absorbing, oppressive, the mere organ of advertisements and puffs, machine for dividends, instrument for all kinds of business, is destined to disappear sooner or later. Writers of conscience and judgment are now unanimous in admitting that they can no longer find in it the guarantees of condition and intelligence to which they have a right. "May the reform of the press be quickly accomplished! Not only will the writers themselves gain by it, but so also will public manners, that are closely allied in every possible manner with the destinies of journalism.” There are always persons in this world who like to sit on benches raised above their neighbours, who take pride in formal meetings, compliments, bits of ribbon, embroidered garments, official discourses, and flattery. These men constitute the academicians of Paris (in the eyes of those who are not of the elect). A vain man is never free. He is always ready to accept a yoke: let the very government that he declares he detests throw him a bit of ribbon, and all his ideas of independence and opposition are scattered to the winds! The English, says M. Fremy, whom we imitate so often in their bad qualities, and so seldom in their good, have no Academies, and yet they have both a science and a literature. An Academy is not, then, as some argue, absolutely necessary for the existence of such. An Academy is necessarily a dependence of every successive government. "Can anything be stranger, or more repugnant to our manners? No one, in the present day, in France, believes in Academies, and yet every one wishes to belong to one!" "People fancy they are a kind of gentlemen, or grands seigneurs, when they are elected to the French Academy." "O bourgeois, éternels bourgeois que nous sommes ! To what superstitions, to what miserable vanities do we daily succumb!" The worst is, that the salary of the academician is by no means equal to the extent of the engagements which he contracts. self-love makes up the balance. "The Frenchman of the present day wishes to be at once the best pensioned, the most decorated, the most official, and the freest of all men." Above all things, the Academy must be upheld, old streets and courts may be swept away, and squalor, dirt, and disease be made to give way to well-built, lofty, and healthy mansions; but there are other incumbrances crowned with musty cupolas that are too sacred to be touched, they must remain in the interest of museums and cemeteries; 66 yes, must remain classical and monumental, or you will die of traditions, relics, and Academies." But The taste for the fine arts is the only thing that is admitted to have made progress in France during the last half century. The passion for paintings, bronzes, china, enamel, and other works of art, has extended even to the bourgeois class. M. Fremy is certainly a cynic. He declares that in proportion as the passion for a "riche mobilier" has increased, constraint, gloom, and spleen have kept pace with it. gilded sumptuousness of the interior, he adds, crushes the simplicity of modern attire. The The French, M. Fremy avers, are born scribblers, poets, songsters, romancers, but rarely sculptors, painters, or musicians; they only become so by dint of study, and the fine arts in France are mere matters of conventional imitation. "France is a nation of upholsterers, not of artists." What a wasp's nest we should have expected about our ears if we had said half as much. Art certainly concerned itself in antiquity with something far different from the decoration of a boudoir, but still no one will deny to the French a perfected taste and artistic feeling as applied to ordinary ornamentation, whether in furniture, paper-hangings, or house decoration. This may be upholstery in the cynical sense of the word, but it is upholstery idealised and beautified. It is, probably, more a matter of fact that modern society gives origin to a vast number more paintings and sculptures than it can dispose of. Paris, we are told, is full of needy sculptors, painters, and composers, who in reality only seek the fine arts as a matter of form, and have no true affection for them; they have not even the time to love them. Such a state of things is not favourable to manners. The artist requires a docile and flexible spirit to obtain an order, and as far as independence is concerned, is often worse off than the common workman. Then, again, the greater portion of architecture, sculpture, and painting is necessarily "governmental." Official art demands Greek, Roman, or Florentine styles. It would have been just as sensible to have asked for spinning-jennies, high furnaces, and locomotives from the Athenians. Modern art should be placed in relation with actual manners. It should have its source in the positive wants of the community; it should, above all things, not crowd modern civilisation into incommodious cages, whilst it erects palaces merely to be looked at, and while the museums of antiquity are like old abandoned