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fashion, culture, and opulence, there is the fallen world, tenanted by thieves, forgers murderers in esse or in posse; by abandoned women whose misery is greater than their sin; and, alas, by little children doomed never so much as to understand what innocence means. Our guide to these heartrending sights is only too competent. He paints and he speaks, not as a religious man he is no Fra Angelico -but calmly, like a citizen of the world. Yet his voice trembles a little; and, in the midst of his shameful narrative there will break out, as it were, a sob from the depths of his heart, as in the piteous story of "L'Armoire." The tale itself is slight, is nothing. But the picture of the child, turned out of its poor little bed and sent to sleep all night as well as it can, on a chair in the cupboard-and the child of such a mother, engaged in such a trade - who can express the things of which it is an evidence? They are as touching as they are horrible. And in one sense or another they are most true not in Paris alone, or Vienna, or Berlin, but, as our police reports tell us, in London, Liverpool - where not in our huge cities? No, we cannot handle the theme; it is pitch and we may not be defiled. But many are the "children of the desolate ;" and to them defilement clings from the day they were born.

When Maupassant tells a story like this, which goes to the heart, we bear with his coarseness, much as it offends a healthy nostril; we are almost willing to forgive and to like the man. But he is a creature of instinct; the pity which fills his eyes one moment is forgotten the next. He cares only for excitement, nor does he reck of what species, tender, morose, or even cruel. Not that he gloats over cruelty as done by himself; but he has a mania for studying its phrases. The world of detestable, though still human vice, seems to undergo a transformation as we pass with him along his dark galleries. Our step falters where he gains assurance. Why explore these Bedlams, whether of life or literature? "Why?" he replies, "because they are the truth, the only solid ground beneath the world's illusion." Thus he indulges, in a mood of mocking complicity, all the bizarre fancies which haunt the last agonies of reason. Upon the inner wall of the vast room we are entering, might be written the author's own words, in which, if our judgment is not wholly false, an extraordinary and prophetic depth of insight is shown, "These men," he writes in "Le Horla,"

"spoke of all things with lucidity, with ease, with intelligence, until their thought, all in a moment, touching on the reef of madness, was shattered to pieces, foundering in that fierce and dreadful ocean, full of raging waves, of mists and hurricanes, which is called insanity." Maupassant knew these things too well.

Out of the Parisian salon, with its delicate eccentricities of color and adornment, where life is passed in making forbidden love, we pass, then, to the Court of Sessions, the police cell, the asylum. We study the records found in sealed envelopes and secret drawers, the diaries kept hidden for years, the confessions made on deathbeds, which at last proclaim the horrid mystery that has been tearing the heart. In the beautiful language of our prose-poet, De Quincey, we behold "the hidden or averted side of the golden arras, known but not felt, or seen but dimly in the rear, crowding into indistinct propor. tions." The epidemic nature of crime has been often remarked upon by moralists and magistrates. Weak imaginations reel under the stroke of horrors vividly presented; and mimicry being among the deepest instincts of mankind, there is always danger that one outrageous incident will make many. Some writers, of whom Hawthorne is perhaps the most daring and subtle, have spent much time and thought in considering the "averted side" of existence. They are fascinated by its irony which evokes unhallowed desires in the austerest bosoms, and seems wickedly to sport with dignities, and the virtues that should accompany them. We by no means say that the compelled hypocrisy consequent on some great crime, into which a man, hitherto blameless, has been hurried, may not furnish a subject as lawful as it is tragic on the stage or in romance. But it calls for skilful and even humane handling, lest our self-reverence, and with it our self-control, should be irreparably injured. The cynicism of a Rabelais carries not with it more peril. For we have this treasure of personality in earthen vessels. How tender should we not show ourselves, likewise, of the gift of reason, so hardly conquered from ages of bestial struggling, so beset in our own day with dangers on every hand! For none, who will look into the matter, can question that, as civilization advances, the pressure which its complex activities cannot but exert, is telling on weak and fevered brains. The azote or nitrogen which tempers, while it dulls, uncivilized patures, is being rapidly withdrawn from

unconquerable dread from the like phenomena in those high-colored and plaguestricken artists, Edgar Poe, Baudelaire, and William Blake. In this weird region of nightmare and hallucination nature seems dead. "Wicked dreams," indeed, "abuse the curtained sleep." And, remark, the passion in which all others are taken up and expire, is not, as we might have anticipated, animal gratification, but a longing after blood.

