LA BELLE FRANCE.* Tins volume is already three years old
; but it has gained so much new interest from the events of the last nine months, and breathes so pleasant an air of serenity through the gloom with which it is inevitable that one should at present regard the fortunes of France, that we cannot refrain from drawing attention to it even now, though a great part of France has changed its whole aspect since the book was first published.
The beauty of Madame Parkes-Belloc's sketches of the old cities of France is in great measure due to her own apparently perfect sympathy with the wistful looks which seem to be turned back upon the past by those old cities and provinces brought before
us by her graceful and picturesque descriptions. We learn to pity France as if there were a melancholy spell over her destinies while we read these pages which seem full everywhere of a half- pathetic presage of evils to come,—a presage, not of course, unnatural in any author writing under that reign of Louis Napoleon during which the events of every fresh year were hardly thought of as more than a 'perhaps' before they came, or as more than a reprieve when they had gone, but which, nevertheless, lends a meaning and a truth of colour to these sketches which they hardly possessed before. Madame Parkes-Belloc paints tht better, that she hardly seems to appreciate the sadness of her own tone of feeling. In the very fine bit of English which she gives us as an introduction, she depicts the true life of France as full of local and municipal individuality, which yet has not the strength to assert itself against superficial modern ideas,—although these ideas themselves are rather propagandist fashions than propagandist faiths. She tells us of old glories and beauties destroyed, not because new ideas have seized upon the people who lived amongst these old glories, but because 'after all, one must follow the fashion,' —i.e., because the local spirit has not the energy and self-confidence
to contest the invasion of new notions with which it has so little sympathy. She tells us in many—perhaps in most—of these sketches, of the causeless destruction of the past by a present that has no particular reason for what it does, no zeal and energy of propagandist improvement, but only a certain want of power to resist a wave of modernism that is almost external to itself :—
" Twenty years ago the strong cachet of the Middle Ages yet remained in the French provinces. '93 had torn up the ancient civilization by the roots, but, like a forest tree felled in full leaf, the branches yet continued green, and their ruins still cumbered the mossy soil, so that one might perceive where the stately growth had been. The Revolution of July always appears to me to have been more destructive, because it was pursued to its results with far more calculation. For instance, it was in 1832 that the monumental beauty of Sens was destroyed; and the municipalities under Louis Philippe pulled down and rebuilt, and swept and garnished, in obedience to ideas which told more heavily upon what remained of ancient France, than did the mad violence of the Great Revolution. 1830 took up the broken thread of 1789, and pieced it with its own new skein ; until, in 1848, the whole snapped, as ever, at the weakest part. But the great destructor, from which there is at once no appeal, and, after which, no possibility of restoration, is the spirit of the present age embodied in the actual ruling power. When I walk through the enormous streets and boulevards of New Paris, I feel appalled by the change, and even unable to dispute with it mentally ; for it bears the imprint of an idea which is becoming dominant over Europe, and which, little as I love it, I feel forced to accept with as much good grace as may be ; for it is evidently the condition of the future. For the moment, the individuality of man, as expressed in his dwelling and physical arrange- ments, is gone,—suppressed. The human creature no longer builds for * La Belle France. By Bessie Parkes-Belloc. London : Strahan and`Co. 1868.
himself, decorates for himself; no longer lets loose its fancy, his humour, his notions of the fitting and comfortable. Science and economy—at least economy as regards the facile production of a certain degree of luxury—go hand-in-hand, and lay down his streets and erect his houses."
The fatalism with which France. has too often accepted that aggressive gospel of doing, for the sake of the masses, what does not conduce to the well-being of the separate elements which go to make up the masses,—what we may call the gospel of the plebis- cite, the gospel that the parts must submit to be overridden by the whole,—is perfectly reflected even in Madame Parkes-Belloc's own passive resignation of spirit ; and there is something to our minds almost equally characteristic of the state of France in the healing febrifuge which she finds for the heat and dust of a present with which she feels little sympathy, in the shadow of a mighty past, the secret of whose power has, however, for the time vanished away :—
"A. sense of repose and stability is therefore to be found in the older things, which to some states of mind constitutes their greatest charm. The imagination, which by their aid can travel back into the past, is thereby delivered temporarily from the anxieties and agitations of the present. Deep must be the grief, or profound the mental disquiet, which cannot be soothed by plunging into a completely different set of associa- tions. It is as much as to say that the effort cannot be made. For me there is no uneasiness which would not be at least calmed by such a re- currence to the life of former ages. This is, of course, a mental habit, capable of being cherished or discouraged. A man may dwell in the actual till all calmness disappears from his face, his gestures, and his speech, and he betrays by his restlessness that present interests are all in all ; or he may absorb himself in the past until he becomes a dreaming antiquarian ; or in the abstract and the unseen until he attains the higher forms of metaphysic or mathematic thought ; or, in religion, of the contemplative life. But there is un juste milieu in ordinary nature, and it is certain that a taste for historic study is a great help to mental cheerfulness, and to seeing things in their due proportion. One of the many reasons why a great Gothic church soothes those who go to pray there, is the feeling that it is a universal home ; that the worshippers of to-day are but the descendants and inheritors of those who moved across its pavement in past centuries,—the parents of those who will visit its altars in days to come. Shall we dare to fling ourselves in impatient agony against those mighty walls,—upon that patient floor? Hearts which do not put this feeling clearly to themselves, are yet stilled by its Influence, subdued by its chastening power. The mind and the soul are curiously allied, they are affected by correspondent influences. 'Peace is the proper result of the Christian temper; it is the great kindness which our religion doth us, that it brings us to a settledness of mind and a consistency within ourselves,' and a part of this peace springs not only from a habit of submission to the divine will, but from a habit of think- ing of the individual life as part of the great whole of the Church, whereby the temporal sorrows and struggles are dwarfed in the imagina- tion. Could the historian of the Monks of the West have absorbed himself in personal ambition while wilting that book, or while he was wandering over France in search of the rained foundations of its monasteries ? "
