ページの画像
PDF
ePub

of French fiction for which Mrs. Cra- | round a table in the evening, the men drawven says she hoped.

ing and the women working while I read to them aloud the finished chapters of my book. All this shows how utterly different our two nations are; no wonder that they find it so impossible to understand each other.

[ocr errors]

The picture is wonderful indeed; such a family party in a French country house deeply wrapt in melancholy wastes of distance, with no neighbors near enough to join the group easily, and no other visitors coming and going, probably not even a billiard-table, and - as an Englishman nothing "to do" would sigh—either out or in, is a terrible experience. We remember one of the feudal castles mentioned in this book where Mrs. Craven was a frequent visitor, in the depths of December, plenty of ice outside but not a pair of skates in the house - plenty inside too, the bath provided for the visitor crackling in the cold turret of the dressing-room attached to a great bedchamber forty feet long― vast corridors and ante-chambers chill as Labrador, no visitor but the curé who came to say his mass once a week, and M. le Percepteur, who was a scion of a noble family much come down in the world. Mrs. Craven seems to suppose, however, that the absence of all idea of on horseback" is made up by riding the ideal picture, much better than England, of the party round the table, complacently listening to "Fleurange." We doubt whether that would be a general opinion here.

It is an excellent conclusion, no doubt, to become more and more absorbed in religion as life tends towards the end; but it is a pity that anything should be done to break the unique charm of this full and much-mingled existence. We prefer to find that the liveliest talk in the evening, the most animated discussions, a little controversy, a little enthusiasm for secular matters, even more than a little politics, take nothing away from the devoutness which makes the domestic chapel and the morning mass so great a happiness to the aged pilgrim. To know that the young people had been dancing over night and the old ones mingling a little salt of gossip in their talk, and Count Albert, Eugénie's son, eager over his plans for his workmen's clubs, makes us like all the better to think of that withdrawal into the heavenly sphere above, and the lovely and delightful world of the past full of so many dear and tender shadows, more real and near than the actual members of the society round her, which takes place when the brilliant old lady, once Pauline de la Ferronays, retires within the sanctuary of her own lonely chamber. It is this that gives her life its greatest interest. The reader, however, will scarcely be able to refrain from a smile when he reads this description of the household circle at Lumingy, which is tamer a great deal, it seems to us, in the gravity of northern France and the seriousness of the times, than those pictures of the Ferronays' household at Naples and Castellamare, in which everything was young and careless and enterprising

and gay.

What would you say if you were here, where three families are collected, women, girls, men, and children, twenty-two altogether, and not one among them ever dreaming of a ride on horseback? In fact, there is not in the place a single animal

upon whose back the feat could be accomplished. This seems very strange even to me; English people could not stand it. En revanche, no English circle would sit

[ocr errors]

Mrs. Craven's views about politics are always sane and sensible, and full of excellent judgment. Notwithstanding all prepossessions she never abandoned the cause of Italy nor the fine delusion that the Catholic faith and political freedom ought to go together. And it cost her a great struggle, when the question of Roma capitale arose among the newly emancipated Italians, to harmonize her political sympathies with her obedience to the Church. This is from Naples in the first excite

ment of the new life :

Imagine how I enjoy sitting at table every day between my brother, who thinks

as all Frenchmen do on these affairs, and | small, influence continually at work in Count Arrivabene, a young Garibaldian, à France, and the power of which it is peine défroqué et débarbouillé from his difficult to overestimate. It shows prison at Gaeta, from which he was set free by an exchange of prisoners. . . I feel sometimes as if I were on burning coals, and I feel a wild wish to escape, par ticularly when they bring forward that

...

endless Roman question. Yet I will not conceal from you, as generally I do from others, that perceiving the moral force of these plebiscites which one after the other lead all the Italian cities towards junction in one great kingdom, I cannot shut out the hope that from Rome may at last come the gran rifiuto of her lost provinces, which would so greatly increase the spiritual power of the Papacy.

even in the work before us. The En-
glish friends of a devout Catholic are
very largely Irish which is not a
bull, though it may appear so. The
English nurse or governess is so to a
We have
quite extraordinary extent.
heard the most strenuous accents of
Cork issuing from young French lips
which had been trained in our Anglo-
Saxon tongue by such means; the
prepossession thus given is as subtle
as universal, and it accounts for a great
deal of pseudo-national feeling. With
a similar partiality the English house-
hold gets its French bonne from Switz-

