ROMANCE AND YOUTH

A YEAR or two ago M. Ferdinand Brunetière, the austere literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes, delivered a lecture at the Odéon Theatre upon Molière's L'Ecole des Femmes. According to him, so M. Lemaître reported, the comedy turned upon the question of age. Agnes is sixteen; Arnolphe confesses to forty-two. That in itself is enough in the play to make Arnolphe not only ridiculous but odious from beginning to end.

His successful rival Horace is twenty. He has nothing but youth to recommend him; nor is anything more needed. He and Agnes have all the sympathy of author and audience. And quite right too! cries this austere M. Brunetière; it is a natural and sacred law. In sympathising with Agnes and Horace, the

heart is sympathising with nature and instinct.

Molière perhaps does not make the play turn quite so nakedly on the contrast of age as the moral requires. There may not be much in Horace's favour beside his youth; but there is a good deal more than his fortytwo years to be set to the discredit of Arnolphe. He is a system-monger and an egotist. Now the egotist, according to Mr. Meredith, is the chosen sport of the comic spirit; while woman (bless her!) was created to be the bane of system and the despair of the system-monger. When a mature bachelor like Arnolphe, in self-conscious dread of becoming as one of the horned herd of husbands about him, captures a babe in long clothes and has her mewed up and artificially trained to be a helpmeet for his special lordship, then the imps of mischief gather in a circle on their haunches to wait and watch for the catastrophe. And if the wretched man, after dwarfing the girl's nature and bounding her horizon, demands love on the score of gratitude, the angels of heaven join in the applause over his discomfiture.

Arnolphe's whole conduct was unfair and ignoble, and the heart of the natural man rejoices to see his prey escape him.

Still, whether or not the comedy was exclusively framed to point this moral, the moral is unquestionably there. Arnolphe's forty-two years count heavily against him. Literature in the mouths of the dramatist and the critic is definitely enough on the side of youth against middle age. Nor could spokesmen be selected for literature less open to suspicion of sentimental bias. As a critic M. Brunetière has been reproached with being too much of a schoolmaster and too little of a lover. And as for Molière, he is the incarnation of that spirit of comedy which is the arch foe of sentimentalism.

So much for the doctrine of literature; now for the teaching of life. Shift the scene from the French stage to the Bow Street Police-Court. A defendant, aged twentyone, described as a pianoforte-tuner, is charged with being drunk and disorderly and with assaulting the police. The police, it appeared, had interfered to protect a

woman, whom prisoner was threatening.

Magistrate. 'Who was the

woman?' Prisoner. My wife, your worship.' Magistrate. Your wife! why you have the appearance of a boy. Is your wife here?' She was. A little woman stepped forward and said she was prisoner's wife. She was nineteen. They had been married twelve months. Then the scandalised magistrate delivered his soul. 'There is no place,' he exclaimed, 'where so much misery is seen as at the police-court. There is no place to see so plainly how human misery is produced by human folly,-not by bad laws but by human folly. A boy and girl, just beyond the age when they ought to be whipped, go and get married!'

The age when they ought to be whipped! Shades of Romeo and Juliet! You see, instead of applauding a natural and sacred law M. Brunetière ought to have laid Horace and Agnes across his knee, and imagined for a moment he held under his admonitory palm the prostrate form of M. Zola. It is painful to think what would have been the worthy magistrate's feelings

could the precocious babes of Verona have been dragged before his judgment-seat, Indeed if Romeo and Juliet could be translated with their ages unchanged from the poetry of Shakespeare into the prose of modern London life, the stringency of our legislation would make it awkward for the lover of a lady of such tender years. Happily those immortal types of youth ( and romance, of passionate and tragic love, were not within the jurisdiction. They were Italian, Italians of the Renaissance; and Italians have a large licence in these matters. It is the naughty sun, as Byron explains, and the naughtier moon. Sun and race make a deal of difference. Do you remember the Indian girl in Mr. Kipling's beautiful story, 'Without Benefit of Clergy,' and her rebellious jealousy of the protracted youth of the 'white mem-log,' her rivals ?

Perhaps the sun of Italy is indirectly answerable for the tender age of the lovers and their lasses in much of English poetry and romance. Our poets and romancers were so long under the influence of Italy and the Renaissance. From the time that