can detect a note of reproach that such a country should exist so near the Ville Lumière. "In the country certain black animals are to be seen." This is a celebrated quotation from La Bruyère, for here, it seems, words fail the Immortal of the French Academy to make his impression more clear; he explains "these animals are the Irish peasants." As La Bruyère died in 1696 it is ingenious to fit in the quotation and apply it to conditions existing in Ireland about thirty-four years ago. The French moralists of the seventeenth century had a vision of the ugly side of life which La Bruyère described in a fashion of his own with a certain brutality of expression. He was tutor to Henri Jules de Bourbon, grandson of the Great Condé, an individual who was so extremely ferocious that even his friends were terrified by his abominable insults and cruel jokes. Patrick Sarsfield lived about the same time, his mother was an O'Moore, and his ancestors were Princes of Leix. His record is a very different one from that of Henri de Bourbon. A long list of the Macs and the O's compares favourably with the memoirs of the princes of France during the same period. In the Sketches, Killarney is placed within the zone of grassy Ireland. A perpetual drizzle damps the enthusiasm of the travellers, but in his pessimistic heart there is a soft corner for sweet Innisfallen where misty fairies dance in the moonlight. This page is to literature what Corot's Dance of the Elves is to art. The legend of The O'Donoghue is told in a few words. . . how occasionally at midnight riding his white silver-shod horse he prances upon the surface of the lake with a pack of hounds barking around him until daylight breaks, when the ghostly company disappears beneath the deep water. This is just the touch of mystery without which the description of Killarney would be incomplete. Stony Ireland is a sharp contrast. M. Bourget travels westward through a "gigantic quarry," as he calls Galway and Connemara. He is so much impressed by the remarkable memory of the Irish regarding the Limerick "scrap of paper," that he mentions it twice. At Lisdoonvarna he comes across some visitors seeking calm and silence there after the strain of a London season, and he remarks the walls of stone placed one over the other and holding together without cement. He laments the absence of beauty in the peasants whose physique reminds him in some respects of the Finns, he mourns the disappearance of a national costume and all elements of the picturesque. Only the dirt and the rags on the surface of a peasant's life are visible to him, he is incapable of feeling their pangs of physical or of national hunger. This believer in the Divine Right of Kings is a contradiction to himself; he fails to realize that many of the poorest in Ireland are the lineal descendants of houses. that were royal when Ireland was young. The French reader of these Sketches must be under the impression that the present population of Ireland consists of the aborigines on one side and the English landlords on the other. There is not a hint that the Irish landed gentry exist, or that centuries ago families from England and Normandy settled in the country and became " more Irish than the Irish." M. Bourget gives in his writings the impression that the old Irish families are extinct. He frequently condemns individualism, exalts the family, and declares that race is stronger than love. If he reads the history of the Irish nation he will find there what he admires, that vital element of race which cannot be exterminated. It is surprising to him that "when the landlord is out walking the peasant seldom salutes him in the feudal manner bending the knee and at the same time bowing the head." Still eulogizing the landlord M. Bourget continues: "Establishments of all sorts are a proof of their generosity. Here it is a pier built in an out of the way part of the bay for which the landlord has received money from London. There it is a house built for the nuns which has been endowed by the present proprietor's grandfather. The sisters nurse the sick and teach in the school. Their convent surrounded by flowers is for this Catholic people a charming testimony of the pious kindness of the landlord. Unfortunately the bounty of the rich is never appreciated when revolution is in the air. The poor only sees tokens of a superiority which they execrate because its acceptance brings further humiliation." This is a statement from a purely French standpoint. The tillers of the land in France were practically the serfs of a sovereign lord of the same race. The corresponding class in Ireland were the un-tamed subjects of a foreign power which understood them as little as M. Bourget does, and they still retain much of their former pride and independence of character. To the purity of the Irish and the orthodoxy of their Faith these Sketches bear testimony and after all (from a pessimist especially) what higher record can be the portion of any land? Leaving the rocks and the rags and the rain, M. Bourget visits the parks and velvet lawns which frame in a country house in England, a building which a Frenchman always persists in calling a castle. What a change of scene from the grey stone-strewn land, England is always advertized by solid comfort. The Oxford student, the writer in the Athenaeum Club, the Member of Parliament at Westminster, the very artist at Shanklin all revel in comfort. It even penetrates the religion of the country, Anglican or Nonconformist. In the Protestant "Temple" he admires the decorum and the apparent sincerity of