Chapter III: Part 3

The sustained and withering irony and censure in this sketch, which yet never goes out of the selected orbit of a boy's observation and experiences, seem to me to be perfect in their kind. The incompleteness of the child's understanding gives only a keener incisiveness to the satire embodied in his narrative. The general reader will never forgive such portraits as that of the elder Barbier, who, after shouting, 'Sursum Corda! Prenons serment de defendre le sol sacre de la Patrie!' accepts the large Prussian orders, sets his steam-saws going in his timber yard, and furnishes the wood for the besiegers of Paris; or of that of the tobacconist Legros, who, after crying, 'Un soldat qui renie son drapeau? Qu'il creve comme un chien!' stands bareheaded with bent spine to sell cigars to Bavarian officers. This is human nature: human nature as commerce and modern teaching and the cheap Press have made it; but Barbier and Legros will never pardon the limner who thus portrays them. To the reproach that such portraits are nearly always those which he selects, Darien would, no doubt, reply that it is not his fault if they are what have been in his path to the exclusion of finer and nobler figures. He is a realist in the full sense of that often-abused word, and he has the courage to represent the realities which he finds.

The _Annee Terrible_ casts its black shadows over the childhood of this writer, and as long as his life shall last the gloom it has left will stay with him. If France herself should ever forget, which Heaven forbid, he will not do so. His soul has been dipped in the Styx.

What will, no doubt, alienate from him a large number of readers will be his almost absolute want of human sympathy, or, at least, of expressions of such sympathy. It is exceedingly rare with him to give way to any sign of any emotion of pity. He sees human nature, in all its phases, with little compassion for it. He sees (and this is, too often, either through weakness or through policy, ignored by writers and thinkers) that the great majority of men are neither the martyrs nor the heroes, neither the victims nor the tyrants of their time, but a mass considerable alone by its numbers, inconsiderable by any mental or moral worth, and chiefly absorbed in different forms of selfishness and the desire of gain. It is probably an error, though one consecrated by usage and talent, to represent the generality of human beings as worthy subjects either of blessing or of curse. But the author who says so will never be forgiven by that mass of mediocrity which forms nine-tenths of the population of the world. Darien says it, and shows it, and it is this which will always make his works appear dreary and depressing to the general reader, who cannot accept and pardon this manner of looking at life for the sake of its veracity and courage.

Of course, also, in the Press generally, the accusation of exaggeration is always brought against exposures and delineations which are unwelcome and embarrassing. But the writer's word may certainly be taken for it that nothing in his descriptions is exaggerated or invented, and many recent inquiries into the causes of deaths in the ranks, and of executions after summary, and almost secret, court-martial in Algeria, have confirmed the veracity of the statements made in _Biribi_. The French Government, indeed, was, as I have said, so apprehensive of the effect of these on the public mind that, although it did not suppress the book, it forbade large coloured cartoons of the events described in it to be posted up on the boulevards. In all nations the public is treated like a child by authority; and as a child who will only walk straight and submissively if its eyes be bandaged and its feet hobbled.

But in these pages we are not so much concerned with the political and military side of these works as with their literary qualities; and these are considerable and of a strong and rare originality of style. _Il vous empoigne_, and it is impossible to read either of his two works without recognising their courage and ability, if we feel pained by their withering scorn and rugged wrath. They are at times hard as the stones over which the sick and swooning soldier is dragged, tied to the tail of a mule. They are at times ferocious as the licensed torturer with the three stripes on the sleeve, who throws his helpless prisoner, gagged and bound, on the burning sands. Terrible they always are, with all the terror of truths which have been lived through by the person who chronicles them. It is not any betrayal of confidence to say that the author of _Biribi_ has experienced in his own person the tortures of which the dread record is made under this little playful-sounding word. After such scenes as are herein described, and such sufferings as these, the blood in a man's veins cannot be rose-water. 'La haine c'est comme les balles; en la machant on s'empoisonne.' And it is impossible that the military system can beget any other than hatred, violent, unforgiving, imperishable, in the victims of that system.

'A young soldier, a conscript, a chasseur a cheval, has lost
two cartridges as the battalion is about to leave for Tunis.

'The Corporal informs the Captain in command, who turns and
looks in silence. The boy Loupat gazes at him with the eyes of
an animal watching the descent of the club which is about to
brain it, and from which it knows not how to escape.

'In passing through Tunis the Corporal says to him, "We shall
leave you here. That will teach you to sell your cartridges."

'The boy understands. The council of war, the sentence as a
thief, the indelible shame stamped on the brow of a youth
because he has lost two of the cartridges of the State! The
following morning the bugle sounds the _reveil_ at four
o'clock. It is still dark. At twenty minutes to five the
company, with knapsacks on their backs, is drawn up in line on
the road which runs through the camp. The trumpets sound the
roll-call, and all down the line each man answers "Present" as
his name is spoken.

'"No one is missing?"

'"Yes, Loupat, my Captain."

'"Loupat is absent?"

'"Yes, my Captain."

'"The scoundrel! He has slunk off in the night to escape
court-martial, but we will find him. Go on. No one else
missing?"

