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misleading in regard to a vital part of her nature-its religious aspect.

Mlle. Villard, having asserted in the first place that the Church of England was, in the 18th century, destitute of all religious fervour, which in her own words 'a disparu pour faire place à l'indifférence' (p. 325), passes from the general to the particular by assuming that the same must therefore be true of Jane Austen's writings; and that, for the characters she depicts, religion is merely 'une fait de même ordre que celui d'observer les règles de la bienséance mondaine.' In proof of this estimate of the 18th-century Church, a remark of Archbishop Secker, divorced from its context, is given, no reference being made to any evidence on the other side, furnished by English divines and above all by those who employed the natural voice of strong emotion, poetry, though of these there were a considerable number, including those who belonged to the school of religious mystics. Of one of these latter-Norris-Sir F. Palgrave writes that in 1730 his poems had passed through ten editions, 'one proof out of many,' he adds, 'how exaggerated is that criticism which describes that period as devoid of inner life and spiritual aspiration.'* It is, however, thus spoken of by Mlle. Villard, who calls it cold, formal, concerned with externals only, and destitute of any 'élan vers un au-delà.'

Having passed this judgment upon the Church to which Jane Austen belonged, the writer reaches similar conclusions regarding herself. Sermons, it is said, were wearisome to her; but a love of sermons, as St Louis told our Henry III long ago, is not an indispensable element in the religious life. Morever, Jane Austen herself says: 'I am very fond of Sherlock's Sermons and prefer them to almost any.' It is also asserted that she took no interest in anything outside 'a series of traditional rites,' as the Services of her Church are called, and that as a writer she 'éloigne de son observation la souffrance, la tristesse et la laideur'-which proves that, as a woman, she cared nothing for the sorrows and wants of the poor. Other entire misapprehensions of Jane Austen's nature are also evident in this work; but,

*The Treasury of Sacred Song. Note CXLIX.

being concerned with points of comparatively minor importance, these need not be discussed here. The collective picture, however, portrays a narrow nature, with a heart cold towards God and unsympathetic towards man, somewhat contemptuous of the needy and ignorant, and caring little for any fellow-creatures beyond those of her immediate family circle. Easy indeed would it be to prove to the contrary, both from her own letters and from the writings of her relatives, and to show how completely such a conclusion misrepresents the attitude of her mind towards the highest questions. But all serious students of her biography may be left to discover this for themselves. They can weigh the assertions made in this work against the testimony given by those who knew her intimately, concerning her faith, her unselfishness, her humility and the 'piety which ruled her in life and supported her in death.' Above all, they will examine the records of that closing scene, when, face to face with a comparatively early death, 'neither her love of God, nor that of her fellow-creatures flagged for a moment,' and will consider whether such faith, courage and entire submission to the Divine will could have been felt by one to whom religion was merely a matter of externals.'

It is well to recall in this connexion that a juster and more discriminating judge, Archbishop Whately, summed up, in this 'Review' (No. XXIV, Jan., 1821) nearly a hundred years ago, his estimate of herself and her works:

'Miss Austen introduces very little of what is technically called religion into her books, yet that must be a blinded soul which does not recognise the vital essence, everywhere present in her pages, of a deep and enlightened piety.'

MARY A. AUSTEN LEIGH.

Art. 4.-THE FRENCH NOVEL.

1. A History of the French Novel (to the close of the 19th Century). By George Saintsbury. Two vols. Macmillan, 1917-1919.

2. Essays in Romantic Literature. By George Wyndham. Edited, with an introduction, by Charles Whibley. Macmillan, 1919.

THE quality of readableness, which is the first though not the last virtue of French novels, is also a challenge to their historian to imitate them. Mr Saintsbury has not declined it, massive as his volumes are. No other Englishman would have been so at home in the whole subject, from the first phases to the last; and the survey which he has made is an extremely close one. But what he has also done conspicuously is to enliven the abstracts of forgotten novels with a play of humour which breaks out on almost every page. This is often so diverting that we hardly regret his habit of re-telling the plots of novels in great detail. His claim as a historian is to keep to the facts; and his book is a safe place in which to find them. As a critic, too, he remembers that the facts he is dealing with are always facts of art. The lines of development and distinctions of kind are indicated clearly, though not emphatically. Yet there are moments when we are tempted to wish he would abridge the facts, such as a forty-page summary of the 'Grand Cyrus,' for the sake of a wider horizon; at times his History seems like a projection into space without enough light from the life and the other arts around it.

