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TWO MEN OF LETTERS.

WITHIN the last few weeks two pieces of might have brought with it Mérimée's fate, and

literary biography * have appeared, which present a somewhat remarkable contrast, and which at the same time supplement one another. The one is the "Life of Charles Lever," the other M. Emile Bergerat's volume of reminiscences of Théophile Gautier. Between the literary merits of Lever and of Gautier there can, of course, be little comparison; but between their positions as representatives of French and English (if Irish-English) men of letters of the nineteenth century there is a not inconsiderable similarity. They were almost exactly contemporary, being born within a very few years, and dying within a very few months of one another. Both depended entirely upon their pens for subsistence, and both, though in very different ways, were what is vaguely called men of pleasure. The rewards which they received were, indeed, different enough in amount. One can not help thinking how Gautier would have envied a man of letters who could make and spend, as Dr. Fitzpatrick tells us Lever for some years made and spent, three thousand pounds a year. Seventy-five thousand francs represent the income of a man whom the French, in their modest arithmetic, would call "deux fois millionnaire," and we may be quite sure that Gautier never "touched" half the amount in any one of his forty years of hard literary journey-work-of such journey-work as perhaps no other man of letters ever did. Less fortunate in his actual wages, Gautier was also far less fortunate than Lever in his extra-literary gains. M. Bergerat has pointed out that, though Gautier was reproached with his Bonapartism, singularly few drops of the golden shower rewarded his adherence to the E.npire. He did his work, which was perfectly honest work, and received his pay, which was perfectly clean money. But no senatorship, no lucrative sinecure, fell to his lot; while Lever, in the later years of his life, was at any rate provided for without the necessity of working. "Je redeviens un manœuvre," said the author of “Emaux et Camées" to M. Edmond de Goncourt, after the disasters of 1870. For my part, considering what this manœuvre has left us, I do not know whether, for the benefit of literature and the credit of the literary calling, one can wish that it had been otherwise. Mérimée's luck

* Théophile Gautier: Entretiens, etc. Par Emile Bergerat, avec une Préface de Edmond de Goncourt.

Paris Charpentier.

Life of Charles Lever. By W. J. Fitzpatrick, LL. D. London: Chapman & Hall.

have substituted a zero of idleness and sterility for the splendid work which Gautier so manfully. did.

It is not at first easy to account for the uncomfortable impression which Dr. Fitzpatrick's interesting book somehow leaves upon the reader. No biography of the author of "Charles O'Malley" could be dull, and the reader who is in quest of amusement merely will find plenty in these volumes. But that Lever, with all his rollicking, was a decidedly unhappy person, whether it be a true impression or no, is certainly the impression here given. He appears to have been one of those extremely unfortunate men who take no genuine delight in the calling which nevertheless they pursue. He was, indeed, intensely sensitive as to public opinion on his novels. But he seems to have felt this sensitiveness, not because unfavorable criticism made him doubt the goodness of his work, but because it hurt his vanity. His reckless expenditure, in the same way, seems to have arisen as much from an uneasy desire to live en prince as from simple enjoyment of the good things which his money could bring him. With regard to the famous accusation of "lordolatry" which Thackeray is said to have brought against him, I think that the passage in the "Book of Snobs" has been somewhat misinterpreted. But nobody can read either his novels or his life without seeing that from the last infirmity of British minds he was not free. He gained plenty of money, but he got rid of it in all sorts of ways, to which it is difficult to apply any milder description than that which was applied to the extravagance of his greater countryman Goldsmith. If he did not exactly fling it away and hide it in holes and corners, like Lamb's eccentric friend, he did what amounted to nearly the same thing. He was an inveterate gambler. He kept absurd numbers of horses, and gave unreasonable prices for them. To his lavish hospitality one feels less inclined to object were it not that "wax-candles and some of the best wine in Europe" are not wholly indispensable to literary fellowship. Like many other men of letters in our country, he could not be satisfied without meddling with politics, and endeavoring, though with no great success, to mingle in political society. His wild oats were not of a very atrocious wildness, but he never ceased sowing them. The consequence was, that his literary work was not only an indispensable gagne-pain to him, but was also never anything else than a gagne-pain. It was always written

in hot haste, and with hardly any attention to style, to arrangement, or even to such ordinary matters as the avoidance of repetitions, anachronisms, and such-like slovenlinesses. It has often been noticed that in "Charles O'Malley" itself it will not do to pay the least heed to the sequence or arrangement of the story. The chronology is utterly impossible, the same things recur again and again as incidents, and the whole book as a connected and coherent story is utterly