'"Look there!" A soldier points to the gymnasium. All the men
look where he points. Under the portico, on the great
architrave on the left, a body is swinging, black, at the end
of a cord.

'A lieutenant runs to the place, climbs to the body takes hold
of it, lets it go, returns.

'"Dead?" says the officer in command. "Is it Loupat?"

'"He is already cold."

'"The scoundrel!" says the Captain again. "Well! he has done
justice on himself. Right flank, march!"

'We are crowded pell-mell into the railway waggons which are
bound for Tunis. I look through the opening in the door and see
far away below me--already far away--a small dark shape which
swings in the wind as on a gibbet, and which is lighted solely
by the first rays of the rising sun.

* * * * *

'Another soldier, Barnaux, has had some liqueurs given him by a
comrade; Barnaux is drinking with the men of his _marabout_,
when a sergeant enters, espies the irregularity, takes the
offender before the officer in command.

'Barnaux refuses to say who the giver of the liqueur was. The
Captain orders him to be put in irons. They have put him _a la
crapaudine_, that is, with his arms bound behind him and
chained to his ankles. He is cast down thus on the sand of the
camp. Because he moans with pain they gag him with a dirty rag,
they tie his chin to his head with a cord. He remains all the
night thus, tied up into a shapeless packet. In the morning
when they change sentinels they perceive that he is dead. The
gag has stifled him.

* * * * *

'Then the horror of the hospital; those hells which these men
so dread that they will tear the bandages off their wounds, or
cut their veins with a bit of broken glass, rather than live to
enter them.

'The muleteers set us down at a great tent which serves as an
infirmary; within there are planks on trestles and large pails
filled with reddened water.

'"You see that," says Palot, who has divined with the instinct
of the dying the destination of those sinister planks. "Well,
that will be my last bed."

'An assistant, a filthy apron round his body, signs to us to
enter.

'The great tent is an unutterably miserable place; it has been
battered about by wind and weather; the currents of air blow
unchecked through it, and clouds of dust arise from the ground.
Some twenty iron beds are there, not more; and beyond those a
pile of mattresses, on which men are lying, rolled up in rough
counterpanes. There are not sheets enough for all. They make a
sick man rise and give up his place to Palot, whose pulse the
surgeon feels.

'"Done for," says the doctor, between his teeth, without
heeding whether Palot hears him or not.

'To the rest of us they assign the mattresses lying on the
earth; these are full of vermin; they throw on us some
covering, stained with the vomit of our predecessors.

'How wretched it is, this hospital! How weary are the days
passed, with no other companions than the dying, whose
characters are poisoned by suffering and whose cries of horror
and anguish ring in one's ears! When, moved by the disgust and
despair which comes over you in this foetid hole filled with
filth and misery, you drag yourself out on your trembling limbs
into the sun, you feel so feeble, so exhausted, so helpless,
you cannot walk a step. You sit down in the torrid heat; you
are chilly, despite the high temperature; your teeth chatter,
your body is drenched with sweat. And at evening you are
obliged to return to the tent, where you pass such hideous
nights, troubled by such frightful nightmares, by such vague
sudden shapeless terrors, which seem to seize you by the throat
and freeze the blood in your veins. Oh! those horrible nights
when you see the dying shake off their covering with shrunken
fingers and try to raise their haggard faces, lighted by the
yellow-green rays of a lanthorn!

'These nights in which the living, who so soon will be the
dead, clutch at the rags which cover them, and shriek with rage
and fear as though they saw an enemy descend on them! These
nights in which one hears the childlike sobs of young Palot,
who is delirious, and who in his long agony calls on his
mother, "Mamma! Mamma!"

'They will ring for ever in my ears those two piteous words
which through three whole nights fill that wretched place with
their unpitied lament. A lament, low and tender at first,
broken with choking tears, ending in screams which make one's
hair stand up on one's skull with horror. The desperate screams
of a perishing life which has lost all sense and measure of
things or of time, of one who knows only that he will die, and
in one supreme appeal protests against his severance from those
he loves.'

* * * * *

And the youth Palot dies in that appeal, and they dig a hole in the red clay under a low wall beside a Barbary fig-tree.

'Ah! poor little soldier, who breathe your last, calling on
your mother; you who, with your glazing eyes, saw the vision of
your home; you who are laid there, at twenty-three years of
age, to be devoured by the worms of that foreign soil on which
you have suffered so much, and where you have met your death
alone, forsaken, without a friend to soothe your last struggle,
without a hand to close your eyelids, except the brutal hand of
the hospital servant, which shut on your mouth like a muzzle
when your desperate cries disturbed his sleep. Ah, I know why
your sickness was mortal; I know it much better than the
surgeon whose steel dissected your emaciated body; and I pity
you, poor victim of the State, with all my heart and soul as I
pity your mother who waits for you, counting the days of your
absence, and who will only receive in her solitude the dry
official notice of your death!

