T.A.INE'S JOURNEYS THROUGH FRANCE.* Tins very pleasant volume is the

outcome of notes taken by the late Monsieur Taine in the course of journeys through France made in three successive years when the writer was acting as examiner of candidates for the military school of Saint Cyr. For some reason, which is not explained, the anonymous editor does not specify the precise dates of the notes ; he says the reader must do that for himself. But facts mentioned in the course of the preface make it plain that they belong to a period antecedent to 1866.. And so we may accept the book as a picture of provincial France thirty years ago,—that is to say, before the Franco-German War and the downfall of the Empire. It is a volume full of charm if we consider it only as a series of delicate and vivid studies of French scenery. It abounds in delightful little pictures of country towns, quiet river districts, and bold seaboards. But that which makes it most interesting is not the picturesque handling of things external so much as the running accom- paniment of acute observation upon social conditions and characteristics. 'Thine declared himself an aristocrat in social tastes, and admitted that he was inclined to look at the world of modern France from a too uniformly pessimistic point of view ; and it is fair to France and democracies in general, as well as to Monsieur Taine himself, to bear these confessions in mind, before giving ourselves up to the influence of his lamentations over the narrowness, the dullness, the monotony, and the mediocrity of life and character in a country flourish- ing under democratic institutions. He comes across "a con- siderable number of peasants and townsfolk at Le Mans, Noyen, Sable, and other places," and they all deepen his impression "that France is organised on behalf of these classes; and it is a melancholy result" :—

"A community is like a large garden ; it is planned for peaches and oranges, or for carrots and cabbages. Our garden is planned entirely for cabbages and carrots. The ideal is that a peasant may eat meat, and that my shoemaker, having made up his pile to three thousand francs a year, may send his son to the Law School. But men who distinguish themselves never rise to eminence. The utmost that they get is a cross, a modest compe- tence; their income just prevents them from starving. Colonel L., who entered the Polytechnic at sixteen, and left it second on the list, has served forty-four years, and has a pension of four thousand francs. Imagine such a case in England !"

We certainly cannot imagine such a case in England. But then the English Colonel would have come from a different class from that of the French Colonel, to whom a pension of four thousand francs means not only a sufficiency according to habits of his kind, but a position of much greater social the

• Journeys through France. By H. Taine. London: T. Fieher Unwin.

dignity than that to which he was born. However, our sym- pathies are, on the whole, much in accord with Taine's objec- tions to the country "planned for cabbages and carrots." We appreciate the rights of the humbler vegetables to grow, but

are sorry to see them crowding out the peaches and oranges.

It is good that the peasant should eat meat and the shoe- maker make his modest pile and send his son to the Law School. But when a country is entirely populated by people who are engaged either in making or administering modest piles, there is danger that the more liberal virtues and inspiring ideals of human nature will drop out ; and this, when it happens, is a national misfortune much greater than

the individual misfortune of having to live on a niggardly pension after forty-four years of distinguished military service. According to Taine, one virtue that had disappeared from the provincial town life of France thirty years ago was hospitality. Upon this point he had some interesting con- versation with an American Colonel whom he met at the

foundry at Ruelle, where some of the better results of the democratic system were to be observed :—

"I noted a few interesting facts. The workmen earn from twenty-six to fifty sous a day; half of them have accumulated some property, from fifteen to fifty thousand francs, perhaps a little carriage, but generally a house. An American Colonel who was visiting the place said to me: 'That is the best of France; they are better off than their fellows in any other country. Above all, they do not dream of leaving the ranks."

Upon which Taine remarks :—

"It is the southern aristocratic type all over ; and he is right. These people have acquired their ideal since the Revolution—a patch of land. Their ambition does not rise beyond it ; an occasional good dinner, and no very heavy taxes. France is made for them."

But then they come to the reverse side of the picture,—the life of the townspeople shut off from the world by the con- tented enjoyment of narrow means :—" Their life has no amplitude, no connecting links. You might compare them to so many little jars of stagnant water. No one is in full evi- dence." This comparison of the contented bourgeois to a little jar of stagnant water is delightful; it makes one realise the hopeless dulness of the situation so completely,—the deadlock of content, with no stimulating springs of ambition, emulation, no impulse of generous sympathy, not even the pressure of uncomfortable poverty, to cause an overflow and a mingling of the waters :—

"The Colonel [it is still the American Colonel] says that our manners here are peculiar to ourselves. Frenchmen's doors are closed to foreigners, except for a few compulsory receptions of persons high in office. What a contrast to English and American hospitality! In the United States you bring a letter of introduction to a single person, and before the day is over you receive a score of visiting cards; the American has been exhorting his friends to see you, and already twenty hospitable homes are open to you. 'All we know of France is Paris,' says the Colonel ; and that is true. Even at Paris we draw the line at verbal politeness. There is half-an-hour's pleasant conversation, and that is all. Recep- tions are impossible ; life is too full of occupation, our houses are too small, and our manner of living too restricted. At the utmost we take our guest to a restaurant; we mistrust ourselves, and lock up our minds. Hospitality is an aristocratic virtue."