formless and void. The more one hears of the

life of the author and his manner of composition, the less surprising is this. The earlier books, at any rate, appear to have been mere transcripts of actual experience, and reminiscences of things heard and seen in Ireland huddled together anyhow. The works of the second period rested in the same way upon actual observation of AngloContinental life, and those of the last, if they had a more original character, were scarcely improved by the change. Lever, in short, was not in the proper sense a man of letters at all. The pen was with him a mere instrument for putting into marketable form the stories which he told so

well by word of mouth, and the queer facts, sights, and incidents which he heard, saw, or read of. Of literary form he had little or nothing. Long practice gave him, as it gives most men of talent, a passable style; but this style had little distinction and no special merit. He had neither the industry which tries a hundred phrases till it hits on the right one, nor the genius which hits on the right phrase at once. If his books are acceptable, it is always for the matter of them only.

So "allegorical an autobiographist "-to use a queer phrase of his own-was Lever, that much of his biographer's work is occupied in tracing the original facts and experiences which he incorporated in his stories. The ballad-singing in the streets of Dublin, the upheaval of the pavement in order to liberate an escaped prisoner, the various escapades and pranks of the egregious Frank Webber, in "O'Malley," are known already to everybody. If some of Dr. Fitzpatrick's informants are to be believed, some still more singular experiences have been utilized in "Con Cregan" and "Arthur O'Leary." Early in life Lever went to America, and, it seems, did not like the inhabitants of the States. Thereupon he flung himself into the ranks of the red men, and the following singular episode occurred :

For a time, Lever said, this was pleasurable; but only for a time. He grew weary of barbarism, and sighed for civilization. He endeavored to hide his emotions, and he succeeded with the men; but one of the squaws, looking at him fixedly, read his thoughts. "Your heart, stranger," said she, "is not

with us now. You wish for your own people. But you will never see them again. Our chief will kill you if you leave us. It is the law of our tribe that none joining us can go away. No, no! You will never see the pale-faces again, nor go back to your country. How could you find the forest-tracks for yourself if you fled? You would be instantly followed and found; and, when found, you would be slain. Oh, stay!" He feigned to be convinced by her arguments; but all his thoughts were fixed on the one object-flight. How could he effect it?

Every day and every hour he studied to find opportunity; but it was all in vain. He found the customs of the tribe to be as the woman described. There was to be no separation from them, or death the penalty. The same squaw noticed the change in his spirits, and ere long in his health; and her woman's heart was touched with compassion. She even devised the means of his getting away.

A red Indian, named Tahata, came to the tribe once a year, bringing tobacco and brandy from some British settlement, and exchanging them for the peltry the hunters had collected from his previous visit. The squaw told Lever that she would sound this man ("The Post " he was called), and see whether for a sum of money he would appoint some place of rendezvous for him in the forest, and be his guide through its mazes until some outpost or town would be reached. Lever had no money, but "The Post" was to be remunerated by his countrymen on his reaching them. The offer was accepted. Lever, at the squaw's suggestion, feigned sickness, and was left behind in the wigwams with the women while the tribe were out hunting. In the men's absence he made his escape. Tahata was faithful.

At the termination of this remarkable adventure he "walked through the streets of Quebec in moccasins and feathers." It would be satisfactory if the feathers and moccasins, at least, could be produced in proof of the veracity of the story.

In the interval between Lever's return from America and his student-days in Germany not much seems to have occurred; indeed, the extraordinary vagueness of this part of the biography may best be indicated by mentioning that Dr. Fitzpatrick is not quite sure whether the German studies did not occur before the American trip and the Indian episode. The following notice of Dr. Barrett, famous in "O'Malley" for his "May the devil admire me!" occurs, however, in this part of the book, and is worth quoting: "A gentleman at Clontarf who wished to become tenant of some college-lands, invited him, when bursar, with other Fellows to dinner. He had not been so far from college since his childhood. It was then that, passing by Lord Charlemont's beautiful demesne, and seeing the sheep grazing, he asked what extraordinary animals they were, and when told expressed the

considerable trouble by his inveterate habit of introducing real names and real persons into his story. Major Monsoon, indeed, who is perhaps his best single figure, literally sat for the portrait at Brussels, and regarded the proceeding in the light of a regular commercial transaction; but a Galway priest was less accommodating, and never

greatest delight at seeing for the first time live mutton. As he passed along the shore the sea attracted his particular admiration. He described it as a broad, flat superficies, like Euclid's definition of a line expanding itself into a surface, and blue, like Xenophon's plain covered with wormwood.'" The following is said to have been a hospi- forgave his insertion in one of the novels. "Harry tal experience:

