The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-01-19

Germany is q nation of purity, and France
nation of license. They cannot bring them
selves to hold with firm grip the equally
manifest proposition that Prussia may
now be going as certainly
down the abyss of political immortality,
as France did on the eve of the war; Or,
even if they hold that Germany is doing
wrong by seizing Alsace and Lorraine against
the will of the inhabitants, they will not face
the logical result-that she is doing deed
less heinously bad than the partition of
Poland, and that she merits large measure
of the stern judgment which has followed the
cline of France. They have but one answer
that the French are wicked people. Nor
can it be denied that Mr.. Carlyle has a firm
substratum of truth for the vehement rheto-
ric in which he clothes the counts of the in
dictment. Paris alone would go far to con-
demn whole people. London may be only
gradation less wicked, if indeed it be less
wicked at all; London may be sink of vice
equally gross and equally hideous in its
don is not gilded, or taken under
the wing of wit aud taste, like that of the
French capital. The vice of London is
coarsely vulgar, idiotically insane; it does not
give tone to society, nor has it literature
devoted to the celebration of its own Internal
destinations; men Of letters do not enlist in
what Mr.. Carlyle might Justly call ''the
souls into his service. Mr.. Swinburne has
striven hard no doubt, to erect an English
literature of impurity, based on the best
models Of France; but when the thing was
done in plain English, its vileness, its want
of manliness its imp-iike orgies filed men of
the world with unutterable loathing, which
was only intensified by the plaudits of the
little clique who placed the young poet in the
same rank with Shelley. France on the
fha, hop hoo oF
letters to which the artistic treatment Of
vice is the abiding theme. In no other
country would such a writer as Theophile
Gautier be possible. Here is a man gifted
with wit, charming sentiment, delicate per-
ception of the Intricate machinery of passion,
tenderness of soul, an easy and melodious
eloquence; and all these endowments are en-
ployed to teach, so far as art can teach, that
the aim of art is TO bring back the gilded and
aesthetic license of Greece. One of Gautiers
books, which we do not choose to name, is so
full of subtle analysis, SO enriched with
beauty of expression, and so Internal in its
vlclousneSs, that even a man of the world
might be excused for calmly and deliberately
tearing it to pieces leaf by Leaf for carefully
placing the fragments in the fire, and watch
ing till every fragment of the lazar-like stuff
be turned to ashes. The literature of Eng
land presents no such phenomenon OF
genius welded to satyrlike depra-
v!ty Even Byron, the most hagranU of
our poetic sinners. won the enthu-
siastic homage of the reading mob by
the intensity of his passion, 10y the marvel
lous force with which he gave utterance to
the Philistine craving for freedom from the
shackles of prim civilization, by the inten-
sity with which he reflected the unrest and
the weariness that trouble the meanest souls
by powers that might in noble hands
have been consecrated to noble ends.
The Yileness of Byron has not helped him to
become the fayorite poet of the untutored
young, and of what Mr. Matthew Arnold
would term the unregenerate middle-cass,
but has rather hindered him from reaching
the chief place in the Pantheon of Phiistia
And the moral taint on such poetry as that
of Byron belongs to different genus from
the artistic depravity which casts the
blight of moral leprosy over
the lighter literature of France. The typi-
cally French school has raised vice to the dig
nifty of fine art, has crowned it with poetic
garlands, and chanted its praises with song;
so that if the new gospel has the warrant of
truth, it undoes all the Christian teaching of
the last two thousand years, and sets us
dreariy down once more amid the paganism
of viler and less gifted Greece. France
has been the corrupter of youth. She has
been the evangelist of depravity. Armed
with literature as perfect in form as that of
Athens, she has waged war against that
purity of tone and principle which is the
most distinctive heritage of Christianity, and
in comparison with which all the glorias of
literature, all the graces of art, all the tri-
umphs of our electric telegraph and steam
engine civilization are only so much dust
and ashes
Germany, on the other hand, is not less
specially land of domestic purity than Eng
land itself. The Germans are good husbands,
good wives, good sous and brothers. Much,
it is true, must be raid on the other side.
Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, and some other
German cities are not the most exemplary in
the world. The gambling ''hells" which ex-
listed at Baden Baden Wiesbaden, and some
other German places of fashion, until they
were found intolerable by the stern Lutheran
ism of King William, did shock the English
sense of propriety And amid the established
gods of morality and religion, the German
thinking class Yields the Thorhammer of
revolution more remOrselessly than the most
intrepid of the French iconoclasts. German
thought has given new depth to the French
| instinct for the destruction of the sanctities
and the proprieties. Germany can claim
half the parenthood even of such distinc-
lively French products as positiyism. Ger
many has done a thOusandfold more than
! France to disturb the quiet of orthodox
! England by directly or indirectly sending
across her frontiers a crowd of Goths and
Yisigoths in the shape of essayists and re-
viewers, Colensos, Voyseys, and the apostolic
| band of devout atheists who are guided by
the one orthodox follower of Auguste Comte,
and who find salvation in the commemora-
tion of their grandmothers. All these facts
are sou0wfully admitted by the good apollo
gisis for Bismarckism. But in reply, they