It has been observed that the Débats almost exclusively supplies the Academy with its contingent of publicists—a circumstance accounted for by that journal being jealous of the purity of its language, and in other respects preserving a high and dignified standard. It has, indeed, for an unusually long period enjoyed its reputation. French and Belgian newspapers are very much of a mystery to an Anglo-Saxon. They seem to flourish under conditions impracticable to American or English journals. The Indépendance Belge and the Journal des Débats lie before us. Neither of them contains sufficient advertisements to make up three of our columns, yet their expenses must, we should suppose, especially in the case of the Débats, published as it is where prices are so high, be very large. Both these papers contain articles evidently the work of able hands, and in the case of the Indépendance the foreign correspondence must be a very costly item, forming, as it frequently does, five columns of a large page. The price of each is twenty centimes—high, certainly, for a single sheet.
It has often been observed, too, that French newspaper-men seem exceptionally well off. They frequent costly cafés, occasionally indulge in petits soupers in cabinets particuliers, and, altogether, taking prices into account, appear to be in the enjoyment of larger means than their brethren of the pen elsewhere. Of course, the success of a French newspaper is, even in the absence of advertisements, intelligible in the case of the Figaro or Petit Journal, with their circulation of 70,000 and 150,000 a day; but in the case of such papers as the Débats, whose circulation is not very large, it is difficult to explain.
The position of a journalist in Paris seems to stand in many respects higher than elsewhere. Of course, the fact of contributions not being anonymous adds immeasurably to the writer's personal importance, if it also gets him into scrapes. Elsewhere, editors are men of mark, and certainly no one in the journalistic world can possibly be made more of than Mr. Delane in London. But the editorial writers in his paper, who would in Paris be men of nearly as much mark as rising members of Parliament in England, are completely "left out in the cold," gaining no reputation even among acquaintance, since they are required to preserve the strictest secrecy as to their connection with the paper. Altogether, we are disposed to believe that Paris—official "warnings," press prosecutions and possible duels notwithstanding—must be accepted as the journalist's paradise. To be courted, caressed and feared is as much as any reasonable newspaper writer can expect, and a great deal more than he is likely to get out of his work elsewhere.
R.W.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Cities of Northern and Central Italy. By Augustus J.C. Hare. New York: George Routledge & Sons.
Those who know Mr. Hare's Walks in Rome and Days near Rome will welcome another series of Italian itineraries from the same pen. These volumes are primarily guide-books; they tell us the best hotels, the price of cabs, the distances by rail or high-road. But the parts of traveler and manual are inverted: whereas you take your Murray or Baedeker in your hand and carry it whither you list, Mr. Hare takes you by the hand, leads you in the way you should go, makes you pause the requisite time before the things you are to look at, points to every view, lets you miss no effect, does not force his own opinions upon you, except now and then when he loses his temper a little on the debatable ground between religion and politics, repeats that quotation you are vainly trying to recall, or delights you by the beauty and aptness of a new one. He gives to a course of systematic sight-seeing the freedom and variety of a ramble with a cultivated and sympathetic companion. We would not be ungrateful to that inestimable impersonality, Murray, for all are his debtors, even Mr. Hare for the plan of his books; but, remembering how, with the latest edition in hand, we have panted up four or more flights of stairs in a Roman or Venetian palace in search of a picture removed years before, we are not sorry to find him here taken to task for leaving uncorrected statements which had ceased to be true. Moreover, Murray is no guide in matters of art; his authorities are often captains of the British Philistines; while Mr. Hare generally gives all that has been said by competent judges, sometimes imperturbably recording two conflicting opinions, and leaving the reader to decide. The range of quotation is indeed remarkable, from Dean Milman to Ouida, including many writers too little known in this country, such as Burckhardt, Ampère and Street.
But it is not to the actual traveler only that these volumes will be of use and give pleasure. They are not bad preparatory reading for those who are going abroad, suggesting what should be studied beforehand; they will be dear to those who sit within the blank limits of a home in this raw New World trying to revive the fading outlines and colors of scenes which, though unforgotten, tend to mingle with the visions of Dreamland; and they are capital wishing-carpets for those who can travel only in fancy. In the introduction there is an excellent passage on the distinctive differences between the great Italian cities: "Each has its own individual sovereignty; its own chronicles; its own politics, domestic and foreign; its own saints, peculiarly to be revered—patrons in peace and protectors in war; its own phase of architecture; its own passion in architectural material, brick or stone, marble or terra-cotta; ...its own proverbs, its own superstitions and its own ballads." Mr. Hare contrives to convey much of the characteristic impression of each town. Pretty little wood-cuts are called in to his aid, but the best illustrations of his text are the poetical quotations and exquisite prose-bits from Ruskin, Swinburne, Symonds and others whose pens sometimes turn into the pencil of a great painter. The author's own descriptions are extremely faithful and charming. To those who have made the journey from Florence to Rome a single fine page of the introduction brings back a thrill of that long ecstasy. In these few quiet words he spreads Thrasymene before us: "It has a soft, still beauty especially its own. Upon the vast expanse of shallow pale-green waters, surrounded by low-lying hills, storms have scarcely any effect, and the birds which float over it and the fishing-boats which skim across its surface are reflected as in a mirror. At Passignano and Torricella picturesque villages, chiefly occupied by fishermen, jut out into the water, but otherwise the reedy shore is perfectly desolate on this side, though beyond the lake convents and villages crown the hills which rise between us and the pale violet mountains beyond Montepulciano." Nothing can be more lifelike than the following picture of the tract around Siena: "Scarcely do we pass beyond the rose-hung walls which encircle the fortifications than we are in an upland desert, piteously bleak in winter, but most lovely when spring comes to clothe it. The volcanic nature of the soil in these parts gives a softer tint than usual to the coloring. The miles upon miles of open gray-green country, treeless, hedgeless, houseless, swoop toward one another with the strangest sinuosities and rifts and knobs of volcanic earth, till at last they sink in faint mists, only to rise again in pink and blue distances, so far off, so pale and aërial, that they can scarcely be distinguished from the atmosphere itself. Only here and there a lonely convent with a few black cypress spires clustered round it, or a solitary cross which the peasants choose as their midday resting-place, cuts the pellucid sky. Here in these great uplands, where all is so immense, the very sky itself seems more full of space than elsewhere: it is not the deep blue of the South, but so soft and aërial that it looks as if it were indeed the very heaven itself, only very far away."
The chapter on Ravenna is the best in the book: it is an admirable piece of work, a complete monograph. Everything is there—history, legends, art—and the quotations and illustrations are peculiarly beautiful and convincing.