This declaration that hospitality in an aristocratic virtue has a

ring of naive satire, coming as it does in the summing up of a conversation between an American and a Frenchman. But after all America, though democratic in its institutions, is as far as possible from having realised the democratic ideal of equality. An aristocracy of wealth may be in some respects a vulgar parody of the true aristocratic ideal, but it is one that preserves at least the ancient principle of inequality ; and not

only preserves it, but tempers it, by making hospitality and other forms of generous social exchange possible.

Again and again Taine returns to the same theme, ringing,

however, many instructive variations upon it. Here is a passage suggested by a visit to Rheims :— " The prevailing characteristic of French provincial life, such as our constitution makes it, is that men have no occupation. They begin with a keen scramble, and then grow torpid. It is a sort of animal hybernation. France is, and will continue to be, a democracy, impelled by men who write, and controlled by officials. The influence of men of understanding is transient, and only skin- deep, for want of a stable proprietary class. Rural landowners have nothing to do but to look after their own possessions. Some few have an outlet in the Society of St. Vincent de Paul ; others lend books through the village libraries, and visit the schools. But they are not men of action; they have no true initiative. They fade out of sight, grow morose, and complain that the Govern- ment suppresses them ; that they have nothing in which they can take a part, either individually or in association. They can- not start a new sect, or a political agitation. The sanction of the State was needed before the Society of St. Vincent de Paul could be established, and it is purely charitable, with no other qualifi- cation than that of being a Catholic communicant. The effect of provincial life is to attenuate the individual, to exhaust his faculties in little whims and trifling duties ; for women, cookery, domestic arrangements, the kitchen-garden, the prevention of waste, the tending of flowers the making of artificial flowers, crucifixes and boxes, paying caks. and gossiping like a revolving wheel, attending church and telling their beads ; for men, the cafe, the club, the dinner of many courses. The main point is to kill time, whether your calling is to be a magistrate, to play cup and ball, or to whip a trout-stream. It is vocation enough to manage your property and husband your estate ; you become a slave to your house or to your garden, and indulge yourself with a game of dominoes or a glass of beer at the café."

Another aspect of provincial France upon which Taine founded many of his carnets, de vogage was the influence of clericalism. Clericalism and Liberalism — the borne Liberalism of democratic ideals and the formal religiousness inculcated by a sensual and unimaginative official hierarchy— he recognised as the two powers holding the life of France in a drill equipoise of mediocrity. But he recognised also that the presence of a religion of lively faith would have introduced a finer spirit into the life of the provinces :—

" Religion owes much of its power in the country to the fact of its being an occupation, a mechanical exercise which gets through a certain number of hours ; and the power of the clergy consists in their being a class of officials ; as for mysticism, it is for a small number of sickly or select souls, one in thirty at the outside."

And again :—

" It is a special characteristic of the Church in France that it is a temporal institution and a machinery of government. The religious sentiment properly so-called, the moral, mystic, artistic feeling, such as one sees in Germany, in Italy, and in England, is almost non-existent, and at best spasmodic."

But after all the book is not all carping. Though Monsieur Taine, travelling from busy, feverish Paris through the stag- nant provinces, found much to vex his cultivated imagina- tion, he found also much to fill him with aspirations after a life externally identical with that of the retired bourgeois and affluent peasant whose narrowness irritated him. Douai, in particular, which he visited three times, filled him with the desire to pitch his tent there, and realise an ideal existence of which the details are those of a picture painted on the spot :— " A house of one's own, a house of glazed bricks It should have wide windows, looking out on a line of poplars, and a stream close by, with well-gravelled banks, where one might walk every day at five in the afternoon. A nice, good-complexioned wife, not too lean, placid and shapely, unfolding like a tulip in a flower-pot, and never disturbing my calm. Servants should wait on us, without any fuss, punctual to a minute. They should not be scolded, they would never rob one ; they should have plenty to eat, go to bed at nine, be quite contented with their 10t. The master, too, should go to bed at nine, have a clean shirt every day, a little green carriage, a sanded cellar, full of old Burgundy ; he should entertain his friends ; hffi house and wearing linen should be got up to perfection ; well-cut transparent wine-glasses, with fine stems, and of good patterns. soft-toned china and bright earthenware, should make my table shine. We should not pine for witty conversation ; the dinner should be so good that it would be pleasure enough simply to eat it."

It is a very pretty picture of a contented life of retirement, but as Monsieur Taine would have been very well aware, its effect in the book is one of gentle irony. The friends enter- tained at that dainty table where the fare was so good that the host forgot to pine for witty conversation, would perhaps, if they happened to be brilliant literary men from Paris travelling on Government employment, find it all irritatingly dull, sleepy, and monotonous, and might not impossibly record in their notebooks just such criticism as Taine him- self makes upon the menage of the old friend he called on at Douai, whose wife received him in the coloured apron in which she had been cooking in the kitchen, and explained the situation thus :— " I live my life indoors. My husband scolds me for it, but I tell him that he likes his food well cooked. He wants me to go into society, but I have been nowhere for three years. It fatigues me ; and there is so much to do in a house with two children. . . . . . Oh, he shall not go to Paris ; I put down my foot against that. We should be too uncomfortable there ; we are going to stay where we are."