has done that of France during nearly three hundred years. The fortune of the Academy during the war has, therefore, a particular importance for us, and it presents this very extraordinary feature, namely, that during that comparatively short period it has lost by death nearly one fourth of its members. Never, since its corporation was shattered by the Revolution in 1793, has it suffered, within so brief a space, anything like so many and so serious losses. These losses were due to different immediate causes, but they were all without doubt accelerated by the anxiety and distress which the invasion created. The earliest victim of the war was the great critic, Jules Lemaître, one of the most delicate spirits of our time, and one of those who have presented literature in the most enchanting and alluring light; he died at his country seat from the shock of receiving news of the German declaration of hostilities. Count Albert de Mun, the ardent counter-revolutionist, who had thrown aside all interests save the united resistance of France, was found dead in his bed at the darkest hour of 1914, having just finished an article in which he asserted his unshaken confidence in victory. The venerable Alfred Mezières, who was in his eightieth year, was caught in his country house at Briey by the Germans, and no news of his fate reached Paris for many months; it is said that his death was hastened by the brutality of the invaders. The mortality among the members of the French Academy during the year 1916 was very remarkable. To the novelist and dramatist, Paul Hervieu, and the publicist, Francis Charmes, followed in the summer the greatest of the living critics of France, and one of the most delightful of men, the beloved Émile Faguet. Two protagonists of the conservative section of the Academy were the Marquis de Ségur and the Marquis de Voguë. The latest losses of the body have been the perpetual secretary, Étienne Lamy, and the poet, Edmond Rostand, whose name and work are known all over the globe. Rostand, who died after a short illness only a few weeks ago, was a great loss to France and to the Academy. All the lucky fairies seemed to have gathered round his cradle, and his life had been spent in a long golden dream. Few men suffered more than he did from the war, which seemed to him a monstrous, incredible, and intolerable burden, a breaking up of the very foundations of existence. Fortunately, he survived just long enough to be enraptured by news of the signing of the armistice, but fate denied him the satisfaction of pouring out his gratitude in triumphant song. He died while the French were entering Strassburg, and while the long De Profundis of Alsace was being transfigured in a Te Deum. These somewhat rambling reflections may be drawn to a close by a few remarks on the taste displayed by French readers during the war. Though books have been expensive and difficult to manufacture and distribute, there has been, especially since 1915, an unexampled appetite for reading. In particular, it has been remarked that the poilus showed a strong predilection for poetry that was not at all of a military stamp. The jubilee of the original publication of Les Fleurs du Mal came round in 1916, and was met by a highly surprising demand for editions, cheap and dear, of the poems of Baudelaire, than whom no one was less of a Tyrtæus. If I am correctly informed, there was a decline in the popularity of Racine, of Victor Hugo, even of Pascal, certainly of Renan; but it is well to be on our guard against statements of this kind. There are always melancholy people among ourselves who rush in with a long face to announce that nobody now reads Shakespeare and that Milton is forgotten. The immortals may be trusted, in spite of all fluctuations of fortune, to guard their own immortality. What may perhaps be safely stated is this. Between August and November, 1914, nothing was written in France. There was a complete break in the national production of literature. All the attention of the country was concentrated on military tactics and political necessities. The intense seriousness of the civic and social conditions of the crisis cut off from ordinary topics the civilians at home no less than the soldiers at the front. After the opening months, the war justified much more hope than that of 1870 had ever done; but by that time the sphere of literary entertainment had partly The Fortnightly Review narrowed. The remarkable religious revival, which marked large sections of the army in 1915, further modified the literary outlook. All these matters are difficult for a foreigner to note with exactitude. But we may at least recognize that, when the earliest strain was relaxed, there was a very distinct tendency to revise the literary values of the past generation. Style alone, irrespective of matter, was regarded with less. reverence. We must not dogmatize, but it seems to me that those writers who have been prominent in encouraging the unity and the strength of France are now held in more honor, and those whose works exhale decadence and anarchy risk being condemned and rejected, whatever their previous success may have been. And so, in France throughout the war, literature also has been one of the formulas of sacrifice. AN ESSAY ON