French romance, following in the wake of much modern journalism, shows a decided taste for cruel, no less than obscene horrors. As in the imperial Roman days, so is it now. Thirty years ago and more, Baudelaire, in his strange and bitter

our modern air; and we see as in a flaming sky the oxygen kindle, burning up the life it should nourish. While the objects of dread and of desire have multiplied a thousandfold, the brain lags behind; it is more slowly developed, though solicited more than ever; and seems incapable only of acting along the lines which experience has furrowed in it. The pulse of humanity beats dangerously quick in our day. Compared with our ancestors, we seem, in the words of the poet, to be "tremblingly awake." Or, as Maupassant remarks, we find our very senses inadequate, and sigh for new powers which may open to us undreamt-of worlds,-"an enlargement of the soul and of sensation." For, he says, "the mind has but five half-open doors-"Fleurs du Mal," depicted "the modern and these are chained - which we call monster ennui," as "a cowardly bourgeois, the five senses. They are five barriers dreaming his dream of classic ferocity and that men enamored of a new art have be- debauchery," as "Nero at the desk and gun in these days to shake with all their Elagabalus behind the counter." For might." Yes, artists "have come to the such an audience, intoxicated, as M. Bourend of their resources; they are running get has said, with "analytic libertinism," short of the inedited, of the unknown, of worn out by its excesses, yet desiring ever emotions, of images, of all things." Hence more to add fresh stimulants where the old they feel tempted to cultivate a "rare and have lost their power, did Maupassant redoubtable faculty," which arises from trace, in burning colors, the scenes of his the diseased sensitiveness of the skin and mad gallery. Yet none affected a loftier the whole organism, prompting it to feel contempt for the régime which is typified every slight emotion with keen energy, in the bureaucrat and the épicier. "The and inflicting upon the mind, in accord- age of art is gone," he exclaims; "there ance with changes of temperature, with is no longer even an aristocratic skin. savors and scents, or with the varying Science has become a convenience, and tones of daylight, sufferings, sadness, and industry looks only to the market." These enjoyments unknown to spirits less finely be the gods that have triumphed over the touched. They dabble in narcotics, and worship of beauty, and the passion for add to the number of the détraqués, whose knowledge that once was far above rubies. existence is a consuming fever, and noth-"Think of the ideal no more," cries some ing less than a peril to civilization.

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jealous divinity to fallen man, "but meditate upon the things of a brute which concern thee, and thou shalt make large discoveries." 'Alas," replies Maupassant, "your electric bells and telephones may arouse our interest; but they never can fire our enthusiasm like the ancient forms of thought-not ours, I say, who are the uneasy thralls of a dream of delicate beauty, that haunts our pillow and ruins our existence !"

Morphine, it would appear, tends, when taken in large doses, to reverie, the symptoms of which are everywhere visible in modern French literature. But hemp is violent and heady. These sketches of Maupassant, which have already cost us so many words, betray the influence of both. We mean that side by side with an anxious peering into all manner of curious possibilities (where the ordinary five senses are unloosed or terribly intensified) It is a noble and a just lament. But there comes the delineation of maniacal how discordantly it sounds in these pages fury, bent on gratifying its cravings in adapted to the taste, though beyond the a series of heightened atrocities. The capacity, of the degraded French peasant, coarse and ill-bred humor which disfig- or of the woman of fashion, who thinks ured Maupassant's Norman tales was herself cultivated because she reads what harmless in comparison. It could only she chooses! Can it be this servant of disgust. But the miasma of insanity ex- delicate visions who has put together, with haling from narratives such as "Un Fou," the patience of Flaubert, the dreary rec"Moiron," "Chevelure," and "Le Horla ord, which, under the title of "Une Vie," betokens, if we may venture on the expres- has reached a thirty-sixth edition? Was sion, a decaying brain. We turn with it a thirst after "ancient forms of thought"

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which led to the publication of "Fort comme la Mort"? Are the other volumes, which we pass by in disdain, likely to kindle a sacred fire in the youthful imagination which has access to them? Or may we suppose that the career to which, being wealthy, artistic, and her own mistress, the heroine of "Notre Coeur" devoted her leisure, was the fruit of a "haunting ideal?”

