Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/678

672 We pass on to the novel proper, whose mission professes to be to paint nature, whether in the novel of recent or contemporary history, the controversial novel, the indignation novel, the religious novel, the descriptive novel, the novel of common life, with or without a purpose, moral or immoral.

By novels of recent history we mean those written without a sense of archaism, though not always concerning the writer's own generation. "Waverley" and "Rob Roy" were such to Scott, who had actually seen the manners and had gleaned the traditions from eye-witnesses. Thackeray's "Esmond" is the result of a careful study of language and manners, but "The Bride of Lammermuir" came as naturally to Scott as if the Master had been his next-door neighbour. Thus we class the many stories of the times of the first French Revolution, past, indeed, but into the perfect, rather than the pluperfect tense. If we represent French people with the same amount of truth as they show in delineating us English, we must afford them a good deal of amusement, for our authors have for many years been fond of dealing with the subject. Henry Kingsley's "Mademoiselle Mathilde" gives us scenes we cannot forget—the sack of the asylum, the mutiny at Nancy, and the noyade at Nantes, with the noble old priest standing, Gospel in hand, to the last, and dying with the words on his tongue: "Old things have passed away, all things have become new!" The beauty of the book is more in its isolated scenes than in the whole, and it is hard to forgive the having deprived a real person like Adèle of her heroism, and made her selfish and foolish to suit the purposes of the story. Sarah Tytler's "Citoyenne Jacqueline" deals cleverly with some aspects of the time. The young peasant-deputy, Joaquille, made into a dandy by his Paris life, is a good portrait, and there is a picture of the interior of the prisons, perfectly borne out by the memoirs of the time, but somehow there is a sense that the book is written from the outside.

"On the Edge of the Storm " depicts the earlier days of the Revolution as seen in the country château, sacked by the neighboring townspeople. This is, however, more a study of a few characters than a real picture of the Revolution, such as the same author has given us in the "Atelier du Lys" evidently the result of many years' study and reflection and a wonderfully intimate knowledge of French character. The author's forte is in quaint old ladies full of character, and Mademoiselle de St. Aignan is a wonderfully clever picture of the lively woman, taking up the Revolution half as fashion, half from native good sense, and yet as exclusively prejudiced as ever on the point of birth and breeding, forgiving everything to De Pelven, the villain (and a consummate villain he is too), because he cannot help being a well-born, well-bred, agreeable man. Then there is the really noble and pathetic figure of the Swiss, Balmat, who has sacrificed everything to study painting at Paris under David, and lives on through the Reign of Terror, pure, innocent, simple, and devoted to his art. He is no colorist, nor can he rise to the hard, rigid, classical style of David. He can only achieve a modest, half-despised success in his own line of landscape and still life, and even that comes too late to save him from dying of his privations after having been the good genius of the book. There is also a beautiful sketch of a priest, who has consented for a while to fly, but returns to do his duty among his flock, suffers agonies from his timidity as long as he is at large, but when taken at last rejoices, and is calm and resolute as well as happy.

The atelier which gives the book its name is a studio within the Louvre which, was, during the republic, we here find, divided among artists and their pupils, and where David worked according to his notions of high classic art, and his pupils raved about him, and walked about in Greek costume. We have in these volumes gained an accurate picture of several phases of that strange shifting scene, and the plot on which the tale is constructed is an interesting one, in full accordance with the time.

Yet we think it a pity that there is so much resemblance to the plot of "Denise," where again we have a marriage and a separation immediately after, the young couple only coming to an understanding at the end. "Denise" is, however, a descriptive, not an historical romance, and has many fresh and charming pictures of the country about Hyères.

Description and history are both united in "Mademoiselle Mori," which has come to be a handbook for sight-seers in Rome, and will remain a brilliant record of various aspects of life at Rome in the year of revolutions, when hope rose high and was quashed by French intervention. All these three books contain work of a very high order, of a kind of miniature detail and finish, studied and truthful in every