JULES LEMAÎTRE.

JULES LEMAITRE, a French critic, born at Vennecy, April 25, 1853. His childhood was passed at Travers, near Beaugency. He completed his school-work in Paris, and received his baccalaureate degree in July, 1871. For five years he was Professor of Rhetoric in Havre, and in 1880 was nominated President of the Faculty of the High School of Literature of Algiers. Two years later he was represented on the Faculty of Besançon as head of the department of French literature. Doctor of Letters in 1883, he was offered a professorship on the Faculty of Grenoble. In 1884 he became editor of the Revue Bleue and dramatic critic for the Journal des Débats. He has written some Oriental verses and a collection of poems entitled "Les Médaillons," as well as some plays: "Le Théâtre de Dancourt," "Les Contemporains," and "Impressions de Théâtre." His novel "Sérénus" is the story of a martyr.

ON THE INFLUENCES OF RECENT NORTHERN LITERATURE.

(From "Les Contemporains.")

ONCE more the Saxons and Germans, the Thracians and peoples of snow-covered Thule, have conquered Gaul: an im.portant but not a surprising event.

One of our most pardonable faults is acknowledged to be a certain coquettish yet generous intellectual hospitality. As soon as a Frenchman has succeeded in acquiring not alone national and classical culture, but European culture as well, it is marvelous to see how, at one stroke, he sets himself free from all literary chauvinism. At this point the most serious clasp. hands, so to speak, with the most frivolous; with the class emancipated from prejudices in favor of clean linen, as well as with those who, to use an expression henceforth symbolical, are "laundered in London."

It is evident that Renan, for instance, who as a matter of fact understood only superficially contemporary French literature, was always dominated by German science and genius, and placed Goethe, and even Herder, above all that is best among us.

Taine also concludes that we have nothing comparable not only to Shakspeare, we must grant him this, but to contemporaneous English poets and novelists.

While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the South Spain and Italy-attracted us, for the past two centuries we have been captivated by the literature of the North.

This attraction has had its accessions and its intervals; but our last attack of septentriomania shows itself particularly violent and prolonged, for it still endures. It began I think about a dozen years ago, in the revolution against the so-called "naturalist" brutalities and pretensions, and in the taste, now perhaps partially forgotten, for George Eliot.

At this time M. Edmond Schérer and M. Emile Montégut vied with each other in demonstrating in profound and eloquent essays that George Eliot far surpassed all our realistic novelists.

Since then M. de Vogue has magnificently revealed to us Tolstoi and Dostoiewski; and compared with them, again, our poor romancers are but dust in the balance. All the world worshiped the Russian gospel, and set itself to "tolstoiser." At the same time the "Théâtre Libre" set before us the dramas of Dostoiewski. Finally Ibsen had his turn of apotheosis, and all his later plays were translated. We have seen at the theaters, beside the plays of these two writers, those of the Norwegian Björnson, the German Hauptmann, the Swede Strindberg, and the Belgian Maeterlinck. The fury and intolerance of admiration on the part of young men and certain women for these products of the North is hardly to be imagined. "Yes," they say, "these polar souls truly speak to our souls; they penetrate them deeply; they stir them to their profoundest depths." And I read with melancholy this page of M. de Vogue, in the preface of his "Russian Romance:"-" There has been created in our day, wider than the preferences of coteries or national prejudice, a European spirit, a fund of culture, ideas, and tendencies common to all intelligent societies. We find this spirit, the same in essence, the same in impressionability, in London, Petersburg, Rome, and Berlin. But as yet it eludes us; the literature and philosophy of our rivals make conquest of us but slowly we are not imparting it, we are towed along by it more or less successfully. But to follow is not to guide; -the prevailing ideas which are transforming Europe no longer emanate from the French soul."

Possibly this may be because they issued from that soul fifty years ago!

I must here premise that in speaking of the works of George Eliot, George Sand, and some other authors, it is necessarily from a somewhat remote reading of them, and from impressions immediately following that reading. ... I shall consider solely on what ground these novelists stand; what are the dominating ideas, the guiding sentiments, what the substratum of their works.

