vague and secret boulevard monises with the clatter and was to waste a long summer's racket of the street. day. There is nothing vague nor secret in the Boulevard Raspail of to-day. It is free and open to all the motor-cars whose drivers can toot a horn, and we are able to measure the ravages which it has left in his wake. Here a hole is made in the side of the Rue de Grenelle. There the envious boulevard has pierced the heart of the Rue de Varenne. An irreparable injury is done to what was once the Paris of the aristocracy, and an immortality of dishonour has been reaped by Raspail, who, for aught we know, was a learned and respectable physician, and who deserved a better fame than this at the hand of his admiring fellow-citizens. It is surely the first duty of those who pull down to see that they worthily fill the gaps caused by demolition. The Parisians have failed in this duty. The style Fallières succeeds ignobly to the style Louis XVI. The delicate mouldings, which cast no shadows, and which were the peculiar beauty of Parisian architecture, have been replaced by bold and striking effects. There is no modern building which presents to the eye a simple, unbroken surface. On every side twisted ornaments and insistent cornices jut out into the street. It matters not whether the design is Romanesque, Gothic, or Classical. The result is always the same, restless and eccentric. The worst that can be said of it, that it is without character and design, a patent outrage upon an old tradition of quiet beauty; the best, that it har But it is practical, of that there is no doubt. The style Fallières contrives two things: first, that you may travel from one fixed point to another with a greater celerity than ever before; second, that you may house more citizens in a cubic yard of space than was permitted by the gracious elegance of earlier days. And it is not wholly inconsistent with the broader tendencies of French life, with the desire for speedily gathered news, with the curiosity not of wit but of fact, with the pride, the most legitimate pride, in the conquest of the air, with the calm determination of a country to hold its own against the battalions of Germany. But just as in remote quarters and in hushed streets there linger still houses of an exquisite beauty, so there remain for good or evil in France traces of the ancient sentimental spirit. The jurymen of Paris are as easily moved by tears as ever they were, as eagerly forgiving of what they call a crime passionel, and even of crimes which may plead no passion. Only a fortnight ago a miserable woman who murdered in cold blood her husband and his unromantie maiden aunt, was triumphantly acquitted for no better reason than that she wept copiously in the dock. fierce hold which practical anarchy has lately had upon Paris was immensely strengthened, as the heroic M. Lépine has pointed out, by the general distaste of punishment, by the foolish sympathy of men of The theory for men of blood. his argument of far less inHowever, in times of change some relics of the past must always survive, and if France has put on a new strength, she has not laid aside all her old weaknesses. The truth remains that, when all deductions are made, a new France is coming into existence. The old legend of the Français léger, which never had a solid basis in fact, is being rapidly dispelled. The Frenchman of to-day is not light, but light-hearted. If he loves his pleasures, he loves his work also, and he sees the task that lies before him with a clearness which was not always in his eyes. In 1870 he lived still upon the glory of Napoleon, and shouted A Berlin without counting the cost or measuring the chance of victory. A few months ago, when war seemed imminent, he was filled with a calm resolution. He did not boast nor shout. He did not believe that the enemy's capital was as easily attained as a goal at football. He set about the work of preparation with an assured tranquillity, and won the respect and confidence of Europe. Whence comes this new spirit? What is it that inspires France with a new sense of security? M. Sabatier in his book, 'L'Orientation Religieuse de la France Actuelle,' attributes it to a religious sentiment, which, says he, "will prove an important factor in the history of French society." The fact that M. Sabatier gives to the word "religion a meaning of his own, renders the conclusion of terest than the facts upon which the argument is based. For M. Sabatier religion is neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, neither clericalism nor anti-clericalism, and obviously if we may attach any sense we please to "religion," the vague sentiment which it suggests does not carry us very far on the road of explanation. It seems wiser to leave "religion" out of the question, except as a metaphor, and to seek the cause of France's rejuvenescence in the history of the last forty years. Since the war a new generation of Frenchmen has grown up-a generation stern, practical, and patriotic. The memory of Alsace-Lorraine is quick in the minds of those whose fathers took part in the campaign of 1870. The prophecies of all the wiseacres have been falsified. Fifteen years ago it was confidently asserted that modern France was indifferent to the loss of the two provinces. Today we know that she is not indifferent, and her desire of recovery is made the keener by the increasing sympathy of the Alsatians. On both sides of the Vosges it is admitted that no tribunal in the world can validate a forced marriage, and it is of this idea that M. Sabatier assures us his countrymen are the faithful knights. We accept his assurance. We cannot accept his solution of the difficulty. The French democracy does not look for a revision of the Treaty of Frankfurt, he says. What it hopes for is an effort on the part of Germany, which will perceive that its honour is not in any degree engaged in the question of Alsace." Was there ever so fantastic a theory advanced? Can any sane man imagine the mailed fist surrendering Alsace, not in its own interest or in the interest of France, but for the sake of a valiant population which "has given Europe a spectacle of idealism hitherto deemed impossible"? The recent utterances of the German Emperor give a very poor support to the ingenuous theory of M. Sabatier. It is not, then, upon a vague spirit of idealism that France will depend in the future. She will depend upon the strength of her arm and the courage of her mind. She has been tried in the fire of the Dreyfus case, and has come out unscathed. She has seen her Church destroyed, its revenues embezzled and squandered upon unworthy purposes, and she is resolute to restore