The Press. — London, England, 1858-12-25 00:00:00

•. 1274 THE PRESS, DECEMBER 25, 1858. notorious,—M. Capefigue quietly talks of Louis's piety" as a thing generally admitted and quite above any necessity of qualification : Louis XV. the IMVA, apropos of the Illuminist crotchets of the Count Saint-Germain) was too profoundly religious ever to accept any of these phantasies of belief, which lie outside of the catechism. the first painful birth of the modern r6gime. " The special character of the eighteenth cen " tury," says M. (2apefigue, on the other hand, " is that of a sweet and facile existence, of a " smiling happiness which breathes in all its " creations." France, in that century, had many great names of which she is deservedly proud—names of men who strove nobly, if vainly, to purify the Augean corruption around them, and to whose contem plation every well-constituted mind must turn with exquisite relief; after immersion in the pol luted atmosphere of the administrative and Court history of the times. Let us see in what light Capefigue views some of the most illus trious among those Illustrations of his country the literary roues above mentioned. To these latter " Madame la Marquise de Pompadour" bears pretty well the same relation that the lozenge with an arsenic base does to the lozenge with a plaster of Paris base. Both compounds are poisonous. But, while the latter works by slow steps and through indirect channels, th e former acts at once, and filters its venom straight into " the noble parts " (to use an old anato mical term) of the system. We congratulate the causes advocated by M. Capefigue—we congra tulate the Legitimists in gen..Tal and the Uivrer l in particular—upon their champion ! The Anglomania (be says) had been brought into fashion by the publications of a magistrate of the Bor deaux Parliament, a Lel esprit, a man of dubious and affected erudition, the President Secondat de Montesquieu. He had made his literary debut with a pretentious, cap tiour, and flimsy book, the " Lettres Persanes," in which no institution was respected. This book had won him popularity with the philosophical party ; and, after having philandered with the ➢fuses in the Temple de Guide, he published the " Esprit des Lois," a work extravagantly overrated (deinesuresment lotde), a meteorological almanac on national institutions. The barometrical philosophy— the erudite coucelii of Moutesquieu, had great success in the parliamentary classes. The author of these little phrases, of these petty verses of the Temple de Guide, with his exclusive veneration for English institutions, his theory of the balance and harmony of powers, chimed in per fectly with the new ideas of the Parliament, and justified their ambition and their resistance. The economist school, always full of charlatanism, had got the weak side of thelKing—his interest in the welfare of the people and his rural tastes. It discoursed about nothing but the amelioration of the labouring classes— paraded its great statistical lies about the produce of a field, of eggs, of ears of corn—published the first prisons litutiques, newspapers, journals, fix.—and, by all these expedients, made its way up to the King and Mrite de Pompadour, in order to achieve for itself a magnificent position. Thus, for instance, a young man much patro- nized by Quesnay and by Mine. de Pompadour, a great talker about ameliorations, but surly and headstrong in his opinions, by name Turgot, after having persuaded a3me thousands of labourers to go and die in the marshes of French Guiana, pocketed during eighteen months at Paris 100,000 hares a year as governor of the colony which he had never visited. But, we repeat, to enumerate all the instances in which this redoubted champion of abuses runs full tilt against the recorded and long-weighed decisions of reason and common sense—from his rapturous admiration of la Pompadour's criminal extravagance, down to his curious discovery that the unpopularity of the Jesuits was simply due to their being "in advance of their age "—would be to translate the whole book. 'We cannot, however, refrain from quoting M. Capefigue's account of " the " Pompadour's introduction to the poor Queen. It will serve as a fair specimen of our author's style—a style which strikes us as a pleasing cross between Mr. " Diary " Raikes and the celebrated Jenkyns of the Morning P081:- Hanworth. Originally published in F ' roger, Magazine. London : J. W. Parker and Son. MAIL LINE stories, which it see ms now almostthe universal fashion to republish, have certain characteristics which are nearly sufficient to mark them off as a distinct class of fi c ti on . Li ke ‘serials " on a smaller scale, their chief business is to have something amusing, witty. or terrific in every number ; and the development of the plot and the characters is usually a matter of secondary importance. Hence they are usually