Page images
PDF
EPUB

6

leave the most pleasing impressions, because they were the most tender and the most generous. It is a frivolous society we are introduced to among The Parisians.' We live for the most part among men and women who are weak and misguided, vicious, and even criminal. Yet it is to be remarked that there is scarcely one of them but has the happy touches of a better

nature.

Now and again in the course of ages a genius like Shakspeare has the gift of identifying himself with any number of individualities, by some intuitive power. If he brings a gravedigger or a tavern drawer on to the back of a crowded stage incidentally, he gets inside him, if we may say so, for the time being, thinks his thoughts, and speaks his speech. The writers of unquestionable genius and talent who are not Shakspeares must be content to concentrate their strength of imagination on a few choice creations, and their capacity for metempsychosis is exhausted in a very limited number of swiftlyshifting transformations. As a rule, men are by far the strongest in creating men, as women are in creating women; and hence the admiration we feel for the masterpieces of a George Eliot, who seems to possess an epicene power that identifies itself indifferently with either sex. In one of the characters in The Parisians' Lord Lytton changes himself to woman, to all intents and purposes; but in general the most lifelike reproductions by an author may be traced to a reflection of his own individuality. Before we had been let into the secrets of Dickens's life, we had pronounced his David Cop'perfield' his greatest work. When Mr. Forster brought out the first volume of the Life we learned that David Copperfield' was Dickens's self, and that the most vivid traits in the hero's boyhood had been copied almost verbatim from the writer's diary. Lord Lytton had lived the life of half a dozen men; and if you embody in yourself the substance of half a dozen distinct experiences, you may elaborate them in almost endless combinations, which will be all the more probable and striking that bare imagination has so little to do with them. Nor can anything illustrate better than this novel of The Parisians' the half-adventitious, half-acquired superiority of Lord Lytton. The author's likeness may be recognised at once in Graham Vane, the cultivated man of the world, the aspiring English politician. We may observe by the way that whereas Lord Lytton had hitherto been in the habit of making his favourite heroes keep pace with himself in advancing years and position-Trevelyan, Egerton, and Guy Darrell-in this, the last of his novels, he returns for the first time in the person of his hero to

[ocr errors]

the days of early hope and promise. But not only does he reproduce himself in Vane, he translates himself also into several mature French statesmen, who direct or discuss the course of French politics in those eventful days of crisis and revolution. There is no mistaking him in the different writers, nor in the various leaders in various sets of society—the less so that he sometimes lends them a characteristic touch of the tone of an older school, with a somewhat old-world dignity of deportment. The character of Isaura Cicogna is lifted out of the realms of exact experience into the loftier sphere of a genuine creation. But in each of the male personages we have referred to, you have a sense of living with the men themselves, because they are copies drawn from the experience of a very varied and active life.

Lord Lytton did not live to write the preface to this last unfinished work; but his son, who knew his mind, explains the history and purpose of the book. "The Parisians " and "Kenelm Chillingly" were begun about the same time, ' and had their common origin in the same central idea. That 'idea first found fantastic expression in "The Coming Race;" and the three works taken together constitute a special group 'distinctly apart from all the other works of their author." The present Lord Lytton goes on to point out, that in his father's latest fictions the moral purpose is more definite and exclusive than in the earlier fictions. Each of them is an expostulation against what seemed to him the perilous popularity of certain 'social and political theories, or a warning against the influence ' of certain intellectual tendencies upon individual character ' and national life.' He proceeds to draw the very just distinction, that, while The Parisians' is a novel, Kenelm Chil'lingly' is a romance-a romance which has the source of its effects in a highly-wrought imagination. Nothing can be more true. Kenelm Chillingly' is the romance of a life that is idealised in a world of fanciful existences. From his infancy upwards he is delineated for us by such pregnant touches of gravely humorous description, as that which represents him as puzzling his childish brains over the solemn problem of his own individuality. But the odd child who grows out of quaintly original youth into most eccentric manhood is taken intentionally from a world that lies beyond the scope of our knowledge. His life embodies a warning against certain pernicious 'theories, social and political;' against the influence of certain 'intellectual tendencies upon individual character.' But everything in the work is extravagant and unreal. As a psychological study, Kenelm himself is a caricature, surrounded by

[ocr errors]

impossible persons in impossible situations, but they are so far faithful to nature that they preserve a certain air of reason, though they were designed to satirise the tendencies of modern society. He is, in fact, a modern Don Quixote. He is true throughout to the author's conception, but the satire so far overshot its mark, that it has been taken by many of its critics in solemn earnest.