That which strikes us in these romances [of George Eliot], all of them being histories of conscience, is the constant moral preoccupation by which every page is marked, as well as the constant cordial and observant sympathy with the most humble and ordinary phases of human life. To consider, in passing, this second characteristic only: it is indubitably to be found, with a fullness that leaves nothing to be desired, in the works of George Sand. . . . Read “La Mare au Diable "[The Devil's Pool], "La Petite Fadette" [Little Fadette], "François le Champi," you will find as much robust and charming goodnature, as sincere a liking for simple life and homely details, as much delight and skill in making us feel the essential interest and dignity of a human soul, its environment and social condition, as in the writings of the George beyond the Channel. There is no more, for that I believe to be impossible. . . . Let us pass on to Ibsen. Save in two or three instances, where he seems to defy his own visions, and to jeer at them, the dramas of Ibsen are crises of conscience, histories of revolt, and struggles towards moral enfranchisement. That which he preaches or dreams is the love of truth, the hatred of falsehood. Sometimes it is the reaction of the pagan conception of life against the Christian conception; of the "joy of living," as he terms it, against religious melancholy. It is, beyond and above all else, that which has been called individualism. It is the assertion of the rights of the individual conscience against written laws which do not provide for individual cases; against social conventions often hypocritical, and respecting appearances only. Often too it is the redemption and purification of suffering. It is, in our relations with others, the exercise of individual compassion, the pardon of certain sins which phariseeism never pardons. It is in marriage the perfect union of souls, a union based only upon the liberty and absolute sin

cerity of husband and wife, and the entire understanding and appreciation each has of the other. It is, in short, the conformity of life to the ideal an ideal which Ibsen rarely defines in set terms; in which is to be found something of antique naturalism, something of judicial and haughty evangelicism, of aristocratic dilettantism, and covering all, a film of pessimism.

I can make these definitions no more precise than Ibsen himself does. But it is undeniably into a general sentiment of revolt that the elements of which his "dream" is composed resolve themselves. He is in fact a mighty rebel, a malcontent, at odds with his own genius. Now, in the work of these Northern men, is there not the very substance of the early romances of George Sand? If I name her anew, it is because she had a marvelous gift of receptivity, and because she reflected all the ideas and chimeras of her time. She had already told us, long before these others spoke, that marriage is an oppressive institution if it be not the union of two free wills, and if woman be not treated as a moral being. Already we had heard from her of the conflict of religious and civil law with that other and greater law, not inscribed on Tables of Stone. And already among us the rights of the individual had been declared to be opposed to those of society.

We listened to these sayings as long ago as 1830, and I doubt if even then they were entirely new.

I admit that I have not re-read the eighty volumes of George Sand, but I know their contents, and have been long imbued with their spirit. I open her first romance and I read the protest of Indiana. Indiana is Ibsen's Nora. She flees from Colonel Delmare in the same mood that drives Nora out of Helmer's house. That which Nora goes to seek, Indiana meets. Indiana espousing Ralph in the presence of Nature and of God is Nora after her flight finding the husband of her soul, and choosing him in her freedom. .

If Henrik Ibsen is not found complete, as to his ideas, in George Sand, it is in the dramas of Dumas fils — preceding, let it be remembered, those of the Norwegian writer - that we shall finally discover him.

The protest of the individual against law, of the moral sentiments of the heart against the moral code and worldly conventionality, this is the very soul of most of the dramas of M. Dumas. Only, while the revolts of Ibsen are against law and society in general, the insurrections of M. Dumas strike almost

always at some particular article of the civil code or of social prejudice. And I do not see that this limitation is necessarily an inferiority.

Let us go on to the Russian novelists, to Tolstoï and to Dostoiewski. M. de Voguë tells us that they are distinguished from our realists by two traits:

"First, the vague, undefined Russian spirit draws its life from all philosophies and all vagaries. It pauses now in nihilism and pessimism. A superficial reader might sometimes confound Tolstoï and Flaubert. But Tolstoï's nihilism is never accepted without revolt; this spirit is never impenitent; we constantly listen to its groanings and searchings, and it finally redeems and saves itself by love, love more or less active in Tolstoï and Tourgénief, in Dostoiewski refined and introspective until it becomes a painful passion. Second, equally with sympathy the distinctive characteristic of these realists is the comprehension of that which lies beneath and surrounds life. In them the study of the real is pressed more closely than ever before. They seem imprisoned within its limits, and yet they meditate upon the invisible. Beyond the known, which they describe minutely, they accord a secret study to the unknown, which they suspect. The personages of their creation are disquieted concerning the universal mystery; and no matter how absorbed they may appear in the drama of the moment, they lend an ear to the murmur of abstract ideas the ideas which people the profound atmosphere where breathe the creations of Tourgénief, Tolstoï, and Dostoiewski."

"The things lying below life" of which these Russians talk what is meant by these? Do they concern those obscure and fatal powers of the flesh, those hereditary and physiological instincts that govern us without our knowledge? But this constitutes nearly half of Balzac, and the whole of M. Zola. And "the environment of life"? Does this mean the influences of the domestic surroundings? Who has better known and expressed these than the author of the "Comédie Humaine," or the author of "Madame Bovary"? Or should we accord to these foreigners alone the privilege of knowing how to render "the environment of life"? Should we say that "while the French novelist selects, separates a character or an act from the chaos of beings and actions, to study the isolated subject of his choice, the Russian, dominated by the feeling of universal interdependence, does not sever the thousand ties which attach