No. When Raphaël de Valentin set out on the journey of despair which led him through a world of curiosities to the deadly talisman, he was haunted by no ideal. And it was an ambition not much nobler than George Duroy's, to which Maupassant yielded, when he exchanged the clerk's quill for the novelist's. He found, to use his own expression, that with the same quantity of writing he could make thousands where he had made hundreds - that was all. To amuse a reading public, which gives its hours of idleness to Dumas, Eugène Sue, Zola, and Jules Verne (who appear from statistics to be the favorite authors at Parisian libraries), cannot be deemed a lofty task. But it rewarded this gentleman's facile pen, and gave him wealth and a name in cosmopolitan society. He became a French falconer, that flies at all he sees. Still, these things did not suffice him. Like other modern artists, he would "shake mightily the barriers of the senses," and purchase experience with drugs. The true "Peau de Chagrin," which promises infinite sat. isfaction and wounds with every draught, is hashish or morphia. How they fulfil the celebrated aspiration in "Les Fleurs du Mal"!

Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l'enfer, qu'im

porte,

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D'un infini que j'aime et n'ai jamais connu ?

At Tunis, not very long before the final catastrophe, Maupassant, visiting the Arab asylum, turns away "with a confused emotion, full of pity, or perhaps of envy, for some of the insane who, in the prison which is none to them, continue the dream they found one day in the bowl of a pipe stuffed with a pinch of yellow leaves." To such a temper was he brought by an indomitable will and an appetite which no daily bread could satisfy. With the fancies that sprang up in him, this polished Frenchman combined the literary manners which we suppose might prevail among Polynesians. He loved, no doubt, to be

poisoned by his own experiments in literature. But they have spread in France like wildfire. The editions of his books are sown broadcast; though, as we are glad to learn, the great European booksellers have begun of late to discover that, outside the French frontiers, their circulation is rapidly falling off. Perhaps the spirit of the decadence, like religious persecution, according to M. Paul Bert, is meant for home consumption, and cannot bear a long voyage. But at home it still puts forth a mighty "uncreating" power upon men and women. The "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" seem, indeed, to have "made thick their blood," and stopped up "the access and passage to remorse." Such wholesale corruption ought to strike the coldest critic as portentous. And yet Swift's grim satire is more than justified; these things made the subject of prurient literature have called forth praise, as being "the productions of art and reason on our side of the globe"- they are "nature, realism, psychology," and therefore to be admired.

Maupassant tells us that he never coveted more than two pieces of statuary one, the headless Venus of Syracuse, the other, a celebrated brazen ram in the museum at Palermo. They express to his mind, he says, with a half-mocking smile, "toute l'animalité du monde "the stupid, unconscious beauty of the senses which no ideal comes to vex or trouble. He was quite right. All his philosophy may be fixed in these outward symbols of marble and bronze. Yet the tranquillity of the brute was lacking to him, as to the generation which he addressed and represented. Dreams still haunt them; phantoms pursue them. A dull or frantic sense awakens in them now and again, foreboding the ruin of the city which they have builded. Even the modern Parisian can. not sleep his sleep of the brute. To his cherished idols he has sacrificed freely. Religion, humanity, art, and whatsoever else may be lovely in men's eyes, he has cast upon the burning altar. It is not enough, so long as he remains alive himself, though but anemic and poisoned with morphine. From hour to hour, therefore, the cry goes up of a victim that has flung himself into the blaze. Yesterday it was Heine-now it is the turn of M. Guy de Maupassant, venal novelist and brilliant man of the world. To-morrow it will be another, with the like genius no less shamefully abused. For what else can happen in a society which has convinced itself of "the immense stupidity of all

