Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 105.djvu/118

Rh assures the Parisians, is his love for Paris. But then, let them know, he loves far more the simple champaigns fertilised bv the Adour, and guarded by the cloud-capt Pyrenees. There, wit and badinage may be scarcer than at Paris; but, on the other hand, God and home are a little more respected. With alarm, therefore, he observes the inroads made day after day by the poison of the capital on the constitution of the provinces, and in a protesting apostrophe upbraids the seducer: "Most imprudent art thou, O Paris, as well as ungrateful, to poison the springs from which thou drinkest! Whence come to thee those orators, whence those poets, of whom thou art so proud, but from the provinces at which thou gibest? Nothing which thou hast is thine own—nothing, be it the lofty or the vile, thy artists or thy prostitutes; both alike come to thee from afar, impelled by genius and by wretchedness; and of the latter thou pollutest the bodies, of the former the souls." So one of her journalists reproaches the capital apostrophised by one of our poets as—

M. de Cassagnac, it is seen, then, is no favourer of the Progress-at-any-price party. Again and again he has his fling at the revolutions and revolutionists of his native land, at democracy and demagogues, mobs and mobocrats. Promptly he fastens on the saying of Lamennais, that whatever law is without the concurrence of the people, and does not emanate from the people, is null and void: a saying which, he contends, being interpreted, has this signification,—that for six thousand years the world has had none but monstrous laws, since there never has existed in the world a single country where the people, as M. de Lamennais understands that term, have directly concurred in the establishment of the laws,—and that the moral law and the law of religion are each a nullity, since hey do not emanate from the people. The liberty of the press is among the things he takes the liberty to satirise. Count up on your fingers, he says, the great things effected by the liberty of the press; it won't take you long: after all, the liberty of the press can only mean the liberty to say all that is within our knowledge; now, if we know nothing, we must either hold our tongues, or talk rubbish,—and that, the latter alternative, is just what France has been doing for the last fifty years. He proclaims himself one of the faithful in faithless times, amid unbelievers innumerable a believer. "There is one thing," he observes, "that of itself and everywhere condemns all so-called liberal ideas, and it is, that they are essentially irreligious, that is to say, essentially immoral, for morality is inseparable from religion." M. de Cassagnac's logic, as well as his rhetoric, is sometimes more sweeping than steadfast, more showy than sound. But he is well worth reading, by those at least who desire freshness and freedom of thought and style, who are weary of routine in humdrum criticism, and can put up with a deal of pugnacity and paradox if only for the novelty and amusement of the thing.