One night a fever-patient died; the student took up his candle and proceeded to the dissecting-room. To an uninitiated stranger it would have appeared a horrible and ghastly sight; yet so much are we the slaves of habit that the young student sat down to his revolting task as indifferently as opening a chessboard. The room was lofty and badly lighted, his

flickering taper scarcely revealing the ancient writings that he was about to peruse. On the table before him lay the subject wrapped in a long sheet, his case of instruments resting on it. He read on for some time unheeding the storm which raged without, and threatened to blow in the casements, against which the rain beat in large drops. "And this," said he, looking on the body and pursuing the train of his thoughts, "this mass of lifelessness, coldness, and inaction, is all we know of that alteration of our being, that mysterious modification of our existence by which our vital intelligence is launched into the world beyond—a breath and we are here a breath and we are gone." He raised his knife and opened a vein in the foot. A faint shriek, and a start which

overset the table and extinguished the light were the effects of his timidity.

Turning to relight his taper, he heard through the darkness a long-drawn sigh, and in weak accents, “Oh, doctor, I am better now!" He covered up the man thus wonderfully reawakened from almost a fatal trance, carried him back, and laid him in his bed. In a week after the patient was discharged from the hospital cured.

Here, also, one would like a little corroboration. But while these stories, regarded as matters of fact, naturally excite some skepticism, there can be no doubt about one thing. Lever's varied life, his propensity to take hold of every laughable or surprising incident that presented itself, and his faculty of furnishing these incidents (when their own garb was not quite sufficient) with cocked-hats and swords, were of immense use to him in his after-life as a novelist. There are two opinions about the value of actual facts to novel-writers. On the one hand, there is no doubt that, if only for a time, they add a considerable attraction and "bite" to a story; on the other hand, it is doubtful whether, in the best novels, any but very occasional use has been made of them. Lever's practice, however, was at one time to rely almost wholly upon the scraps of his experience. More than once he got into VOL. VII.-27

Lorrequer" is said to have been very largely made up of the local stories current at Kilrush, whither Lever was sent in the cholera-time of 1832. His subsequent employment in Ulster, near the Giant's Causeway, was not less fruitful of stories, and gave him in addition a considerable amount of scenery and character, which he drew upon especially in "The Knight of Gwynne." It is said, too, that in Coleraine Lever himself performed the feat of jumping over a cart and horse, which he afterward introduced in the most popular of his books. In the same way, his visits to Prebendary Maxwell (an exceedingly unclerical representative of the Church of Ireland) supplied him with most of his knowledge of Galway and Mayo. So it continued to be throughout his life. At Brussels, during his reign as editor of the 'University Magazine" at Dublin, in his subsequent wanderings about the Continent, and in his residence at Florence and Spezzia, his observation of men and things was the constant source whence he drew his inspiration. Of Trieste the great complaint seems to have been that there was no society, or next to none. In fact, Lever appears to have had a horror of being alone; though, perhaps, it may be admitted that few people have made such tendency to gregariousness as they might possess conducive to the amusement of so large a number of their fellows.

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When he began to write for the press, it was naturally enough in short stories and sketches that he preferred to record the results of his experience. He is said to have actually refused to write a long novel, and for a considerable period nothing like regular planning of his work seems to have entered his head. His biographer says that the prominence of Mickey Free in "O'Malley" was quite contrary to such original design as Lever had formed. The novelist found Mickey a very convenient mouthpiece "for enunciating the good things he had picked up." This fully accounts for Mickey's inferiority to Sam Weller, to whom he has been so often compared. Amusing as he is, any critical reader must feel that he is only a mouthpiece. This could never be said of Sam, even by those who deny to the latter any possible existence out of Topsy-Turvy Land. Perhaps the strongest evidence of Lever's real talent is to be found in the way in which he has succeeded in melting down these innumerable tags and scraps into books which, whatever may

