A French critic has ranked the FrÈres Rosny amongst the 'authors of to-morrow,' and in a certain sense they, no doubt, belong to the class called les jeunes, often wrongly, since amongst these jeunes there are men of middle age. Les jeunes is an expression which is rather intended to indicate new methods and new views than to describe the actual age of the writers. In a sense everyone belongs to les jeunes who is emancipated from conventional tradition; but too much stress, too much importance, has been attached to this name; true art is always natural, and this new school is seldom natural; there is more eccentricity of manner in it than there is genuine originality of thought; there is too great an effort, too perpetual a strain in its productions; frequently, as in the case of Maurice BarrÉs, subtlety of language is employed to conceal absolute poverty of idea; or, as in the case of Georges Ohnet, to clothe mere wooden puppets with a semblance of life by skill in depicting incident; or, as in the case of Paul Bourget, to eke out a slender modicum of incident and idiosyncrasy with charm of style and an imposing psychology, and disarm criticism by euphuism.

In the two Rosnys there are some of the affectations of these writers, but there is none of their poverty of idea. They are full of ideas; full of meditation, of observation, of sympathy, of experience; the narrow limits to which custom confines the novel are far too small for their abundant powers. In portions of their work there is that more artificial mode of treatment, that strain after recondite words and tortuous and archaic methods of expressions, which are the blemish of les jeunes; but in many other portions their true insight, their deep feeling, and their artistic instincts raise them above this pedantry and enable them to produce certain passages which have few equals in any literature. L'ImpÉrieuse BontÉ is a very long book, but the reader would be dull indeed who did not wish it were longer, and who would not feel that the writers had been forced to renounce many scenes and many reflections and descriptions with which their minds were teeming. They convey to their reader their own attachment to their personages; willingly, we feel sure, they could have filled a hundred volumes with the story of their fate; the fountain of their sympathies is fed by an eternal spring. What is most admirable also in them is their remarkable equity; they can see the injustice done to the rich by the poor, as well as that done to the poor by the rich; and this quality of impartial sympathy is very rare. There is abundance in the world of that one-sided sympathy which springs from a parti pris, but that which is many-sided and perfectly just is very unusual. The Rosnys are capable of it.

The language indeed is at times tortuous, inflated, archaic, after the manner of the modern school; but at other times it loses this mannerism and becomes the clear, limpid, polished French so dear to us. It is never clearer or simpler than in the passages concerning the Lamarques and other sufferers which touch the heart.

The first portion of the book is the finest; the scenes which treat of this family are the greatest as they are the simplest of the whole. Was there ever any passage more pathetic and more real than this description of the last drive in the poor hired vehicle of the dying man and his children?

'Lamarque drew a deep breath under the delicious weight of the freshened air. Strength and peace brushed his tired, sickly frame.

'"Ah! I was sure that this would make me well."

'A smile came around his diaphanous nostrils, his lips parted with childlike pleasure. Albert felt that heaven and earth were born again in endless life. His soul shone through his blue eyes; he began to laugh and jest with nature. But his mother and Georges only saw more plainly in the luminous light the deadly thinness of Lamarque, and could think of nothing except how they should be able to make up for the expense of the five francs for the cab. They had driven out towards a road which looked mysterious and poetic; limes, acacias, young elms, all kinds of shades of green, were lit by a descending sun. There were flocks of slender trunks; a dainty philosophy of verdure; high above, pale foliage seemed to drink in the light; then depths where the sun-rays seemed to flow and stream like the nebulÆ of comets, where they lay like vapour on which some fragile insect life floated like medusÆ on the sea. Already dead leaves were on the ground like the tanned flesh, or the brown fur, of forest creatures. Spiders' webs had the colours of the rainbow; in these birdless trees butterflies lent an illusion of winged life and figured the flight of nestlings. Happiness seemed crystallised in the figure of a woman knitting; in the cry of a distant railway train; in the joy of two children munching pears with their crusts; in the sport of a dog who rolled on the grass with a youthful bark and the eyes of one in love with life. The red frock of a young girl passing by lent a note of force, of splendour, of intensity, to the golden afternoon.

'"It is so nice here!" said Albert.

'Georges, watching the silvery gossamer webs of the spiders, remembered all the visions he had ever had of liberty and space for kind animals and kind people.

'"I am young again!" murmured Lamarque.