things"? One may address it in words not unlike those which Billaud flung at Robespierre: "Avec ton être infâme tu commences à m'embêter." To Maupassant life was "an ignoble farce." Let us hear his poet once more, Norbert de Varennes, as he paces along the boulevards with Bel-Ami, "under the silent moon," and gives him the conclusion of the whole matter. "About the soul of every man," he says, "there is an eternal solitude. I look up into the sky; and it is empty. I find myself alone in the world, without father or mother, wife or child. I do not believe in resurrection or immortality. And I have no God."

vanished, an "immense moral, and perhaps intellectual, abasement," will be the inevitable consequence. M. Renan, who would fain be a laughing Silenus in his old age, is, therefore, as despondent as M. Bourget, who dreads that the "fatal incapacity of action " may follow upon the "incapacity to believe or to affirm," which is the prevalent disease in Frenchmen of genius. And M. de Vogüé, though aiming with his vigorous eloquence to persuade "the young men of twenty," that they ought to sacrifice their pessimism at the shrine of a social crusade, is still given over to the gloomiest apprehensions. The question which these eminent writers, and a hundred more, have constantly in their minds, is as momentous as it is practical. Will France survive? Or are we looking on at the suicide of la grande nation? Such is

It affords, surely, a valid reason for con

But there is a conclusion of a far different kind which forces itself upon thoughtful minds, when they weigh and consider as "documents of civilization" the products of the French decadence. M. Renan, the problem in half-a-dozen words. surely, is a witness beyond suspicion at the tribunal of "Liberalism" and "prog-sulting the omens; and, although it never ress." Yet, in his latest volume, "Feuilles Détachées," M. Renan sounds the alarm, not once but often; he dares not prophesy smooth things for his countrymen who are showing, on every side, as he affirms, a notable decline in morality. "Sound literature," he protests, "is that which, when carried out in practice, makes a noble life." That of the seventeenth century was such -he means the classic achievements under Louis Quatorze. But "modern literature will not endure to be put to the touch." Evil days are in store for the nation. "It is certain," continues this by no means austere sage," that moral values are losing ground; the spirit of self-sacrifice is almost extinct; and the day is approaching when everything will be done by a syndicate, and organized egoism will be set up instead of love and devoted." Yet, as he clearly perceives, while the age has invented a mechanism which grows more perfect from hour to hour, men are blinding themselves to the fact, that even a perfect machinery, if it affects human interests, must imply "a certain degree of morality, conscience, and selfdenial" Two institutions in France, the army and the Church, have hitherto resisted the torrent which is bearing society along; and they, says M. Renan, will speedily be carried away like the rest. Man is tormented by the need of an "eternal conscience." What, then, he inquires, will become of a democracy which has exhausted its religious belief, and does not look beyond the tomb? It will decline much lower than the present time; for when even "the shadow of the shade "has

ness.

can have been the pleasantest of tasks to inspect the "smoking entrails," as Virgil styles them, of sheep and oxen, yet no other way do we possess of learning what will be, than by carefully studying what is and has been. We would not deny (no, indeed!) that behind Paris there stands an inarticulate peasant France, which is too little civilized to be decadent. Nor do we reckon the literature of a people as equivalent to its life, as though there might not be a forced circulation of paper, without gold or even copper to redeem it on demand. But in Maupassant and his like we find evidence, which not the most stubborn optimist can rebut or refuse, that the upper and middle classes of the French have fallen into a most unhealthy condition. It is, we repeat, a decisive argument, a crucial test; and therefore we not only are justified, but are bound to apply it, be the nature of the investigation required as painful as our criticism has shown. For it is no light thing that France should disappear from the map of Europe. We put aside questions of sects and dynasties; we make no appeal to national prejudice or the inveterate suspicion bred of former wars. It is enough for us that a race and people, confessedly among the chosen of the world, with abounding gifts of mind and temperament, and an heroic past, should be thus imperilled, to excite our attention and kindle our sympathy. We look upon the tribe of Zolas, Renans, Bourgets, Daudets, and Maupassants, as among the most dangerous enemies that France has nourished in her bosom. Vain, utterly vain, it is to praise their skill in

