brated in one of his novels by describing it as "frequented by the better sort of deans and bishops." Gounod came often to see me. One day he appeared at half-past two, dressed in a long fur coat which made him look very picturesque. "You must excuse my toilette," he said, as he laid his fur cap on the table; "but I do not come to pay a visite de cérémonie to a young lady, but as one soul comes to another soul. How are you, my dear child? This morning I said, I must go early to see my Eve, as if I put it off I should not be able to go, as there is the choir to-night." He said I ought to do nothing: "This child ought not to work! She ought to be l'enfant gâté, fed upon love and also upon good cutlets. The body must be looked after as well as the spirit. Love is worth just as much as the people worth who give it. I need not tell you that I love you, my dear child. I loved you from the moment I saw you, and I think love is a thing that arrives at its maximum instantaneously; if one loves a person thirty or forty years, one does not get to love him more or less; it is just the same."

are

Another day he brought a little machine for spraying the throat; he had gone to some particular chemist to buy it as it was a French invention. We showed him a book of poems by Louis Dierz; he read one or two, but did not like them. "Bad style, bad style," he said. "If I do not strongly accentuate the words you cannot understand what is meant, but if I do, hear how unmusical the sound is! This poet follows Victor Hugo too much. I admire Victor Hugo very much, but not his imitators. The tendency of modern French poets is to exaggeration. Now what is difficult in art is not what we give forth, but what we hold back. It is to say to everything that is exaggerated, to every immature thought, to everything that is not true, vous n'entrerez

pas ici. People nowadays write poetry to be looked at, not to be read aloud. They think much about the idea, but nothing about the way in which it is expressed. I say to such as those, 'Why do you not write excellent prose?' The very life of poetry is to be perfect in form as well as in thought."

If

I asked who were his favorite poets? "Molière," he answered; "Molière and Lafontaine, these are my favorites. See how admirable are Molière's lines! the French language should exist for a million years not a word could be added or taken away from the verse of Molière. No exaggeration, no poverty, no redundance! It is like Mozart; it is perfect for all time. Do you remember the admirable scene in the 'Misanthrope,' in which Oronte shows his bad verses to Alceste?" And he forthwith recited nearly all the scene.

Then again taking up the volume of Dierz's poems, he opened it at one which contained the words, "Nos douleurs sont immortelles." "Mais ce n'est pas vrai," he said; "nos douleurs ne sont pas immortelles. Nos douleurs sont mortelles. Our sorrows, the sorrows which we innocently suffer, are surely for this earth only. As to les damnés-c'est autre chose. Mais enfin, il y a une parole de Notre Seigneur à laquelle je pense toujours. Il disait 'Mon Père, je n'ai pas perdu un de ceux que vous m'avez confiés excepté le fils de perdition' (qui est, je crois, Judas). Pas un! Ainsi, j'espère qu'il n'y a pas beaucoup de monde en enfer."

On the nineteenth of that February there was a Wagner Concert, a novelty then. Gounod happening to say the day before that he would like to go to it, we asked him to come with us, to which he readily assented. At the agent's we were told that all the good places were sold, but when it was hinted that M. Gounod would be of the party three excellent seats in the mid

dle of the front row were produced. The concert began with the overture to "Tannhauser,"-"a fine work, but un peu trop violent." After a song from "Rienzi" there was a selection from "Lohengrin," all of which Gounod liked, but most of all the prelude to the third act; several times he said in a low voice, "That is beautiful, that is beautiful." But a piece from the "Meistersinger" he did not like at all. After the concert he returned with us to the hotel and took chocolate with us. "The public," he said, "moved much faster than the individual, and therefore the individual must place himself before his age if he desires not to be behind it. Wagner has some idea of this sort; it is a necessity which every true artist must realize. Great men may be said to be for every age save their own; small men are for their own and none other."

"The coloring of some of Wagner's morceaux is splendid," he continued; it is intensely mystical, but is it scenical? Macmillan's Magazine.

Is it suited for the stage? There is more process than finality in his music, and he is too fond of exhausting the orchestra all at once. Violence, impetus, is not strength. Look at the Greek art! There is a saying of Tertullian, the Father of the Church, 'God can be patient because He is Eternal.' And you remember in the Scriptures when God spoke to Elijah, He was not in the storm nor in the whirlwind but in the still, sweet breeze. Now look at Mozart's "Don Juan." The statue advances to seize the guilty one [here he hummed the music and imitated the action] without hurry as without halting, tranquil and inevitable as eternal justice."

