It is a source of astonishment to me how inventive the French “little people” are in the matter of domestic stores. In Ireland, certainly, you will see nothing like it, but perhaps it may be different in England. Here all sorts of things are made at home: wines, spirits, liqueurs, and essences; jams, jellies, oil, vinegar, linen, bread, and honey. Everything in nature is turned to useful account, and the housewives are never idle. They have fruit and vegetables in abundance, and live, on the whole, well, if frugally. Their lands produce flax, hemp, cloves, colza, wheat, maize, every kind of flower, according to season and soil; and such is the elasticity of their temperament and their unsleeping industry, that they have been able to float above that tidal wave, the phyloxera, as great as any of the Egyptian plagues, as they floated above the national disaster of “’70.”
The hero of M. René Bazin’s most charming novel La Terre qui Meurt, is a métayer; and métayage is land worked on the half-profit system, a midway position between labourer and freeholder. The sermon preached by this mournful little story is that the French land is dying for want of cultivation, as the peasants are swarming into the big towns, where they are not wanted, and leaving to waste the land that needs them. Each name in France is selected with a regard for the dignity of mankind. The cook and the barber call themselves “artists,” and thereby efface any menial touch from their calling. The retired servant calls himself a rentier, and the retired labourer decks himself in the gentlemanly title of cultivateur. You may be a cultivateur with “lands and proud dwellings,” like the earl in the song, or you may modestly cultivate a single acre.
With such a fine name in prospect, I wonder any peasant lad is lured from the country to the big, unsatisfactory towns, as M. Bazin laments in his tale of the métayer and his sons. In the métairie system the partnership between landlord and métayer is worked in this wise. The landlord supplies stock, land, and implements; the métayer brings the labour, and the profits are equally divided. The métayer boards his labourers, and their wages vary, according to season, from seventy-five centimes to two and a half francs per day. The agent, on this system, is done away with, and the landlord and his partner stand as man to man. The artisan, too, in the country enjoys a pleasant independence. He builds his own house, he makes and maintains his own home with thrift and ambition. The standard of honesty is high. There is little beggary or drunkenness, and early marriages are frequent.
Of course the peasant is grasping,—it were idle to hide this, even in praising his frugality. He is close-fisted and hard-headed, and would rather part with his blood than with a franc; but he and his brother, the artisan, have made, and help to keep, France where she is. However deplorable the pictures of their land which French novelists and story-tellers may offer us, we may believe, without fear of error, that it is not La Terre which represents the French peasantry, so human and so lovable, despite its lack of disinterestedness and generosity; and it is not M. Octave Mirbeau’s appalling heroine who represents the great hard-working, honest, and intelligent artisan class. Both of them have qualities above and beyond any to be looked for in the same classes elsewhere; and if there were nothing else to admire, surely we must find admirable their rectitude and their love of independence.
CHAPTER IX
THE PRESS AND THE PEOPLE’S COLLEGES
The French bring an artistic instinct into the manufacturing of all things, and so it follows that they could not be content to compose newspapers on the lines of British journalism, which accepts the propagation of mere news as the aim and object for which journalism was instituted. It is not necessarily what is true, but what will amuse and please his subscribers that the editor thinks of. If these want fiction, then give them fiction, by all means, but mix it up in a literary ragout. And so, when you have turned from the political article of your paper, which is frequently written in questionable taste, you will find little paragraphs, half-columns about the nothings of the hour, written with a delicate wit, an infinite grace and humour. Most of the contributors to the Figaro are remarkable writers. Of M. Anatole France there is nothing to be said here, once we salute him as the living master of French literature. Every Wednesday he offers the fortunate readers of the Figaro a scene of contemporary history which constitutes a morning delight. This front column is reserved for the elect. Since the split in the French nation over an unhappy Jewish officer, many of the old contributors have been replaced by writers more in accord with the present line of the Figaro in politics. M. Cornély, the practical editor to-day, used to be a frantic Monarchist, the pillar of the Gaulois. Now the Government has no more firm upholder than this Conservative Catholic. His brilliant leaderettes each morning in the Figaro are a daily joy, so full of sense, of logic, of humour, and of wit are they.
Then the brief and delicious dialogues of M. Capus, who would miss them? To see the name of Capus to a half-column of dialogue on a topic of the hour is to be glad you have lived another day. It was by sheer imperturbable good-humour that the Figaro so splendidly fought the governmental campaign during the severe crisis it passed through after the verdict of Rennes, and out of which it came so triumphantly. Since the Revolution no French Government has had such an hour of triumph as that which the brave and excellent old man, M. Emile Loubet, and his brave and able Minister, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, enjoyed on the 22nd of September, 1899, at the unforgetable banquet of twenty-two thousand mayors of France, come from all parts of the country to gather enthusiastically round the head of the State in a loyal protest against all the base and scandalous machinations of his enemies. It is not often one can congratulate a French editor on the political conduct of his paper, and M. Cornély deserves hearty congratulations for his skilful management of the governmental campaign in the columns of the Figaro. It is true he was magnificently supported by M. France, a host in himself, whose witching satires on Nationalism will remain among the most delicate and dainty of contributions to political literature of this or any country. It was a battle worthily won, the weapons, used with a surprising dexterity, being wit, charm, grace, and humour. The Figaro has also an old contributor, Le Passant, who out of nothing will fabricate you a half-hour of delicious hilarity, and for articles of a more serious and intellectual quality, the distinguished woman of letters who writes under the pseudonym of Arvède Barine.
Add to these intellectual features the bright interspersion of graceful little Parisian notes on anything, from a cabmen’s or washerwomen’s strike to the fraternity of European soldiers in China, from the weather to the circulation of false silver, the literary and theatrical chronicle at the end of such papers as the Temps and the Débats, always intrusted to writers of wide renown. For the criticism of books in Paris is done by competent critics, who sign their articles, or is not done at all. Unsigned reviews in Paris are regarded merely as publishers’ advertisements; and as well-known and responsible critics are few, it wisely follows that few books are ever seriously noticed. This is as it should be. If the London Press would adopt this manner, and suppress the daily trivial reviews of trivial books, less time would be wasted on mediocrities, and more time devoted to the few makers of literature. It is, thanks to this indifference to the large majority of incompetent and unoriginal scribblers in France, that here there are far less spurious reputations than across the Channel, where popularity and frantic eulogies in the columns of the newspapers seem to be based on the possession of no conceivable literary quality.