cemeteries. Pedantry, we are told, has seized upon a whole half of modern manners, and threatens to leave an ineffaceable impression on our age. Pedantry is that pretension to knowledge which crushes all that comes near it with its individual and intellectual supremacy! Luckily, we have no such assumptions in this country. There is far too much real democracy of intelligence, and less of the perpetual struggle to level. Such phenomena have been known, but they have soon fallen under the unerring shafts of ridicule. Yet we are told that pedantry came in with English parliamentary forms, introduced into France under Louis Philippe. Possibly it was so. France, we are told, enjoyed under the Orleans dynasty "a liberty of invasion, a liberty Waterloo, which had been at Ghent, and which, above all, boasted of it openly." There never was a greater mistake than for public and parliamentary men to ape English manners, their repulsive stiffness, even to their starched collars, by a people who prefer (let us whisper the fact) "even an equivocal and vicious character that is open, amiable, and approachable, to the most honest man of the world, who drapes himself before us, and assumes a composed and majestic air!" "A Frenchman prefers of the two even to be cheated than to be humiliated." It certainly was to be regretted that the Martignacs and the Guizots adopted the so-called parliamentary physiognomy even in salons, but every statesman has not the rare Palmerstonian buoyancy, and the lively Parisian does not make allowances for wear and tear, for labour and anxiety, when he is so expectant as to call upon a councillor of state to pirouette, and a minister to be also a petit maître. Yet, M. Fremy tells us, that "Ce qui a manqué à la plupart des hommes d'Etat de ce temps-là a été de savoir jouer aux osselets et de se mettre à faire des ricochets sur la Seine en sortant du Palais Bourbon !". The so-called "doctrinaires" and "universitaires" are considered as the heads of the school of contemporaneous pedantry. The physiognomy of the doctrinaire is a mixture of mysterious solemnity and doctoral arrogance, the English statesman predominating over both. The doctrinaires restored the worship of "la grande dame;" they influenced letters and style; they dogmatised, formulated, monographed, but they never became, nor can become, popular. "The "universitaires" had their origin in the attempt made to supplant the supremacy of the ancient nobility by that of learning and intelligence. Alas! it was soon found that men like Rasius and Baldius made but poor statesmen, and still poorer aristocrats. Their pedantry was intolerable. It has been said that the monarchy of July fell by the professors. There are other pedantries in vogue, as, for example, "le pédantisme mathématique, polytechnique, et métallurgique ;" there are also astronomical, geological, and chemical pedantries, represented by persons who talk eternally of their labours, their discoveries, and their titles. They all have their origin in the same principle of a vulgar bourgeois struggle for supremacy, which springs from the love of inequality, the desire of placing whole classes at one's feet. "This is a most dangerous disposition of mind. A society, founded in part upon the ruins of ancient privileges, cannot, without falsifying and denaturalising itself, gather itself together in a crowd of partial and little aristocracies, which would soon become, in the collective, more abusive and repulsive than those of olden times. "Savants, magistrates, professors, advocates, writers, professionals, people of ideas or of the robe, cannot forget that they exercise crafts essentially pedantic. It is their duty, therefore, to avoid pedantry in form above all things. It is their duty not to aggrandise their importance, but to be constantly apologising for it." M. Fremy reserves the consideration of that which has the greatest influence upon manners of all-woman-to the last. It has been proposed, he says, to emancipate woman, to make a man of her, to suppress her, in fact, but that is not solving the question. No more are the exceptions-the clever women-concerned in considering the influence of the sex on the epoch. Women who surpass the rest of their sex are "hommes-femmes." The position of woman, as seen in the domestic circle, or in society, is, in many points of view, equivocal, false, and barbarous. Looked upon in the highest classes as a child, she is treated by the "monde positif" as a "travailleuse," as a "citoyenne." She has to lodge, feed, and provide for herself. The weakness of her sex assures her no immunities or privileges on that score. Aristocracy only acknowledges the young and the beautiful woman. Woman is made, in their eyes, to represent ornament and pleasure. She reigns by her physical beauty. But such a reign has a brief duration, and, once over, one is succeeded by another, and no one knows what becomes of the first. Bruyère says, "I have known one who wished to be a