* * * * *

'Ah, no! I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your
mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are
killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they
send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of
childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the
Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves
let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that
there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne
away from them? Do you not understand that it would be better
to tear your new-born creatures limb from limb than to bring
them up for one-and-twenty years, only to throw them into the
hands of those who want their flesh to feed the cannon?... And
you would ask our pity when, in some dark hour, the end comes,
and the bones of your children are gnawed by hyaenas and
whitened by the sun in some forgotten corner of the earth?'

There are many such passages in _Biribi_, burning with truth and with pain; and it would be well if they could be stamped into the mind and the memory of the peoples of this epoch, who go meekly and stupidly as sheep to the slaughter, under the pressure of their sovereigns and statesmen. Of course, such a teaching as this carries with it its own condemnation by what is called authority, and by all those classes of which I have spoken, to whom war is a necessity and a standing army is the ark of the Government. But it would be well if the populace of every country could read, learn, and digest it, and realise its truth and its justification. As I have said, I place _Bas les Coeurs_ higher, in a purely literary sense, than _Biribi_, in the sense of construction and of concentration. For _Biribi_ is abrupt, at times confused; is rather a series of terrible records and tragical incidents than a consecutive and harmonious narrative, although it relates the career of the same soldier from the time when he enters the ranks, to the last day in which he flings from him for ever the grey coat and _kepi_ of the punishment-battalion. In that punishment-battalion he has been placed, let the reader remember, for no especial crime against law or decency, but for those offences against the military code (the unwritten code) which make the offender more guilty in the eyes of a court-martial than any actually criminal accusation: to have lost a regimental article, to have forgotten to salute a superior, to have stopped to drink at a brook on a march, to have omitted to put the regulation number on a clothes brush or a pewter platter, to have been out without leave, to have lost cartridges or buttons--any one of those innumerable and incessantly recurring actions or omissions which make a soldier an _insoumis_ to his military superior, whether sergeant or general, corporal or colonel, which to the military mind constitute crimes too heinous to be named, offences which fill a punishment-book with accusations of acts in which only the semi-insanity of perverted authority could see any provocation. Read only of the punishment of the _tombeau_ for simple sins of negligence or thoughtless mirth. The _tombeau_ is a canvas cover, stretched on stakes, making a cage a metre long by sixty centimetres wide, into which the soldier condemned to this torment is obliged to creep on his stomach as best he can. In this cage he spends days, weeks, months, at the caprice of his tyrants, with a litre of water as his only drink, and nothing but the canvas between him and scorching heat or icy rain, or blinding desert dust. On hot days the water in his little can evaporates rapidly; and at the will of the corporals in charge of him he may be kept thirty-six hours without other drink and without food at all. Remember, as you read these lines, that the _tombeau_ has been the home for months of the man who describes it; a home on the scorching Algerian sand in the parching African weather; a home in which he envied the jackal its lair and the vulture its wings; a home in which his flesh rotted and his manhood swooned.

It is, perhaps, the finest compliment one can pay to an author to be so much impressed by his theme that one almost forgets to speak of his purely intellectual qualities. It is difficult to treat of either of these works in a coldly critical spirit. For they are written with tears of blood--such tears as are wrung from the heart's depths of all those by whom France is beloved.

For if militarism be her only armour, her only resource against her foes, then must we tremble for her indeed; and tremble no less for the whole of Europe, of which all the male youth is bruised and crushed under militarism as in a mortar. The charge of want of patriotism has been brought against Georges Darien for both these volumes. But it is the flaw in human nature, not in French nature only, which he exposes; the cynicism, the selfishness, the cowardice, the meanness, which are so conspicuous in all modern society, in all nations and in all grades. Were there a German invasion of Italy or of England next year, there would probably be as many Italians or English ready to succumb to, to cringe before, and to profit by, the conquerors as there are Versaillais ready to do so in the volume called _Bas les Coeurs_. There is a moral motor ataxy in the spinal marrow of modern nationalities; the love of money, the fear of poverty, and the continual concentration of the mind on personal interests taught by modern education and by modern commerce make up a large percentage of human beings, who are mere time-servers, always ready to hold the stirrup-leather of the strongest. It is not alone the French bourgeois of 1870 who is satirised in these pictures of Versailles under German domination; it is the whole modernity of the last quarter of the nineteenth century under the teaching of modern science, modern trade, and modern morality. All humanity has been inoculated with the serum of concentrated cowardice and egotism; some are robust enough to resist the contagion, but the majority absorb it and develop the disease. That which Darien calls not cowardice, but fear, is enormously developed by modern influences, and will probably continue to increase in the coming century. He asks himself and his reader of what elements is it composed that discipline, that blind obedience, which is enforced in military life (and which is already demanded in civil life by the scientific and medical tyrannies). He replies, and it is a subtle distinction which will escape the comprehension of many, that the soldier who thus cringes to base orders is not a coward but a craven (_pas un lache; un peureux_).