'He was still pale, but his pallor was less corpse-like. Even the little FranÇois listened and enjoyed with a mute delight—mute because shut within himself—and loved his parents, his brothers, the driver, the trees, and the buzzing flies.

'"Stop," said the sick man suddenly. It was before a high gate, through which was visible a spectacle of Eden, a large garden.

'They could see a great pond, over which there could float whole broods of delicate dreams; there were tall Lombardy poplars, and the grace of weeping willows. Drooping larches also hung over the water-lilies; there were the thick shade of Canadian poplars, and also the timid murmurs, the sensitive sighs, of aspens. Then there was the charm of woodland life reflected in the water; of the landscape repeated below, symmetrical, and sombre in an abyss of oxidised silver. Then came grassy walks and gentle slopes of turf; further off were clearings in which beautiful trees were half seen, half hidden in misty distance like a promise of abundance and of happiness. The felicity of the place entered into the souls of the poor family who looked on it; they had at once the anguish of feeling that nothing like this would ever be theirs, and the ecstasy of knowing that such beauty did exist.

'Standing up in their sorry hired carriage, they gazed in rapture, saying but few words.

'"One little corner of this garden would be wealth to us!" sighed the mother.

'"That corner—there," said Lamarque.

'"One could not eat one's garden," said Albert.

'Georges, hypnotised, followed with his eyes the flight of an insect. Poised in the sunlight, the creature was motionless awhile; then descended, ascended, then, swift as a sped arrow, vanished in the shadows. One would wish for such an atom, taking so small a place in creation, the joys, the instincts, the intelligence of a great animal. At anyrate, it symbolises all the enjoyments of life, repose on a leaf, movement, ecstasy of travel through space and towards mystery.

'"Ah!" thought Georges, in distress, "even to come and see this, one must have money!"

'The hard and heavy thought was like a blow on the tender heart of the boy. Soon this bitterness entered into the souls of all, even of the youngest child.'

What I have translated as 'oxidised silver' is in the original 'blackened nickel,' one of those unfortunate, grotesque, inharmonious expressions of which there are many in this work. To compare water, the liquid, the mobile, the translucent, to any metal is a strange and unfitting comparison. In this passage, which is serious and poetical, the intrusion of such words as 'blackened nickel' seems offensive, and mars all the impression of the phrase. But it is in this kind of offence to the ear and the intelligence that les jeunes unhappily revel; they see in such offences signs of emancipation, of realism, of originality, when, in truth, the usage is no sign of anything except of a faulty ear and a lack of judgment.

Throughout the work, however, despite these occasional blemishes, every episode connected with the Lamarques is a masterpiece of pathos and of simplicity, until the last scene of all, when the three children with their mother are about to light the charcoal collected by the little FranÇois as it dropped from the waggons when they passed along the quay, and kept in a corner of the miserable room, in readiness for the last hour of all.

The characters of the three boys, so dissimilar and yet united by the vague likeness of race, are drawn with a life-like distinctness: Georges, pensive and philosophic, proud, gentle, observant; Albert, sceptic and scornful, with his passionate sense that, since death killed his father through serving others, there can be no God; and the youngest, FranÇois, timid, imaginative, devoted, hiding himself under the table, to still the pangs of hunger with fancies of a lonely fairy isle where neither want nor death should come. These three children offer one of the most perfect pictures of innocent and unmerited suffering which literature can offer, and the limner of them and of their sorrows is a fine writer. Jacques Fougeraye, the central figure of the romance, yields his place to them as its chief interest; and is also perhaps inferior in interest to his unhappy and generous patron Dargelle. One would desire to know through what circumstances a man of the talent and character of Fougeraye comes to be destitute in the streets of Paris; something also of the parentage, education, influences which have gone towards making him what he is. In the same way one would wish to know how Lamarque fell into poverty, how his children became so cultured and refined, how the whole family is aloof in every way from their common and odious kindred. Les jeunes do not deign to throw light on the antecedents of their dramatis personÆ; they are wrong, for two reasons: one because they thus baulk the natural and legitimate curiosity of their readers; the second, that there is no true psychology (the word they worship) without study of the causes which have contributed to make a man or woman what the observer of them finds them to be. A writer like Gyp may with airy grace jump, as through a circus-hoop, into the middle of the lives of her personages without further explanation, but in a philosophic student of human nature in its sad seriousness such saltatory pranks are unbecoming.