A few weeks later we left London for the country. I like to see people come but I hate to see them go," said Gounod, when we took leave of him. "J'ai porté le deuil depuis vingt heures pour votre départ."

It was a prophetic mourning, for we saw him no more.

Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco.

C. D. W.

II.

We read that in the year 1153, when the failure of the princely dynasty of the Fujiwara had pitted against each other the families of the Taïra and the Minamoto, a monster alighted on the roof of the imperial palace. He had the head of an ape, the body of a tiger and the tail of a serpent. We recognize the animal. It is the old original feudalism in a new shape, and for four centuries to come it will rend by its turbulence, its ferocity and its perfidy, the territory of Japan. One after another the shoguns, who are its offspring, will endeavor to master it, and to restore for their own benefit the centralization of the empire. But however manly themselves, they have but effeminate children. They are only vice-emperors, and the regents whom they appoint become shoguns to them. Nevertheless, upon two occasions, unity was all but realized. The Hojo, in the thirteenth century, repelled an invasion of the Mongols, unhappily the only one. In the fifteenth century the genius of Japan attained to perfection through patience, and wrought lovely miracles in silk and lacquer. Then the shogunate also succumbed, every province of the empire erected itself into a separate kingdom, the great monasteries became fortresses, and anarchy supervened.

Similar spectacles are afforded by the history of medieval Europe. But when we reflect that for four hundred years Japan was forging souls on the anvil of civil war, yet never struck out one new idea, one of those flashes which light up the universal conscience, one of those truths or even one of those noble errors which lay bare the primitive bases of humanity, the heroic history Translated for The Living Age.

of the country will inevitably appear less rich than our own, less fruitful, resembling rather, in its sterility, that of barbarous peoples. The pretty fancies of Japanese art cannot atone for the horrors of that time. Among a people in whom a humanity which may fairly be called exquisite, is often found united with positive cruelty, delicate little women, with painted lips and pointed finger-tips received from the soldiers in besieged castles, gory severed heads which they carefully label, that every man may be able to recognize his own trophies when paytime arrives. They even go so far as to blacken the teeth of the victims; for, since none but the princes of the imperial family and nobles attached to the court had a right to this adornment, the warrior willingly took the benefit of such a trick. "We were not afraid of the heads," wrote one of these women, "we were used to sleeping in the smell of blood."

It is true that the greatest nations also have emitted these abominable exhalations, but in their case a trace of metaphysical intoxication has usually mingled with the enthusiasm of carnage. Our crusades, our religious wars, our wars of races, our Jacqueries -what a list! Their battle-fields continually remind one of the man who climbed a pile of corpses to get a wider view. Here the heaps of dead are prodigiously high, but the victors who scale them see only the same contracted horizon. The conquests of Japan were bounded by a vicious circle; and her native intellect contributed nothing to the universal store.

Nevertheless, the love of fighting rendered the spirit of the country at once intrepid and adroit. The sons and daughters of the samurai were trained

in hardship; the former learned to wield the sword, the latter the dagger. The thought of death played so large a part in their educational program, that they were even instructed in the ceremonial of suicide. At that age when the charms of life appeal most strongly to the heart and the senses, the youth of the country learned in what attitude and with what rites persons of good birth disembowel themselves. Some even gave proof of a terrific precocity. The little Jap, of whom the following anecdote is related, can hardly have been more than seven years old. Assassins had been ordered to dispatch his father, and, misled by a strong likeness, they had brought back to their master a head which no one could positively identify. The magnate sent for the child and showed the head to him; and the boy, perceiving the mistake, and that the assassins must be upheld in it, pulled out of his belt the poniard, which the sons of the samurai wore even at that tender age, and gave his unspoken lie the indisputable authority of despair by plunging it into his own entrails and falling dead before the ghastly countenance.

No people has ever gone farther in the stern cult of death. Buddhism, though reproving suicide as a childish subterfuge on the part of a man confronted by destiny, did, nevertheless, weaken the ties that bind him to the external world; and it was to the doctrines of Confucius most of all that the Japanese owed their sombre penchant for self-murder. It was not that they regarded death as a deliverer. The notion that they would get another and a happier existence in exchange for their last sigh, would have marred in their eyes the equity of the transaction.