'This craven would throw himself into fire or flood to-day to
save a comrade's life; but he would blow his comrade's brains
out to-morrow at the word of command of a non-commissioned
officer. He is not base: he is frightened. His courage
disappears before a watch-word: his boldness shrinks and
vanishes under a regimental order. What cows him is the
apprehension of punishment, the fear of the men set above him.
Fear is the keystone of the ark of the temple of Janus. The
army is a laundry where they throw the consciences of men into
a tub of soap-suds, and where the characters of men are wrung
and twisted like wet linen, and are placed, shapeless, under
the wooden beater of a brutalising discipline. It is only by
means of fear that the military system has been able to
establish itself. It is only by such fear that it maintains its
position. It is obliged to affect the imagination by terror, as
it must extinguish the soul and sense of nations to prevent
each from seeing farther than the stupid limit of a frontier.
It is obliged to surround itself with a mysterious ceremony,
with a religious pomp in which horror is united to
magnificence; in which the trumpet-blast joins in the
death-shrieks; in which one can see confused together the
blood-stained robe of glory, the plume of generals, the
handcuffs of gendarmes, the marshal's baton, and the dozen
balls of the execution-volley, the golden palms of triumph and
the shattered bones of the dead. It must present this
spectacle to the crowds which stare and tremble before it as
they stand open-mouthed before a charlatan quack doctor at a
fair, whose tinsel and feathers attract them, but from whom
they shrink alarmed as soon as they see a forceps or a lancet
glitter ominously in his hand. It must do this in order that
the people, always in ecstasy before the marvellous, which it
does not attempt to analyse, shall be seized before it with awe
and admiration: even as a savage who prostrates himself in
terror and respect before the shooting-iron which he does not
understand, but which he knows possesses the power to strike
him to the earth.'

Many will protest against this figure as an insult to the general public, but like many other insults which carry an intolerable sting in them, it may claim that it is merited, and does not overpass the truth.

Darien writes with that force which can, indeed, only come from the intimate persuasion that what it tells mankind is true, and should be told.

'"It is commonly said," he continues, "that the army incarnates
the nation. History puts this into our heads by means of all
her subtlest lies. Ten martial anecdotes sum up a century; a
boast describes a reign. History preaches hatred of the people,
respect for the pillager, the sanctification of carnage, the
glorification of slaughter. The weak, the sensitive, the timid
succumb beneath it, and are buried in the red clay or left on
the sand for the vultures and jackal. The strong (sometimes,
not always) lives to have his whole future poisoned by these
memories, his whole temperament warped and embittered; or he
forces his tormentors to shoot him by some unpardonable breach
of discipline; some blow to a superior, or some intentionally
insolent reply; death is the continually recurring sentence in
the military code; if the man does not bend he must be broken:
broken in two with a volley which smashes his spine. The
punishment-battalions, the workshops of the Travaux Forces, are
the immediate consequences of the standing armies. Society, to
protect its interests, makes of a young citizen a soldier, and
of the soldier a galley slave at the first effort in him to
shake off the yoke of that discipline which degrades and
brutalises him, requiring like all tyrants and usurpers to
support its rule by terror, to make itself dreaded that its
prestige may dazzle and its tottering throne be secured. What
society requires is an obedience passive and blind, a total
imbecility, a humiliation which has no limit or hesitation; the
response of the machine to the mechanic, of the dancing dog to
the stick of his teacher. Take your man, make him surrender all
free will, power of choice, liberty, and conscience, and you
create and possess a soldier. To-day, at the end of the
nineteenth century, there is as much difference between the two
words, soldier and citizen, as there was in the time of Caesar
between two similar words--Milites and Quirites. The standing
army is the corner-stone of the actual social structure; it is
a force which sanctions and secures the conquests of force; it
is a barrier raised much less to combat foreign invasion than
to resist and paralyse the just claims of nations. Soldiers,
those sons of the people armed against their fathers, are
nothing more or less than gendarmes in disguise."'

This is surely absolute truth--that truth which is of all others most feared by those in authority; those who, whether as sovereigns, ministers, financiers, professional men, or tradesmen, live on and by the servility and gullibility of the nations.

'What is discipline except fear? The soldier is reared to dread
what is behind him more than what he is forced to face; he must
be more afraid of the fellow-trooper who will be told off to
shoot him in the back, than of the adversary whom he is ordered
to attack. The army is the incarnation of fear. The soldier
must dread his commanders as a burnt child dreads the fire. He
must never laugh at their absurdities, nor raise a voice
against their injustice or their tyrannies. He must never
speak. He must not even think. His superiors do both for him.
If he laugh, or resent, or speak, or think, if he be neither a
coward nor a dolt, he is a mutineer: he must be tamed, beaten,
broken _a Biribi_.'

And when the dreamer, Queslier, says that it will not be long before the people will become awake to this abuse of them, and will see that the military caste is established on prejudices and interests hostile to them, and will arise and destroy it, Darien replies, with equal truth:--

'There will flow much water under all the bridges of the world
before the people will have ceased to adore their vain idols
bathed in blood and tears.'

Vain idols, indeed! For thousands of years the Juggernaut of military despotism has rolled over the living pavement of the prostrate multitudes, and there is no sign as yet that those multitudes will arise and shiver the blood-stained car to atoms. Darien has but little hope in the resistance of the people. He fears that the majority of them will always continue to be daunted, dazzled, made dumb and helpless by the powers which ruin and slay them. William of Germany makes his insolent and inhuman declaration that the soldier must slaughter his own progenitors if his 'war-lord' bid him do so; and yet William of Germany is allowed to continue his reign.

