THE SUICIDE OF FRANCE.

The second part of an article on "The Modern French Novel," which was begun in the last number of the Quarterly Review, is finished in the present number. It is a very powerful piece of literary handiwork, although it is somewhat spoiled by the excessive straining after an exaggerated pessimism. Beginning with Balzac to Zola the reviewer surveys the field of modern French fiction, and proclaims that the realists are all dominated by one principle; they write under the pressure of passion, and the man they delineate is only la bete humaine.

BALZAC'S GOSPEL.
Balzac was a materialist who worshipped force, and did not believe in God. To him the ordinary man is an evil beast, whose measure is the lowest to which he can fall. His only God was an attenuated gas, the soul an electric machine. Dante's Hell is less inhuman than Balzac's present age. Balzac himself is as merciless as Lucifer, and as devoted to evil as Satan. All good people to him are dupes who are cheated in the bargain of life. His only faith was faith in money; it was the goal of ambition and the standard of success. He is the supreme artist of the ignoble who excels in consummating the type of the ignoble, or even of the cadaverous. His characters are always intrinsically vicious, and he anticipated many of the worst things of Zola. For Flaubert the spiritual world of faith or philosophy does not exist; it is a chimera. Religion, as it appeared to him in history, was a succession of blood-stained or hysterical illusions. Of Zola, the reviewer says, as no one would laugh willingly in a cancer hospital, so his novels are dulness incarnate. The human beast does not laugh, any more than he sings: he is too full of murderous or hungry appetites. The sparkle has died out of French literature. Baudelaire describes the world as full of leprosy, fit only to be shovelled out of sight, or passed through a winnowing fire. French fiction glows with lust and obscenity, and its noisome atmosphere is only fit for Yahoos to dwell in.

TOADSTOOLS ON THE GRAVE OF FRANCE.
Baudelaire has called his poetry of the Decadence Les Fleurs du Mal. It is the epigraph of the French literature of our time, the very virtues of which are grafted upon vice. Corruption breeds creatures of one kindred with itself. These dark and poisonous toadstools, growing upon the grave of an illustrious people, bear witness to the life in death which is fast consuming the France we have known and admired. Realism—pessimism; pessimism—realism; the pendulum swings to and fro, always describing the same hopeless curve in this literature of an exhausted race, the life-blood of which seems corrupted in its veins. Only the most unwholesome metaphors, derived from asylum or hospital, will convey an adequate sense of the impression made by the vulgarity of M. Zola, or by the nerveless refinement and deep melancholy in which the soul of M. Bourget takes delight. The spiritual creed, relying on which men have dared and done noble things for years, has at length, these writers tell us, been shattered, dissolved, explained away by science running out into nescience, like a stream losing itself in mid-Atlantic.

THE SPIRITUAL CHILDREN OF ROUSSEAU.
Rousseau is their father. Rousseau was a compound of mysticism and sensuality; no law was sacred to him but the gratification of instinct. He had cruel as well as cynical instincts. He was vulgar, obscene, furious; all sentiment and sensation. In his view, society was one monstrous pile of falsehood. If we enlarge this picture till it becomes a national autobiography, shall we not see in it the literary, artistic, and philosophical France which the novelists have drawn? It appears so to us, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Bourget, Pierre Loti, Daudet, greatly as they differ in character and style, do yet agree in the general resemblance. They are not controlled by that reason which discerns the laws of life, morality, and the Divine Presence in the world.

SOMETHING BEYOND REVOLUTION.
There is something beyond revolution; and the Renans, Bourgets, and Daudets are not slow to pronounce it—the word " decadence." A putrescent civilisation, a corruption of high and low, a cynical shamelessness meet us at every turn, from the photographs which insult modesty in the shop-windows on the Boulevards, and the pornographic literature on the bookstalls, to the multiplication of divorces and the "drama of adultery" accepted as a social ordinance. The civilising bond of the moral law has burst asunder in France; and the whole beast nature it kept in check is stripping itself of the last shreds of decency that it may go about naked and not ashamed. "All has ended in the mire, in the abyss of the eternal nothingness," cries the hero of "Le Mariage de Loti." The literature of a nation possessed with that belief has become either a Psalm of Death, or, as H. Renan proves in "L'Abbesse de Jonarse," a wild outburst of Epicurean sensuality.

SOCIETY SUFFOCATING IN ITS OWN STENCH.
The question is whether we are witnessing, not the " tragedy of a will which thinks," exemplified in the rejuvenescence of a great nation struggling against adversity, but something at once hideous and beyond all description pitiable, the comedy of delirium tremens, of foul dreams and spasmodic effort, with which M. Zola makes his hero die in "L'Assommoir." These are not merely symptoms of revolution; they are prognostics of an intellectual and moral suicide. To find a parallel to the modern French literature we must go back to Martial and Petronius. But when Martial and Petroniis wrote, society was "sinking down into its ashes like a spent fire, suffocating in the stench of its own abominations. M. Zola has shown us the barbarians ready to break out from the Ventre de Paris. And in Sapho, Les Rois en Exil; Un Disciple, La Morte; and the rest, we learn the temper and the moral resources of that governing part of France which will be called upon to withstand or to civilise them. M. Richepin, moreover, has vehemently declared in Les Blasphemes, that so long as science, art, or principle is believed in, the old superstition which he calls Theism and Christianity will return. We may invert the reasoning, and assert that when Christianity has been cast out, science, art,and principle will follow it. For man to "sleep the sleep of the brute," means not only the decadence, but the end of a civilisation.

 17 October 1890,