BOOKS.

" ANDALOUSIE ET PORTUGAL."*

FEW people are probably aware that the most brilliant French female writer, next to George Sand, of the last half-century is the Countess Agenor de Gasparin. And yet how strange, how

paradoxical, is the contrast ! The woman whose stormy life had made shipwreck, so far as the sexual relations are concerned, of the moral law, the friend, or more than the friend, of social and moral revolutionists, writes in a style of the purest classical grace. She has probably enriched the French dictionary with more words than any other author, yet none—or scarcely any— of them are coins of her own mintage; rather pearls which she has rescued from being trodden under foot, disdained jewels of the peasant. But the style of the devout Christian lady whose

husband is her second self is abrupt, passionate, audacious often in its neologism, seldom a model, frequently a marvel. The one paints Nature, touch by touch, so delicately, that it grows by degrees into self-luminous beauty ; the other flashes upon it a light so vivid, that the scene bursts upon us in sudden splendour.

Compare these two pictures, the former, from George Sand, of the neighbourhood of Cr6vant, in the Berry ; the latter, from the work under review, of a pass in Southern Spain :-

"It was an oasis of granite and greenness, a labyrinth where all was a refuge and a mystery. Everywhere big, rounded blocks, either coming out of the earth or climbing on one another like rolled stones, small, hollow lanes, all uneven, where narrow carts had much ado to pass along, others smaller still, where they could pass no longer, and which sank into the Bands, crossed by running waters in which one might without sinking walk. Over all this a splendid vegetation. Enormous chestnut-trees on all the hills, in the bottoms, thick bushes, wild pear-trees covered with fruit, woodbines all in flower, honied; and junipers as big as trees, running roots which made bridges over the sands which bad given way, or which dragged themselves along like monstrous snakes."—G. BAND, Nation.

• Andalousis Portugal. Par PAateur des "Horizons Pro3hains." Paris: Calms= Levy. 1880. "And then the col suddenly discovered itself ; the haunch of the last peak is in sunlight, and here we are, at one fling, carried into fall heroic symphony ! All the summits, all the create, all the shelving planes before us go on to end in the sea. These, their profile cut out in the transparent air, rush to it with one precipitate bound. Others meet the blue abysses with aoftneases of outline, bathed in and still further softened by I know not what vaporous fluidity. We have two Continents stretched at our feet ; Europe, Africa ; the Mediter- ranean, the ocean almost. The mountain elopes lead one's gaze into these lowlands steeped in light. The prospect swims in the azure. It is immutable. And yet the vibrations, the radiance, this prodigious brilliancy of colours, the limpidness of the atmosphere, idealise the view so as to carry it off, so to speak, into a higher region. One would say that the picture is about to detach itself from the earth, to rise, to float higher, higher still, and vanish into the ether."

The story of the work is a somewhat singular one. The travels which it describes took place in 1867; the book was in the press when the Franco-German war broke out ; then part of the MS. was lost during the Commune, and had to be restored from the author's notes. Since then, indeed, the writer's husband, the excellent Count Agenor de Gasparin, to whom many of the letters appear to be addressed, but who seems to have been of the party for a good part of the way, has gone to his rest, so that we have in the work before us the last literary outcome of the writer's earthly happiness. The narrative, between the departure from Madrid on April 14th, to the quit- ting Oporto on May 25th, covers the season during which the Iberian countries, before their fiery summer sun has quite burnt half the land brown, display a marvellous loveliness, and when their most rugged mountains, from every ledge that can husband a few inches of soil, burst forth into tufts of many-coloured flowers. And no traveller has ever felt more fully, expressed more vividly, than Madame de Gasparin, the fascinations of such a nature. The tour comprised Cordova, Seville, Malaga, Grenada ; an attempted ride of some forty-five miles to Gibraltar, which ended half-way in a voyage by steamer ; an excursion to Tangier ; a further ride from San Roque to Vejer, Cadiz, Lisbon and its environs, Coimbra, Oporto. Nothing much out of the way, it will be seen, and yet apart from some little super- fluity of historical recollections, which the experienced reader will easily skip, the freshness of the book is throughout entrancing.