What are we to look for from nations which lie down to be stamped on thus? which lick the spurred boots of those who outrage them?

_Biribi_, and what _Biribi_ represents, has its prototype in every country of Europe; and wherever Europe introduces her 'civilisation' there she introduces also her quick-firing cannon, her numbered battalions of slaves, her organised butchery, her pulverisation of virility and of volition, her destruction of initiative and of liberty.

England considers that such arguments as those contained in this book do not concern her because she has no conscription. But how long will she be able, or be allowed, to be free from enforced service? The present field-marshal, commanding-in-chief, Lord Wolesley, desires conscription. It may well be that events, in the not far distant future, may strengthen his hands and enable him to enforce it.[4]

[Footnote 4: This was written by me in 1897; England has not waited long to confirm the truth of it.]

'Ah, Mascarille! who wished to put history into madrigals!'
cries Darien. 'History has given us Chauvinism (Jingoism), that
epidemic which makes a nation run headlong like the Gadarene
swine, to fall into the pit of absolutism! The army incarnates
the nation, you say? No. It diminishes it. It incarnates
nothing but force, brutal and blind, which lies at the service
of whoever most pleases it; or--sad to say--whoever pays it
highest. The army is the social cancer; is the octopus of which
the tentacles drain the blood of the nations; the hundred arms
and feelers which the people should sever with blows of their
hatchets if they desire themselves to live.'

Such language is very strong, and will rouse strong opposition in those who have long been cradled in conventional opinions, and believe that the established order of society, now existing, is admirable, and intangible, because it has had the force and the cunning to so establish itself. It is language which may, of course, be challenged by adverse argument, which may at anyrate be met by counter-statements deserving to be weighed against it; but it is language which is more needed than any other in the present state of Europe, with every nation armed to the teeth and every country an arsenal.

III

THE ITALIAN NOVELS OF MARION CRAWFORD

I believe that the novels of Mr Crawford of which the scene and the characters are Italian are not among those of his works which are the most generally popular. This fact, if it be a fact, must be due to the general inability of his English and American public to appreciate their accuracy of observation and lineation. Nearly all of them have qualities which cannot be gauged by those to whom the nationality of his personages in these works is unknown. In my own works, of which the scene is in Italy, I have dealt almost exclusively with the Italian peasantry. Mr Crawford has devoted his attention to the middle and the higher classes. I do not think his portraiture of the Italian aristocracy always redolent of the soil, but that of the lower and middle classes is faithful to a wonderful degree. That side of Italian life which is given in _Marzio's Crucifix_, for instance, is drawn with an accuracy not to be surpassed. The whole of this story indeed is admirable in its construction and execution. There is not a page one would wish cancelled, and nothing could be added which would increase its excellence. It is to my taste the _capo d'opera_ of all which he has hitherto done.

I think in his studies of the Italian aristocracy he has given them less charm and more backbone than they possess. He has drawn their passions more visible and furious than they are, and their wills less mutable and less feeble than they are in general. He seems to have mistaken their obstinacy for strength, while, if he have perceived it, he has not rendered that captivating courtesy and graceful animation which are so lovable in them, and which render so many of their men and women so irresistibly seductive. According to him they are a savage set of _berserkers_, always cutting each other's throats, and he does not in any way render that extreme politeness which so effectually conceals the real thoughts of the Italian gentleman, and which never deserts him except in rare moments of irresistible fury. No one remembers so constantly as the Italian of all classes that language is given us to conceal our thoughts, and no one lives so completely as the Italian does from the cradle to the grave in strict concealment of his thoughts even from his nearest and his dearest.

But in his Italian _genre_ pictures, and in portraiture of the people whom we meet every day in society, Mr Crawford has a delightful pencil; little side studies also of more humble persons, which many writers would neglect, are charming in his treatment; take, for instance, the old priest of Aquila in _Saracinesca_; with how few touches he is made to live for us. We only see him once, but he will always remain in our memory; in his whitewashed room with its sweet smell from the pot of pinks, and his touching regret that he has never seen Rome, and at his age cannot hope to do so.

His priests, by the way, are always excellently drawn, from the humble village vicar to the learned and imposing cardinal. He has penetrated alike their interiors and their characters with that skill which is only born of sympathy, and it is therefore perhaps only natural that he has not the faintest conception of the motives and views of the socialist and republican whom he dreads and hates.

All these charming little details, like the pot of pinks, can only be thoroughly appreciated by those who know intimately Italian character and habits; but they abound, and show so much of fine observation and delicate discernment in the author that one cannot forgive him for ever beating the big drum of florid sensation.

