LE VALBRIANT.*
NOTWITHSTANDING the utmost care in bottling and transmission, connoisseurs in the finer but least alcoholised Burgundy wines, say that much of their aroma is lost before they reach British palates ; and though Lady Herbert's translation of Mrs. Craven's recent novel, lame as it often is, is certainly not among the worst, we prefer to deal with the original, in its graceful and iridescent, rather than sparkling, style, which illumines the incidents, and beautifies the stage on which the half-dozen figures of the story, play their parts. It is our contention that the use of fiction is to smooth the passage from what is common fact, to what is ideal beauty. We regret the pessimism which is coarsening and corrupting Art, and we think that no form of literature should be more helpful than prose romance in combating the despair of humanity. None more than the French self-styled realists " have deepened that despair in those who have been misled by their cynical representation of life, for we crave at any cost to know the whole truth about our fellow-men, and becanse of our sad consciousness of inexplicable evil, we, with a shudder, incline to think that the revolting details of psychical putrefaction are all the truer for their horribleness. The magnified vibrios in the drop of Paris water exhibited by some modern writers frighten us from the calm perception that man is bigger than these creatures born of dirt by his whole stature, though unhappily they can and do breed mortal diseases in him. The tragedy and the comedy of life depend on other relations than those of the sewer, and though typhoid fever be a very serious fact, and vice and moral disintegration be still more serious evils in our environment, Art, the consoler and teacher, should have naught to do with them, save to use them in their subservient place. Fiction should be constructive, not destructive, of human society, and should give us diagrams of higher life, not "diagrams of dissolution." The skill of the Paris novel-wrights is admirable in collection of facts, but the facts they collect are not material out of which to create human e Le Vatbriant. By Mrs. Augustus Craven. Sixth Edition. Paris.—Lucia or, Le Valbriant. Translated by Lady Herbert. London Hurst and Blaokett.
figures. Even Frankenstein was not made of street refuse, and consequently, with all their admirable literary technique, there is little of heart-stirring power in the mass of yellow-covered volumes. Nor can their vogue last beyond the present weary satiety of a society enervated by the sense of advancing storms. We do not deny that all things incident to human life are legitimate materials for fiction ; but if it be an art, fiction must respect the limitations of all art. It cannot escape without suicide from its mission of representing beauty. The beauty may be in cyclones as in calms, in man's worst excesses as in his serenest life,—but the cyclones must be suggestive of the calm they interrupt, the excesses must be aberrations from the ideal perfection of existence, or the purpose of Art is unfulfilled. The justification of fiction as more than recreative is, that by touching the various strings of human life, it recovers harmonies that might be otherwise forgotten. It is not enough that it should be an imi- tative machine, giving, though with the utmost truth, only the dissonant and uncontrolled noises of the human chaos.
These remarks will, perhaps, explain why we value the literary work of Mrs. Craven, and think her latest story, Lc Valbriant, deserves a notice in its French form which we have not given to the far more exciting studies of life which have lately issued from the Paris press. One of them, La forte, by Octave Feuillet, well deserved a careful review, for it is a most vigorous and artistic protest against the drift of the Paris world. In its pages, the distinguished writer sets the Christian against the Atheistic ideals with remarkable skill. He has dwelt with more detail on the evil personages than on the good ; he paints in the limited scale of pigments possible to artists, from the dark upwards ; Mrs. Craven, from white light downwards, as it is said Turner attempted to do in his latest work. The darker pictures will be the more popular, as Rembrandt's are ; but were it not for such as Mrs. Craven, and the persons whom she loves to create, the very traditions which have enabled M. Feuillet to set before us his Aliette de Courteheuse would have been extinct. Testifying as it does to what the modern drift of materialist society is tending, expounding with a clear voice the modern dance of death, La Merle sins by its sadness. It gives us, no doubt, " authentic tidings of invisible things," but the "invisible things" are shadowy and grey as the ghosts of Hades. It is forlornly pessimist, while confessing that there is sunshine in " another place." But fiction of the best sort cannot afford to be pessimistic, and if it has artistic qualities and recreative value, if it be meant to brighten hope and help us to greater goodwill to our fellow-men, it should leave us cheered for effort. Forcing on us facts of our being too subtle for ordinary observation, though recognisable when uttered, it should correct by its wider outlook the false fancies and morbid imaginations which most of us, at least when new to life, construct for our- selves in our own mental laboratories.
In La Merge, we have an admirable sketch of a man of the world's conversion to the "ancient ways." In Le Valbriant, the principal personages have never left them, and their conversion is but to liberal ideas concerning our sovereign, Demos. We hasten to say that Mrs. Craven is never didactic, yet, as we read her sketch of modern life, we see how personages endowed with any true nobility must feel the social responsibilities of the day. They are all the more instantly pressing in France, that the Revolution still burns with here and there a jet of angry flame.
