BOOKS.

MADAME DE TRACY.* MADAME DE TRACY, Newton Tracy, as she usually signed her name, a descendant of the family of Sir Isaac Newton, was born at Stockport in 1789. Sarah Newton, we learn from M. Ste. Beuve, was seven months old when she was taken to France, and she never left it again. When a girl she was introduced to the cele- brated Marquise De Coigny, the mother-in-law of Marshal Sebes- tiani. At twenty she married a French officer, Colonel Le Tort, commanding the dragoons of the Imperial Guard. He was shot through the heart at the battle of Ligny, a few hours before the battle of Waterloo, leaving a daughter, the Vicomtesse Beuret mentioned by Napoleon in a codicil written on his death-bed at St. Helena. Madame Le Tort was not unnaturally fascinated by the glory of her new country, which she considered as her own. " Je no sais rien," she used to say, "do mon pays paternel ; je suis Anglaise. God bless the Xing I voilb. tout !" (At a later period she spoke with respect of English political life.) A few years after the young widow married another French officer, M. Victor Do Tracy, the son of M. Destutt De Tracy, one of the well- known ideologues, celebrated in France for his commentary on Montesquieu. Thus, as N. Teulet observes, "La descendant° do Newton devint Ia belle-file du alebre commentateur de Montesquieu."

We have stated these few facts as simply as we could. They cannot fail, we think, to awaken the interest of English readers. When lately we drew a parallel between an average French authoress and an average English authoress of modern times, we hardly expected within so short a period that we should have to introduce our readers to a confirmation of our theory designed with almost the rigour of a philosophical experiment. Possibly, of course, Madame De Tracy's lineage may be worth little enough, the fact being of just sufficient interest to fix the attention. But that a girl seven months old, an English girl, and as it turned out a clover girl, should be taken to France and brought up there permanently in the best intellectual cireles,,and leave us the means of judging of the intellectual effect of French life upon her mind, under such circumstances, is one of those rare chances which critics cannot create to test their theories, how- ever much they may hail them when they arise. There is a sort of physical and material treat in the study of such a case not un- like that which the chemist feels when he plunges a bit of metal into a new chemical solution.

It is often pleasant to be able to form some idea of a writer's personality, and of Madame De Tracy's person we are enabled to form a very distinct idea. She was pretty in her youth, very slight and fragile, sprightly, and graceful, " d'une grace legere et piquanto," says M. Ste. Beuve. Madame De Coigny, with whom she travelled in her eighteenth year as a companion, gave her an ermine as her emblem, with the motto, "Douce, blanche, et fine." Add to this, a delicate little foot, that she was an exquisite dancer, and very natty with her hands, a trifle capricious, and, so to speak, clever all over, and we see the little white angel, with a spice of the devil, as clearly as if we were sitting by her side. So much for her personal appearance in youth, when we find her writing an account of a journey, and fretting with witty French petulance over interminable readings of interminable historical works. She next tries her hand at small imitations of English novelettes, very thin, and very French in conception. From this point, however, we jump without note or warning to her notice upon her father-in-law, M. Destutt De Tracy. By this time she must have reached her forty-third year. She has become one of the Parisian celebrities. Her drawing-room is the•centre of attraction of the gauche Constitutionnelk. She detests the republicans, is frankly dynastic, but tempers very decided views with a large and really philosophic spirit of toleration. By this time. too, her mental lines are cast and settled, her character is formed, she has lived on familiar terms with the best intellects of France, studied them practically as guests of her own, and even acquired an influence over them. She has seen life on a large scale, and learnt by practice to measure minds of different stature. With what a firm held she sketches her father-in-law's character, and how naturally alma describes his views! How measured and almost statesmanlike is her tone, with what a clean and delicate pencil she fills in the strokes, how true to herself, and how impartial to him ! She is an ardent Catholic (of this more hereafter), and he . . . . n'avait pas ks foi. Observe the exquisite urbanity and the epigrammatic depth of the following description. She means to * Emais Dicers, Lettres, et Penees de Madame De Trail. London: Trubner.

convey that M. De Tracy was not a believer, that his views were therefore limited, or, to cut the matter short, that he was a Vol- tairian. Later she will just let you see her own views, but at present she is painting not herself, but him: —

"On pent dire qne U. De Tracy a's pas vu (on peut-etre n'a pas voulu voir) toutes lea faces des chosen; male celles qu'il a vues, il lea a sondem jusqu' I leur dernihre limite. 11 n'a pas route s'elever au-dessus de ce gen*/ sarait, a tea youlit voir qua cc gut &aft dans he nature, sans supplier par timagination au difaut d'une observation scrupuleuse. [The italics are ours.] "M. De Tracy etait humilid de croire,il voulait savoir. Pascal dit (Lull flint savoir douter, s'assurer, et se soumettre. U. De Tracy doutait, affirmait, et ne se soumettait pas. D n'eorivait rien pour In popularite, n'estimait nullement ; II dcrivait pour se rendre compte h lui-meme de lui-meme, et ne reconnaissait quo co qu'il avait ddcouvert."

Considering how radically Madame De Tracy disagreed with her father-in-law, and how deeply she was attached to her own views, it is almost impossible to conceive a higher degree of urbanity in epigram coupled with exact appreciation from a hostile pen—hostile, we mean, of course only in a specula- tive, not a personal sense. We can think of only one woman in England who could have written a similar notice —we mean the historian of the Thirty Years' Peace. But then she is intellectually a woman of great powers of mind. Madame De Tracy is only a clever little woman in fine society, with an average intellect, and any one travelling through France might lay. his hand with ease on three or four thousand such women.

But another characteristic of Madame De Tracy is curiously English. She is (behind the scenes, for the moment any one appears she smooths her apron and settles down as if she had never opened a book in her life), behind the scenes, then, she is on per- petual tip-too of self-improvement. Every one must be familiar with a class of female minds in England who, owing to some curi- ously disposed spring of ethical ambition, are for ever pulling them- selves up by the roots to see if they are growing. There is a per- petual "how shall I improve myself now" sortof atmosphere about them. Instead of liking things for what they are, and doing things for their own sakes, they have an inverted eye for over peeping round their own shoulder at their own look under the circumstances. They are like .a man who walks not to go any- where, but to watch the action of his own toes. And as the frog asked the ox, when it puffed itself out, whether it was big enough yet, and he answered brutally, "No," so there is about them a pervading, sometimes prominent, sometimes latent, but never absent, " Look ! look at me now, look at me well, tell me, am I improved, am I better yet, ant I big enough now ?" which invariably suggests the brutal answer, "No, you're just the same, only a little more tiresome than you would be if you were not perpetually looking over your own little shoulder at your own little shadow." We read among other memoranda written in the country, in her fifty-fourth year :— " .Te lis beaucoup de prieres,

J'examine ma conscience,

Jo pease h Ia bent& de Dien,

Jo frequent° lea Eglises. Jo m'efforce de no fairo de poise is personae, Jo no Tema plus avoir d'orgueil. Je prends lea contraridtds sans dire nn mot.

Jo me soumets, je m'humilie."

Excellent things, too, but a plain man after reading them all in a lump feels tempted to wipe his forehead and to bless himself. And all this because she cannot find an ideal priest to fit her fancy, and so she has, she says, to act chap- lain to herself. No sinecure, certainly. She is studying the Fathers, and her whole imagination is swallowed up in ideal priests—" austere, disinterested men, hard taskmasters to them- selves, compassionate towards others." If the clergy would only be like that, she says, it would load the world. Of course it would. Only the experiment having been tried over a scale of a thousand years the result of the experiment is that you cannot get it like that.

