BOOKS.
ABOUT'S "STORY OF AN HONEST MAN."*
THERE is a good deal said about the advantages of a better acquaintance with foreign literature; and certainly, to such of our islanders as are educated sufficiently to profit thereby, a critical and thorough acquaintance with other belles lettres than our own might be of vast advantage. But translations that have allowed the spirit of the original to evaporate, and that make no attempt to reproduce any excellences of its form, are worse than useless. Such imperfect work darkens knowledge, and actually hinders our appreciation of the distinctive qualities of other literatures. And it is always hard to give English form to French ideas, for so diverse are the modes of thought of Frenchmen and Englishmen, that it would almost seem as if there were a difference in the make of their brains. The diffi- culty becomes, we are bold to say, well-nigh insurmountable, when a novel of M. About's is to be reproduced, so as to rouse in English minds the sense of that polished style, witty phrase, and literary art, whether in telling a story or in creating a typical personage, which distinguish the author of Tolla and Le Rot des Montagne& And thinking thus, we will not dwell on the particular faults of The Story of an Honest Man. It is altogether unlike the original Boman d'un Brave Homme, notwithstanding a con- scientious use of the dictionary, which here and there has un- kindly betrayed so faithful a votary as the translator. Her power to render About may be gauged by her giving "the gen- tleman citizen" as an equivalent for "le bourgeois gentil- homme," and translating " sur les bras d'un ministre," "into the arms of a minister." Nor has the dictionary always befriended her even in a literal sense, or why should " une botte de digitales, ou un fagot de bruyeres roses," be called "a box of digitalis, or a bunch of wild roses P" A writer so determined to use English as to translate " sapeur pompier " by "sapper fire-brigade" might have been at more pains to render sums of money and measures of length in their English equivalents ; at least, " stereo " of wood need not have been printed" stires," a word which conveys no meaning in either tongue. Yet these are but minor defects, in comparison with the translator's failure to express M. About, even when she contrives to give the literal sense of his words. He is one of that priesthood which is versed in the inner mysteries of the French language. All that he writes is flavoured with a subtle essence of the wit and the traditions of the past. His turns of phrase, his racy idioms, the moulds in which his sarcasms are run, are so many reminders of the great masters who have been his guides and models. His least important works have a charm that is potent almost in proportion as his readers are conversant with the literature of old France, and it is a cruel misrepresentation to put his nams on the title-page of so dull and awkwardly written a novel as The Story of an Honest Man. Whatever the faults of his books, M. About is never dull. He belongs to the elder school of writers who carefully compose a well-ordered sketch of what may be, founded on their knowledge of what is, and whose ob- servation of men and manners does not confine itself to study of disease, mental or physical, but is rather constrained to "dwell with noble forms" by a fine imagination and a sound sympathy. Humour is the happy and frequent accompaniment of stories
written under these conditions, if the writers of them be fairly competent to write novels at all. How seldom there is a gleam of it to brighten the verbose examination of diseased tissue and the analysis of the loathsome which characterise modern French fiction, let readers of Zola, Belot, and their imitators confess. We do not claim for M. About that the subjects of his novels have been particularly well chosen, though the "brave homrne" and his family redeem some former errors in taste and ten.
dency ; but the art with which he makes his puppets dance in such good time is always agreeable. Perhaps, as in some bourr6es and gavottes of the last century, there is almost too strong an appeal to our sense of rhythm in the elaborate figures they perform with such precision, good young men setting to good young women, while the lesser personages perform their various steps ; yet M. About's wit and style suit themselves to such a fault as this. He plays with our credulity by impossible series of events, he violates fact and likelihood with the lightest of light hearts, and his very absurdities appeal to our sense of humour, and we forgive all to so lively a showman.
• The $tory of an Honest Alan. By Edmond About. Tratudated from the French by Bertha Nun. London Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Ittvingtort. Le Boman d'un Brave Homme is as solid a book as any that its author has written, and there is a political and patri- otic passion in it which gives to the story a manliness and realism that set off its merits of style and structure. The fortunes of the Dumont family are related as if M. About were one of them, and it is hard not to believe but that much personal narrative is mingled with the regular business of the plot. Can the author have invented the three generations of Dumouts, each HO strongly marked by the stamp of its epoch, and yet maintaining the characteristics of the family ? The study is in satisfactory antithesis to M. Zola's Rougon Macqnarts, and leaves us hopeful that it is as true to life as it is well painted. Indeed, the careful picture of Courcy, the Touraine town, of its college and its various industries, is so admirable, that we are half-sorry when we have to follow the story of Pierre Burnout's rise in life from a charity boy to a wealthy and cosmopolitan manufacturer of artistic falence. Once he has set his scene and introduced his personages, we feel that the author means to play at hide-and-seek with them more than such excellent creations deserve at his hands. They are hustled through extraordinary circumstances, they are sub- jected to turns of good and bad fortune, they surprise us and are surprised themselves with infinite ingenuity and poeti- cal justice. We know they will always do what is ex- pected of them with neat accuracy and an agreeable turn of wit. But our satisfaction is marred by finding, after the opening chapters, that M. About is more concerned with the type than the individual. Pierre Dumont is one of the new and improved variety of bourgeois. Simonnot represents an obso- lete species. Lutzelmann is a schoolmaster of the latest fashion. Basset is a working-man, who combines all the fidelity of a humble dependant born a hundred years ago with the most splendid gift of making money known to a Californian. The touches of nature by which we should feel ourselves akin to these well-drawn persons are wanting ; yet there is very good material for our British consideration, in the strong family ties, the respect for race among the peasants—more proud of their pedigree, and. with perhaps better cause, than are the nobles— the love of country and the superstitious reverence for law and custom which M. About describes ; links that remain stronger, as it would seem, in provincial France than in provincial Eng- land, and that help to keep the gulf from widening between labour and capital, unlettered virtue and arrogant knowledge.
Of course, M. About could not take his hero through the political difficulties of 1848 without airing his own theories of the best of all possible worlds, which, in spite of his persistent optimism, becomes well-nigh the worst of all possible worlds after the Empire sets in. However much, true to his eighteenth- century models, he loves his Happy Valleys, the author is fairly in earnest in presence of the Napoleon spectre, and forgets his tricks of fiction in the facts of 1870. Fortunately before the Prussian invasion the hero had advanced in his career as an artistic potter by leaps and bounds, and there is no lack of electric light and splendid transformation-scenes in his history. M. About piles up the success, that we may the more admire M. Dumont's patriotism, when he leaves his sprightly wife, his promising young potters, and his factory in full blast, for the lines of Belfort. As part of the novel, the military experiences of the hero might well have been omitted ; but much may be forgiven to a Frenchman who wishes to remind us that brilliant episodes here and there relieved the monotony of French disaster, and no set historical panegyric could do that better than the account by the "brave homme " of Colonel Denfert Rochereau's defence of Belfort, during its seventy-three days' bombardment. On the whole, while we again warn our readers that the translation we have been reviewing is in no way representative of M. About's novel, we recommend them to read the original as a consoling fragment of contemporary biography. His, if a smirking and posturing France, is, at all events, a living and well-mannered France, and not the mass of painted corruption and amorphous death which some of her children pretend to set before us as her portrait. The country in which Pierre Dumont prospered, and which he describes with passionate affection and well- founded respect, is, we like to think, a truer representation of France than those proffered by so many asphalt-bred geniuses who trade on the unbridled curiosity of their readers. It is one to which our boys and girls may be introduced without injury to their morals, and with much gain to their knowledge of French; while their elders may learn from it that in some social and even political respects, France can teach ngland More than one lesson of what are the true paths of progress,.
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