The story opens in a secluded clateau, where the Comte de Bois d'Harlay awaits a letter from his only daughter, the Marquise de Livernois, whose marriage four years before had been arranged according to French conventions, and had proved entirely unhappy. From her last novel, Miaw, it is clear that Mrs. Craven does not consider our British, haphazard, way of offering our daughters in the market, more successful than the French plan of private contract arranged by parents, who are sometimes, after a life's experience, not so dazzled by wealth and rank as modern inginues, while they are certainly more senti- mental. The expected letter from M. de Bois d'Harlay's daughter brought the news of her sudden widowhood, and that she was bringing home a weary and disenchanted heart to the house where already sadness seemed of obligation. The sketch of her mother, a grancle dame, who had known the pangs of the emigration, the short-lived triumphs of the restored Bourbons, and the shiftless sulks of the Faubourg St. Germain, is perfectly drawn, however slight. The scorn of M. de Bois d'Harlay for his neighbour, the Vicomte d'Arcy, who had fought under Napoleon—a crime that might have been forgiven, had he not afterwards turned his chciteau into a factory, and diagracea
himself by success—is equally true. The generation that lived in the pre-railroad age has always a kind of Jane Austen interest for us ; and simple and calm as are the scenes of that leisurely time in the opening chapters of Le Valbriant, they gain artistic breadth by the wide horizons of Mrs. Craven's experience. She has seen so much, that she dares to be hopeful of her race; she has looked fairly at its discouragement, and passes on serenely con- fident, and this in itself is very pleasant. One of those incidental remarks, which never are allowed to encumber the story, gives a hint whence comes this optimism. Discussing the ebb and flow of taste, she says :—" The unmistakeable beauty of Nature and that of human souls alone preserves its empire over us. It is not the handiwork of man, and its language, which can never change, addresses itself to what is unchangeable and eternal in us." The book is full of this truest realism, which gives concrete form to what is immortal, and sums up the wide experience of the writer in fair and gracious pictures of humanity. Acknowledging, of course, that there are men such as Madame de Livernois's husband, the author sees what is evil in life as the felisz culpa from which the noblest issues can be secured, the "cloudy porch oft opening on the sun." Not that M. de Livernois makes a good end, but Mrs. Craven's serene confidence in the ultimate triumph of good is un- shaken by individual lapses. This colours her vivid reminiscences of the friends of her youth. The eloquence of Montalembert and the sanctity of Lacordaire have not been fruitless in her eyes, and the words she puts in the months of her personages ex- press her belief that the faith which moved the leaders of the Catholic revival fifty years ago is, notwithstanding present tyrannies of faction, the most vital force towards national pro- gress. So she honours the stirring young life of the present day, and her finest ladies and gentlemen feel its pulses. She is a link between the courtesies of the ancien regime, founded as it was on Christian ideals of social and family life, however sophisticated by Versailles, and the actualitee of the moment. The love of the millowner for the Marquise de Livernois is described with rare insight. The contest of their generosity, when, risking his life for the child of one of his hands, M. d'Arcy is all but permanently blinded, gives opportunity for the hest sort of true romance,—the romance of which unselfish and ennobling love is always the mainspring. Colouring it, and influencing the lives of all in the story, are the social ideas of which Mrs. Craven's nephew, Count Albert de Mun, is an eloquent advocate. Prominent among them is the belief that now, as in the making of Europe, it is the duty of men who are aristocrats in the proper sense to re-establish the weakened laws of the old Christendom ; to replace " fraternity " by brotherhood, and "liberty " by in- dividual freedom, and to distribute happiness in more even shares to those who are outrun and trampled on in the toil of evolution. To " baptise the demoeracy," and give safe direction to the splendid advance of mankind, is the work for modern paladins, and the vision of Gauthier d'Arcy. Our readers must discover how his example and enthusiasm leavened all around him, and the picture of his model mill is drawn not from fancy, but from literal fact. " Patronage," or the science of manu- facturing mastership, is better understood in many French factories than in England, where we have no corresponding word to describe the duties of the employer of labour ; and when so many of us are eager to do solid good, Mrs. Craven's hints ought to find many attentive to them.
Le Volt riant, however, is so essentially French, that much of its charm might be lost to English readers, were it not for its ideals of life that are common to all who have turned their faces towards the light. It is a very perfect and finished sketch of French provincial life. The Bois d'Harlays are real people, clearly cousins of M. Octave Feuillet's De Courteheuses. If the heroine of La Morte had lived and found a D'Arcy, the last words of Aliette might have been those echoed by Lucie de Livernois :— " Joy passes so quickly, that it is scarcely recognised before it disappears ; but sorrows pass too, and how often are they com- panioned by heavenly delights !"
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