Let me not be understood to mean that crime, or the impulse of crime, is not a perfectly legitimate subject for the novelist; both can be made so, but they are only so when treated as Mr Crawford himself treats them in _Marzio's Crucifix_. When treated as he treats them in _To Leeward_ and _Greifenstein_ and _Casa Braccio_ they are merely coarse and inartistic. He has a leaning towards melodrama which is chiefly to be regretted because it mars and strains the style most natural to him, and does not accord with his way of looking at life, which is not either poetic or passionate, but slightly sad, and slightly humorous, modern and instinctively superficial, superficial in that sense in which modern society itself is so.

In _Marzio's Crucifix_ he is perfectly natural, and one cannot but wish that he had never left that manner of treatment. Every motive therein is natural, every character consistent with itself. This naturalness in his characters is Mr Crawford's greatest attraction, and when he departs from it, as he does in such detestable melodramas as the _Witch of Prague_ and _Greifenstein_, he is no longer himself. It is hard to understand that the same author can create the most delicate of aquarelles and the most glaring of posters, or why one who can draw so well and finely in silver-point can descend to daub with brooms in such gross distemper. If this be the price of versatility, it were best not to be versatile. But it is not versatility, because true versatility consists in possessing a many-sided power which flashes like a jewel of which all the facets are equally well cut. True versatility, moreover, does not consist in the mere change of subject, but in the change of style, of treatment of thought, in fact, the mutation of the entire mind of an author, such as brings it into entire harmony with its fresh field and its new atmosphere. There is no such change in these novels. Mr Crawford is Mr Crawford always. As he never loses himself in his creations, so he is always present in them to the reader; and his style never varies, whether he treats of horrible psychological mysteries in Prague or of pleasant carnival seasons in Rome.

He is not strong or forcible in tragedy. When it is incidental in his stories like the murder of Montevarchi, or the attempted assassination of Ser Tommaso, it is admirably sketched in; but when it forms the structure and essence of a romance he fails entirely to give it sublimity; it becomes in his hands a mere scarecrow, which makes us only smile as its wooden hands beat the empty air. One feels that it is not his natural element, that he does not like it or feel at home in it, and has merely lent himself to it from some wrong impression that the public requires it; due, perhaps, to the suggestion of some unwise publisher or friend. The coarse melodrama with which some of his novels ends is not in unison with the characters or the scope of his work. It is quite true that, as murder is, in some circumstances, justified in actual life, so in some circumstances it may be used as a _denouement_ in fiction with perfect accuracy; yet it is always a violent ending which fully accords with romance of wild life or peasant life, but always jars, unless introduced with the most perfect skill, in stories of men and women of the world; because the evil passions of this latter class of persons are of a different quality, and find different modes of relief, from the primitive and barbarous satisfaction of killing enemies or rivals. All the influences and habits of society make it almost impossible for men and women of society to become assassins.

Now Mr Crawford can draw men and women of the world so well that it is a pity he so often goes out of his way to spoil his portraits of them with the bowl and dagger taken from a different phase of life from that in which they move.

He is always a gentleman, and he is at his best when writing of gentlemen in the society which he knows so well. Duels are quite natural in good society everywhere, except in England, and no one since Charles Lever ever described them so well as Mr Crawford; but murders are not general in the world of well-bred people, indeed are not very often heard of out of the lowest strata of plebeian life.

In _Casa Braccio_ a fine motive, that of the peasant of Subiaco's long-cherished vengeance, with its final satisfaction, both based on a mistake, is wasted, because no one can care in the least for the man who is slain, and the original sin committed by this victim (marriage with a nun), although it seems so great to Mr Crawford, appears to us no sin at all; so that his tragic end neither moves us nor satisfies in us any sense of justice. What are admirably rendered and true to life in _Casa Braccio_ are not Griggs and Gloria, or Angus Dalrymple and Maria Addorata, but the peasants of Subiaco, Stefanone, with his long-cherished vendetta, and his wife, Sora Nanna, who wears her lost daughter's shoes because it would have been a sin to waste them. One regrets that two persons so perfectly natural and well drawn should be set on a pyre of flaring melodrama which obscures their portraits in its smoke and flame. Why could he not give us a story of Subiaco, passionate but natural, in which the action would have passed entirely in that interesting and little-known part of the Sabine mountains?

When I use the term melodrama, I mean by it that which mimics the tragic, but falls short of it; the tragic, imitated but so environed, that it loses dignity and has something of the inflated and grotesque. The melodrama in _Pietro Ghisleri_, in _Taquisara_, and in _The Children of the King_ is this kind of melodrama; it does not move us for a moment; we are, on the contrary, impatient of it in a modern period and history, with neither of which it has any harmony. In the latter story the conception of Rughero, though by no means new, is fine; but the frame in which this mariner is set lacks all fitness for such a figure; and the man whom he murders is not sinner enough, nor serious enough in his actions, for the reader to be moved to pardon the act as the author himself pardons it. If violent delights have violent endings, violent endings need strong provocation and clear explanation; they should appear to the reader to be inevitable, the offspring of an unavoidable result. To the reader such a crime as this should appear to be the inexorable justice of an inevitable retribution. But in the violent _denouement_ of _The Children of the King_ the cause is trivial, the act under the circumstances improbable, and the rude shock of it is not in accordance with any of the other characters and with the light, careless modernity of the setting of this story.