In The Parisians' it is exactly the reverse. Living with the Parisians from the first page to the last, you are in the whirl of the busy world, or within hearing of its hum. You have no longer for your chief companion a dreamy lad, gazing musingly down into the depths of his inner consciousness, or lifting his eyes above the things of earth, until his look loses itself in the depths of the empyrean. You are in the capital of the most mobile and versatile of nations, and you prolong your sojourn with them through one of those great historical dramas that might stir the most phlegmatic of races to frenzy. Excitement aggravated by suspense gradually grows into agony, as illusion vanishes after illusion and calamity follows on calamity. Far from being concentrated anywhere or in any person, the interest is diffused over a vast and crowded area. There may be figures which stand out more conspicuously than others on the great canvas, and yet it is well-nigh impossible to single out the heroes. You have types and representatives of every party and every class, and are introduced to a far more varied company than you ever met in masquerade in the foyer of an opera ball. You pass from among the exclusive aristocracy of the Faubourg to the millionaire financiers of the Chausée d'Antin; from the worthy bourgeois of the Marais to the fierce socialists of Belleville. The scene opens in the giddy insouciant Paris of the Empire, where people are eating and drinking, making love and arranging marriages, as if there were no volcano smouldering beneath their feet and not a speck black on the political horizon. You mark the rise of the little cloud that spreads and swells till it breaks in the storm, to be accompanied, like the tropical tornado, by those internal convulsions of the soil that shake society to its very foundations. In those troubled times with their violent passions, if men do not actually change their characters, at least they betray the natures they have been disguising. Political license succeeds to the era of stern repression; social barriers are broken through and social disabilities swept away; luxurious idlers are stirred out of their apathy, and everyone is talking, thinking, or doing. Creeds and the negation of creeds find their advocates and make their converts. The conspirators whose schemes have been

of

confided to us, and whose secret councils we have attended, cast off their disguises to come out into the light of day. Priests and Atheists, Legitimists, Imperialists, Orleanists, Republicans, the magnates of the Bourse, and the workpeople of the Faubourgs are all in a violent ferment, while the dregs of the great city come seething up through the scum. Adventurers, seizing their opportunity, are striving to make capital of the calamities of the country, the more honest of them lulling their uneasy consciences by ingenious sophistries as to the singleness of their aims. All social conditions are revolutionised, and men of every class are involved in strange and unlooked-for experiences. Lions who had affected effeminacy and languished through life on couches of rose-leaves, shoulder the chassepot or serve in the ambulances. Literary leaders, whose occupation is gone, have to choose between oblivion and the prostitution of their pens to the doctrines they dread. Rich rentiers are brought to the brink of starvation for want of the crust they are ashamed to beg; while women show their strength in resigned endurance, and forget themselves and their own sufferings in ministering to the sorrows they can scarcely alleviate. Thus through the history of the turmoil of a world turned topsy-turvy, runs the double thread of two charming love stories entwining itself with the fortunes of the principal personages, and giving to a web of intricate intrigue consistency and harmony.

When Lord Lytton had written My Novel, or Varieties of English Life,' we can conceive his contemplating a pendant to that picture, in the form of varieties of life among our French neighbours. But in his English life the rural element balanced the urban, if it did not dominate it; he had sought his scenes and his studies through the length and breadth of the land we were as much at home at Lansmere or at Hazeldean as in London, and even in London we lived very much with those whose hearts and dearest interests were in the country, and who only came to town for the season or the session. But the heart of France beats in Paris, and the excessive centralisation of the French has centred their hopes and ambitions in their capital. It is there that the dramatist finds gathered to his hand all the elements of dramatic action. Thence were pulled the political strings that governed the provinces through the Préfets and the Maires. Thence came the subsidies that seduced the constituencies, and the state loans that the peasants scrambled for when they put in for a stake in the dynasty. There was the fountainhead of lavish expenditure and the glitter of an easy-going court, that attracted nouveaux

riches and spendthrifts from either hemisphere. There the journais were published, through which lay the paths to the préfectures, the Assembly, and seats in the Senate; and the books that made reputations in society and the salons of the Empire, for the true salons of France were closed. This capital of dissipation, under the safeguard of its great garrison of soldiers and police, was at the same time the head-quarters of active and discontented industry, while the wealth that was displayed so ostentatiously in the eyes of the envious, stimulated socialism, communism, internationalism-everything that menaced existing institutions.

[ocr errors]

A novelist could hardly find a broader or better subject for picturesque and artistic treatment-or a more hazardous one. It is delicate and difficult work to trace the development of a single character under the influence of subversive changes on the circumstances that surround it. How immeasurably must the difficulty be increased, when dozens of distinct idiosyncrasies are exposed simultaneously to the action of a social revolution. It is no light thing for a foreigner at the best of times to deal with the vie intime of a foreign people, and impress you throughout his descriptions with a sense of his fidelity to nature. For the very groundwork, it demands an extraordinary acquaintance with manners and customs, and habits of thought. Imagining M. Taine or M. Esquiros to have had Lord Lytton's powers as a novelist; can we conceive either of these gentlemen having written a My Novel; or Varieties of English 'Life,' that would win the approbation of English critics? Yet even a supposition like that, extravagant as it must sound, is far from suggesting the difficulties of Lord Lytton's undertaking. For the Parisians are altogether a peculiar people, and have long laid claim to brilliancy as their especial birthright. In Paris, dulness has always been regarded as the one unpardonable sin; and as the women by instinct make the most of their dress, so by intuition the men and the women make the very most of their minds. They succeed too, so far at least as superficial sparkle goes. Those lighter faculties of the intellect on which they pride themselves, are never suffered to rest for want of exercise. Society, in its higher and more refined circles, resolves itself into a perpetual contest, where the absence of visible effort only comes of long and assiduous training, as constant practice in the manége or the fencing-room makes a perfect master of the horse or the small sword. To make the élite of Parisian society talk naturally Lord Lytton must make them talk brilliantly; to make their talk real he must make them talk discriminat

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »