Le style. See Introduction

Page 8. 1. 20. le publiciste. The writer on politics, distinguished from the ephemeral journalist. We hâve borrowed the word from the French.

Page 11. 1. 5. la Révolution. In the préface Tocqueville writes : — ' L'objet propre de l'ouvrage est de faire comprendre pourquoi cette grande Révolution, qui se préparait en même temps sur presque tout le continent de l'Europe, a éclaté chez nous plutôt qu'ailleurs, pourquoi elle est sortie comme d'ellemême de la société qu'elle allait détruire, et comment enfin l'ancienne monarchie a pu tomber d'une façon si complète et si soudaine.' He had no intention of writing a history of the Révolution in rivalry with his contemporaries Thiers, Michelet, &c, but only a study of its character, and the causes which produced it. His spécial object was to show the connexion of the France of his day with pre-Revolutionary France, the ancien régime. The first volume stopped with the Révolution itself, the continuation would hâve carried the study up to the Empire.

George Eliot.

To enable the student to appreciate M. Scherer's criticism we will give a brief epitome of George Eliot's life and works up to the time when this review was written. It is not dated, but from internai évidence this must hâve been in 1861.

Mary Ann Evans was born in 18 19, the daughter of a carpenter who rose to be land-agent to Mr. Newdigate, and whose strong simple character she drew partly in Adam Bede and partly in Caleb Garth. She was brought up in an atmosphère of somewhat narrow Evangelicanism at home, and at school received the orthodox middle-class éducation of the early Victorian âge.

A close friendshlp that she formed with a liberal-minded family of the name of Bray, residing at Coventry, was the means of introducing her to modem scientific thought, and her first literary work was a completion of the English translation of Strauss' s Life of Jésus (1846). On the death of her father in 1849 sne came to London, and boarded with Dr. Chapman, the publisher and editor of the Westminster Review, of which she became subeditor (1851).

She studied the works of Comte, and was closely allied with the English Positivists, though she never formally joined that body. In 1854 she formed a union with George Henry Lewis, a brilliant littérateur, which lasted till his death in 1878. In 1857 she found her true vocation as a writer of fiction. In that year Amos Barton appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, under the pseudonym of George Eliot. Scènes of Clérical Life followed in . 1858, Adam Bede in 1859, The Mill on the Floss in 1860, and Silas Marner in 1861.

Page 13. 1. 3. le premier romancier. Charles Reade, the author of The Cloister and the Hearth, had said, ' Adam is the finest thing since Shakespeare.'

1. 9. des mœurs anglaises, ' of the English character ' ; but mœurs is rather the habit of mind, Matthew Arnold's ' conduct which is three-fourths of life ' 5 caractère is the image or impress, the resulting disposition. Hence Racine can say ' point de mœurs, point de caractère.' It may be noted that la morale is ' morality ', as in Whewell's Eléments of Morality ; le moral (an untranslatable word, which we hâve consequently borrowed), the effectiveness in moral qualifies of an army, &c.

1. 14. sportsman. A chapter in La vie des mots might be written on the words in this sentence. ' Sport ' is a clipped form of ' disport ' or ' desport ', borrowed from the French se desporter, to carry oneself away from ordinary occupations. It returned to France with the anglomania of horse racing (cf. ' jockey,' ' groom,' ' handicap,' ' steeplechase ') and was recognized by the Académie in 1878. Dandy too is probably French. Cotgrave, 161 1, has ' dandin, a meacock, noddy, ninny '. Blasé is a récent French word, not recognized by Cotgrave. Byron seems to hâve been the first to introduce it into English. For gêne see Trench On Words. Un sans-gêne is a ' cool dog ', a ' free and easy fellow '.

1. 17. les pics des Alpes. It was in 1861 that John Tyndall made the first ascent of the Weisshorn, and about then that Alpine climbing, under the influence of Tyndall, Forbes, Leslie Stephen, &c, became fashionable.

1. 17. le Sahara. Gordon Cumming, the father of Afrîcan nimrods, published Five Tears of a Hunter's Life in tbe Far Interior of South Africa in 1850.

1. 18. des demoiselles, &c. Mrs. Bishop (Miss Isabel Bird) may be named as a signal spécimen of the adventurous lady traveller.

1. 22. la campagne de Sicile. The Garibaldian expédition of 1860. Garibaldi landed at Marsala May 11, and defeated the Neapolitans at Calatafimi May 15 and at Melazzo June 20. On October 20 he saluted Victor Emmanuel as king of Italy. Among his ' thousand heroes ' were several English volunteers. The campaign has been brilliantly narrated in a récent work by G. M. Trevelyan.

1. 23. le genre, this eccentricity, this national peculiarity.

1. 24. le puséisme, the name or misname given to the extremists of the Oxford Movement, from E. B. Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, 1826-82. Newman said of him in 1835, ' He gave us [the Oxford Anglicans] a position and a name.'

1. 25. Je sais : beware of translating ' I know ' with Professor Saintsbury.

1. 29. Essais et Revues. Essays and Reviews, a volume of theological essays, published in 1860. It was a manifesto of the Broad Church party, among whom Jowett was the most distinguished, and three of the contributors were prosecuted for heresy.

Page 14. 1. 3. peindre ses statues. John Gibson (1790-1866), whose tinted Venus was one of the noted features of the International Exhibition of 1851.

1. 4. le préraphaélitisrne. The Pre-Raphaelites was the name assumed by a distinguished band of painters in 1848. Ford Madox Brown and Holman Hunt were the leaders in âge, Dante Gabriel Rossetti the leading spirit, and John Millais ultimately the most distinguished of the school, but Millais departed widely from the original faith. Scherer's judgement of the school is partial and grossly unfair.

1. 6. Byzantins. The Byzantine painters under the Later Empire produced endless replicas of saints and martyrs, gorgeous in colouring but defective in drawing. ' Les types, les attitudes, les expressions même avaient une désolante uniformité.'

Courbet, Gustave (1819-1877), the head of the French realistic school of painting. A French satirist made him say :

Faire vrai, ce n'est rien pour être réaliste,

C'est faire laid qu'il faut ! or, monsieur, s'il vous plaît,

Tout ce que je dessine est horriblement laid.

NOTES. PAGES 1 3~ l6 I4I

1. 19. Il y a de l'intention, ' there is a set purpose, a formulated method, a deliberate aim.' Any page of Macaulay will supply instances of his balanced antithesis. A notable one is the passage in the essay on Warren Hastings, beginning, ' The place was worthy of such a trial.' Ruskin's paradoxical style is well parodied in Mallock's New Republic, where Mr. Herbert desiderates an army of navvies to raze to the ground the smokebegrimed cities of England. Carlyle's jargon, his German compounds, his abstract substantives, and his new coinages, like ' gigmanity ', hardly need illustration.

1. 28. Tout sera bon pour arriver. ' Anything will serve their turn to make a hit,' or ' So long as they score a success they care not how it is donc'

1. 31. les prétentions réformistes. The Yorkshire schools of Nicbolas Nickleby, red tape and imprisonment for debt in Little Dorrit, the High Court of Chancery in Bleak House, and public exécutions in Barnaby Rudge.

1. 32. Kingsley. The founder of what was known as ' muscular Christianity '. For the ' heroic clergyman ' see Two Tears Ago, published in 1857.

Page 15. 1. 7. de la campagne. Her native Warwickshire, where the scène of ail her first novels is laid.

1. 10. sans s'écouter, &c. Unconscious of her own utterance or personality.

1. 16. maestria (accent on the penultimate), the quality of a maestro, especially applied to music.

1. 25. Les hypothèses, &c. Thus a Warwickshire village schoolmaster imposed on the public by declaring that he was the author of Scènes from Clérical Life, the manuscript of which he showed, and that he had sold them to Blackwood for a song.

Page 16. 1. 1. Strauss, a Tubingen prof essor, published Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (the Life of Jésus critically examined) in 1835. He explained away ail the miraculous éléments in the Gospel story as the natural growth of myth.

1. 13. Hayslope, the village where Dinah Morris, the Methodist, preaches.

1. 22. Jane Eyre, published in 1847. Charlotte Brontë wrote under the pseudonym of Currer Bell, and the question of sex was as keenly debated as in the case of George Eliot. M. Scherer, in his enthusiasm for George Eliot, unduly dépréciâtes her predecessor. We may allow that Mr. Rochester and the mad wife in Jane Eyre are melodramatic, but it is monstrous to say that Shirley and Fillette are nothing but replicas. The only one of her works to which the charge can apply is the Prof essor, a rough

draft of Fillette, published posthumously. Against M. Scherer we may set R. H. Hutton's comparison of the two. ' In the depth, force, and thorough naturalness of the human characteristics in the delineation of which she delights, George Eliot is not superior to Miss Brontë, who never fails to give us a distinct measure of the instinctive tenderness, depth of affection, and energy of will of her créations. But in breadth of range George Eliot is far beyond Currer Bell.'

Page 17- L 7. le Moulin. The moins de fini in the MM on the Floss is most apparent in the catastrophe of the flood, which cuts the knot without solving the moral problem.

1. 25. misère. Not ' misery ', but 'destitution ' ; hère 'starvation and cold '.

Page 18. 1. 12. le dialogue. The main line of development of the modem novel is rightly indicated, and Scott undoubtedly was the principal innovator, but the statement needs qualification. There is the novel of action, represented by R. L. Stevenson, of which Scott is no less the literary father, and the psychological novel, of which Henry James may be taken as a type.

1. 37. Hettie: Hetty, the pretty, shallow-minded dairymaid, betrayed in Adam Bede.

Page 19. 11. 1-2. Maggie (Tulliver), the heroine of the MM on the Floss ; Lisbeth, the mother of Adam Bede ; la famille Dodson, Maggie's three aunts, Mrs. Deane, Mrs. Glegg, and Mrs. Pullett, each exhibiting ' the true Dodson spirit ', l'esprit épicier, with idiosyncrasies.

1. 22. redite burlesque, catchword, such as ' He 's tough, ma'am, is J. B.' and ' When found, make a note of,' in Dombey and Son, ' Barkis is willin' ' in David Copperfield.

Page 20. 1. 16. Sancho Pança. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations has eight pages under the heading ' Cervantes ', quite a fourth of which contains Sancho Panza's proverbial philosophy. 1. 29. en dernière analyse, ' in sum and substance.' 1. 30. La philosophie. Not a philosophie system, but a deep sensé of the mystery of life, and an endeavour, in portraying life, to probe the mystery. Thus Shakespeare philosophizes, though none could set him down as Determinist or Free-willist, Stoic, or Epicurean. So Hutton says of George Eliot : ' She can do what neither of them [Scott and Fielding] could do — explain the relation of the broadest and commonest life to the deepest springs of philosophy and science.' George Eliot writes of her own métier : ' My function is that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher — the rousing of the nobler émotions which make

NOTES. PAGES l6-20 143

mankind désire the social right, not the preaching of spécial measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly moved by social sympathy, is not the best judge.'

MlCHELET.

Michelet was the writer pure and simple, the greatest historian of France, if not her greatest writer of history, and the leading facts of his life are the dates of his voluminous works. Born in Paris in 1798, the son of a poor printer, who stinted himself to give the boy a good éducation, he knew as a child what it was to be cold and hungry, and never lost his sympathy with the poor and afHicted. After a brilliant school career, he was appointed Professor of History at the Collège Rollin in 1821, and six years later Maître de Conférences at the École Normale. The grand climacteric of his life was the year 1830. The July Révolution, which placed his friends in power, brought him public office, and, what he valued more, leisure and full opportunity to pursue his researches in the National Archives, where he was installed as chief of the historical department, and it was then that he first conceived his great work, completed thirty-six years later, L'Histoire de France. As he tells us in his usual rhetorical style, ' Dans ces jours mémorables [les jours de juillet] une grande lumière se fit et j'aperçus la France.' In 1838 he was appointed Professor of History at the Collège de France, and his lectureroom was crowded by ail the élite of Paris. By the coup d'Etat he lost his professorship in 1851, and two years later his post at the Archives. He retired first to Nantes, and then to a country house near Genoa, where he continued the composition of his History. The evening of his life was passed in the study of natural history, a work in which he was greatly aided by Mlle Mialaret, a governess of brilliant parts, whom he married en secondes noces. He died at Hyères in 1874.

The first part of his History to the close of Louis XFs reign appeared in six volumes between the years 1833 and 1846. The continuous History was interrupted to write the History of the Frencb Révolution, published 1847-53. This finished, he returned to the mediaeval epoch, and the gap between the two was filled in ten volumes, which appeared between 1855 an^ 1867.

Michelet's collected works amount to fifty volumes, and in this brief sketch we hâve mentioned only the two most important. One other, however, the Précis de l'Histoire Moderne, written while he was a lecturer at the École Normale, must be mentioned both as showing how early his conception of history had been formed and because it revolutionized the teaching of history in

French schools. Previous manuals had consistée! of chronological tables, with dry summaries of reigns and periods. Michelet, in the préface, gives it as his aim to represent epochs, not by abstract expressions, but by characteristic facts, which will impress themselves on the imagination and be remembered by the young reader. This aim he expressed later as ' une résurrection de la vie intégrale du passé.'

Of La Mer, the work that stands at the head of Scherer's article, little need be said. It served merely as a peg on which to hang a gênerai critique. For a fuller account of Michelet, the édition of La Mer, by William Robertson, in this séries should be consulted. It forms one of a group of works on natural history, written in collaboration with his wife — L'Oiseau (1856), L'Insecte (1857), La Mer (1861), La Montagne (1868). As contributions to natural science they are worthless, not even abreast of the best science of the day, but they show the same intense love of nature that inspired Wordsworth, the same power of interpreting her various moods and faces, the life of beasts and birds and creeping things and plants, that in diverse manners animâtes the pages of Thoreau's Walden, of Richard Jefferies' Gamekeeper, of Kipling's Jungle Book. As spécimens of rhythmical French prose they take the highest rank, and Taine in a review of L'Oiseau goes so far as to say of him, ' Sa prose, pour l'art et le génie, vaut leur vers ' [the poetry of Musset, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo]. This particular vein, what we may call the poetizing of animal life, has since been successfully worked by Maeterlinck in L'Abeille.

Page 22. 1. 6. gorges chaudes. Donner gorge chaude is a term of falconry, ' to feed a hawk on Eve méat or flesh still warm ' ; so faire gorge chaude de quelqu'un is exactly our English ' to roast.'

1. 17. // va au-devant de, ' he lays himself open to,' ' he courts.'

1. 19. la malice. The French word keeps more closely to the meaning of the Latin malitia = ' chicanery' or 'légal quibbling,' and does not necessarily imply any spite, like the English ' malice '. ' Chafï ' is too colloquial, but ' banter ', or the old-fashioned ' quizzing ', will express it.

Page 23. 1. 14. Buffon, George Louis Leclerc (1707-1788). His Histoire Naturelle was begun in 1749 and continued till his death. ' He envisaged nature with a tranquil and comprehensive gaze, and with something of a poet's imagination.' — Dowden. In style he is the antithesis of Michelet — grave, ornate, classical — and his descriptions of familiar animais are models of periodic French prose.