Absence of Dignity in French Society. 129 sion. His principle was to owe no one anything; neither a service nor a sword-thrust. He was never en reste with any living creature, and could not have borne to feel himself a debtor to one of his equals, let alone his inferiors-the bare notion whereof would have been intolerable. The aspects of French civilization have so totally altered, that perhaps meanness, in all its various modes of manifestation, may precisely be said to be the one great characteristic of even what is termed the highest society of France. As to money matters, it is no revelation to proclaim Frenchmen en masse (of course we admit exceptions in this as in everything) as far from entertaining our notions upon pecuniary obligations—between what is merely honest and what is the right thing;' in these transactions there is an abyss which a Frenchman too rarely clears with perfect grace. But this is not all; there are small, delicate, social obligations which, if not nicely felt and nicely cancelled, do serious mischief, in the end, to independence of character. Here it is that the modern Frenchman, and especially the Parisian, is so sadly deficient. The descendants of the really proud grands seigneurs of other days will accept benefits, favours, or civilities -anything, from a bow to a ball-from persons whom they regard as their inferiors, and to whom they never dream of returning the equivalent of what they receive. The utter absence of dignity of French society in this respect is literally not to be believed. There is a floating population of foreigners, the object of whose very existence in the French capital seems to be the 'getting-up' of fêtes and other diversions for the sole gratification of the Parisians. Americans and Russians are the principal contributors to the pleasures of the Autochthones, and the latter spare their purses, and strive to lessen their ennui at the cost of some twenty or thirty opulent mediocrities, who consent to open a sort of select Cremorne for the convenience of a set of impertinent, ill-bred people, who never regard them as more than the mere innkeepers of society. There is in every large town in France a class of individuals who 'get up' whatever may be needed in the way of public diversion, from the fireworks to the flowers; they undertake to provide everything, including enthusiasm; and they go by the name of entrepreneurs des fêtes publiques. The other gentry we have just alluded to do the same thing, but on a narrower scale: they are the entrepreneurs des fêtes privées. Like their colleagues,' the contractors for public rejoicings, their individuality is completely lost in the amusement they are held to furnish to their customers. And in the case of the former there is, at all events, this to be said, that some price is paid by the consumer for the pleasure he obtains, some equivalent is given; whereas, in what takes place in the so-called 'grand monde,' there is a consumer who gets as much of everything as he possibly can, without paying for for it; a customer, who, if he will not allow you to say that he swindles the dealer out of his wares, at all events remains his debtor to all intents and purposes, seeing that he never so much as saysThank ye' for all he makes away with. For the most part, these foreign party-givers are persons whose position in their own country is not of the very highest respectability; and the archives of the Parisian great world contain a list of some of the most noted scamps in the whole universe, who have at different epochs had the honour of keeping open house for the stingy representatives of the most disdainful, but most undignified nobility on the continent of Europe. All nations are there, and all trades. You will find bankrupt grocers from New York; imitation princes from the Danubian provinces; Russian serfs, the illegitimate sons of great men, but whose mothers are unknown; Austrian Jews, who are pitilessly banished from the 'crême' in Vienna, and who burst with joy at receiving' the most illustrious names of the old French monarchy; Portuguese jewellers; Mexican brigands; Havanese slaveholders; Greek pirates; Heaven knows who and what you may not find, for the fishy' portion (be the word forgiven!) of every country on the globe furnishes its contingent to this army of open-housekeeping, humble pleasurepurveyors to the French aristocracy, or what answers to the name. French exclusives' may paraphrase the speech of the pasha who wondered men danced for themselves, instead of being danced for; and instead of entertaining,' they may coolly say, 'We get these things done for us by other people.' It is hardly possible to read through the essays of any chronicler without falling upon the description of one or other of the fêtes given to Paris society by these most disinterested undertakers of its amusements; and it is, we repeat, a feature of modern French civilization well worthy to be studied. The part least easy to comprehend in the comedy is the humility of the leading actors; they are more determinedly battus et contents' than even those diplomatists painted by the Prince de Ligne, who smilingly ratify by their signature at a congress the definitive cession by treaty of some province that has been only temporarily wrested from their country by arms. Why they should crouch so Shylock-like before the haughty, jibing Antonios of Paris fashionable life is really not easy to understand; but that they do so is certain; and if anything can excuse the thoroughly undignified, mean conduct of French grands seigneurs and grandes dames, who consent to remain the debtors of people whom they despise, it is the still meaner attitude of the individuals who, while favours are uniformly accepted from them, consent to be themselves treated with the coolest contempt, and seem instinctively to feel and proclaim that they deserve nothing more. This is a peculiarity of French manners to be dwelt upon, and we need only read M. de Pène's narration of M. de G's monster ball-for which the partition walls of half a story at the Hotel de Louvre were knocked down-to form an accurate estimate of what the state of good breeding is likely one day to become in a country where what is called 'la société' rests upon such shifting and slippery foundations. Montaigne, in speaking of the faculty possessed by fine writers of transforming and embellishing almost any act, however wrong in itself, makes use of the quaint expression: Le disant a sauvé le faisant.' Now, with a large degree of talent in the chronicler, you might suppose he would frequently gild the ugliest details so as to seduce you into letting their ugliness pass by unperceived. It would seem natural that the teller should rescue the doer of the deed,' as Montaigne says. No such thing! In the first place, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the narrator is on a level with his narration, and discerns nothing that ought to be palliated. Neither his moral nor his critical sense is in any way shocked by what he has to record. He