witnesses of
the time, Ph. de Ségur, Miot de Mélito, as well as Sismondi, lead us
to infer. The genius of Napoleon is not diminished, and nothing is
more remarkable than the conversations related by Mme. de Rémusat,
wherein he judges everything, literature, politics, and history, with
a haughty originality from the point of view of his own interests and
passions. Some of his sayings relative to the government of men
are worthy of Machiavelli. The reasonings whereby he explains and
justifies the assassination of the Duc d'Enghien would form a splendid
chapter to the "Prince." But from the moral point of view Napoleon
strikes us as the most perfect type of a tyrant. No moral law exists
for him; he does not admit the obligation of any duty; he does not
even recognise those duties of a sovereign, that subordination of
the individual to the interests of the State, which constitute the
greatness of a Cromwell or a Frederick II.; he recognises but one law,
that of his nature, which insists on dominating and being superior to
everything that surrounds him. _Quia nominor Leo_, is his only
rule. Morals always have their revenge on those whose encroaching
personality refuses to recognise laws. Writers or sovereigns, whatever
their genius, relapse into falsehood and extravagance. This was
Napoleon's fate. You are always conscious in him of the _parvenu_
acting a part--the _commediante tragediante_, as Pius VII. put it.
He had fits of goodness, of weakness even, but his human and generous
sides had been crushed by his frightful egoism. He liked to make those
he loved best suffer. He treated his wife and his mistresses with
brutal contempt; he could no longer lament the death of those who
seemed dearest to him. "Je n'ai pas le temps de m'occuper des morts,"
he said to Talleyrand. By the side of this great figure Mme. de
Rémusat has, in her Memoirs, sketched many others--the frivolous,
good, touching, and unfortunate Josephine; the amiable Hortense
Beauharnais, the dry, cold Louis, Napoleon's sisters, jealous, proud,
and immoral; and others--but all pale before the imperial colossus.
Besides M. Daudet's novel, M. Renan's new volume, and the Memoirs of
Mme. de Rémusat, the last three months have witnessed another literary
event of some consequence--the birth of an important Review, which
aims at the position occupied for thirty years past by the _Revue
des Deux Mondes_. The _Nouvelle Revue_ was started and is edited by a
woman, Mme. Edmond Adam, known as a writer under the name of Juliette
Lamber. A new phenomenon this in the literary world, the strangest
feature of it being that Mme. Adam has taken exclusively upon herself
the bulletin of foreign politics. If the task of editing a Review be
arduous for a man, who in the interest of his undertaking must brave
every enmity and quench his individual sympathies, how much more
so for a woman whose staff of contributors is recruited from the
_habitués_ of her _salon_, and who must be constantly tempted to carry
into her official transactions the habits of gracious hospitality
which have made her house one of the most courted political and
literary centres of Paris?
The aim of the _Nouvelle Revue_ also is to be up with the times; it is
inclined to judge an article rather by the fame of the name at the end
of it than by its own intrinsic merit; it will insert the superficial
lucubrations of General Turr or M. Castelar, which but for the
signature are worthless. It gives political questions an importance
hardly appreciated by those who find all their political needs
supplied by the daily press, and look to a Review for literary or
scientific interests. Finally, the chief obstacle in the way of the
_Nouvelle Revue_ is that our best essayists are bound not only by
chains of gratitude and habit, but also by chains of gold, to the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_. Nevertheless there is plenty of room in
our literary world for a new review, so far at least as writers
are concerned. If she makes talent her aim, and not merely opinions
agreeing with her own, Mme. Adam will not want for contributors. To
get readers will be more difficult in a country of routine, where
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ has become an indispensable item of every
respectable family's household furniture. Until now the _Nouvelle
Revue_ has been successful; the sale has reached from 6000 to 8000
copies per number, and, without having yet published anything very
first-rate, it has been fairly well supplied with pleasant articles.
The recollections of the singer Duprez have hitherto been its greatest
attraction. A novel by Mme. Gréville, and articles by MM. de Bornier,
Bigot, and de Gubernatis also deserve mention.