RECENT FICTION.-II.

ed from the French by J. Henry Hager. New York: goria of superficially seen objects and events.

ginning to gloat over the woes that led up to the final woe. It is as if the novelist played with his characters-doomed and plainly declared to be doomed-as a cat plays with a half-dead mouse.

ficient fidelity if it were only a question of some insignificant writer whose exact mentality was of less importance than the making of a sprightly and picturesque English page. But it is occasionally sufficiently inaccurate, and especially in the matter of additions and questionable emendations, to be

positively impertinent. It is needless to give illustrations; the very last sentence quoted above will serve as well as any. It reads, in the original :

The stories and sketches so far translated are well enough chosen to give bits of all sorts of Balzac's writing-all, at least, in the case of such a master as Balzacthat would bear this climate. They are never vicious, but there is a tolerably frank animalism in the point of view. The motives and qualities portrayed are not such as interest the best of us in each other. It is always man and woman seen closely and depicted strenuously, but seen only skin-deep, and to that depth we are still the primitive animal. The sketch, A Passion in the Desert, represents Balzac at his best. Nothing could be more perfect than these pictures. It is only difficult to know where not to quote :

"He was awakened by the sun, whose pitiless beams falling vertically upon the granite rock, produced an intolerable heat. The Provençal had ignorantly flung himself down in a contrary direction to the shadows thrown by the verdant and majestic fronds of the palm trees. He gazed at those solitary monarchs and shuddered. They recalled to his mind the graceful shafts crowned with long, weaving leaves, which distinguish the Saracenic columns of the Cathedral of Arles. The thought overcame

him; and when, after counting the trees, he threw his eyes upon the scene around him, an agony of despair convulsed his soul. He saw a limitless ocean. The somber sands of the desert stretched out till lost to sight in all directions; they glittered with dark luster like a steel blade shining in the sun. He could

not tell if it were an ocean or a chain of lakes that lay mirrored before him. A hot vapor swept in waves above the surface of this heaving continent. The sky had the Oriental glow of translucent purity, which disappoints because it leaves nothing for the imagination to desire. The heavens and the earth were both on fire. Silence added its awful and desolate majesty. Infinitude, immensity pressed down upon the soul on every side; not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a rift on the breast of the sand, which was ruffled only with little ridges scarcely rising above its surface. Far as the eye could reach the horizon fell away into space, marked by a slender line, thin as the edge of a sabre-like as in summer seas a thread of light parts this earth from the heaven it meets."

The translation is a spirited one, and follows the original with what would be a suf

"Enfin l'horizon finissait, comme en mer, quand il fait beau, par une ligne de lumière aussi déliée que le tranchant d'un sabre."

And when Balzac wrote, just above, "ces arbres solitaires," why should the translator "improve" his style by calling them "solitary monarchs"? If Balzac had wished thus to designate them, the French language is not without a symbol which he could have employed. Again, it shows a feeble sense of the swing of a properly arranged sentence, closing in its most emphatic idea, when the French " Il voyait un océan sans bornes," is needlessly clipped and inverted to "He saw a limitless ocean." If we are translating Balzac we might as well not only say precisely what he said, but say it precisely as he said it, especially when the very words needed are ready to our hand. Nevertheless, we must do the translation the justice of declaring it, for the most part, an admirably intelligent one. Its defects are trifling compared with its merits. We are tempted to quote one paragraph more, as a sample of Balzac's power in minute realistic description, and at the same time of the excellence of the rendering:

.. A strong odor,

"In the middle of the night his sleep was broken by a strange noise. He sat up; the deep silence that reigned everywhere enabled him to hear the alternating rhythm of a respiration whose savage vigor could not belong to a human being like that exhaled by foxes, only far more pungent and penetrating, filled the grotto. When the soldier had tasted it, so to speak, by the nose, his fear became terror; he could no longer doubt the nature of the terrible companion whose royal lair he had taken for a bivouac. Before long, the reflection of the moon, as it sank to the horizon, lighted up the den, and gleamed upon the shining, spotted skin of a pan

ther . . . It was a female. The fur on the belly and

on the thighs was of sparkling whiteness. Several little spots like velvet made pretty bracelets round her paws. The muscular tail was also white, but it terminated with black rings. The fur of the back, yellow or dead gold, and very soft and glossy, bore the characteristic spots, shaded like a full blown rose, which distinguish the panther from all other species of felis. This terrible hostess lay tranquilly snoring,

in an attitude as easy and graceful as that of a cat on

the cushion of an ottoman. Her bloody paws, sinewy and well-armed, were stretched beyond her head, which lay upon them; and from her muzzle projected a few straight hairs, called whiskers, which shim

mered in the early light like silver wires... At this instant the panther turned her head towards the Frenchman and looked at him fixedly, without moving. The rigidity of her metallic eyes, and their insupportable clearness made the Provençal shudder. The beast moved towards him; he looked at her caressingly, with a soothing glance by which he hoped

creature drew up her tail voluptuously, her eyes softened, and when for the third time the Frenchman bestowed this self-interested caress, she gave vent to a purr like that with which a cat expresses pleasure; but it issued from a throat so deep and powerful that the sound echoed through the grotto like the last chords of an organ rolling along the roof of a church."

an interest in real life as it actually lies throbbing all about him, that such fiction can greatly prosper with him. Yet it is something gained if weariness with the near ends in aspiration for the distant; and once out of one's petty province, one may chance to go very far. It will certainly be a distinct gain for Boston, not to speak of other intellectual centers, if beginning with Balzac in English it should happen to end with George Sand in the original French.

