PARAGON PARIS

WILL Some critic of high mark frame canons by which we may judge the tangent-flights of genius? Everyone can praise and blame, and there are few readers so devoid of critical faculty as not to perceive the shortcomings or noddings of their favourite authors. But there are great writers, some of whose most characteristic passages make their most earnest admirers wince. No one else than A could have written this or that eloquent or whimsical extravagance; but then one almost wishes it had been equally impossible to A himself. And writers of this order-usually men of rare genius, who have either not enjoyed, or have slighted, opportunities of correcting their taste or regulating their invention are the more trying, because they affect a border-territory which is neither sense nor nonsense. Their escapades in this no-man'sland set plain men arguing with and despising each other most unpleasantly. One disputant is sneered at for presuming to find fault with an acknowledged genius; another is despised for being too matter-offact to admire a genuine burst of fancy or sentiment; while a third is contemned as a poor creature whose ears may always be tickled, and whose eyes are ever ready to overflow. And the worst is, that passages of this kind are as a rule let alone by all who guide the public taste. They occupy themselves at best in slashing conspicuously inferior or very new men. As for accepted writers, if to their share these puzzling errors fall, reviewers think of their names, and forget them all.

So far as he is admired in England, Victor Hugo is very much in the position I have just sketched. There are many passages, especially in his later writings, which no one can defend; many that all must admire; many about which readers willing to be pleased have been, and will be, bitterly divided. That M. Hugo is a foreigner increases the difficulty. As never to be astonished is considered a sign of gentility, so to be very rarely offended by national peculiarities is deemed the surest mark of cosmopolitan intelligence; and as French epigram is very apt to appear to English readers astoundingly devoid of common sense, and often in grossly bad taste, there is much danger of visiting upon Victor Hugo a heavier penalty than he deserves for the extent to which he exceeds the license ordinarily taken by his countrymen. Enthusiasts there may be who consider the great verse and prose poet above criticism; but their raptures can only occasion a sigh that so distinguished a man should sometimes sink beneath it. For my part, I carry these reflections no farther. They will be illustrated, but not dwelt upon, in the sketch I offer of a really noble monograph

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recently contributed by Victor Hugo to a very remarkable work. That an academician and peer of France, who is also of European renown as a poet, should compose an introduction to a guide-book is in itself an event; but the Livre Paris Guide is not only no ordinary guide-book, it is a remarkable literary achievement. Even Victor Hugo's name appears with honour beside those of Sainte-Beuve, Louis Blanc, Michelet, Guillemin, Taine, Berryer, and others. The character of his introduction suggests that in some cases the work of these great men might have been more practically performed by less eminent hands; but if this historical excursus stood alone, its brilliancy would justify the policy of the publishers. Accept, then, Victor Hugo as your guide; but understand that it is rather through centuries and speculations than through Paris that he will conduct you.

As if to show at once his mettle as cicerone, Victor Hugo sets out with a sonorous burst of prophecy. There is to be in the twentieth century an extraordinary nation. It will be great, but that will not prevent its being free. Here is a thrust at France of to-day; but it is not even the France of the future, but united Europe, whose glory the prophet-poet sings in his rhythmic prose. The nation he foretells will be illustrious, rich, thoughtful, pacific, amiable towards humanity at large. It will have the sweet gravity of an elder sister. But the sweet elder sister will be a prey to colour-blindness and confusion of mind, for this nation of the twentieth century will wonder how a conical projectile can ever have won glory, and will perceive no great difference between the purple of a general and the crimson of a butcher. Thus we see that a rhythmic prose poet and effusive friend of Garibaldi may talk very like a Peace-Society lecturer, without waiting for the great twentieth century to assimilate the characters. But it is a noble scorn of silly human differences, not a maudlin aversion to bloodshed, that animates his prophecy. He is thinking of a time when a battle between Italians and Germans, English and Russians, Prussians and English, will seem as absurd to the great nation as a battle between Picards and Bourguignons appears to us. When such wars as now convulse the world shall have become ridiculous, what will remain? vast and united nation, in which the great powers will be mere departments, it is clear that only the boundaries of Europe will suffice to margin the great nation's expanse of territory. Such is Victor Hugo's idea. "This nation will have for its capital Paris, but it will not be called France. In the twentieth century it will be called Europe; and in succeeding centuries, still more transfigured, it will be called Humanity." And Humanity will be the "definitive nation." But M. Hugo is a practical man. He knows we are, to all intents and purposes, infinitely distant from its definitive establishment. So, as our guide to Paris, he bids us shade our eyes and scrutinise only the path. immediately before us. The nation of Humanity is discernible enough by the thinkers and dwellers amongst the half-shades of perfectionist

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speculation. But for plain people, plain ways; for average men, moderate tasks. Let the nineteenth century-there are still nearly thirtythree years to the good-confine itself to the moderate undertaking of forming Europe into a nation! With the twentieth age, let the vision majestueuse burst upon the world.