refutation in this record of the last days of the greatest of nineteenth-century humanists. Certainly Gautier was not without his trials. The preface of M. Edmond de Goncourt, an older friend, shows those trials pretty fully. The siege, the Commune, and the Republic were all heavy blows to Gautier. The siege disturbed the placid life which he had led at Neuilly with his sisters, his daughters, and his cats, afflicted his ardent imagination with its somber ugliness, and wounded the perfectly sincere patriotism, which was none the less fervent in him because it was less vocal than in some of his contemporaries. The outrages and horrors of the Commune jarred upon his kindly nature. Last of all, he had to adjust himself to a new order of things in which, rightly or wrongly, he felt himself a stranger and a foreigner. His meeting after long years of separation with M. Victor Hugo, is strikingly told in these pages. He had parted with his master when that master was still captain of the crew which De Banville has described in one of his matchless parodies:

be their literary defects, can at any rate be read, and are not mere collections of jests. But the literary merit of the early novels is in reality almost as scanty as Edgar Poe, in a well-known review, asserted it to be. Toward the end of his life, long practice and some alteration in his manner of composing, improved Lever in this respect. But his early books are in many parts not merely not good as pieces of literary work, but positively and disgracefully bad. He used to say, we are told, that by the time he had got the details of his stories written down, he was so disgusted with them that he could hardly bring himself even to correct the proofs. It is, therefore, not very surprising that as his natural gift for writing was certainly not great, his work should have had a slovenly aspect. Such an aspect it most assuredly has, when compared not merely with great masters of style in French and English, but with practitioners in his own kind, such as Crofton Croker and Carleton. The very abundance, perhaps, of his material made him less careful in using it, and in showing it off to the best advantage. But it would rather seem that he did not possess the requisite faculty for turning nature into art. There were many of his contemporaries-Thackeray is a notable instance He met him again, as he told M. Bergerat, sur-who were by no means averse to the use of rounded by "toute la rédaction du Rappel." To actual facts and actual persons as materials and these moral shocks may be added the pressure models. But Thackeray invariably worked up of failing health, and the necessity for continuing his raw material into the peculiar form, at once to work for his daily bread at an age when most individual and typical, which literature requires. men have retired to a state of more or less easy This is what Lever rarely or never does. His rest. Yet the unfailing sweetness of his temper, pictures are not portraits, they are merely photo- and the fullness of his trust in his art, carried him graphs embellished with the stock appliances and through these trials. If he was melancholy at garb of caricature. It is needless to say that times, as M. de Goncourt relates, it was with a anything that is unfavorable in this criticism ap- melancholy which had not much bitterness in it. plies merely to the artist and not to the man. His brilliant days were indeed over-the days Personally, Lever was doubtless a charming when, in half-sincere, half-humorous gasconade, companion, and for mere companionship his he would cry out, "Moi, je suis fort; j'amène books are charming enough still. Only they 520 sur une tête de Turc, et je fais des métamust not be regarded as books, but simply as phores qui se suivent." The preface contains reports of the conversation of a lively raconteur. not a few of these extravagances. There is an appalling description of Louis XIV. which is too Swiftian for quotation. There is a speech to M. Taine, in which that critic's ideas of poetry are treated in a manner which does one's heart good:

A very different picture is given us by the charming volume in which M. Bergerat has placed on record his remembrances of the last days of Théophile Gautier. The acquaintanceship of the author with his subject was late; it did not, indeed, begin until after the disasters of 1870 had given Gautier his death-blow. But what it wanted in time it gained in intimacy. M. Bergerat was Gautier's son-in-law, and for the last two years of the poet's life the intercourse of father and son, of master and pupil, was constant. The old age of Gautier seems to have been as kindly as it could be, and not in the least frosty. The very prevalent notion that epicurean principles and tendencies insure for their possessor an old age of misery and disgust, finds its appropriate

"Dans les salons de Philoxene

Nous étions quatre-vingt rimeurs."

"Tenez! Taine, vous me semblez donner dans l'idiotisme bourgeois. Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme ! . . . Ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants . . . des mots de lumière, avec un rhythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est que la poésie. Ca ne prouve rien... Ca ne raconte rien."

I can not, as I read this, help wishing that somebody had suggested to Gautier that poetry was "a criticism of life," as we in Englandsome of us greatly wondering-have been taught in these latter days by a fine master of criticism.