though he found matrimony, as far as he had gone, very delightful, it had to be paid for, especially at the beginning of its career, when it ran into furniture, linen, plate, and expensive presents to a dear little wife, though the expensiveness of the last he generously kept to himself. So it resulted in the visit to Brighton. They spent the happiest four days in the world there, and felt quite sad when Tuesday morning arrived. But they wisely did their best to forget that the evening train would take them back to London, and resolved that their last day should pass merrily.

"Suppose we have a long, drowsy morn

the art of literature, their acquaintance with all manner of human passions, the vivid power of their brutality, or the melting charm of their putrescence. What arguments are these to address to a nation on the very edge of the abyss? And how shall we account of Englishmen (such as are not wanting), who can see in the wide plagues to which we have been calling our readers' notice, merely a feature of the moment, artistic trifling, and not the proof, as well as the symptom, that a process of death, moral, intellectual, and even physical, has set in among the French who have yielded to revolutionary principles? What is to be said of journals which advertise with the most careless air suching on the pier," she suggested; "nothing authors as we have been compelled to is nicer or more restful than to listen to denounce, and which extend to them a the band and look down into the water. disinterested pity, if not a qualified admi- We needn't see the horrid people-inration? Nothing will rouse men from deed, if we sit on one of the end seats and their comfort or their lethargy but a vio- keep our faces turned seawards, we can lent shock. We dare not, indeed, attempt, forget that they even exist." in this Christian age, to write with the freedom of Juvenal, who had no worse portents to depict or to transfix than may be viewed, any day, in the world tenanted by the Maupassants. But while we have touched its hateful phenomena as lightly as was compatible with giving some true account of them, we would say that never was the lightning of indignation, human or divine, so justly called for as in the day on which we are writing, to sweep these abominations from the earth, and restore a great people to the place which still awaits them in the European comity, if they will choose less degraded teachers than they have lately gone after; if they will burn what they adore, and adore what they take an insane delight in burning. For without morality, no art or science, however advanced, will save them from ruin.

From Temple Bar.

AUNT ANNE.
CHAPTER I.

Mr. Hibbert solemnly considered the proposal.

"The only drawback is the music, it makes so much noise - that's the worst of music, it always does," he said sadly. "Another thing is, that I cannot lie full length on the pier as I can on the beach."

"Very well, then we'll go to the beach. The worst of the beach is, that we can't look down into the water, as we can from the end of the pier."

"That's true; and then there are lots of pretty girls on the pier, and I like to see them, for then I know that there are some left for the other fellows," he added_nobly,

So they went to the pier, and sat on one of the side seats at the far end and looked down into the water, and blinked their happy eyes at the sunshine. And they felt as if all the beautiful world belonged to them, as if they two together were being drawn dreamily on and on into the sky, and sea, and light, to make one glorious whole with happy nature; but a whole in which they would be forever conscious of being together, and never less sleepy or blissful than now. This was Walter's MR. and Mrs. Walter Hibbert had been idea, and he said it all in his dear romanmarried just four months when Aunt tic way that generally ended up with a Anne first appeared on the scene. They laugh. "It would never do, you know, were at Brighton, whither they had gone from Friday to Tuesday, so that Mr. Hibbert might get braced up after a hard spell of work. Besides doing his usual journalism, he had been helping a friend with a popular educational weekly, and altogether" had slaved quite wickedly," so his wife said. But he had declared that, 4058

LIVING AGE.

VOL. LXXIX.

because we should get nothing to eat."

"Don't," she said. "That is so like you; you always spoil a beautiful idea, you provoking thing," and she rubbed her chin against the back of the seat and looked down more intently at the water. Without any one in the least suspecting it, he managed to stoop and kiss her hand,

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