To the poet's eye, however, it is already visible; for there is in the embryogénie of peoples, as in that of beings, a sublime hour of transparency, when the mystery of gestation permits itself to be watched. And this, it appears, is the moment. In the Hugo divining crystal, Europe, one and indivisible, germinates. A nation, which will be France sublimated, is seen coming to light. From henceforward the fecund womb of progress bears under a distinct form this wonderful future. As the winglets flutter in a chrysalis, so palpitate in our Europe the greatness, the nobility, the esprit, the harmony of the nation which is to be the twentieth century's glory-the nineteenth century's masterpiece. What a consolation to have one's faith in this future aided by a token that cannot be gainsaid! "Give us a sign!" cry the great prophet's more-than-half-incredulous disciples. And he condescends to their weakness: "Europe has not yet its people, indeed, but it has its city. Of this people, who exist not, the capital exists already. Nor is this a prodigy, but a law." And then the poet becomes physiologiste as well as rhetorician. As every other embryo, the embryo of the great nation is at first a head. After this the case is proved. Paris is the head of Europe, and will one day be the capital of Humanity. Let us all worship, with the windows of our intelligence open to the New Jerusalem. It is true that the head of our embryo is not easily recognisable. Paris does not yet shrug its shoulders at war as at the Inquisition. Some would even say that the Inquisition itself is not despised there quite so much as it used to be. The battle of Sadowa is not regarded altogether as we regard the quemadero of Seville; and if Paris regrets to see an Austerlitz balanced by a Waterloo, it is generally supposed she would be very indulgent to anyone who would balance Waterloo in any way whatever. Yet in the great nation which is not, but of which Paris is already the capital, all these changes are to come.

Authority is to be respected by the citizens of that country-as orthodoxy is respected by the Frenchmen of our day. "A press prosecution will be to that nation what a prosecution for. heresy would be to us. It will permit public vengeance against writers, as we permit it against astronomers; and, without reproaching either Béranger or Galileo, will understand Béranger in a cell as little as Galileo in prison. E pur si muove, far from being its dread, will be its joy. It will have the supreme justice of goodness. It will be ashamed and indignant in the presence of barbarities. The sight of a scaffold will be an affront to it. In that nation, punishment will melt and disappear under education as ice beneath the rising sun. Circulation will be preferred to stagnation.

No one will be prevented from getting on. To frontier rivers arterial rivers will succeed. To break a bridge will be as impossible as to decapitate a man. Gunpowder will be blasting-powder, and saltpetre, instead of piercing bosoms, shall cleave mountains. The nation of the future will be ungrateful to Chassepot for surpassing Dreyse, and to Bonnin for surpassing Chassepot. That in the nineteenth century Europe, for the advantage of destroying a bourgade (Sebastopol) should have sacrificed the population of a capital" (and here Victor Hugo supplies the statistics), "will then seem glorious, but singular. Ignorance will be pushed to the point of not knowing that 'in 1866 there was constructed a cannon weighing twenty-three tons, and called Bigwill” —a fact of which, assuredly, some denizens of the nineteenth century are equally unaware. "Other beauties and magnificences of the present times will be similarly lost. For instance, chez ces gens là there will be no budgets such as we see every year in France, making a pyramid ten feet square at the base and thirty feet above. Under the impulses of that time, the long train of misérables will invade magnificently rich and fertile solitudes as yet unknown, not for gold, the coarse and eye-deceiving lure of to-day, but for land. The dying-ofhunger and the shoeless-those dolorous and venerable brothers of our short-sighted splendours, and our egotistical prosperities—will have their table spread, in spite of Malthus, beneath the same sky;" while overhead aerial navigation will be busily employed in dispersing the good things of life.

Nothing will be lost. "The Corrientes, for example, that gigantic natural hydraulic mechanism, that veined network of rivers, that prodigious ready-made canal-system, traversed now only by the swimmings of bisons and the floatings of dead trees,-will support and nourish a hundred towns. Whoever chooses will have a virgin soil, a roof, a field, a well-being, riches, on the sole conditions of spreading over the earth the idea of country, and considering himself a citizen and labourer in the world; so that property-that great human right, that supreme liberty, that mistress of spirit over matter, that sovereignty of man interdicted to the brute-far from being suppressed, will be democratised and universalised. It will be more than a nation, it will be civilisation; and more than civilisation, it will be a family." And the family is to enjoy unity of language, of money, of measures, of meridian, and of code. . “Peace, goddess with eight breasts, is to be seated majestically in the midst of men." Ignorance, slavery, prisons, armies, are, of course, to be abolished; and-hear this, polyglot spirit of Nisi Prius-the jus contra legem is to be understood. The simplification of antagonisms will simplify events. Facts will have no factitious side. Politics and jurisprudence are alike to be absorbed by science; for law, the incontestable-whatever that may be; and the only senate shall be the Institute. In fact, you have but to name a change or institution which philosophers hope for, and most other folks