In this dense and attractive material there is nothing which Mr Saintsbury handles more skilfully than the origins of the novel in early romance. That richness of the romantic sources, beginning with the chansons de geste, was what also attracted George Wyndham in his Essays'; but his pursuit of the romantic spirit led him on not to the novelists, but to the poets, Villon, Ronsard, and the Elizabethans; and he only returns to fiction at the end in a memorial speech, full of exquisite feeling, about Scott. What has interested Mr Saintsbury is the way in which France, as he says, grew the seed of romance and dispersed it to other countries, and

cherished and perfected that art of telling a story which is a peculiarly French gift. He does not lose sight of the romantic strain, and it finally leads him to the conclusion that even the 19th-century French novel is dominated from first to last by romanticism. This provocative idea needs perhaps more defence than he has given it. If we take George Wyndham's excellent definition of romance as 'a welcome of the strange and Mr Saintsbury seems to agree with it-we get a good measure for testing the special quality of Victor Hugo and Gautier, or of Flaubert in 'Salammbô'; but, if we go on to extend it to all 19th-century novelists, it must be diluted into vagueness. No doubt, any original work is strange, as casting an individual, unsuspected light. This was how Flaubert described talent; it shows us something that no one else has seen. But it is a different thing from the fantastic, emotional spell of the great Romantics; and, even though Mr Saintsbury enlarges the meaning of romance, he hardly escapes this confusion.

The volume on the 19th-century novelists was bound to expose itself to more criticism than the first. Almost every writer named is the object of lively affections or dislikes, and there is no novel of repute about which good judges have not differed. Mr Saintsbury is a writer with such clear antipathies that the general fairness of his verdicts does him all the more credit as a critic. He does, indeed, leave us under an impression that the reason why he rates Les Travailleurs de la Mer' so high is because he knows Guernsey and has pleasant memories of scenery and good cheer. He finds it difficult to be just to George Sand, and hardly succeeds; and his pen runs away with him when he mentions the Goncourts. But the only real disappointment in this volume is his treatment of one of the authors whom he most admires, namely Flaubert. Though he calls him the greatest of all novelists since Thackeray, he has given him only half the amount of space allotted to Maupassant, and a good deal less-Flaubert would have appreciated the irony-than is allowed to Paul de Kock. The excuse that he has written at length on Flaubert elsewhere is merely tantalising, for this book is surely the place where Flaubert's position should be vindicated.

We are sorry, too, that he has declined to deal with living novelists, since MM. Anatole France, Pierre Loti, and Paul Bourget, to mention no others, seem to belong distinctively to his period of the 19th century. But when all is said we are left with a feeling of sheer gratitude to Mr Saintsbury for these stores of knowledge and entertainment, which make his book not only a history but a dictionary of the French novel.

Few readers of French novels care to look for them farther back than the 18th century; and they may console themselves by thinking that the earlier stories are tentative excursions in which the complete novel is felt after rather than attained. There is no barrier between romance and novel; it is one and the same stream of story-telling which descends from the old conteurs to Mérimée and Maupassant. But, when we take down the delicately beautiful Aucassin et Nicolette,' or such a vivid wandering in dream-country as 'Parthenopeus de Blois,' the pleasure that we get is one of poetry and strange imagination rather than the close-woven interest of life and character which is the substance of the novel. In reading Rabelais, again, any special interest of this kind is swallowed up in the humorous expansion of his 'bel et joyeux amble.' The heroic romances of the 17th century are hardly read at all; and there is perhaps some antiquarian flavour in the appreciation of Scarron and Furetière, or even that decisive book, 'La Princesse de Clèves,' where the novel thrusts up strongly towards the light. With the 18th century the case alters. It is not only that the writers are the first of the moderns, speaking to our minds and using their own with the same freedom with which we use ours. This appeal is sometimes blurred by the waves of sentiment which come flooding in upon the age of reason. The chief reason why they hold us is that they have grasped and disengaged some of the greatest possibilities of interest in the novel. These different themes can be worked still deeper; above all, they have yet to be brought into a rich harmony of design. But they are clear enough for us to be able to judge these novels as we should judge the fiction of to-day. Our release from antiquarianism is marked by the feeling that we read them because we

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