They derived from the Confucian philosophy only the rudiments of an imperious positivism. The hoary sage who disliked Buddhism deeply, and resolutely warded off its dreamy VOL. VIII. 424

LIVING AGE.

speculations, made a virtue of their very philosophic impotence. They went beyond that renowned master of ethics, and, too proud to question one who will not speak, regarding it as almost indecent to peer into the blackness of the tomb, they asked of death only an unequivocal attestation that honor had been satisfied and duty done. For them, therefore, death put off its dread apparel of grief and anxiety. They stripped it of all disquieting associations, but it was no more a luxury to them than was love. They were not carried away by it as in a whirlpool. They made it a custom, an institutionthe regular solution of the more difficult problems of life. Had a samurai embezzled his master's money? He killed himself. Had the master permitted himself an offensive word or gesture? He killed himself. They died by way of protest against orders which they could not obey, or injuries which they could not avenge. In the correct form of hari-kari, at the very instant when the kneeling samurai struck his own bowels, his dearest friend who stood beside him, cut off his head. The Japanese sabres worked like lightning, and were seen only when they were withdrawn. In certain of the ruder provinces, the men who bore arms practiced their virgin blades at nightfall on belated travellers. Selfmurder was to them the crowning grace of civilization; and the murder of others no brutality. They looked at everything sub specie mortis. One night a young warrior rescued a young girl from a band of ravishers, and took her to the Royal Palace. The prince, in his turn, offered her to him; she was an adorable creature. But the young man replied, with melancholy grace, that one vowed to death must not contract these ephemeral ties. The girl heard him, and the cup which she was holding fell from her hands. Before these men who, with no quarrel against

life, are yet bent upon self-destruction, the illusions of earthly love and the illusions of piety itself, behave like the young girl. They drop the cup. Murder and suicide were the chief national sports.

They refined and refined upon the obligations of the soldier to his captain, the wife to her husband, the child to its parents. Even while it disorganized the country, feudalism, aided by the nature of the people, created there no end of distinct and animated organisms. Filial piety, personal loyalty, obedience, the sacrifice of the individual to the interests of the fief, were carried to so fanciful an extreme that the sublime itself was cheapened. Our own ancient history reveals no such transports of self-sacrifice and stoicism. But the very slight effort which superhuman virtue seems to have cost these heroes, rather impairs its beauty to my mind. I can understand one father's immolating his own child, to save the child of his prince, but that this example should become the basis of a school, this atrocious abnegation of self a common practice, that a strict devotion to worldly obligations should come to demand as much bloodshed as the altars of the gods themselves-here I detect the invincible tendency of the Japanese mind to push a simple idea to the point of absurdity and engraft monstrous fantasies upon natural instincts.

The Japanese have wit, but they are thoughtless. In the absence of material they undertake to provide it. They work furiously over elementary ideas; but the deductions which they draw therefrom are so grotesque that they impoverish rather than develop them. They hollow them out, work them over, carve, chisel, stipple them, until they become so strange as to be no longer recognizable. But the ideas are elementary still. Their morality is like their houses-absolutely primitive in structure, but overlaid by a thousand

petty devices, an infinitude of detailslike their apartments, where a fanciful art admires itself upon a humble matting, or shines over columns which are tree-trunks with barely the bark removed. When you get inside them you find their souls as rude and primitive as those of Homer's heroes; and yet, between two instincts which breathe of the primeval forest you shall find an exquisite fancy, comical or dainty, or one of those gorgeous chimeras characteristic of a society which has grown so sick of nature that it finds no pleasure save in occasionally defying it.

The ruling passion in that society was ambition intensified by the close and solitary contemplation of death. The polish of a princely court could never have been maintained among men at once so vindictive and so vain, save under pressure of the most onerous formalism. Moral repression was transformed there into physical restraint. Warriors went muffled up in garments wherein their figure was almost lost. Hanging sleeves paralyzed all vivacity of gesture, and trousers were so wide and so long that he who walked in them seemed to be travelling on his knees, and could neither make an attack nor escape one. This amplitude of drapery disarmed individual men, raising between them impassable barriers of light, rustling silk. Then the Buddhist priests brought into fashion the ceremonial of tea-drinking. Tea was imbibed as though in celebration of a mystery, with rhythmic evolutions, hierophantic gestures and silent incantations and the deep deliberation which properly attends the working of a miracle. Nor was it women only who strictly observed the forms of this ritual. Men-at-arms also assisted patiently and with decorum. The room where some one officiated at a brazier, while the rest assumed grave and self-collected attitudes