Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/679

Rh part. Almost every character is either an individual portrait or the type of a class, and perhaps the very elaboration prevents individual figures from standing out as prominently as perfect art would require.

The Franco-German war has its share already of tales. "The Parisians," unhappily unfinished, is in Lord Lytton's best style of what may be called representative writing. Every character stands for a class. There is the proud, honorable, narrow Breton noble, dipped in Paris society, and getting soiled by its vices, but not irremediably; there are his two kinsmen, one the true, bright, gay, brave French noble of the old kind, the other the saintly and gallant "son of the crusaders," of the Montalembert pattern; there is the spoilt, sensual, sentimental young poet, a degenerate copy of Camille Desmoulins; there is the speculator, the gambler in shares, the special product of the empire; there are the ouvriers, that terrible element in modern Paris; and there is the arch-plotter, a sort of Rochefort, but in whom it is less easy to believe than in the rest of the characters. Another story, whose chief interest lies in that unhappy period, is "Iseulte," by the author of "Vera." It begins unsatisfactorily, and we think we are falling into the threadbare style of the intriguing priest getting the innocent girl into a convent, but suddenly we find ourselves breathing a fresh air when we are taken to the mountain château, whose master is one of the school of Lacordaire, and where the gradual refinement of Iseulte's nature is well brought out in the midst of amusing sketches of the development of a new French watering-place on the site of some old Roman bath. Iseulte, be it understood, is an unhappy wife, married without her own volition to a man whom it is impossible to love or esteem, and who does not wish to be troubled with her, so that she has lived apart from him even from the first. In her mountain home, she meets Guy de Lussarques, the first man who stirs her affections, and this brings her to a sense of the duty and necessity of returning to her husband.

He is prefect of the city of Velun, in Burgundy, where she arrives to find him severely hurt by an accident, and she has just nursed him into recovery when the Prussians are upon them, and he is one of those unfortunate officials who were forced to make a journey on the engine of the train used for transport, as a pledge of security for the invaders. Fatigue and exposure cause his death, and Iseulte immediately after sets forth to join her sister in her convent. Her way lies through a village whence she can make no further progress, and is forced to wait while the place is harried, first, by the Garibaldians, and then by the Prussians. Then it is that a most touching and noble scene ensues, when two German soldiers having been shot, each death is to be punished by that of six men, chosen by lot, from among the villagers. The first name is that of the curé who has been the blessing of the parish through all its sufferings, and had refused to be excluded from the fatal urn. Two unmarried men give themselves in the stead of two fathers of large families, and the curé leads the way to the place.

Iseulte, after nearly perishing at the hands of her own people as a Prussian spy, is rescued by her lover, whom she is now free to marry, and we leave this very striking book with a sense of gladness and peace.

One more story of this war must be mentioned—Miss Bramston's "Ralph and Bruno"—a contrast between the English and French character, which would have been more probable if the heroes had not both been half of each nation. The latter, a brave young dreamer, of high aspiration but unanchored faith, is a very touching sketch, only indeed such a sketch as a feminine hand can draw, and yet worthy of note as a record of the character of the times.

We pass on to the controversial novel—a thing of bad name, and often deservedly. It is always, on a longer scale, a likeness of the old dialogue in Italian churches of the avvocato di Dio and the avvocato del diabolo, and thus is like playing at chess against yourself. It is impossible to make the avvocato del diabolo so much in earnest or so dangerous as he would be in real life, and yet the other avvocato is apt to come out so priggish as to throw the sympathy on the wrong side. We hardly know of any of note enough to mention; most are on the Romish controversy, and they generally betray profound ignorance on the subject, and of the Roman Catholic point of view. They are not good weapons, for nobody