'We are somewhat ashamed,' I said, 'in general of Jewish blood, yet the
Lévis boast of their descent from the Hebrew Levi.'
'They are proud of it,' said Tocqueville, 'because they make themselves out to be cousins of the Blessed Virgin. They have a picture in which a Duc de Lévi stands bareheaded before the Virgin. "Couvrez-vous donc, mon cousin," she says. "C'est pour ma commodité," he answers.'
The conversation passed to literature.
'I am glad,' said Tocqueville, 'to find that, imperfect as my knowledge of English is, I can feel the difference in styles.'
'I feel strongly,' I said, 'the difference in French styles in prose, but little in poetry.'
'The fact is,' said Tocqueville, 'that the only French poetry, except that of Racine, that is worth reading is the light poetry. I do not think that I could now read Lamartine, though thirty years ago he delighted me.'
'The French taste,' I said, 'in English poetry differs from ours. You read Ossian and the "Night Thoughts."'
'As for Ossian,' he answered, 'he does not seem to have been ever popular in England. But the frequent reference to the "Night Thoughts," in the books and letters of the last century, shows that the poem was then in everybody's memory. Foreigners are in fact provincials. They take up fashions of literature as country people do fashions of dress, when the capital has left them off. When I was young you probably had ceased to be familiar with Richardson. We knew him by heart. We used to weep over the Lady Clementina, whom I dare say Miss Senior never heard of.
'During the first Empire, we of the old régime abandoned Paris, as we do now, and for the same reasons. We used to live in our châteaux, where I remember as a boy hearing Sir Charles Grandison and Fielding read aloud. A new novel was then an event. Madame Cottin was much more celebrated than George Sand is now. For all her books were read, and by everybody. Notwithstanding the great merits of George Sand's style, her plots and her characters are so exaggerated and so unnatural, and her morality is so perverted, that we have ceased to read her.'
We talked of Montalembert, and I mentioned his sortie the other day against the clergy.