Gustave Flaubert has the great recommendation of having been the close personal friend of George Sand and Turgenieff. It is impossible that a man could have been this without sensitiveness of spirit and fineness of mental fibre. Yet he was evidently capable, at the same time, of that insensitiveness to magnetize her. He let her come quite close to him before he stirred; then with a touch as gentle and and that mental obtuseness which Pariloving as he might have used to a pretty woman, he sians alone seem able to possess in incongruslid his hand along her spine from the head to the ous union with the opposite qualities. Among flanks, scratching with his nails the flexible vertebræ our own people, love of the bloody and the which divide the yellow back of a panther. The ghoulish is the proper trait of the vulgar; and if the brutal taste creeps up higher in the social strata than one might suppose, it is covertly and shamefacedly. The translator of Salammbô says that “Zola and the men of his type. . . have gone to an extreme at which Flaubert's wisdom, his dignity, and his devotion to literature would never have permitted him to arrive. His disdain for the conventional restriction of the cold and classical school was not so great as to lead him to indecencies, or to pervert his imagination.” But this same translator describes Salammbó as "like an exquisite piece of Greek sculpture, mighty, yet too ethereal in its beauty for modern hands to create "—a comparison which puts him out of court as far as any opinion on what constitutes a perverted imagination is concerned. Salammbô is about as much like the "thunders of white silence ” of Greek sculpture as are the "realistic" pictures of the Paris exposition, which represented with much skill victims under the hands of torturers, decaying corpses, and other such unpleasant and very un-Hellenic objects. The adjective" ethereal" applied to this book is simply grotesque. It is a historic story of the war between Carthage and her rebellious mer

The sudden birth of an interest in Balzac in this country is symptomatic of several things. In the first place, like the recent interest in Russian literature, it denotes a commendable aspiration to reach out beyond our own provincial horizon, and to learn what it is that other races and temperaments admire Furthermore, it indicates a partial reaction from the too easily accepted delusion that all French literature is highly objectionable, and especially all realistic French novels. But the interest in Balzac, particularly, suggests above all the suspicion that our civilization-and shall we say peculiarly that of the region from which this series of translations emanates?-has reached the stage of profound ennui. The mind that craves the endless narratives of Balzac must be-if not individually ennuyé—at least the product of a society that is so. It is only when one has lost the vigorous freshness of

cenary troops—a war provoked by shameful treachery on the part of the Republic, and continued and avenged with unparalleled ferocity on both sides. The principal contents of the narrative are minute descriptions of the mutilations of the battle-field, the torturing of captives, the appearance of diseased persons, and as many like matters as can be packed into its limits. It is useless to urge, as the admirers of Flaubert do, that this sort of book is not a product of the same taste that sets kitchen maids to devouring the "Police Gazette," but of a love for truth in art, upon the principle that it should shirk no representation of life as it really is. For a conscientious belief in the doctrine that art has no duty to select from life, but must take it as it comes, beautiful-or ugly, does not sanction a story that does select, and selects the ugly-gathers it together, piles it upon the reader's attention in an ill-smelling heap, ignoring the existence of anything else; and this is what Salammbo does. Salammbô, the daughter of Hamilcar, is herself a beautiful figure; there is also some description of beautiful gardens, garments, and landscape. The rest of the book, every person and incident in it, is ugly. It is not quite the same thing as Zola, but Zola's books are legitimate successors of such as this. It is probable that war in the time of Hamilcar and Matho was as Flaubert describes it; but if the details of its mutilations and savageries are to be accepted as proper material for the making of novels, it is not to be wondered at that some one should remember that bodies are mutilated and diseases are loathsome today, too; and conclude that the uglinesses of the modern slums afford even better material than those of the ancient camp or court. Either is a stupid caricature of the occasional bold brutality of the Greek models to whom these Parisians appeal. The Greek selected something noble or beautiful for his theme, and if in the following it he came to any occasion for speaking of things physically or morally unpleasant, he spoke of them with simple directness, neither seeking nor evading. The same lesson Flaubert might have learned from his great friend Turgenieff, who is in the highest degree real

istic, who does not fear to talk of the dark things in life, yet who does it nobly, simply, and because the theme calls for it. Flaubert neither shrinks from his savageries, nor gloats over them; he simply dwells upon them with cold care and precision, working them out in detail, precisely as the painters of the same school work over the proper effect of muscles in the faces of men on the rack. They do not, therefore, produce any especial terror or horror in reading-not a tithe, for instance, of the feeling that the uncalculated, crude vigor and sincerity of "Fox's Book of Martyrs" never fails to inspire-but simply a sickened disgust and depression in reading, and still more in having read. The reason that the commoner sort of people crowd to executions, or narrate to each other with gusto the details of ugly wounds and diseases, is doubtless that these strong, gross stimulants stir their sluggish emotions, as their drugged gins and whiskys stir the sluggish brain. When, by virtue of its innate coldness and insincerity, a book that seeks to take advantage of this desire for excitement fails even to excite, it is left without shadow of reason for existence.

Absinthe is a Paris institution; and it points to the same trait in Paris society as the existence of such writers as Flaubert and Zola. There are brains in Paris that must have an intoxication even more potent than that of the vilest gin or whisky, and yet not so coarse; and there are intellects there that demand excitement essentially the same as that given by the "blood and thunder papers," and yet administered through the writings of men of unquestionably great literary skill, and some mental power. We do not see to what this can point except a real dullness of emotion, under all apparent quickness; a dullness akin to that which makes the Anglo-Saxon yahoo crave a hanging or a fight; or else a profoundly jaded condition, a boundless ennui. Not that such a comment must be taken too sweepingly ; the existence and acceptance of a certain class of books in a nation, proves only that there is a class there whose tastes they represent-not that they reveal the charac