Méry.
Of these, in French, I myself hardly know a more remarkable example than Joseph Méry, who, born two years before the end of the eighteenth century, lived for just two-thirds of the nineteenth, wrote, from a very early age till his death, in prose and in verse and in drama; epics, satires, criticisms, novels, travels, Heaven knows what; who had the reputation of being one of the most brilliant talkers of his day; who collaborated[294] with Gautier and Gérard de Nerval and Sandeau and Mme. de Girardin, and other people much greater than himself; from whose pen the beloved old "Collection Michel Lévy" contained at least thirty volumes at the date of his death—the wreckage of perhaps a possible three hundred—and of whom, though I have several times in the half-century since dived into his work, I do not think I can find a single story of first, second, or even third-rate quality.[295]
Les Nuits Anglaises.
As it happens, one volume of his, Les Nuits Anglaises, contains examples of his various manners, some of which may be noticed. Not all of them are stories, but it is fair to throw in a non-story because it is so very much better than the others. This is a "physionomie" of Manchester, written, it would seem, just at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria; and it shows that Méry, as a writer of those middle articles or transformed Spectator essays, which have played so large a part in the literature of the last century and a quarter, was not quite a negligible person. Moreover, the sort of thing, though not essential to the novelist's art, is a valuable tool at his disposal.
The minor stories.
But here the author, who was a considerable traveller and not a bad judge of art, was to a large extent under the grip of fact: when he got into fiction he exhibited a sad want of discipline. One must allow something, no doubt, for the fact that the goguenard element is avowedly strong in him. The second English Night, with its Oxfordshire election (he has actually got the name of "Parker" right, though Woodstock wobbles from the proper form to "Woostock," "Wostoog," etc.) and its experiences of an Indian gentleman who is exposed at Ellora (near Madras) to the influence of the upas tree, by a wicked emissary of the Royal Society, Sir Wales, as a scientific experiment; and the last, where two Frenchmen, liberated from the hulks at the close of the Napoleonic War, make a fortune by threatening to blow up the city of Dublin; may sue out their writ of ease under the statute of Goguenarderie. A third half-Eastern, half-English story (Méry was fond of the East), Anglais et Chinois, telling quite delicately the surprising adventures of a mate of H.M.S. Jamesina[296] in a sort of Chinese harem, has some positive merit, though it is too long. The longest and most ambitious tale, Histoire d'une Colline, if not "wholly serious" (as a famous phrase has it), seems to aim at a good deal of seriousness. Yet it is, as a matter of fact, rather more absurd than the pure extravaganzas.
Histoire d'une Colline.
Sir John Lively—who appears neither to have inherited the title (seeing that his sainted father, a victim of English tyranny, was named Arthur O'Tooley, perhaps one of the tailors of that ilk) nor to have paid M. Méry five or ten thousand pounds for it—is an Irishman of the purest virtue and the noblest sentiments, who possesses a cottage on a hill not far from the village and castle of Stafford. From this interesting height there are two views: one over the beautiful plains of Lancashire, another towards the brumous mountains of Oxfordshire. Lively always looks this latter way, because in coming from London he has seen, at the other village of Bucks, a divine creature who dispenses soda-water and some stronger liquors to the thirsty. She, like the ninepenny kettle of the song, "is Irish tu," and belongs to the well-known sept of the O'Killinghams. They are both fervent Roman Catholics (Méry is astoundingly severe on our "apostate" church, with its "insulted" Saint Paul's and Saint Martin's). She is also persecuted by an abominable English landlord, Mr. Igoghlein. The two meet at mass in "the Catholic Church of the City," to which, "as in the time of Diocletian" (slightly altered to 1830-40), "a few faithful ones furtively glide, and seem to be in fear." To get money, Lively gambles, and (this is the sanest part of the book, for the reason that things went on in much the same way at Paris and at London) is cheated. But the cottage, and the hill with such commanding views, are discovered to be in the way of a new line and to conceal coal. He sells them to a Mr. Copperas; marries the beautiful O'Killingham; the bells of Dublin ring head over heels, "and Ireland hopes." Let it also be mentioned that in the course of the story we are more than once told of the double file of Mauresque, Spanish, Gothic, and Italian colonnades which line the marvellous High Street of Oxford; and that Mr. Copperas visited that seat of learning to consult an expert in railways[297] and see his three largest shareholders. (Oh, these bloated dons!) That three members of "the society of titotal abstinence" drank, at the beautiful O'Killingham's cottage, twenty pints of porter (White-bread), two flagons of whisky, and three of claret, may meet with less incredulity, though the assortment of liquor is barbarous and the quantity is certainly large. But let us turn from this nonsense to the remarkable Manchester article.
The "Manchester" article.
It was not for some thirty years later than Méry's visit that I myself knew, and for some time lived in, the new-made "city," as it became, to the horror of Mr. Bright, just before Méry saw it. But though there must have been many changes in those thirty years, they were nothing to those which have taken place in the fifty that have passed subsequently. And I can recognise the Manchester I knew in Méry's sketch. This may seem to be at first an exceedingly moderate compliment—in fact something close to an insult. But it is nothing of the kind. It is true that there is considerable naïveté in a sentence of his own: "En général les nationaux sont fort ignorants sur les phénomènes de leur pays; il faut s'adresser aux étrangers pour en obtenir la solution." And it is also true that our "nationals," at that time and since, have been excessively ignorant of phenomena which the French tourists of Louis Philippe's reign discovered here, and surprised, not to say diverted, at the solutions thereof preferred by these obliging strangers. That Méry had something of the Michiels[298] in him, what has been said above should show. But in some strange way Manchester—foggiest and rainiest of all our industrial hells,[299] except Sheffield—seems to have made his brain clear and his sight dry, even in drawing a sort of half-Rembrandt, half-Callot picture. He takes, it is true, some time in freeing himself from that obsession by one of our not-prettiest institutions, "street-walking," which has always beset the French.[300] But he does get clear, and makes a striking picture of the great thoroughfares of Market Street and Piccadilly; of the view—a wonderful one certainly, and then not interfered with by railway viaducts—from and of the Cathedral; and of the extraordinary utilisation of the scanty "naval" capabilities of Irk and Irwell and Medlock. But, as has been said, such things are at best but accidents of the novel.