This defect of consistency, which is grave in literature, would be ruinous on the stage where action is so much quicker, and where the idiosyncrasies of each personage are so visible to the audience; and such a fault is the more vexatious because it shows that the author was never really absorbed in his own creations, was never so possessed with them that they dominated him and made him do what they chose, as Bulwer Lytton has said that the characters of every true novelist must do, because a character once conceived is like a child, being once begotten, it becomes what it must, we cannot control the subsequent shape it takes.

Another defect of Mr Crawford's works is usually that their interest flags towards the close, that this close is too abrupt, and that it gives the reader the impression of the narrative being brought to an untimely end because the writer no longer cared about narrating it. This defect may be noticed in nearly all his stories, beginning with _Mr Isaacs_, in which it is conspicuous; and is startlingly and irritatingly visible in one of his latest, _Adam Johnstone's Son_; indeed, in the last-named story the conclusion is obviously totally different from what it was intended to be in the opening chapters. Now, a well-constructed novel may please you or not, may be attractive or offensive, but it will always be accurately conceived and harmoniously balanced; and nothing animate or intimate will be introduced into it which has not some bearing direct or indirect upon the plot. Nothing can be more incorrect than to excite the expectations of the reader by indications which result in nothing, sign-posts on a road which do but lead to a blank wall.

A grave violation of this rule is frequently to be found in the Crawford stories, no worse one than that in this story of Adam Johnstone's son, where a long chapter is occupied by an incident with a brutal Neapolitan carter on the Sorrento road. The man is knocked down by the hero, and endeavours in return to stab him; carabineers arrive and arrest the carter and not the Englishman (as in real life they unquestionably would have done). The whole incident, related with much spirit, is obviously only in its place, only pardonable as an episode, if the carter be destined to appear again and sate his thirst for vengeance on the hero. But he disappears from the scene for ever as the carabineers handcuff him. We neither see nor hear any more of him, nor does the Englishman hear any more of the matter, which in actual life certainly would have caused him much annoyance at the local tribunal. The appetite of the reader should not be tempted by dishes, which become a mere Barmecide's feast, in this manner. Some intention must have been in the author's mind when he created this scene. Why did he not carry out his intention?

In this manner many combinations and situations of the most interesting and uncommon kind are deliberately thrown away unused. He frequently introduces personages about whom he excites our liveliest interest, and whom he then forsakes or dismisses with an indifference which the reader does not share. It is as though a painter painted into his canvas numerous figures which he has never finished, though he sends out his picture as a finished work. The only novels of his which are entirely free from this defect are the _Cigarette Maker_, the _Three Fates_, and _Marzio's Crucifix_, and here I cannot resist (though it is not within the scope of this article, since its venue is America) pointing out how delicate, subtle, and clever is that story entitled the _Three Fates_. There is little movement in it, no incident of any note, its interest lies entirely in the development of character and in the evolution of feeling, but these are so treated that they suffice to hold the reader's charmed attention, and the study of the man whose hesitations and tergiversations make the subject of it is one which may be caviare to the general, but which may be read again and again with sympathy and curiosity by those who can appreciate psychological problems. The persons in it are such as we may have known to-day or may know to-morrow; and the working of their minds and inclinations is traced with a masterly skill, and is as correct as a physiologist's diagram of the nervous system.

What to me is especially attractive in Mr Crawford's novels is the atmosphere of good breeding which one breathes in them. One feels in the company of a well-bred man. Their philosophy, their experiences, their views, are all those of a man of the world; and there is in them a tolerance and a total absence of prejudice (except in religious and political matters) which are refreshing, and which are a fair approach to, if not an actual attainment of, unbiassed liberality. There is in them no enthusiasm for anything, no altruism, no deep emotion. They are unfortunately entirely lacking in any perception of those myriads of other lives not human, but as sentient as the human, such as vibrates in every line of Pierre Loti's works. We have never in his novels any profound tenderness like that with which the Freres Rosny speak of the semi-humanity of inanimate things, or show us the dog gambolling on the wayside turf in all the simple joy of its youth and its pleasure in existence. To Mr Crawford as to Peter Bell, a primrose by the river's side is a primrose, and it is nothing more, and the thrush or the linnet which sings in the hawthorn above the primrose roots for him has no existence. He has the American's indifference to all created things which are not human. There are no animals in his books except two poor terriers (who have their necks broken by the odious lover in _To Leeward_), and the unhappy cat, introduced only to be poisoned in _Taquisara_. There is nothing which indicates that he cares for nature in any of its phases, and he calls the cicala a locust.

In Italy he lives only for the people around him as he would live in Pall Mall, or Broadway, or the Champs Elysees. That passion with which Italy has inspired Shelley, Byron, George Sand, De Musset, Owen Meredith, even the calm analytic mind of Taine, has never touched him. He has never felt the ecstasy which is embodied in that single phrase of Taine's, 'On nage dans la lumiere.' One would say that the moonlight shining on the waters of Tiber, under the bridge of St Angelo, is no more to him than a flash-light illumining a grain-elevator on the Hudson. All which is still Italy, of colour, of perfume, of light, of legend, of rapture, of emotion, has wholly escaped him; he has never felt its _hysterica passio_; he has never known its eternal youth, he has never seen its lost gods rise and walk through its blossoming grass as the star rays shine in the white cups of the narcissus of its fields. But of the people who pass him in the Corso and on the Chiaja, who shake hands with him at Montecitorio and on the Lung' Arno, who lounge and talk with him at the cafes, and the legations, and the public gardens, he is an admirable student, and an admirable photographer.

