Who was it that, his soul hot within him at the undue predominance of the dead languages in the English university curriculum, declared that the system of facts with which the British graduate of the present day was the most familiar was the intrigues of the heathen gods?
We think of this Thersites sometimes when our eyes light, in big double-sheeted daily or fashionable monthly, on a column or two, fresh from over the water, of exhaustive minutiæ of the daily life, walk and conversation of French artists, playwrights, actors and actresses. Matter of this sort was not wont to be so absorbingly interesting to the American reader. The time was not very long since when a very little of it went a great way with him—when the domestic troubles of Madame de Caux and the personal habits of M. Sardou would not have been considered worth as many lines as they now get paragraphs. Even such assiduously advertised affairs as the relations of De Musset and George Sand, and Rachel's patronage of her pets among the gilded youth, created no contemporary sensation comparable to that consequent upon their resuscitation. And we were none the worse for missing such topics, although they were rather less unworthy of study than the corresponding gossip of to-day. Literature, the drama, music and pictorial art on the Continent were certainly not at a lower standard fifteen or twenty years ago than now. The inner halo around their leading lights was not less attractive or less deserving of micrometric analysis. No first-class name has been added to their number in either walk, nor are the individual careers of the second-class characters who have succeeded them at all more fruitful in salient traits for instruction or entertainment.
It is a familiar theory that the creative age dies out as the critical age gains strength—that when we grow nice, finical and blasé as to the quality of our intellectual aliment, we prove thereby the enfeeblement of our intellectual appetite and digestion. At present, the circumstances point to our having gone a step farther still, and attained the hypercritical stage. Our attention now has degenerated into a study of the dishes wherein the aforesaid food is served—their lustre, fabric, style and "crackle," a craze in flesh-and-blood ceramics. We never get tired of holding them up to the light and minutely mapping all their flaws and beauties, with each shade of color and glaze, superficial and iridescent or struck through and solid.
There may be something in the fierce light that beats upon a literary or artistic throne beneficial alike to subject and monarch. But here there are too many thrones, and the light is too fierce. Let us have a selection of potentates to be illuminated, and let us turn down the gas a little.
E.B.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
In this volume Mr. Parkman has made a long step toward the culminating point of his historical series, and in the preface he announces that, passing over the intervening half century, he will make the fall of the French dominion in Canada the subject of his next book. There will then be more to relate of interest to readers in general than the events and personages of the present work can afford: this, nevertheless, has a peculiar value, as showing the opening of the rivalry between the French and English colonies, and exposing the causes which from the beginning rendered defeat inevitable for the former. These causes Mr. Parkman has already stated in the Old Régime in Canada, though less clearly and with an apparent tendency to consider that the result, after all, really came from an incapacity of the "French Celt" for self-government. More truly he now says that, had the Huguenots been allowed to settle in Canada, its fate would probably have been different. They represented that middle class to which was in great part due the success of the English settlements; and, standing shoulder to shoulder, as was their way, they would have formed a strong wall against encroachment and invasion. But Louis XIV. wished to exercise a more immediate control over his North American possessions than he might have found practicable had the too independent Huguenots been permitted to swarm into the land. Moreover, the colony, formed originally by the missionaries, retained its religious character to the very end. In the government the priest gradually gave way to the royal officer, though not without a contest: the jarrings between temporal and spiritual authorities were frequent, and not least so in Frontenac's time. He indeed lived in a constant state of quarrel with the Jesuits, who were, nevertheless, his right hand in external troubles. Canada was peopled by an "army of bigots," to use Napoleon's expression; and the priests kept alive the spirit of warlike piety which furthered so well the purposes of king and governor.
Cross in hand, they led their Indian converts to battle; nor do they seem to have softened the asperities of Indian warfare, doubtless looking on fire and steel as the best discipline for their heretical foes. Children taken in war they were accustomed to keep and bring up as Catholics; and this desire to save souls, which was communicated by the fathers to the whole population, helps to explain why captives among the Canadians, as among the Indians, so often forgot their homes and were unwilling to return to them. Both French and savages received their prisoners into their families, and treated them as they did those of their own blood—the latter to make good their losses in war by the adoption of new members into the tribe, the former as well from natural kindliness as moved by eagerness for the spiritual welfare of the benighted. The English, like the Plains Indians of the present day, had no such motives; and those living in captivity among them, however kindly treated, remained aliens, and seized gladly any opportunity of regaining their freedom.