BOOKS.
LA. MORTE.* THE ablest French writers have one extraordinary power which hardly any of our own appear to possess,—the power of com- pression. Here is a story which might, we suppose, be easily read in about the time it would take to read a single number of this journal, and which yet paints a picture of the effect of the collapse or complete absence of faith on the constitution of the moral character which seems to us as powerful as it would be possible for any writer of fiction to present. For the story, though it conveys undoubtedly a most impressive lesson, is far too artistic to suggest that it was written to embody that lesson, and not rather to impress on the mind of the public the fall practical significance of faith, or want of faith, among the con- stituent elements of human character, just as it had painted itself on the mind of the writer. It is the dramatic signifi- cance of faith and agnosticism which has occupied him, not the moral lesson, and it is this dramatic significance which he impresses on his readers. M. Fenillet has been possessed throughout with a literary theme, which, truly presented, could not help conveying a great moral; but it is not the moral, we imagine, which led him to paint the picture, bnt the fascination exerted on him by the picture which com- pelled him to present it in all its striking characteristics to the rest of the world.
We have in this story, in the first place, the portrait of a French sceptic of rank and fashion, who is, in his own belief, entirely emancipated from all faith, and who certainly pursues his own selfish ends with as little scruple as any man could who is true to the prejudices of a certain loose code of honour, and who is too proud to misrepresent himself to others. Without believing in any eternal laws of right and wrong, he yet cannot persuade himself to win an advantage by telling a lie, and he cannot suppress his preference for women possessing the virtues to which he makes no sort of pretension for himself. The study of M. Vaudricourt's thoroughly arti- ficial state of mind, compounded as it is of selfish desires and moral prepossessions of which he is not thoroughly aware, prepossessions which, if he came to look steadily at them, he would have regarded as pure prejudices, is very effective. The extremely trivial and worldly motives which make him eager to marry a devout Catholic, whose faith he despises, while he can hardly be said even to have fallen deeply in love with herself, are also very skilfully indicated. Of course, the mar- riage is unhappy. His wife suffers keenly under the whirl of vulgar Parisian excitements, which at once disgust and bewilder her ; and at length, out of mere pity and consideration for her, he consents to leave Paris, and to live in the country. There he quickly grows a victim to ennui, and his wife is compelled to send him for a change to Paris, in order that he may not find his country home insupportably dull. He is, however, recalled by the dangerous illness of his child, and to save her life he has to form an intimacy with a scientific physiologist of extraordinary originality, who has retired into his neigh- bourhood for the purpose of writing the scientific history of the nineteenth century. This physiologist, who saves his child by performing brilliantly the operation of tracheotomy, brings with him to the house a beautiful girl, a ward and cousin, whom he has instructed from her childhood in all his science and all his art, and who has proved a most docile and assiduous learner. Now, M. Tallevant and his ward repre- sent the two principal phases of agnosticism. He represents the benevolent positivist phase, which delights in regarding Nature as working towards some great end, which the intelligence of man may co-operate in achieving. She, though her guardian does not know it, despises from the bottom of her heart this view, and regards the forces of the universe as the antagonists from whom, by her own skilful play, she hopes to win the prizes she most covets for herself,—namely, the effective exercise of her talents, and the gratification of her desires,— and this without paying the full price which the ignorant are compelled to pay for such enjoyments as they obtain. The picture of this scientific enthusiast and his able but wholly un- scrupulous ward, is painted with a few powerful strokes; but the latter, at least, is very vividly portrayed :— "It was, then, according to M. Tallevant, unworthy of a man to renounce every ideal belief because he had lost the Christian ideal.
• La More. Par Octave Fenillet, de nicademie FramOse. Paris : E4vy. It was absolutely necessary for him to attach himself to some ideal belief, if he would not approximate, little by little, to a purely animal life. A man well born who no longer believes in anything, and who resigns himself to it, finds himself yet for a while upheld by the momentum imparted to him by his early education, and by the external decencies of his social position ; bat in reality the sentiment of duty and of moral dignity, resting no longer on any solid founda- tion, grows fainter and fainter in him ; be has no object in life except easy and base enjr.yments ; he thus descends, little by little, beneath his varnish of civilisation to the moral standard of the negro, and in this descent, just in proportion as he grows old, be falls the lower ; even his intellect is depressed and lowered ; he takes no interest in spiritual things, except so far as they exhibit aspects which are insignificant, superficial, and to some extent, materialistic. As regards his reading, he reads only novels or newspapers ; in rela- tion even to the theatre, he loses all taste except for the lower order of pieces,—the spectacles which address themselves almost exclusively to the senses ; is not that the history of the man and the peoples who have lost all trace of an ideal ?"
His own ideal is, however, for him a real force :— "Believe me, my friend," he said, "there is an infinite sweetness in feeling that one has hold of the truth, and that one is walking, so to say, hand in band with the Eternal, because one does one's work with him. It is thus that I live, for my part, in a serenity which has, I may Fay it, something of the paradisiacal. If that serenity is some- times troubled, it is only by the fear that I may not be able to com- plete the work to which I have devoted my existence."