One of the most admirable of his portraits is that of the young Don Orsino, the hero of the novel of that name. Sant' Ilario, like his gallant old father, might be a North German, a Hungarian, or a Scottish noble, his temperament is, indeed, much more northern than southern; but Don Orsino,[5] his son, is exactly that which he is represented to be, a youthful Italian of high rank, who has been educated at an English public school, and has all the vanity, and egotism, and _secheresse de coeur_ of modern youth in him. The type of the modern youngster of rank was never so well drawn as in this story of his _debut_ in speculation and his failure in it. His character is one very difficult to draw, that coldness, that self-reliance, that self-sufficiency, which are something at once harder and less contemptible than conceit, the qualities which will make him successful later on but will never make him lovable or tender; the instincts of race which hold him back from meanness but are not strong enough to raise him to nobility, attenuated as they have been by modern education, all these are rendered with the utmost skill till the boy, in his sterile and self-satisfied modernity, lives before us, and vain and selfish though he be, we are loth to part from him, and curious to know what his future will become. In his history that one supreme charm of Mr Crawford's, of which I have previously spoken, his naturalness, is conspicuous; nothing can be more natural than the relations of Don Orsino with his mother and father and those who surround him, and the crafty _affaristi_ who get him into their meshes of speculation.

[Footnote 5: A novel called _Corleone_ reproduces Don Orsino, but was published after these pages had been printed. It has been very popular, but in it, unfortunately, Don Orsino is given away deplorably, and turned into a mere romantic lover, which in real life he never would have become.]

What is not natural in this story is the character of Madame d'Aranjuez. She comes before us instinct with all which goes to make up an unscrupulous adventuress. She is that, or she is nothing. She does her uttermost to fascinate and capture the son of Saracinesca. She succeeds; and lo! with one of those _volte-faces_ which are so frequent and so irritating in Mr Crawford's works, she gives up the game when she has won it, does nothing that we expect her to do, and marries the speculator who has beggared Don Orsino on condition that this gentleman shall restore to Don Orsino all he has lost. Nothing more improbable or inconsistent, given the character of the woman, could possibly be conceived; nor is it more probable that the haughty and irascible young man would endure to be served by her mediation, however it might be veiled. Everything surrounding this lady promises us passion, intrigue, perhaps tragedy, certainly peril, but we are balked of them all. The mysteries concerning her turn out to be very tame ones indeed, she appears a wholly innocent and harmless person, and even a very large paper-knife shaped like a dagger, which we are told always lies beside her and which has no _raison d'etre_, unless it is to be ultimately used in killing or defending somebody, does nothing whatever and disappears from the story, leaving us in tantalising ignorance of why we were ever introduced to it.

Now no French writer of any degree would have created that remarkable paper-knife, and kept it lying beside the heroine, and laid stress on its unusual size and splendour, unless he intended to turn it to account as a _deus ex machina_. To draw the reader's attention to a conspicuous object, and then to cheat the expectations raised concerning it, is a great fault in art; but it is one of which English and American writers are continually guilty. It is true we are told casually, towards the end, that her husband had hit her with this paper-knife, and that for this blow the famous fencer Spicca had killed him; but this is mentioned incidentally, and does not sufficiently account for the interest we have been excited to take in this weapon. Spicca is, on the contrary, admirably drawn, and the regard we feel for the merciless old duellist is roused in us with true art. We have that sense of Spicca having really lived, and really been that which he is described, which can only be aroused in a reader by life-like accurate and sympathetic portraiture.

There are many pathetic touches in this portrait of Spicca, and little incidents entirely true to the life of an Italian gentleman of aristocratic race and straitened means, as when in his distress of mind his servant persuades him to eat 'a little mixed fry' with a fresh salad, 'the salad is very good to-day'; and Spicca, touched and refreshed, examines his meagre purse and takes out a ten-franc note which he gives to the man, remarking that it will buy him a pair of boots, and this ten-franc note is, when his purse lies on the table at night, slipped back into it by the servant, who knows that his master 'never counts.'

I think the most exquisitely drawn of all Mr Crawford's many characters is this Count Spicca; because the character of a noted duellist who invariably kills, and kills how and in what way he chooses, with profound indifference and unerring accuracy, is one very hard to make sympathetic to the general reader, and especially to the English reader, by whom duelling is abhorred. But Spicca is so perfect a gentleman, so sad and simple and calm, so natural and unassuming despite his deadly power, that no one can regard him without interest and even affection, and see him without sorrow ill-treated by a woman so extremely unpleasant as Consuelo Aranjuez, for whom he has done and suffered so much.