DINNERS SINCE Walker's Original (1835) there has been no classical treatise on the art of dining. And, indeed, the art, which has been rapidly disappearing for the last twenty years, has been dealt a blow by the war which we can only hope may not be mortal. For the only really good dinners, gastronomically and socially good, are those given in private houses. Owing to shortage of servants and material, the tumultuous and porcine banquets of the restaurant have replaced the old hospitality of the home, a unique feature of English life. But let us join the optimists, and cherish the belief that sooner or later we may be able once more to invite a few friends to our house, or to order a small dinner at a restaurant without being a millionaire. The club, by the way, is a compromise or halfway house between the home and the hotel. Sir Henry Thompson, the famous surgeon, used to take a great deal of trouble with his men's dinners, which he gave regularly and called 'octaves.' But eight are too many, for this reason, that they break up into four tête-àtêtes, and if anything spoils conversation it is a number of tête-à-têtes going on all round; unless, of course, it is a really big dinner of twelve or more, when tête-à-têtes are unavoidable. We start from the assumption that the object of the dinner is conversation. If your object is to please or amuse a woman or women, the thing is different, but quite simple. Go to the smartest restaurant of the day, choose a table in the middle of the room, order anything, invite anybody. The women will be quite happy looking round the room, making mental notes on the dresses of other women, asking who is that? and doing just as much listening and answering as will suffice to 'carry on.' There is no art in giving dinners of this sort, and for us no pleasure in eating them. But to give a dinner where good food and drink are to be combined with good talk is more difficult, and requires consideration. There can, we think, be no difference of opinion on the point that general conversation, that is, conversation in which all the guests take part by talking and listening across the table, is better than a number of duologues carried on simultaneously. It is impossible for four duologues to be carried on comfortably or profitably: the talkers are too near to one another, the waves of sound jangle, and the attention is distracted by overhearing your neighbors. On the other hand, the octave is just too large for general conversation: it involves the silence of too many; and that is why we condemn eight. Five is a good number, because the fifth person can't be left out in the cold. A quartette is admirable, because it admits of the alternation of two duets with a solo. Three, despite the proverb, is a perfect number: it prevents the pauses that sometimes occur in the duologue, and it gives each talker time to rest and eat. In final defense of general conversation, as opposed to the duologue, let us say that all men play better to a gallery, however small; and that a clever man will talk better to three, four, or five listeners than to one. Having settled the number of your guests, which should not, in our judg ment, exceed five, you must give your orders for the dinner, however small, as carefully as a general plans an advance. It is essential that you should leave nothing to the hour of eating, and that, having made all your arrangements beforehand, you should give your undivided attention at the table to the talk of your guests. Can anything be worse than a host who is all the time fussing about the service, and scolding the servants or waiters? A casual recommendation of a dish, or an occasional question about drink, is all that should distinguish the host from his guests. Is there a more maddening or a more common experience than the following? Just as you are approaching the point of your story, which, like all points, should be driven in shortly and sharply, your host says, 'Forgive me one moment,' and then, turning to the servant, begins a dialogue of this sort: "This champagne is too much iced; you know I told you not to put it in the ice more than half an hour before dinner,' etc. And, Pearson, the cigars I want are those Coronas I bought last week,' etc.; and then, turning back to you and your poor, suspended, mutilated story, 'I am so sorry: go on, go on!' This is barbarous, and comes of not giving all your orders beforehand. Lay your plans deep: issue your orders, take all precautions, and having done these things, lend your whole ear and mind to the conversation of your friends. Having settled the number, and ordered the food and drink, there remains the question of the guests. Whom are you to ask to meet whom? Here again we must turn down a lying proverb. Birds of a feather do not flock together; at least, they ought not to dine together. Don't ask couples who cancel one another. Never, if you can help it, invite husband and wife together. If they love each other, they will have no eyes or ears for anybody else; and will help each other out with their stories, which is a bore. If they hate each other, they will watch each other, listen, and try to quarrel. We have seen a wife throw her napkin across the table at her husband's head. This, too, is a bore. Asked