rather fatiguing to read through in a collected form ; the interest is disjointed, and eve r y situa tion is lighted up with a sort of artificial glare ; so that their merit in their temporary sh a p e is often in an inverse ratio to that which they show in their permanent one. " Hanworth" differs from most of its class, and especially from those which have hitherto appeared in Fraser. Its periodical appearances there did n o t excite in us any very lively feeling of expectation, and towards the end we found it a somewhat difficult task to identify the characters, or to carry our recollection back to the precise situation occupied by them in each pre ceding number. Perhaps Colonel Melville's dashing stories have a little spoilt our taste for domestic fiction ; or the multiplicity of maga zines and serials, of which it is necessary to be au courant, have palled on a somewhat jaded mental appetite. Really, now-a-days, unless the characters are left on the brink of a precipice, or the eve of a duel, one's interest grows languid before the month comes round again. From whatever cause, we found the successive in stalments of " Hanworth " rather up-hill work. We have heard, indeed, that this is not the gene ral opinion, and that Fraser has been more than usually in demand during the continuance of the story. Certainly there is no accounting for tastes,—unless perhaps the semi-aristocratic sphere through which the narrative moves, and its perfectly unexceptionable character and style, may explain the preference said to be shown for it. We ourselves cannot understand any ones look ing with impatience for a fresh chapter of "Han worth ;" but the most brilliant writers appear bores to some people, and, conversely, the most tedious, like the blue-bottle in Sydney Smith's famous illustration, have their clienti'le of patient and faithful admirers. However, we are quite willing to admit that the tale improves upon being read in a collected form. A strawberry, or an oyster, which would be painfully nasty if cut up and taken piecemeal, may be swallowed whole with much satisfaction ; and perhaps a similar process of simultaneous deglutition may be .ne cessary with certain novels. " Hanworth ' laudably short—less than 300 pages; and through this space the characters are kept up with con sistency and probability. We have nothing to complain of in them except a degree of stiffinesq and tameness which leaves on ones mind the impression of a number of gracetul and well dressed tableaux virana—not of animated human beings in their every-day guise. Not that there is anything at all abnormal in the doings of the Hanworth party—they are probably like hundreds of people who may be met with every day. But, as we have heard it said, they resemble puppets whose joints want oiling. Lord Hanworth himself, in spite of all the author's attempts to make him definite, and in spite of a few sensible speeches and several very good qualities and actions attributed to him, remains vague and shadowy to the last. Edith and Margaret remind us of the blonde and the dark beauty in Mr. Frank Stones picture of " Sympathy." They flush and tremble when Lord Hanworth makes himself too agreeable to the one or not agreeable enough to the o ther: . a slight fleecy misunderstanding perturb s the As a lady of title, the new Marchioness had to be pre sented to the King, to the Queen, to the Princes and Princesses of the Royal Family. She accomplished this duty with perfect propriety and dignity, under the escort of the Princess of Conti, who had been selected for that office by the King. The curtseys were ekganl. The Queen addressed a few kind words to the Marchioness, and even put some gracious questions to her about several of her friends with whom she had been herself acquainted. The Marchioness, in saluting the Queen with marked respect, replied, " Madam, I passionately desire to accomplish all that your Majesty shall command from me for your service." How very gratifying this assurance must have been to her Majesty !—and what serene pleasure those " elegant curtseys " must have given her ! In laying down this book, we have a final re mark to make. Modern French literature con tains much to revolt—much that is glaringly immoral ! But this immorality is at least unmasked, and therefore half-disarmed. Paul de Kock, Balzac, Dumas fi/s, make no pretension whatsoever to be correct, much less religious, men. They speak their opinions boldly and carelessly out, like the young roue one meets in the billiard-room, whose dashing improprie ties are almost too puerile to waken sober indig nation, and are utterly forgotten as soon as the door has closed upon their declaimer. But this grave biography, which claims historic beatifica tion for a notorious adultress—which places reli gion before us as a thing utterly distinct from morality—which gilds with grandiloquent praise a society of which