Perhaps the greatest charm of Madame de Gasparin's writing is that she is too thoroughly Christian not to be absolutely human. No one, for instance, has ever rendered with a bolder

touch the fascination of gitano dancing. Though she may be entirely innocent of the special lore of a Borrow or a Leland, neither of them has ever depicted the Rommany with a more thorough friendliness. A dozen splendid pages on the subject conclude with the following alto rilievo of a new-married gipsy

Couple :—

"Enfolded in each other's arms, their beads bent toward each other ; they were radiant with the most splendid love. The man was high of brow ; his thick hair waved in mighty locks ; his black eye- brows met ; his form, supple and firm, uprose in all the grace and the energy of its spring-tide vigour. Fresher than a May morning, Rosita, the bride of yesterday, looked at us, then looked at her beloved, sheltering herself as it were under his wing. Their loose flowing hair mingled together. They had that beaming smile of youthful felicity, shadeless, cloudless, saddened by no yesterday, fearing no to-morrow. It was the gitano Adam, the gitano Eve, at the dawn of the first day. The same san shone in the skies, the same tenderness made their hearts to beat, the same purity enwrapped them in light."

As a contrast, take the following extracts from the description of a visit to the harem of a Moorish Pasha, which it is painful not to be able to give at full length :-

" At the end, under the horseshoe arch, of which the lacework cuts the wall, ure spread cushions piled up tier by tier. There sit the queens of this place, in the full aband ot of home. As we approach, one of them, a mighty, colossal, fearful mass of flesh, attempts a few un- certain steps, and unable to go beyond these, leans against the rise of the arch. The shawls, folded and refolded around her overflowing amplitude, do not suoeeed in restraining its expansion ; the arms, bare, encircled with armlets, are like pillars; the breast, unspeakable, hangs to mid-body ; the face, that of a Hottentot, has high cheek bones, thick lips, a tattooed chin ; some scarf, cashmere or silk, is twisted on the hair, flattened in long bands ; a waistband of scarlet morocco, embroidered with gold thread, encircles and restrains as it can this living mountain. Propped against her wall, the Pasha's favourite (for she it is) sees us coming to her, mean objects that we are ; the disdainful curl of her lip reveals to us clearly the nature of her im- pression. A second houri of the hippopotamus order, heaps herself up on the mattresses at the end The human form has dis- appeared ; you may seek in vain for one pore line, one profile, your eyes meet nothing but avalanches of obesity ; with savage physiognomies against which year goodwill goes and breaks its nose Oar sultanas all come from ME quinez. There it is that these beauties are manufactured. When they stir, they have the gait of elephants ill- poised ; but they scarcely do stir, leaving to their slaves the care of

moving. Their costume defies analysis. I can see in them neither petticoat, nor tunic, nor pantaloon, nor jacket, nor sleeves, nor anything that has a name. Pieces of cashmere or of silk go from hence, start from thence, twist together by chance, and the whole forms a big block farrowed with big folds ; make what you can of it."

It is always a mistake to visit Portugal after Spain. Madame de Gasparin, though she is struck as soon as she has passed the frontier with the superior industry of the Portuguese agricul- turist, finds Lisbon modern and without character, and the people the same. " I know not what vulgarity of physiognomy and habit has taken the place of the grand, regal air of the Spaniards. Assuredly the Portuguese belong to as good a house, but one would say that they were their neighbour's farmers." By degrees, however, she is able to judge the smaller country from its own point of view. She notes not only the absence of anything resembling the Spanish despoblados (deserts), but that, in addition to numerous villages, isolated dwellings are scattered more or less everywhere, testifying to general security and to the well-being of the peasant. The students of Coimbra University are "noble figures, which one might think detached from some canvas by Velasquez." Even the peasant's cape of dried reeds is "not devoid of nobleness or of beauty. When one sees advancing with majestic tread, his brown face half- hidden beneath the black beaver, this peasant, the king of the mountain, made larger by the stiffness of his monumental toga, I know not what visions of primitive razes pass before your eyes." Oporto is " our last enchantment :"—

" Oar hill—Villanova da Gaya—descends luxuriant as far as the Douro. Thither it goes, heavy with a fleece of orchards and meadows ; the slopes hollow themselves out into valleys, swell into shoulders, clad in orange-trees, dressed with grass, flowering with gardens. Here and there some dwelling shows a bit of frontage or of roof. The monumental cellars of the English—gulfs which absorb all the wine of the country—stretch out their backs towards the river. That river, the Douro, a road of gold set on fire by the setting sun, curves to each promontory, forgets itself at each bay. Opposite, scattered on the heights, spread upon the create, hanging from the rocks, Oporto—laughing, variegated, a fairy sight—displays herself with incredible audacities of colour ; imposing, fantastic, her tower of the Clerigos planted like a lighthouse on the sharpest pinnacle of the rock ; her churches, her CA dungeons and turrets, flung at every plane, upon every height !"

It would be painful to criticise where so much is admirable and delightful ; but considering that the work has reached its fourth edition, one cannot but feel surprised that throughout the earlier portion such a barbarism as carroferril (for ferrocarril) should have remained uncorrected.