the descendants of the Puritans, but the well stuffed hassocks do not escape him, placed there as aids to piety. He is struck by the monotonous and hoarse voice of the motionless preacher than which "a machine is not more mechanical." We are next transported to the Isle of Wight where Tennyson wrote his "heroic legends whose pure beauty harmonizes so well with the dreams of this English people,” which M. Bourget compares to "a flower which wishes to ignore its stem." At Shanklin, the classic village of the English novel, there are to be seen particularly attractive cottages. Behind the flowers and the small panes of glass one can guess at the sitting-room furnished with polished mahogany where "respectable people drink innumerable cups of tea." In a valley near by is an old Abbey, the ruins of which have been skilfully adopted to modern uses. Behind the ogive windows one might expect to catch a glimpse of a melancholy young monk dreaming. How English it is, this symbol of the genius of a people which is so clever at social transitions. Here we find the present and past joined together by those who are past masters in the art of ploiting all that was for the greater profit of what is!" 66 ex These Sketches of M. Bourget's travels in 1881 were only published in 1889, just before his great work Le Disciple, which in his literary career may be called the parting of the ways. Up to this time Paul Bourget was a philosopher drifting along the paths of science. He has been called a "born pessimist" but he is one whose moral teaching has been an antidote to the lower tone of the contemporary French novelists. Jules Lemaître said his influence with young men was something like a priest's. What has been called his conversion is rather his return to the teaching of his youth. With eyes opened to the danger around him he caught a glimpse of the light and followed it. Those who were watching him were prepared for the change and they declare that the publication of Le Disciple will remain a date in the history of French thought and morals. It marked a turning on the road quite as much as did Le Génie du Christianisme. The preface of Le Disciple is a key to the mission of M. Bourget to his young compatriots. He addresses them with simple tenderness and affection pointing out the course they must follow in the solid reconstruction of devastated France. With the wisdom of experience, learned through suffering, and defeat, he impresses on the youth of France their responsibility as custodians of the safety and the glory of their country. He has seen the victorious Prussian cavalry galloping between the poplars of his native land, he has heard the Prussian cannon booming at the gates of Paris. He asks the young men of 1889 if they realize what the young men of 1871 died for and if the peace of that time was the final answer of France to Germany. He repeats the beautiful lines of a French poet. "Vous en qui je salue une nouvelle aurore, Vous tous qui m'aimerez Jeunes hommes des temps qui ne sont pas encore, Speaking of the students of his day Paul Bourget continues: "The dawn which we witnessed was bathed in blood, may to-morrow's dawn be as brilliant as ours was gloomy . . . our duty was to heal the wounded Soul of France." In this noble task the effort of his generation was untiring. Those devoted to the cause had to face great difficulties and received no encouragement from those in power, still the valiant bourgeoisie struggled on and made every sacrifice to sustain the life of the nation. Addressing the students of the generation succeeding his own Paul Bourget pleads for high ideals, for faith and hope and he reminds them that a tree is known by its fruit. "Yes," he said, " you would be ready to die là bas, but that is not enough, you must first learn to live." Then follows his abjuration of the scientific creed he had upheld with might and main in his earlier writings. "The true, the modest science of to-day, acknowledges that beyond its limits stretches the sphere of the unknown. Littré, who was a saint, has spoken nobly of the ocean of mystery which surges against the shores of science, we behold it as a reality but we have no barque to sail across its waters. To those who will tell you that beyond this great ocean there is a void, an abyss of darkness and death, you must have the courage to reply, "You know nothing about it." Old It is not astonishing that such a fearless declaration of faith was called Paul Bourget's "conversion"; some scientists were scandalized, his old friend Taine was sorrowful, the younger generation was jubilant and followed its leader along the path he had so clearly marked out. The whole spirit of French literature has been raised to a higher plane by this writer's efforts to make sin unfashionable. By his sincerity and analysis of character he has shown up evil as unlovely. The critics admit that his work is complex. He is undoubtedly the novelist of society life which he does not spare in spite of his intense admiration for its traditions or surroundings. In his travels M. Bourget has not skimmed the cream of any land except perhaps Italy. He thoroughly understands his own country. As a literary power his influence has been felt; other writers have followed in his wake upholding the ideals of the Church and the family and saving their nation from the dangerous effects of secular education. The seriousness of the France of today has not begun on the battlefield, it was noticeable long before the war amongst educated young Frenchmen, and is due in a large measure to this army of writers. More |