handsome girl from thirteen to twenty-two, and then to be a man." The ancients, more consistent than the modern French, established two orders of women, the matron and the courtesan, one for home, the other for out of doors. The one is scarcely ever heard of in history, philosophy, poetry, and arts, all the material and intellectual enchantments are grouped around the latter. It at least established the position of woman, as is done in Japan, upon a clear and distinct basis, but at the same time it tolerated a monstrous sophism. Christianity restored to woman her rank as daughter of the Creator, the type of chastity, virtue, and love. But in France, we are told, a sex so noble and so interesting, made to be the equal of ours, is solely "exploitée par le faux amour.' The only exceptions are the ugly. To be worthy of persecution, pursuit, and corruption, woman must be beautiful. The Catholic Church beautified its Madonnas; ugly, they would not have been acceptable. Regularity of manners are preached to young men, and yet the libertinages of all the kings of France are constantly paraded before their eyes. It is essential to a man in the present day to be in the fashion, "qu'il ait eu beaucoup de femmes." So, at least, says M. Fremy. Man has, now-a-days, no choice; either he must be a monster, but a charming, a delicious monster, whose society is sought and coveted by all, or he must be a happy, affectionate husband, only that his happiness is dull and inglorious. How can he hesitate between the two? It is the same with regard to the woman. She opens the history of France, and she finds that by far the most glorious names are the D'Estrées, the Vallières, the Montespans, the Maintenons, the Pompadours, and the Dubourgs, quasi queens, often more queenly than the real queens, and whose children have been princes, dukes, and have even inherited thrones. It is not the thing, then, that is branded, but the accessories; if accompanied by high rank and power, it is adulated; if by rank and wealth, it is "received;" if by wealth alone, it is tolerated; if without either rank or wealth, it is denounced! And thus the safeguards of society are preserved. A thing is only criminal in as far as it is inconvenient. Then, again, what does the young woman see in the present day in the world? Ladies, clothed with rich dresses and valuable jewellery, in splendid equipages. She is told to turn away, that vice is humiliating. She opens her eyes, and sees quite the contrary! The romantic literature of the day and the stage alike exalt the manners of the Regency. "Ah!" says M. Fremy, "this is truly a sad page in our manners, so sad, that one is too often obliged to turn away not to see it." Still, he does not despair; he grieves for the empire of beauty in woman as he did in that of man; he quotes Socrates, as asserting "that a beautiful person is more dangerous than a scorpion," but, sad to say, beauty in the woman is more dangerous to herself than to others. "The reform of woman," he says, "cannot be the work of a day; too many prejudices, too many obstacles, too many chimerical theories oppose it. But is that a reason not to undertake it? Wherefore despair? It has never yet been sincerely and seriously tried; and under any circumstances humanity ought to say to itself, not less important and less difficult reforms have already been brought about in the history of the world." He who undertakes to reform the manners of his age, to chasten the customs of his epoch, and to cleanse the body social, undertakes an Augean task; he cannot expect to succeed at once, but still he is deserving of all encouragement, even if certain of his ideas may be neither convenient, practical, nor sound; for it is almost impossible but that some of his words will fall where they will be heeded, or be perused by some susceptible conscience, and awaken in it the desire for amelioration and improvement. Even one or two such good results will repay the labours of the cynic and the satirist, as his opponents will perhaps designate him. THE COMING OF SPRING. BY NICHOLAS MICHELL. SHE comes, she comes! your sunny portals Beams from her limbs of beauty shed; She comes, she comes! hoar Winter seeing, Gives a last groan, and seeks his tomb; Away the King of Frost is fleeing, The Tempest spreads his wings of gloom: Before her sunshine softly breaketh, And genial airs are wafting balm; On walking, an incarnate beam. She comes, she comes! ne'er bowed or hoary, Her form enduring as the sun, Which gives her face a softened glory; And light as she had just begun To tread the vales, and skim the mountains, Her eyes, like stars beheld in fountains, Her hair, in ripply waves outrolled, She comes, she comes! and earth is showing She comes, she comes! sweet angel shining O yes, a paradise she bringeth, Glad earth again seems young and new; And as the heart of Nature singeth, The soul of man is lightsome too; Away dark thoughts our spirits fling, Rejoicing with rejoicing Spring. |