The poor little woman had gone down into the country more dead than alive in her fifty-fourth year to pick up her strength, and by way of "improving herself " had plunged into the Fathers. It seems she applied for help to the parish priest, but the good man confessed with simplicity he did not even know their names, but was very fond of Napoleon's battles. That was an honest man decidedly. Her effort to conceal her contempt, gulp down her vanity, and make allowances for the good man with an "apres tout," is very amusing. Presently she is in a little fever of palpitations and delights. She gets a visit from fi e priests—five priests all in a bunch. "Sherry and strawb ry tarts" (of course), " conversation," "politics," " instruc

"gardening," "Fathers of the Church." It is no use trying. She no longer even cares to conceal the intense gratification of her vanity. It bubbles out of her fingers through her pod :—

en co main la visite de cinq cures; je leur ai fait servir des gateaux de fraises at du vin de Xeres. None avons par% jardinage Peres de PEglise, politique, instruction. Je lee a vivement engages a petitionner en muse pour demander l'abolition de resclavage. C'est de Rome maintenant .gue ?IOUS viendra la lumibre. Ce gu'rs dit de Pie IX. est tres-beau,_ et )e sum certaine gue sous son rigne le catho kinne va briller d'un nouvel &kit !"

"Si le dere) voulait s'entendre pour etre austere, desinteresse, dur lui-meme et compatissaut envers lea autres, il menerait le monde? Il a dfd lea femmes pour lui ; at quant a moi, je declare hautement qua lea pretres m'insPirent Is plus vive sympathie. C'est an point gue je regar- derais ccmsnee us bonheur d'avoir an pretre dans atre entiniite:"

Dij2a! The word is really beautiful in its unadorned sim- plicity. We thought "the priests had had the women" much longer. We never remember to have seen such a naive display of polished priestolatry in any equal number of pages as we find in Madame De Tracy's reflections. What is it in the mere notion of a priest which paralyzes a woman's understand- ing? Poets have celebrated holy women, and a man must be a very brute who does not feel touched by genuine female piety and ' sanctity. But the feeling which holiness in a woman inspires - in a man has nothing analogous to the sebacious emotion, the pinguid flutter.of delights with Which even a clever woman looks upon any man with a big stomach swaddled in silk, a bald head, and fat buckles on square shoes. It is the psycholo-. gical problem which puzzles us, for be it distinctly remembered we have no puritan prejudices against a priest as such. "The present reviewer" was brought up in the house of a priest, and looks back to him with respect as a man of commanding intellect and colossal will, and he can think of no greater luck than to possess the friendship of such a man, equally at home in all the philosophical systems of the past and present, and equally tolerant of them all. But the feeling of a woman for a priest is quite another thing, and certainly one of the most curious problems of the day.

But Madame De Tracy with all this—from her childhood, when she was only five years old, she used to "play" at altars and candles, and tells us she loved priests and church millinery from the cradle, and she tells a story of a melancholy and handsome young priest who was kind to her, and made her nosegays of cloves, upon which she runs a tilt, womanlike, at the married priesthood, "Jaime lea cure's, lea croix, lea cloches, lea moines, lea images, lea cha penes, et tone lea saints. Quand lavas cinq an:, je faisais des autels entoure's de poupies qui etaient a la ?nesse, et on m'appelait 'petite paienne' "—with all this Madame De Tracy is not'by any means a bigot. She looks with a sharp but not a jaundided eye at systems of thought opposed to her own. Such a woman in England it is impossible to conceive as a convert. A recent convert in England immediately contracts her circle within the straightest limits of her sect, as if she were doing penance for the errors of all her ancestry to the uttermost collateral branch, and clutches the blanket of her new belief retina her as if she felt how naked she had become of the old one.

How different from Madame De Tracy I She reads Hobbes. "Ma lecture du moment ce sont lea muvres de Hobbes. Ss metaphysique est hardie et originale, fine et profonde." She dis- cusses Kant. On another occasion, when her friends come to her house, there is a grand discussion about all the heresies. "Tons mes =is," she says, "sont Aliens ou Voltairiens, et tons, hormis un soul, semblent disposes h se fake Protestants. Et pourtant Luther, etait un homme grossier et vaniteux ; Calvin, un homme sec et cruel; Henri VIIL,un homme feroce et libertin," &c., &c.