We do not know whether this was more than the last flash of that vision-erland, and therefore misses any reflex ary and enthusiastic Catholicism of 1830, which believed that new heavens and a new earth were to come from the union of the Church and Freedom; but it is touching to read of the devout imagination now when so many strange things and eventful years have come and gone.

action from the genuine French mind; though the honest Swiss are not likely to spread hostility at all events, whatever little imperfection in the way of accent they may bring with them. Mrs. Craven, however, knew enough of the question to have formed a right opinion about Home Rule, and she expresses it with great frankness, especially in respect to the Irish clergy, whose position she was evidently quite unable to reconcile with any Catholic or religious law.

I have read over attentively the pastorals of Dr. McCabe, and also the resolutions of the clergy of Cloyne. It is a language too different from that in which the Catholic people is addressed by its clergy all over the world to be conceivable for us, unless

Mrs. Craven was equally sensible, which perhaps is still more wonderful, upon the question of Home Rule. Very few indeed are the French politicians who are impartial on this subject. It is a commonplace among them to compare Ireland with Poland as countries equally oppressed by an alien race and creed; and this opinion exists, or used to exist, as much among the most highly educated class of liberal thinkers, taking the greater part of their political beliefs from England, as among the most ignorant of bigoted Catholics. We remember that Montalembert was not to be convinced on this subject, any more than the narrowest of country priests, notwithstanding even the strange fact, of which he and still more his family were a little ashamed, that his keen, youthful perceptions had found out O'Connell to be a humbug at a very early period. (But situation, if they possessed religious and what a genial humbug and a big one, civil liberty, notwithstanding their bad and instead of the small race of his shriek- cruel landlords, we should, as they would, ing successors !) It is curious, too, feel very thankful indeed; and we ourthat in acknowledging this we all re-selves here, undergoing, as we are, religious main insensible to one great, if also persecution (which, after all, is the worst

we are to understand that in Ireland it is the people who lead the clergy, and not the clergy who guide the people. Enough has been said of the virtues and wrongs of the Irish. It is now time, it seems to me, for their pastors to tell of their faults and of their crimes. England has for many years been in a temper to listen to their griev ances and to remedy them if justly, temperately, and clearly stated. Surely there must be Irishmen capable of doing this. Good heavens ! if Poland was in the same

of all grievances, though the Irish clergy | den and literary autocracy was over; forget to remark it), how differently we are still it must have had, we should imadvised by the highest ecclesiastical au- agine, echoes round it of the greatness thority. ... Of course, it is visible enough of the past. Here is one sketch among that the present Irish agitation is simply the very few that are worth quoting: revolutionary, but that is why it is so astounding that the clergy so hesitatingly denounce it. Those whom at present there is an attempt to wrong outrageously, and who are in fact the victims of to-day, are the landlords. It is by them, therefore, that the clergy ought to stand.

...

All the persecutions of the Church in France, in Germany, and Italy seemed to me nothing in comparison with the disgrace which Ireland was inflicting on the Church. . . . I see in a paper of last night that the Irish bishops are strenuously opposing the proposal of many in England to bring about a renewal of relations between the Holy See and the English government. It is my belief that they hate the English to such a degree that they had rather they did not become Catholics, or behave well to the Church, or indeed to themselves, because all these would be reasons for hating them less; and they worship their hatred, and cling to it more than to their faith.

Those queer Catholics the Irish! [Mrs. another occasion]. What is true for all the world is not true for Ireland according to their view, and the wrong done by an Irishman is not at all in their eyes like the same wrong done by any other man in the world. . . . You and Mrs. La Touche cannot pretend to be among the Irish of the right sort, though I have not yet quite understood where one began and where one ceased to be an Irish man or woman. I am told, for instance, that Lord O'Hagan and Lord Emly are no longer to be considered as Irishmen -and

Craven exclaims on

so on of all those I like.

