Parisian Points of View | Page 3

1891.]
There is no trace or taint of snobbery in M. Halévy's treatment of all
this magnificence; there is none of the vulgarity which marks the pages
of Lothair, for example; there is no mean admiration of mean things.
There is, on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging satire. He lets us
see that all this luxury is a little cloying and perhaps not a little
enervating. He suggests (although he takes care never to say it) that
perhaps wealth and birth are not really the best the world can offer. The
amiable egotism of the hero of In the Express, and the not unkindly
selfishness of the heroine of that most Parisian love-story, are set
before us without insistence, it is true, but with an irony so keen that
even he who runs as he reads may not mistake the author's real opinion
of the characters he has evoked.

To say this is to say that M. Halévy's irony is delicate and playful.
There is no harshness in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We do
not find in his pages any of the pessimism which is perhaps the
dominant characteristic of the best French fiction of our time. To M.
Halévy, as to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need
not be taken sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems still enjoyable,
as it must to most of those who have a vivid sense of humor. He is not
disillusioned utterly, he is not reduced to the blankness of despair as are
so many of the disciples of Flaubert, who are cast into the outer
darkness, and who hopelessly revolt against the doom they have
brought on themselves.
Indeed, it is Merimée that M. Halévy would hail as his master, and not
Flaubert, whom most of his fellow French writers of fiction follow
blindly. Now, while the author of Salamnbo was a romanticist turned
sour, the author of Carmen was a sentimentalist sheathed in irony. To
Gustave Flaubert the world was hideously ugly, and he wished it
strangely and splendidly beautiful, and he detested it the more because
of his impossible ideal. To Prosper Merimée the world was what it is,
to be taken and made the best of, every man keeping himself carefully
guarded. Like Merimée, M. Halévy is detached, but he is not
disenchanted. His work is more joyous than Merimée's, if not so
vigorous and compact, and his delight in it is less disguised. Even in
the Cardinal sketches there is nothing that leaves an acrid after-taste,
nothing corroding--as there is not seldom in the stronger and sterner
short stories of Maupassant.
More than Maupassant or Flaubert or Merimée, is M. Halévy a Parisian.
Whether or not the characters of his tale are dwellers in the capital,
whether or not the scene of his story is laid in the city by the Seine, the
point of view is always Parisian. The Circus Charger did his duty in
the stately avenues of a noble country-place, and Blacky performed his
task near a rustic water-fall; but the men who record their intelligent
actions are Parisians of the strictest sect. Even in the patriotic pieces
called forth by the war of 1870, in the Insurgent and in the Chinese
Ambassador, it is the siege of Paris and the struggle of the Communists
which seem to the author most important. His style even, his swift and
limpid prose--the prose which somehow corresponds to the best _vers
de société_ in its brilliancy and buoyancy--is the style of one who lives

at the centre of things. Cardinal Newman once said that while Livy and
Tacitus and Terence and Seneca wrote Latin, Cicero wrote Roman; so
while M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet on the other,
may write French, M. Halévy writes Parisian.
BRANDER MATTHEWS.

ONLY A WALTZ
"Aunt, dear aunt, don't believe a word of what he is going to tell you.
He is preparing to fib, to fib outrageously. If I hadn't interrupted him at
the beginning of his talk, he would have told you that he had made up
his mind to marry me from his and my earliest childhood."
"Of course!" exclaimed Gontran.
"Of course not," replied Marceline. "He was going to tell you that he
was a good little boy, having always loved his little cousin, and that our
marriage was a delightful romance of tenderness and sweetness."
"Why, yes, of course," repeated Gontran.
"Nonsense! The truth, Aunt Louise, the real truth, in short, is this, never,
never should we have been married if on the 17th of May, 1890,
between nine and eleven o'clock, he had not lost 34,000 points at
bezique at the club, and if all the boxes had not been sold, that