One could well spare the hundreds of pages devoted to long and, one must say, tiresome descriptions of moral and mental states, for a few pages of lucid and graphic information as to the causes which brought the characters of the book to the pass in which we find them at their first appearance. But this is a method of composition too simple, direct, and natural to commend itself to les jeunes. And when on rare occasions they do furnish personal descriptions, these are so wrapped up in anatomical and physiological language that we can conjure up from them little or no real likeness. The characteristic of this new school is an extreme vagueness, an intentional nebulosity. Their personages are never introduced to the reader, nor are they given any pedigree; even personal description of them is of the slightest. They come abruptly on the scene as though they came up through a trap-door. It is left to the intelligence of the reader to supply all the details which the author disdains to furnish. In a book, as in life, one likes to have people duly presented before making their acquaintance; but this is a prejudice which the new school scorns to gratify.

There is a certain tedium in some of the experiences of Fougeraye, such as in his visits to the hospitals and the asylum of misshappen human creatures; and the young woman Louise, a medical student, who has learned to look on death with professional indifference, is so virtuous and self-satisfied that one is indisposed to share the admiration which Fougeraye feels for her. He himself is so unpretentious, so warm-hearted, so single-minded, and so manly that he deserves a more sympathetic and less vain helpmeet than this female doctor, with her too prosy platitudes and her chill philosophies.

Jeanne Dargelle, whom he rejects, is the least truthful, the most artificial, figure in the book. We are never interested in her. The breath of life has not been breathed into her; and when she kills herself we remain indifferent; we know that in her world women do not kill themselves, and a very proud woman would have found the idea of dying, because her husband's secretary had no love for her, altogether unendurable. We feel also that in real life Fougeraye would probably have shared her passion, and the struggle it would have caused between his temptation, and his loyalty and gratitude to Dargelle, would have been of profound interest. The chapter following on her death, in which Dargelle is alone with her dead body, is very fine, and reflects exactly that strange mixture of emotions and sensations which sway the survivor who passes long hours of solitude beside the corpse of one once dear to him—the trivial incongruities which force themselves in amidst intense regret, the eccentric fancies which dance like marsh-lights over the sombre swamp of a deep despair. Who amongst us has not cried, like Dargelle, 'Pardon, pardon!' from the depths of an aching heart, looking on the dead features of one to whom, in the eyes of the world, we had no fault?

There is in the Rosnys the distressing habit, common to all the more recent French writers, with few exceptions, of endeavouring to be pedantic, to be involved, to express an idea barbarously and bewilderingly instead of harmoniously and clearly; to say Épiderme instead of peau, vÉridique instead of vrai, prunelles instead of yeux; to use the jargon of science, the abomination of foreign or technical idioms; to turn away from the natural, the direct, the usual, the obvious, and seek an appearance of profundity in what is merely a confusion of sounds. These affectations, these efforts, spoil many of the pages, and weary the most attentive reader in many of the chapters; as does also the incessant tendency to find similes of the most bizarre and eccentric kind, such as the comparison of dead leaves to the fur of animals; of a simile 'frail as the downy blow-ball of dandelion-seed'; of a sky 'of a powdery blue, with the horizon of an aquarium'; of a heart beating 'like a pear oscillating in a breeze,' and many others as far-fetched, as incongruous, and as grotesque. The excessive use of simile, however apt and exact, is always a fault; but similes as absurd and as strained as are most of those employed by the Rosnys, become a deformity of style, annoy the mind, and disagreeably abstract and distract the thoughts.

A too long, too technical, and too involved description is an inventory which leaves no concrete whole upon the reader's mind; it is a mere conglomeration of items. Take, as an instance, this description of Dargelle's physiognomy; and be it remembered that we never know who or what Dargelle is, how he came by his vast fortune, or anything, indeed, about him, except that he is un pauvre riche, a capitalist, one supposes, rich by inheritance. Here is the personal description of him:—

'A fat face, sad, meditative; his cheeks fell in; they were flabby. The forehead was a half-circle, with three deep wrinkles, the temples inflamed. The brow was vast but undecided, despite heavy eyebrows above violent eyes. The lips of a wild beast; a short beard which had never grown; flat hair, forming a little patch behind the brow and advancing laterally to the ears. The whole a Finnish face, very pale, with a disposition of the skin to become scaly. The nose long, broad, very irregular, between the snub and the aquiline, the end raised, the bridge bowed. Hardly any back to the head; the neck, like a Celt's, running straight up to the crown. The ears folded backward, stiff, cartilaginous,' etc., etc., etc.