it. Above all, she is keenly conscious of the danger that threatens her frontiers, and she is prepared to make the last sacrifice to prevent the Teutonising of France and the consequent triumph of efficient mediocrity. The worst is, she cannot count upon the COoperation of her Governments. Whatever she achieve, she will achieve in spite of the professional politicians who pretend to rule her destinies. Democracy has met its inevitable reward in a Chamber of Deputies completely divorced in sympathy and understanding from the people who is supposed to elect it. At the very moment when France's future is in the balance, her Radicals and her Socialists wander up and down the country mumbling of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The paid deputies who sit at the Palais Bourbon are prepared to do anything which will secure their salaries, and they will not sacrifice their comfort to the dictates of patriotism if they can help it. But if parliamentary government has broken down in France, as elsewhere, the heart of the country is sound. More keenly conscious than ever of her noble past, France may be trusted, when the hour of battle comes, to fight like a nation of men who have not yet forgotten the triumphs of the Grande Armée. It is the boast of our popular dramatists that they are the masters of an esoteric art. They have discovered a secret, they believe, which has been revealed to no others. Their secret has not necessarily any relation to literature; it is concerned chiefly with a trick of getting men and women on or off the stage with an appearance of naturalness; and professional playwrights are never tired of explaining that the problem which they have solved so easily can never be tackled by a mere poet or man of letters. It is It is a pleasant fiction which, no doubt, seems to enhance the importance of those who have invented it. But it implies a complete separation between the art of drama and the art of literature, for which history and experience afford no warrant. A play, like a poem or a page of prose, must be estimated by the beauty or propriety of its style. And yet we have witnessed the spectacle in these modern times of a popular playwright solemnly declaring his faith in what he called "the literary drama." If the drama be not literary, what is? No longer drama, but a mere carpenter's job. At the Centenary of Browning Sir Arthur Pinero lifted up his voice in defence of his craft and in dispraise of Browning. Browning was no dramatist, he said; and we dare say he was not. But the reasons which Sir Arthur Pinero, in a somewhat pompous oration, found for his failure seem inadequate. He valued speech more highly than action, we are told. He had not got beyond the theory of soliloquy. In brief, he had none of those gifts which ensure a run of many hundreds of nights, and therefore he was not a dramatist in the sense that Mr Henry Arthur Jones is a dramatist, or Sir Arthur Pinero. It is not our intention to defend the dramas of Robert Browning. We believe them to be made in accord with a wornout convention, and to concontain wearisome passages which grate harshly on the ear. But we would protest, with what energy we may, against the subordination of speech to action. Speech is the sole medium of drama, as it is the sole medium of every form of literature. But the drama makes an increased demand upon the resources of literary art, because its words are framed less for the eye than for the ear. The virtues of har mony and propriety of sense and sound are its first necessities. In other words, if it have not speech it has nothing. There is no drama, emerged from its own time to ours, that does not owe its survival to a beauty of speech. It is their verse, not their action, that keeps Sophocles and Shakespeare ever radiantly young. If Congreve is immortal in the study-he is too fine for our modern stage-he has won his immortality by the perfection of his style. The scène à faire is all very well, and inapposite talk is as blameworthy in a drama as in a novel. But to pretend that there is any form of literature to which speech is not the first essential, is to confuse a profitable business with a delicate art, and to set the stage for ever on a level with a circus. When the practising dramatist accuses others of not understanding the drama, he should define more exactly what he means by it. Of course the drama that is in his mind is the confection which attracts large audiences and is a lasting satisfaction to the box-office. But drama of this kind is composed for a purpose, which is and must always be inartistic. As the dramatist keeps steadily in view the tastes and prejudices of his audiences, these audiences may be said to collaborate with him. And since he knows them and their whims as he knows his pocket, he may claim a certain advantage over the mere poet. It is not an advantage of honour. Yet most often it is the only advantage that he possesses, and he explains Flaubert's questioning wonder why popular dramatists should always boast a heaven-sent genius, and then write like cabmen. 6 among the masters-than those There is one modern dramatist at least, Henrik Ibsen, who believed devoutly in the paramount importance of appropriate speech. He did not brag of the possession of a cabman's style. He did not prove his contempt for fine language by aping the manner of a popular journal. He was quite incapable of writing such a sentence as the following, which flashes in a popular play of a popular British dramatist: "I am in no hurry, I assure you-in view of dear Nina's present amiable mood to recapitulate her many regrettable deficiencies." Don't the big, meaningless words back one another up in that sentence? Isn't there a fine literary sense in packing together the flat Latinisms, which are never used in familiar talk? Ibsen could never have been guilty of so gross a fault of taste as this. He may not have been the heaven-born teacher of mankind that his foolish champions of the eighties pretended he was. The lesson of the vestryman, foisted upon him by indiscreet admirers, was none of his teaching. the plays of Ibsen which does Rather, he was a finished not belong authentically to craftsman, a man of letters, the man or woman to whom who knew well the value of he assigned it. But then he speech, and who wrote for the was a man of letters, in whom stage with a full sense of the so absurd a phrase as "the weight and value of words. literary drama" would have There are few wiser lessons in aroused the laughter of condramatic art-not as it is con- tempt, and who did not claim ceived by our dramatists, but for himself a secret and esoteric as it exists and has existed gift. |