She thought, however, that Home Rule would be attained, although it would be fatal all round. "The bill will pass unopposed by the Lords, and the time of its failure in Ireland will then begin." This, we may suppose, was the opinion of Holland House, from which she dates this fortunately erroneous prophecy. It is a little tantalizing to find a good many letters from Holland House, with all its traditions of brilliant talk, and intellectual interest, with extremely little in them. To be sure, the great day of that remarkable lions'

Mr. Gladstone, next to whom I sat at dinner at Lord Granville's the other day, was most pleasant, talkative, brilliant, eager, full of poetry and earnestness, and yet to my mind how visionary on some points and how unpractical ! We talked of everything, and it certainly was most interesting. One thing he said with an energy which added to the feeling he expressed, that the growth of infidelity was the one evil to be resisted before all others, and that whoever served the cause of Faith and Christianity was doing the greatest of all deeds to be done. "In comparison with that nothing whatever signifies much in this world." I said it was a good thing for England that her prime minister should utter such words.

But these scraps of the world grow less and less as the book draws to an end. The letters to Sir M. Grant Duff are almost the only exceptions to the strictly religious correspondence, and her friendship with him is a piquant touch in the fading life. That so grave a personage should have used a sort of calendar compiled by a pious enthusiast, with all the dates and memorial days of the "Récit," should have kept up some half-century after the end of that youthful romance and tragedy the gentle recollection of Alex and Eugénie and their tender sayings, sending little sprigs of jasmine to the sole survivor ou certain anniversaries, is one of the most curious things in literature, touching in its reality and very pleasantly demonstrative of the "soft place which is always to be found in a good heart-if it were not for the faintest lurking sense of humor in these kind sentimentalities from so unlikely a quarter. They bring us back pleasantly to the book which is Mrs. Craven's chief title to be remembered in literature, though it is not literature properly so called, nor, as she and her admirers often repeat, a book at all in the ordinary sense of the word. Here are some little indications from her

own hand of the way in which that book moved other souls to whom it was a revelation. Towards the end of her life Mrs. Craven made a last visit to Boury, then in a second set of hands, the present proprietors having learnt to take pride in the associations of the place:

say which "choked" her sometimes in her occasional solitudes, was stricken down by that most terrible of maladies paralysis, and lay for ten months, a long lifetime in such circumstances, bound in chains more hard than iron, speechless, as unable to communicate with those about her as if she had been dead. The conclusion is so tragic, that with the sufferer bound to “ that nightthe heart aches painfully in sympathy

Still more astonishing and gratifying is the fact of the many visitors who come, some from very great distances, to pray in the little churchyard. A man had been mare, life in death." In the later there the day before who had come all the months of her long agony she seems to way from Lille to spend an hour there have given forth a murmur, inarticand he has written to me since a letter,ulate, which one of her tender nurses which has touched me deeply, to explain to calls her cantilena, and from the varyme in what kind of a way he had been ing tones of which some guesses at her helped by those whose story he had read, meaning, so far, at least, as feeling and why he thanked me so much for went, could be divined; there could having written it. He speaks with a kind not be a more piteous picture of human of passionate affection of them all. He is weakness. Upon this last act it is too heart-rending to dwell. On April 3, 1891, the ill luck and the frequent trials came to an end, and a few days after she rejoined the many whom she had loved and lost at Boury, where, a few years before, her always loving and faithful husband had also been laid.

66

an employé on the railroad. A girl, too, a very nice young Alsatian, with whom the Récit" had made me acquainted, went off the other day to Boury to place a wreath on my mother's grave, because, she said, she was the one she turned to with the greatest love whilst reading the book, and she felt she must go and thank me.

Here, however, is another amusing side of the question :

I had a letter the other day which would have amused you from a young man very young, I suppose - who called himself un

obscur étudiant, and dated from the very centre of the pays latin. He had been reading for the first time the "Récit d'une Soeur," and had to say about it a great deal that was touching and flattering for me to hear. But what he was annoyed at was that such a beautiful book should be so very little known, and should never have been spoken of. At first this remark made me laugh a little; then I reflected that if this young reader is only twentytwo or twenty-four, it is very natural that he should never have heard of it, and I feel thankful that one of quite another generation should read it with so much pleasure.