separately, the husband or wife might be charming. Never ask a Jew to meet a Jew, or a lawyer to meet a lawyer, or a stockbroker to meet a stockbroker, or a Canadian to meet a Canadian, or an American to meet an American. The last person that a Canadian or an American wants to meet at dinner is another Canadian or American. There is always a risk in asking one wit, or famous talker, to meet another: one or the other will be silenced. We have been told that Labouchere and Mr. Belloc met at table, and that Mr. Belloc, being the younger and the stouter, reduced one of the most amusing talkers of his day to a resigned aphasia. Encourage a guest to talk 'shop,' for a man always talks best on his own subject. Never attempt to recount the plot of a play you have just seen, or a novel you have just read: it is endless. Let your stories be short, and like those which Jupiter told Ixion, let them be 'not scandalous, but gay.' We admit that our prescriptions are for The Saturday Review male dinners. For we have witnessed two or three clever men engaged in most interesting talk, when a woman appeared, and the conversation suddenly turned into baby's prattle. This may have been the fault of the men as much as of the woman, for most men in the presence of women betray their origin by spreading their tails and uttering inane sexual cries. But it must be said that a good woman talker is very rare; for either she does n't listen her commonest foible or she is what Johnson called 'a speaking cat.' Mrs. Crewe must have been a good talker, for she was invited alone to snug little men's dinners of Whig stalwarts, at one of which when they gave Mrs. Crewe and true blue,' she at once replied, "True blue and all of you.' And she dined alone with Burke when he lounged sadly and wearily on the table, being near his end. Mrs. Thrale, even judging from the scraps given by the jealous Boswell, must have been a man's talker. Our advice to the dinnergiver is that, if he knows a Mrs. Crewe or a Mrs. Thrale, he should not be afraid to invite her alone to meet three or four men. What the petit souper was to Paris in the eighteenth century, the little dinner ought to be to London. Here is a career open to tact! MEREDITH REVEALED BY ROBERT LYND GEORGE MEREDITH, as his friends used to tell one with amusement, was a vain man. Someone has related how, in his later years, he regarded it as a matter of extreme importance that his visitors should sit in a position from which they would see his face in profile. This is symbolic of his attitude to the world. All his life he kept one side of his face hidden. Mr. Ellis, who is the son of one of Meredith's cousins, now takes us for a walk round Meredith's chair. No longer are we permitted to remain in restful veneration of 'a god and a Greek.' Mr. Ellis invites us - and we cannot refuse the invitation-to look at the other side of the face, to consider the full face and the back of the head. He encourages us to feel Meredith's bumps, and no man whose bumps we are allowed to feel can continue for five minutes the pretense of being an Olympian. He becomes a human being under a criticizing thumb. We discover that he had a genius for imposture, an egoist's temper, and a stomach that fluttered greedily at the thought of dainty dishes. We find all those characteristics that prevented him from remaining on good terms, first with his father, next with his wife, and then with his son. At first, when one reads the full story of Meredith's estrangements through three generations, one has the feeling that one is in the presence of an idol in ruins. Certainly, one can never mistake Box Hill for Olympus again. On the other hand, let us but have time to accustom ourselves to see Meredith in other aspects than that which he himself chose to present to his contemporaries, let us begin to see in him not so much one of the world's great comic censors, as one of the world's great comic subjects,and we shall soon find ourselves back among his books, reading them no longer with tedious awe, but with a new passion of interest in the figure-inthe-background of the complex human being who wrote them. For Meredith was his own great subject. Had he been an Olympian, he could not have written The Egoist or Harry Richmond. He was an egoist and pretender, coming of a line of egoists and pretenders, and his novels are simply the confession and apology of such a person. Meredith concealed the truth about himself in his daily conversation; he revealed it in his novels. He made such a mystery about his birth that many people thought he was a cousin of Queen Victoria's, or at least a son of Bulwer Lytton's. It was only in Evan Harrington that he told the essentials of the truth about the tailor's shop in Portsmouth above which he was born. Outside his art, nothing would persuade him to own up to the tailor's shop. Once, when Mr. Clodd was filling in a census-paper for him, Meredith told him to put 'near Petersfield' as his place of birth. The fact that he was born at Portsmouth was not publicly known, indeed, until some time after his death. And not only was there the tailor's shop to live down, but on his mother's side. he was the grandson of a publican, Michael Macnamara. Meredith liked to boast that his mother was 'pure Irish' |