To this address, the man of pleasure, who is perfectly aware that no ideal motive of the kind has any appreciable influence on his own course of life, very naturally answers that since the difficulty is to supply the place of religions which are vanishing away, it seems absolutely hopeless to preach to the human mass, the people, such a philosophical religion as this, of which he himself does not deny the grandeur, but which requires a potent intellectual passion to initiate it ; and Dr. Tallevant answers that it will be enough to convert a chosen few to this religion, if that chosen few can but become sufficiently influential to dominate the crowd, and "to constrain it to its duty either by moral authority or by force." In the meantime, he is quite unaware how stiiking a proof his own household is supplying that an ideal motive of this kind cannot be enforced even on the most intelligent by any exercise of human authority, even though that authority has been exerted for years with every kind of advantage. The ward he is bringing up so carefully, and who shows such aptness in mastering his sciences and his arts, and in using them for her own advantage, is cherishing in her heart the utmost contempt for his moral ideal. The moment she perceives her chance of breaking out of this monotonous network of scientific study and petty philanthropy, she is eager to do so, and is willing to commit secretly the most horrible of crimes, in order to open to herself the life of pleasurable excitement and of sensuous gratification. When her cousin and guardian discovers what she has done, and passionately reproaches her with the noble moral ideal he had impressed on her, she calmly replies :—
" How is it that a mind such as yours has not suggested to itself that I might infer from your doctrines and from our common studies, precepts different from those which you yourself draw from them ? The Tree of Science does not bear the same fruits on all its different soils. You speak to me of rectitude, of justice, of humanity, of honour ? You are surprised that the same theories which have inspired in you these virtues have not inspired them in me ? The explana- tion is nevertheless very simple. You know, as well as I do, that these pretended virtues are in reality assumptions, since they are mere instincts, veritable prejudices, which Nature imposes on us, because she needs them for the conservation and the progress of her work. It pleases you to submit yourself to these instincts, and it does not please me, that is all I hold that it is the duty, the honour of a human' being, to revolt against these servitudes, to shake off these trammels with which Nature, or Clod,—whichever you choose to term it,—loads- and oppresses us in order to make us work in spite of ourselves at an unknown end, at a task which does not concern us. No doubt you have said, and said over and over again, that it was for you not merely a duty, but a joy, to contribute humbly by your industry and your virtues, to I know not what divine work, to I know not what superior and mysterious end towards which the universe is on its march. But, truly, these are pleasures which leave me wholly insensible ; I care little, I assure you, to deny myself, to constrain myself, to suffer all my life, in order to prepare for I know not what humanity of the future, a state of happiness and perfection, in which I shall not participate, in whose festivals I shall have no part, into whose paradise I shall not enter Must I tell you all ? I was ennnied to death. I was entailed by the present, by the past, by the future. The notion of passing my life here, bending over your books or your furnaces, with the prospect of the flnal perfection of the universe for my only distraction and my only comfort, was to me absolutely insupportable ! Such a life may be safficient for a being who is all brain like you ; but for those who have nerves under their skin, blood in their veins, passions in their heart, never ! I am a woman, and have all the aspirations, all the- passions of a woman. They are even with me more potent than with others, because I have neither the superstitions nor the prejudices which, in the case of other people, are able to neutralise them. I dreamed of love, of a life of luxury, of pleasure, of elegance in the midst of the festivals of the world. I felt that I had received from chance all the gifts which would enable me to enjoy such a life in its fullness, and it was necessary for me to renounce them for ever ! To what purpose, then, would have been this independence of mind which I had acquired ? What purpose would all my knowledge serve, if I drew from it no satisfaction for my ambitions, no food for my pas- sions. An opportunity presented itself. I loved this man, and I learned that he loved me, that if he were free, he would marry me. And then, I did—what I did. A crime ! That is a word. What is good and what is evil ? What is true and what is false ? In reality, as you know well, the code of human morality is to-day nothing but a blank page, on which each writes what he chooses, according to his own mind and temperament. There are no cate- chisms left except those of the individual. Mine is that which Nature preaches to me by example. She eliminates with an impassible egoism, that which is inconveniept to her; she suppresses whatever interferes with her end ; she extinguishes the weak to make room for the strong; and it is not to day only that this doctrine is the doctrine of really free and superior minds. They have said in all ages that the good leave us. No; it is the weak who leave us, and they only do their duty ; and when one gives them a little push, after all, that is only what God, too, does. Re read your Darwin."
Such is the powerful reply in which this pupil of the agnostic destroys all the agnostic's noblest hopes for his race. And granted this young lady's nature and education, we really cannot see how, if she fully accepted her guardian's principles, and was not warned by any interior voice that those principles were false, she should have drawn any other con- clusion than she did. Her character is worked out in a very few pages with extraordinary force, and we need hardly say that when she becomes Madame de Vaudricourt, she soon convinces the man of pleasure that whether the agnostic's creed be true or false, it at least makes very unpleasant wives.
The defect of the story is that it only illustrates the moral failure of agnosticism as a discipline for the human race.
The author suggests, what can hardly be true, that it is enough to prove agnosticism helpless, and that this is equivalent to proving some kind of revelation true. Perhaps, however, the story would not be as effective as it is, if it did not thus strictly limit itself. There is no sort of doubt that M. Octave Feuillet has produced a little book of immense power, in which the sketches of character are as vivid as if he had had no moral after-thought in his work.
The title is not very good. It is not really the pions "dead wife" who converts her husband; it is the impious living wife who drives him into a somewhat empty and tardy repentance for his selfish and profligate youth.
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