heartlessness, reckless extra vagance, and an ostentatious contempt for every form of purity and virtue, constitute the promi nent characteristics—seems to us far more pro- toundly immoral than the worst productions of And again : Louis XV. had no vulgar notions about death : a Chris. tian philosopher, he contemplated it without turning pale ; a fervent Catholic, he believed in the resurrection of the flesh and the life eternal. Convictions like these do not give to death the same cruel form that it has for the impious. Among the reproaches brought (and unani mously brought) against this model king, that of a passion for the chase, indulged to the notorious detriment and neglect of all State affairs, occu pies a prominent position. Gross and ridiculous prejudice ! The chase, according to M. Cape figue, is one of the most efficient aids to political wisdom. The more a man hunts, the more pro found will his statesmanship become; and in pursuing the stag Louis XV. was merely throw ing himself into that state of mental abstraction which his deeply-felt responsibilities imperiously required : The agitation (says our author) which the chase imparts to the frame, and the leisure it leaves to the mind, were admirably suited to the character of the King, who was profoundly affected by the state of the country. The chase gave him time to reflect, to repress the impetuosity of certain counsels, to wait for fresh intelligence, to beguile his melancholy, and to consult his friends in the closest intimacy. Almost everywhere, in the midst of these vast forests, he had created rendezvous de chasm, vast pavillions where he often supped and slept, and where, amid those grand woods, the council was held. Solitude inspired all minds—just as, in antiquity, the nymph-peopled forests murmured oracles around. We confess that, on reading the above passage— especially the classic allusion to the " nymphs" —the idea crossed our minds that the whole book must be a quiz, and that M. Capefigue's real object in composing it was precisely the reverse of his ostensible one. A mental survey, how ever, of other hicubrations from :the same pen, relieves us from the humiliating suspicion of having played the gobemouche ; and, with re sumed self-respect, we continue our extracts : I consider the reign of Louis XV. (observes M. Cape ligue ) as the last and most fascinating reflex of the esprit gentilhomme. . . . Under Louis XV. the nobility were at the same time brave, chivalrous, and fascinating, as they are represented to us in the pastels of Latour, on the canvas of Boucher, in the battle•pieces of Charles Par rooel. And this enthusiastic admiration for the " chi valresque noblesse " of the day is repeated almost in every page, until we really begin to expect it, as a sort of refrain, at the end of each paragraph. Now, among the qualities comprised in the epi thet " chivalresque," we have always imagined that a high and refined sensitiveness in matters affecting woman's honour—the honour of those women, above all, who are nearest and dearest to us—stands pre-eminent. Here again we have the misfortune to differ from M. Capefigue, as the following extract will plainly show : An historic remark presents itself here. As long as the King addressed himself to ladies of noble birth for his adulterous distractions, the Court around neither complained nor expressed surprise. If any of his liaisons were really scandalous and immoral, his strange love for the four daughters of the illustrious house of Neale was so ; and yet no one was astonished at this. Nay, praise even was accorded to the pious (I) gentleness of Mme. de Mailly, to the elegant and rather forward (ltardie) grace of Mme. de Flavencourt, and, above all, to the courage and pride, so truly French, of the Duchess of ChSteauroux in the midst of war. But everything changes as soon as Louis no longer chooses his amours in the ranks of the high nobility, among ladies of title. Then they begin to accuse him of dissolute morals—of vulgar passions. It is a little bourgeoise who preoccupies now the attention of the King, and the high nobility can neither understand nor forgive him. The above does not require —indeed, scarcely bears—comment. But we cannot refrain from observing that the man who plainly tells us (in his Preface) that " Mme. Pompadour and her " works of art are more to his taste than Mme. " Roland and her pedantic dissertations on po litics and philosophy " cannot be expected to place much value upon female virtue. Were we to extract every illustration this book affords of the peculiar historic method pursued by M. Capefigue, we should render ourselves liable to an action for piracy. A few more of the most glaring, and we have done. History has marked out the eighteenth cen tury as pre-eminently and distinctively the age of scepticism and analysis—the age which wit nessed the last bitter agony of feudalism, and