OHNET'S " IRONMASTER." 0 A FRENCH work of fiction, of which
140,000 copies have been sold on the other side of the Channel, which has been successfully dramatised in Paris, and adapted both by Mr. Robert Buchanan and Mr. A. W. Pinero to suit the taste of English playgoers, and which not only gives virtue the ultimate triumph over vice, but presents it. with the roses and raptures as well, must be accounted a remarkable success. It is matter of course, there- fore, that a book which has attained such a success must have certain remarkable qualities. Yet we doubt if one person in ten who make their acquaintance directly with M. Ohnet's Le Maitre des Forges, and not indirectly through the medium of Mr. Buchanan's Lady Clare or Mr. Pinere's The Ironinaster, will say that M. Ohnet is a remarkable writer, judged by Present- day standards. Leaving out of consideration "the Great Un- mentionables " of that modern French fiction of which two parts are absinthe aud one part Paganism, no one will ever dream of comparing M. Ohnet with George Sand or with Balzac,— " George Sand, that," as M. Taine says, "has celebrated one passion ; Balzac, that has celebrated all passions, and has magnified them into sublime monsters more true than the truth." He is not even to be put on a level with M. Daudet,— not the M. Daudet who has condescended to write Sapho, but the M. Daudet who in Names Rountestan has given us "dance and Provencal song and sunburnt mirth," and in The Nabob has proved that be might have been the Dickens of happy and virtuous sub-middle-class life in France had he chosen. No English reader who masters Le Maitre des Forges in the original, instead of in the essentially reliable if not quite perfect transla- tion which Messrs. Vizetelly have published, will place M.
• The Ironota.ter; or, Lose and T.iae. By Georges Ohnet. Translated from be 146th French Rdlion. London : Vizetelly sad Co. 1884.
Ohnet on a level with Mrs. Oliphant, probably not with Mr. Hardy or Mr. M'Carthy, possibly not with Mr. Black.
To what, then, is the success of The Ironinaster to be attri- buted ? In the first place, to the fact that M. Ohnet is mani- festly a consummate playwright. The convent-school jealousy between Claire de Beaulieu and Athenais Moulinet, which leads up to The Iron master, seems but a poor basis for a good story. Yet M. Ohnet's superstructure is undoubtedly ingenious and compact, and you never quite forget this early girlish rivalry in the duel between the wife of the ironmaster and the wife of the heartless lover who has deserted her, to the all but tragic close of which, the plot leads up. But M. Ohnet skilfully transforms Claire and Athena'is into the impersonations of moral loveli- ness and unloveliness in woman. Then M. Ohnet is evidently endowed with two of the best qualities of the playwright who does not depend on mere crude melodramatic effects for success. He can concentrate the attention of his readers or critics on the leading figures of his plot, and he can manage his by-play admirably. In The Ironniaster there is a pretty little love affair between Susanne, the sister of the hero, and Octave, the brother of the heroine. But they never interfere with Claire and Philippe ; their business is to give them sup- port. Even the faithless Duc de Bligny and the French Becky Sharp whom he marries—without Becky's brains, though with an amount of money that Becky never was able to command,— do not appear on the scene too often or trouble us too much. The ground is left perfectly open for the interesting con- flict between the two leading figures,—between insulted affec- tion and a growing passion that has to struggle with an ever-declining pride. In the second place, this story is, even from the English point of view, a wholesome one, and M. Ohnet does not pretend to teach a moral after the peculiar manner of M. Dumas, M. Zola, or M. Angier. His translator, indeed, declares, with a clumsiness which almost degenerates into bathos, that The Ironmaster "chastises the malice which is born of envy, and establishes the folly of that selfish pride which blinds its possessor to all consideration for the commoner clay of humanity. It shows anew how need- ful it is that husbands and wives alike should study each other's character before marriage, and it enforces in convincing lan- guage the oft-repeated lesson that a woman should never trifle with the affection of the man to whom she is mated for life." But M. Ohnet is far too skilful an artist to prattle, or even to insinuate, Richardsonian vice as morality. He merely endows virtue with every grace, including even physical charm, and pits it against selfish and rather vulgar vice. From first to last, the sympathy of the reader is enlisted on the side of the ironmaster and his wife, who, although they are ignorant of the fact, are thoroughly at one; and although the roué Due persecutes Claire, whom, for the most mercenary of motives, lie has jilted, she is never for a moment in danger of anything worse than insolence. Outraged pride and a brain-fever have destroyed whatever affection she may have had for her boy-lover, and besides, she is being gradually subjugated by a passion for the man whom she has married in a moment of pique. If M. Ohnet's story conveys any teaching at all, it is that if you surrender yourself absolutely and unconditionally to all the virtues, all the graces will in turn surrender to you. it is to be hoped that the popularity of The Ironmaster indi- cates that such sound teaching has many more followers on the other side of the Channel than is commonly believed.
Bearing in mind the dictum of the eminent American authority, that in plots there is nothing new under the sun ; remembering also that in fiction, as in real life, people have, before The Ironmaster was written, married in haste to fall in love at leisure, we must yet allow that the central incident in M. Ohnet's story is sufficiently powerful to be essentially fresh. Philippe Derblay, the ironmaster, is himself a character of a kind seldom met with in French fiction, a character, indeed, of the English—or shall we say the Teutonic ? —rather than the Gallic type. He is courageous, sagacious, disinterested, merciful, a worshipper of duty. The love which he cherishes for Claire de Beaulieu is precisely the strong affec- tion which a self-made Englishman who has fought his way into the npper-middle class might feel for a beauty belonging to the caste of Vero de Vere, provided he himself has what Burns terms "a patent of nobility direct from Almighty God." When, indeed, Derblay finds on his marriage day that- Claire has accepted him merely to revenge herself on her cousin, and that an old rival at school may not be able to triumph over her in society, he gives way to an extra- ordinary burst of passion. But he speedily recovers his self- control ; indeed, in the very whirlwind of his indignation, he conceals from Claire the fact that he has not married her for her money, but that she has come to him penniless. It is at this stage that the interest of the story really begins. Derblay having accepted the situation, does his duty as a husband and a man with formal austerity. Claire, cured of her affec- tion for her unworthy cousin, the Due de ]lligny, proceeds with feminine perversity to fall violently in love with her husband. She becomes jealous of her rival Athenais, who, not content with robbing her of her lover, coquets with her husband. Here, it seems to us, M. Ohnet makes a mistake. Claire was too proud a woman to have become actually jealous of Athenals, and too sensible a woman not to see that Derblay gave her no cause for jealousy. M. Ohnet errs also in making Derblay—who is, above all things, magnanimous —too merciless. He declines to forgive Claire long after he must have seen that her old indifference to him had been trans- formed into an overmastering passion. But M. Ohnet is, as we have said, above all things, a playwright, and had he allowed Derblay to open his eyes to facts a little sooner, he would have deprived himself of any excuse for the closing scenes of the story, and Claire's final triumph over her husband's pride by intercepting with her hand the bullet meant by the remorseless De Bligny for his heart. Readers of The Ironanaster will be grateful to M. Ohuet, not only for the story he has given them, but for some of the characters he has introduced them to. In particular, the mother and brother of Claire, a sprightly baroness and her good-natured scientific husband, and a pro- vincial notary of the old school, are so good, that we can only hope that they are not too good to be out of place in a repre- sentation of French life at the present time.
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