[blocks in formation]

This world could scarcely have given more to a woman than was given to her-youth, love, happiness, reputation, sorrow, trouble, and anguish, and in the end an oblivion at which she was able to smile.

From Macmillan's Magazine. THE IRRESPONSIBLE NOVELIST. BY AN INDOLENT REVIEWER.

THERE is a popular, but on the whole an erroneous, notion that hostile criticism proceeds of personal malice. The severest criticisms probably are written by conscientious young persons with high literary ideals and little acquaintance with the world. A late French critic, M. Désiré Nisard, put on record his own dolorous experience, which no doubt has been the experi ence of many. As a beginner, alone in the proverbial garret, he devoted to his criticisms earnest study and a jealous regard for the honor of letters. By degrees he made a name, became

[ocr errors]

known, began to receive invitations. | outraged family honor. Of the solemThe books he had criticised he had nities with which he prepared his regarded simply as books. To his sur- blackthorn, and therewith set forth on prise and chagrin he met them now in society as angry and unforgiving men and women. Authors he had censured were constrained in his presence; their wives would not meet him at dinner. Few classes surely are so unhappy as to incur on grounds so impersonal such strong personal re

sentments.

his mission of vengeance, you may read a spirited account in Dr. Wright's pages. He called at Haworth for a blessing on his undertaking. Charlotte, like a sensible girl, endeavored to dissuade him, and so did her father as befitted a Christian clergyman. Gentle sister Anne, however, blessed the avenger and bade him good speed. The perils amid which the reviewer So up to London he went, and raged plies his harmless, if necessary, trade round the metropolis with his blackare vividly illustrated by an amusing thorn in quest of the reviewer. He story in a recent book by Dr. Wright never succeeded in unearthing him, on "The Brontës in Ireland." Char- and had to return to Ballynaskeagh lotte Brontë sent an early copy of with a blackthorn unbaptized in the "Jane Eyre" to her Irish uncle Hugh. enemy's blood. At Murray's he saw The book was received in the family more than once a personage said to be circle with misgiving; the instinct of the editor. If it was Lockhart, it was the blood-relation suggested that niece probably the mau he was in search of; Charlotte had probably made a fool of but Hugh Brontë, clutching his blackherself. To know the worst Hugh thorn, would deliver his private mesBrontë set off to Ballynaskeagh Manse sage to none but the declared reviewer. to take the opinion of the Rev. David Well-informed literary persons natuMcKee, an old friend of the family rally were forward with the desired and the literary oracle of the neighbor- information. Some knew the reviewer

hood. For once the oracle was neither to be Thackeray, others were sure that dumb nor doubtful. "Hughey," thus it was Dickens, George Henry Lewes, it spake, "the book bears the Brontë Harriet Martineau. Happily the stamp on every sentence and idea, and avenger mistrusted the information. it is the grandest novel that has been It would have been an unfortunate produced in my time." Hugh Brontë exhibition of the workings of anwrung the parson's hand and departed, onymity had Dickens or Thackeray no longer despondent but elated. got his crown cracked by the frantic Charlotte's book was something for the Irish relative of an anonymous novelist relations to boast of, and not to be for the sins of an anonymous reviewer. ashamed of. And boast they did, you The secret of the authorship of the may depend upon it, until no doubt review has been loyally kept by the the name of Currer Bell became the house of Murray to this day, but there bugbear of the place. At length, at is little doubt that it was the work of the zenith of the family triumph, came Lady Eastlake, then Miss Rigby. The the notorious article on "Jane Eyre" current theory, however, is that the in the Quarterly Review. The neigh- offending passages were editorial inbors naturally relieved their feelings in terpolations, which may be recognized gossip. So this wonderful niece of as out of harmony with the general Hugh Brontë was after all, it seemed, tenor of the article. This theory was "bad woman," that was the popu- first put forward some three years ago lar version at Ballynaskeagh of the in the Daily News; and Dr. Wright critic's judgment. You conceive the has come independently to the same wrath of the relations. Uncle Hugh, conclusion. If, as would be probable, with something of Wuthering the interpolations were Lockhart's, the Heights" in his Brontë blood, felt apparition of Hugh Brontë and his himself called to be the avenger of the blackthorn may have served him for a

a

66

« 前へ次へ »