• Surely this power which "the recurrence to the life of former ages" exerts for the calming of the spirit, must depend on the degree in which we find that this life of former ages rested on truths which we are forgetting and have ignored. There can be no healing in this recurrence to the life of former ages, if the strength of former ages was rooted in errors of which we have discovered the utter fallacy. The Positivist who sees in the past, the reign of an illusory theology gradually supplanted by the reign of an equally illusory philosophy, can surely find but little rest in plunging back into the shadow of those grand and universal errors. Nay, can the severe Protestant find much rest of spirit in plunging back into a world of conceptions full of the assumptions he holds most dangerous and corrupting? To the Catholic, no doubt, --and we take it from her book that Madame Parkes-Belloc is "an English Catholic," — there may be rest and peace in returning to the ages when the Catholic faith governed the whole daily routine of life with a completeness with which it is seldom governed now. But then, that is not because there is peace in the past, but because to every one there is peace in realizing the sway of principles which he or she holds to be true. But is not this exactly the source of the weakness of modern France,—that, like the accomplished writer whose book we are noticing, France looks back in imagination to a former age, in which whatever of faith it still has was more fully realized, while she half despairs of reconciling those principles with those of the present age, to the impetus of which she yields with a sort of fatalism that is without sympathy, but also without the courage for resolute opposition ? Throughout these graceful pictures of provincial France we seem to be always reading the same lesson,—the weakness of a beautiful and imaginative country whose faith is half cowed and wholly shaken by a tide of modern ideas which she can neither receive nor resist,—whose women have for the most part their hearts and minds in the past, whose men hardly know where their hearts are, but find their minds almost always at issue with their hearts. This is why Paris and the great cities exercise so vast a sway in the provinces,—that they alone are
utterly and distinctively modern, and have, on the whole, really ceased to yearn after the past at which the provinces still cast back wistful glances. Paris is not thoughtful in her modernism ; she is the reverse of thoughtful, fanatical ; but she is, in this, at least, at one with herself, while provincial France is not. Throughout these sketches Madame Parkes-Belloc perpetually notes and regrets the fatal influence exercised by the Reds of Paris over the provinces.
In the striking account of the old Breton city of Guingamp she tells us :—
" Had much of the old spirit subsisted in the provinces, the towns could' never have been tyrannized over by gangs of wretches sent down from the metropolis in 1793. Rheims was deluged in blood, and the atrocities. committed at Nantes are a bye-word ; and these things were ordered by men who came down from Paris, and sent up their exulting reports to. head-quarters, and who were enabled to work their evil will because the- wholesome local life of each province bad been bound and gagged for a hundred years past. Cetait une suite de cette centralization fatale qui mettait at met encore la France toute entiere a la monde d'une baud& de sacripants,' observes the historian of Oitingamp."
—a remark on which recent events supply a striking comment, as they show a 'reactionary hatred towards Paris which has sprung up in the provinces in consequence of this sense of injurious centralization. But we do not at all believe that mere administra- tive centralization could have led to this moral chasm between Paris and the provinces, were it not that in Paris that faith has become all but extinct which in the provinces is still the dreama and romance of life.
But we must conclude, and we cannot do so without most. warmly recommending these artistic and beautifully written sketches of provincial France. The graceful verses interspersed amongst the prose sketches are not equal to the prose,—being here and there, indeed, very deficient in rhythm,--bet even they have not unfrequently a very great charm ; indeed,' both prose- and verse contain real poetry. Many of these sketches are con- cerned with places to which the last nine months have lent a. most melancholy interest, and are all the more taking, because they gave us a peaceful, tranquil view of cities which have since been deluged in blood. The happy wedding at St. Denis; the patient search for the shrine of an old saint at Tours ; the pictures of Meaux and Rheims, where the Prussians have so long been encamped, as they were in the profound quiet of 1868; the flying sketches of Chartres and Le Mans, where Prince Frederick Charles and Chanzy fought through the bloody months of December and January ; the admirable account of Bourges where Gambetts manufactured his best guns, and on which the Germans seemed always about to pounce, though they never reached it ; these and twenty other carefully-painted pictures of old French cities deriver a new and sad interest from the miserable stories over which we have been poring for so many dreary months. No one can read Madame Parkes-Belloc's pages without a more vivid image of French provincial life, and a more graphic conception of the causes of the apparently strange want of French unity and hope, in the war through which the great nation has so recently passed.
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