This long and disagreeable description merely conveys the impression of a monster; and it does not in any way agree with the character of Dargelle, magnanimous, tender, generous, and sensitive; suffering acutely from a sense of utter loneliness amidst the parasites, who trade on his kind feelings. A man of this temperament would not have violent eyes or wild-beast lips; and the elevation of his sentiments would certainly have given some beauty of expression to his features.

Of Jacques Fougeraye, the hero of the work, we are given no description whatever. On the other hand, the portraiture of the frightful occupant of a monsters' asylum is traced in fullest and most minute detail, with an ostentation of technical knowledge, in that passion for what is horrible and abnormal which is characteristic of this school.

Dargelle, morally, is throughout consistent and lovable, from his first movement of suspicion and distrust, feeling that his new favourite will only use him and cheat him, as all the other dispensers of his charities have done, to the last frank smile with which, though jealous of the happiness he has himself created, he says: 'Allons donc! Je vois bien que vous m'aimez aussi.'

The rich man will only have the crumbs of the bread of the soul which is called love, but his generosity is content with it. 'Le pauvre riche!' say the Rosnys, with rare insight into the small consolation which, to those in full possession of them, the powers of wealth can give. Dargelle is unique, and it is almost to be regretted that he should occupy but a secondary place in the narrative. The description of his physical malady is perhaps exaggerated; deafness would scarcely cause such violent moral and mental torture; but the pathos of his last appearance is unexaggerated, and goes to the heart of the reader. By his mere word so many people are made happy, and yet, to secure happiness, even relief, for himself his millions are powerless! This is what many a rich and generous man must have felt. The irony of fate is more cruel in a sense to the heirs, than to the disinherited, of fortune. But the pain which the rich suffer is purely sentimental, and there are very few indeed who have nobility of nature enough to feel this at all.

The rich man has always material comfort, freedom from daily and hourly anxieties; he is at liberty to go wherever he likes, to do whatever he pleases; he enjoys, if he have the true faculty for enjoyment; he can make himself obeyed, if the obedience be but eye-service; he can surround himself with beautiful objects; and he can freely indulge the luxury of generosity, although it is the one luxury of which the rich are not enamoured, the rich man in general never gives except to see his name in print in the newspapers. The compassion of the Rosnys for the rich is scarcely justified, since their greatest burden is ennui, and this is an artificial kind of suffering due to defective sympathies, as cold feet are due to sluggish circulation. The statement, put in the mouth of Dargelle, that suicide is much more general amongst the rich than the poor, is certainly not based on fact or on statistics. The rich man, moreover, has one great and most precious exemption: he is free from petty, carking bodily cares; he never knows the greatest agony possible, that of seeing those dear to him hungry and homeless; he can be always warm in cold weather, cool in hot weather; in illness he has every palliative and assistance; his home is his own if he care for it, intangible and immutable; the whole world is his if he possess perception enough to enjoy it; his sufferings may be considerable from dyspepsia and discontent, and, if he be of a high nature, from irritation at the ingratitude and insincerity of human nature, but it is absurd to compare his pains with those of the poor—above all, when the poor are of fine temper, sensitive nerve and cultured intellect like the Fougeraye and Lamarque of the Rosnys. It is well to remind society that there are sorrows of the soul from which the rich may suffer more acutely than the poor; but it is to exceed this truth to represent the rich as often suffering from this cause. The rich man is usually a complete egotist, whose philanthropy has a political purpose or a social ambition as its mainspring. A Dargelle may exist, does exist; but he is one in ten millions. He is legitimate in his place as a character in romance, but as a character in real life he is met with but very rarely.