These arguments show the calibre of her intellect clearly enough. Her mind is precise, logical, clear, tender, and imaginative, but she has no power of generalization. She travels intellectually from country to country, giving a clever account of the bushes and houses and immediate landscape, but her frankly reactionary tendency is never qualified by a large grasp of the principles at work in the present. "The past is chiefly good, the present chiefly evil. Let us then go back to the past."

There are many other aspects, however, in which these volumes are really delightful, especially the third. Her wit, her delicacy, her tact, and a certain naiveté and simplicity appear in every page. But what is to us chiefly delightful is her exquisite, pene- trating, and intensely English sense of nature, a minute, living, hedge-row feeling for natural objects—passages which almost suggest the smell of damp English fields and quiet mists.

"II fait aujourd'hui," she writes in 1843, "un de ces jours grisatres oh Is nature est silencieuse, le paysage tome, lea nuages presque im- mobiles' on un mot, un de ces temps modestes oit ton craint de Aire du bruit, de pour de rivailler le vent ou d'aneener

What an exact and living picture in a few slight touches! The pale, liver-coloured, uniform day—the breathlessness of the atmosphere—the clouds as if standing still—the sort of fear lest by making a noise one should awaken the wind or bring out the sun. Or, again, of a broiling French day in July:—

" En cette Liaison la route du Bourbonnais est comma une longue beside de sable, dont la poussiere vous prend aux yeux at vous saute Isla gorge. Dana lea auberges, la soupe est froide at team est chaude ; lea poukts sont vivants et lea poessons sont marts."

There is an exquisite energy in these few touches—in two words she recalls the lively bee-like rapture of the chickens in the broiling sun and the dying agony of the fish.

Her love of birds, and animals, and flowers, and her observa- tion of their characters and her speculations about them in con- nection with her own more general views, are in the highest degree _interesting, fanciful and mystical often, always genuine.

And even apart from .the literary aspects, in which these vol- umes are well worth reading for mere curiosity's sake, they have unquestionably a certain merit and value of their own. There is a singular tone of' intellectual and moral refinement and elevation about them. You feel as you read them that the woman was a lady, and a French lady in the good old sense, that although 'a warm convert (we detest the word "pervert ") herself, she would not have stooped to any of the baseness or treacheries of genuine propagandists, nor would she have sac- rificed the essence of Christianity to its form. Hers was none of the coarse, blundering, criminal natures that flop into crime to promote church millinery. We doubt whether Madame De Tracy would have done evil that good might come. If men, she said, with admirable irony, would spare themselves unneces-

sary baseness, and women the lovers they don't care for, the world would go on all the better. We would complete the apho- rism by adding, "If women would spare themselves unnecessary

baseness, and men the women they don't care for, things would

go on better still." These volumes will certainly be read, and largely read, by English Catholics as the work of a clever and dis- tinguished convert. We doubt, however, if they will do more than

raise a smile on the part of the older Catholic families, who, by the bye, are sorely puzzled and plagued by the neo-Catholics, being di- vided between the feelings of the father in the parable of the pro-

digal and those of the prodigal's brother, between the pride and satisfaction of the one and the " botheration " of the other. On

the whole, it may be said that the neo-Catholics are received into the bosom of the Church, with open arms indeed, and a loud embrace, but with an accompanying whisper in the ear of "There, there, that's enough, now go into a corner and hold your tongue, do.': Madame De Tracy is no doubt an additional ornament to the Catholic Church. But considering that Catholicism boasts. ninety-nine hundredths ofall the distinguished women in history, Madame De Tracy is simply a drop in a bucket.

We -have said nothing of the later contemporary or quasi- contemporary names mentioned in these volumes. The Duchess& d'Aumale, Duo De Choiseul, M. De Is Vieuville, Monseigneur Dupanloup, Madame Adelaide, Louis Philippe, M. Remusat, M.

De Lasteyrie, and many others figure here and there en deshabille. Altogether Madame De Tracy's literary remains are a literary treat, whose long delayed introduction into this country we can only regret.