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One very curious statement of M. de Goncourt's is that, to the end of his life, Gautier retained the fine horror of the bourgeois which had characterized his earliest days. The ironical felicitations which he addressed to some unfortunate person recall the preface of Mademoiselle de Maupin: Toi, tu es heureux, tu aimes le progrès, les ingénieurs qui abiment le paysage avec leurs chemins de fer, les utilitaires, tout ce qui met dans un pays une saine édilité." After which he would indulge in the most terrible pictures of bourgeois morals, an effect which must have been full of comedy. For, in truth, Gautier's bourgeois was a highly figurative person; and, in one sense of the term, nothing could have been more bourgeois than his own placid existence at Neuilly in the midst of his family.

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Besides M. de Goncourt's preface, the book has no less than seven different divisions into which M. Bergerat has thrown what he has to say. The section on "Théophile Gautier, peintre," though an interesting one in itself, need not concern us here. It is amusing enough to know that the great writer regarded himself to the last (and was dutifully regarded by his faithful sisters) as one who ought to have been a great painter. Derniers Moments" contains a sad though in no way repulsive account of the painful malady, or complication of maladies, which proved fatal to Gautier, and need not be much dwelt on. Then there is a section headed Euvres posthumes et projets," which contains, among other things, a full account of a ballet in the style of "Giselle," and others which figure among the poet's published work. This ballet is on the subject of the pied piper of Hamelin, and is very gracefully treated. It is said to have been rejected by M. Halanzier (or, rather, to have been denied representation) for a delightfully absurd reason. M. Halanzier, it seems, called to his assistance that responsible and dignified official, the ballet-master of the opera. The ballet-master was dead against the piper and his rats. The rat, he said, was an "animal immonde," and the subscribers would be wholly unable to bear the sight of him. 'Encore, monsieur," said he, “si c'était une abeille!" But, unluckily, it was not possible to turn the rats into bees, and so the "Preneur de Rats" remains still in M. Halanzier's portfolios. A section entitled "Souvenirs" is chiefly occupied with defending Gautier from the charge of being a Bonapartist. "He was at most," says M. Bergerat, a Mathildien," but he admits frankly that the poet had as great a horror of the red specter as any of his enemies the bourgeois, and that his political ideas were limited to a very hearty respect for authority-a respect which did not trouble itself greatly about the authority's source, its manner of exercise, or

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anything else connected with it. He tells us, too, what any reader of Gautier will find little difficulty in believing, that political discussion was peculiarly disagreeable to the poet, and that he would leave any table or society where it was started.

More important than these are the sections of the book devoted to a short sketch of Gautier's life, to a selection (all, unfortunately, that can be published) from his charming letters, and to the Entretiens, which, indeed, form the bulk of the volume. The biography contains some interesting statements. Even the sternest contemner of trifling literary anecdotes must be pleased to hear that Gautier's father and mother spent their honeymoon in no less a place than the Château d'Artagnan. His earliest years were spent at Tarbes, as is sufficiently well known. But what is not sufficiently well known is the following delightful "story of a desk," which M. Bergerat has preserved:

While I was at Tarbes (said he) I heard from my fellow townsmen that my school-desk was religiously preserved at the town school, and that it was the admiration of tourists. Very much flattered at finding that such honor was paid to me in my lifetime, I resolved to make acquaintance with the curious desk which was attributed to me, and, at the same time, with the school which boasted of having owned me as a pupil. I therefore presented myself incognito to the Principal, and, announcing myself as an enthusiastic admirer of my own writings, I begged him to take me to see the beloved desk which had been the witness of my childish precocity.

The Principal insisted upon the honor of being and even allowed me to touch, was certainly a desk himself my guide. The desk which he showed me, of some sort, but, at the sight of it, an irresistible emotion took possession of me. It was assuredly the first time that I and it had ever been face to face with each other, but still, if it was not my desk, it might easily have been. It might have awakened in

me a crowd of memories! I sat down on the bench which belonged to it, and which, if fate had so willed it, would have been my bench, and, having placed myself in the attitude of a studious scholar, I tried to imagine myself as once again in my own proper position. The Principal, seeing me thus absorbed, could not restrain a smile softened by emotion; he showed me on the desk sundry scratches and cuts made by Théophile Gautier in class, procuring for him, no doubt, many an imposition. I asked if I might carry off a little fragment of the wood as a relic. He gave me permission. Then he led me away, telling me, meantime, a score of authentic anecdotes which appeared even to me conclusive, and from which it resulted that I must have been a marvelous scholar and the glory of his school. A Philistine would have taken a foolish pleasure in robbing the good man of his illusions. I had the less desire to do so, because I shared them with him.

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