There are many social questions and many philosophic theories discussed in L'ImpÉrieuse BontÉ. An unkind critic might say that it is rather a social and philosophic essay than a romance. But in much it conforms to and fulfils the highest demands of fiction, and the naturalness and lovableness of the chief personages lend to it throughout the interest of romance. The mission of Fougeraye in the expenditure of Dargelle's money introduces, perforce, many phases of social misery. It was probably to do this that the book was written; but the harmony and interest of the action of the novel, as a novel, are not sacrificed to this intention. In these chapters all affectation, all artifice drop from the style, and the writers become masters of strong, simple and infinitely touching prose. It is to be regretted that the influence of their time should ever mislead them into tortuous and strained exaggerations and archaisms when it is possible for them to write thus simply and eloquently:—

'The few precious things—the brooch and earrings of Madame Lamarque, even her wedding-ring, alas! then the china service, saved with such effort from the fire, with a little rosewood secrÉtaire, and two SÈvres vases won at a lottery for charity, the gift to it of the Empress EugÉnie—all disappeared, all were devoured by the monster Misery. Georges suffered as much as his parents; his nature was inclined towards the adoration of relics, of frail things, of the semi-vitality of objects.

---

'It rained a little; in the shadow of the fortifications the lamps trembled under gusts of wind; the reflections touched the wet grass, which seemed for the moment as fresh as the turf of meadows. Everywhere solitude—solitude filled with a sense of near and hidden human life in the closed houses from which came the subdued light of unseen chambers in vague suggestion of mysterious joys. But there was no living creature out of doors except in the openings of the ramparts; on the grass, a dog looking as furtive as a hunting wolf. The boy's eyes gazed at the sky, at the grass, at the long vista of burning lamps, at the grey stony road under his feet. A sense of beauty came into his soul, but a beauty sombre as the psalms of All Saints' Day.

'Beside him his mother carried the mattress which had been sold; he bore one side of it on his shoulder.

'They walk thus, beaten, conquered, the child full of suffocating revolt, the mother humble and resigned, like the meek beasts of the stall, with occasional flickers of wrath soon extinguished. They go thus, saying to each other a few words, muffled and heavyhearted, which are the mere dull echoes of their souls. "We must turn down that street. How will it end?—why does not the family help?" At a corner they stop, and suddenly Georges is overwhelmed with pity for his mother, as he sees her profile wet with rain in the light of the street lamp.

'He gazes at her. He remembers, in his earliest childhood, a time when there had been two servants in their house; when his mother had been a gentlewoman, going out for a walk with his father, while the bonne pushed the little carriage of the baby FranÇois. And here she was, his own mother, with a mattress for sale on her shoulder, on foot in the mud at this time of night. "Mamma! mamma! dear little mamma!" he cried, sobbing, without a single selfish thought, caring only for her, so profoundly, so intensely!'

Again, there is the same intense sympathy in the author with the suffering of the spirit when the two SÈvres vases are taken to their new home, sold for twenty francs, the poor, pretty, familiar things which look so elegant, so slender, so aristocratic amongst the coarse, vulgar ornaments of their new owners, that Georges is proud of their superiority amidst the anguish with which he thinks of them, lost for ever:

'Frail penates, saturated with the soul of home. Ah! how many birthday mornings, how many twilights of study, how many long rainy days and gentle suns of springtime, how many dreams of future voyages in far lands, how many nights fearful with storm or mute with falling snow, had these objects seen! They had been always there, fixing themselves inalienably on the retina in their unalterable attitude of delicacy and art: and now they were lost for ever, given over to an alien hand for a coin of gold which would last two days!'

Nothing can be more touching, more sincere, more eloquent than this episode.

Take again the magnificent opening chapter of the fire at which Lamarque contracts the illness which ultimately kills him. It is too long to quote here, but its description is of a force incomparable, and of a truth as great. No one of his contemporaries could have written this chapter; its sobriety and veracity, united to its splendour of diction and its terror of suggestion, make it a magnum opus.

It has only one defect; it gives the reader the impression that it cost great effort to the author. It does not convey that sense of the author's spontaneous fertility and joy in creation which Pierre Loti, FranÇois CoppÉe, Anatole France, feel and give. L'ImpÉrieuse BontÉ is a great work, but its greatness must have cost painful thought and unremitting labour.

One feels that there is nothing of improvisation, of careless and happy inspiration, about it. It is the matured fruit of profound observation, and of complicated doubt, of an unselfish sorrow, and of a noble altruism. It is a work which must impress and elevate all readers who are capable of comprehending its teaching. But there is no laughter in it, nor is there even a smile, save that sad divine smile which accompanies the tears of pity.