is, as we have said, the amanuensis of the million, and in his complex nature of both 'teller' and 'doer' he has no more fancy for preaching to the public, whereof he is a component part, than the public has for being preached to. He wishes neither to disguise nor to improve what comes under his notice; his business is only to record it, and it is from the simple fact of its being' that the more philosophical reader may draw inferences and conclusions. If this were otherwise, la littérature chroniqueuse would be worth infinitely less to the foreign reader. In a more restricted and conventional sense, much profit might be reaped from the 'Lettres Parisiennes' of the late Madame Emile de Girardin, who, in her famous Courriers de Paris,' in the Presse,' was the ostensible founder of the genre chronique; but you rarely met the clever authoress of Lady Tartuffe in any regions save those hedged in by the stiff limits of polite society, at a time when society in France thought limits of some kind necessary. Before the Revolution of 1848, all traditions of individualism were not totally lost, and what one man did who was 'distinguished' had still a kind of superiority over what was achieved by no matter who.' This has altered since 1848, and the sentence attributed to M. Villemaine is perfectly true, 'Il n'y a plus d'hommes distingués, nous vivons sous le règne du premier venu.' The English term of no matter who' hardly renders truly the intense contempt implied by the French expression of 'le premier venu.' When you have said of anybody that he is 'le premier venu,' you have stigmatised him as a complete nonentity; as a person not to be consulted, or referred to, or cited; as one, in short, who is not not. It is, at the same time, not taking an exaggerated view of things as they stand at the present hour in France to say that this 'no matter who,' this nonentity, this 'premier venu,' is the ruler of the day, and this will, in some degree, help to explain the prodigious development under the imperial government of the chronicle literature of this perpetual every-day record of the infinitely small deeds of infinitely small people. The policy of the Emperor Napoleon III. is not to encourage the production of great citizens or distinguished men; his manifest interest, on the contrary, points to the increased influence of the mass of the ignorant, imbecile throng : every great citizen or distinguished man who should rise up in the state, as the state is now constituted in France, would be a frondeur, or, if he possessed the talent and courage adequate to the task, an accuser, like Montalembert; consequently, the formation of such men by sound education, and their development by vigorous institutions, is to be opposed by every possible means; and the imperial government certainly, in this respect, discharges zealously what it regards as a duty to itself, as an act of absolute self-preservation. But the social results of the system are more serious, and worse than might even be supposed. No encouragement being afforded to distinguished individualities, the individual instinctively, inevitably, tends towards insignificance, and instead of aspiring to a superiority which would isolate him from the crowd, relapses, on the contrary, into perfect resemblance with the mass of anonymous nullities around him. He ceases easily (alas!) to be himself, in order to become one of the many; and in this way, any one man being the equivalent of any other' (the Emperor Louis Napoleon's pet theory), the thoroughly undistinguished, unoriginal human creature is the equal of the greatest genius in the world; he is as important as the latter, and possesses the same amount of power and weight; he is a fraction of that sovereignswarm, that is taught to believe it controls the destinies of France by the establishment of universal suffrage. This brings about 'le règne du premier venu;' there can be no doubt of it: and it is, morally, intellectually, and socially, under that reign that contemporary France is now living-this is also an indubitable fact. Now, the chronique, as we have described it, is to the public such as the imperial régime has contributed to make it, the representative of what were the individual records of two hundred years ago. 'Chronicles' are the mémoires of the existing governors of France-of the omnipotent premiers venu. No one must despise them who wishes to attain to an accurate appreciation of contemporary France; they register the deeds of the 'million' that now constitutes la société, as the Memoirs of Sully or Richelieu did those of the really distinguished men who once guided to such far more useful aims the destinies of the French race. ART. Penny Savings Banks. 133 ART. III.-1. Good Times; or, the Savings Bank and the Fireside. 3. Savings Bank Reforms. By C. A Letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. By C. W. Sikes. 1856. 4. A Deposit Book for Huddersfield Preliminary Savings Bank. 5. Plain Papers on the Social Economy of the People. No. II. Penny Banks. By J. Erskine Clarke, M.A. London: Bell and Daldy. 1859. 6. Scheme for the West Riding of Yorkshire Provident Association and Penny Savings Bank. By Edward Akroyd. 1856. 7. Rules of the West Riding Penny Bank. 1858. THE working man has long been the pet of the English public. It has spoken for him, written for him, and acted for him. All classes have vied with one another in degrees of unbending fussiness and officiousness, and clergy and laity have been alike conspicuous in devotion to his interests and betterment. Kind country squires have torn themselves from the pages of genial Urban, their agricultural journals, the newest system of manuring, or the last treatise on the rationale and cure of pleuropneumonia in cattle, and shut themselves up in their libraries, in hermit-like seclusion, to elaborate an address which shall guide the provincial society, of which they hold the presidential seat, in matters relative to the enlightenment of the working classes. Members of Parliament wax eloquent, during the Christmas vacation, upon popular education, societies, and literature. The working man has been coaxed and fondled like a very spoilt child. We have usurped his place in committees to improve his status for him, have decided upon the character and mode of his amusements, and have prescribed the bounds of his literature for him in the most patronizing manner. He is delicate, and must be prevented from doing too much for himself; he is a sort of minor, over whom it behoves the public to exercise a most rigorous guardianship; he is unfit to rule himself, and must for ever be under the sway of a regency. Our zeal and theorizing have fairly carried us away. Less enthusiastic than our Gallican neighbours, we have caught their poetic tinge, and busied ourselves in developing, under a variety of phases, a purer taste and a more thorough enlightenment, as specifics for the social, moral, and physical depression induced by our rapid civilization amongst a labouring and urban population. 'Darkness and chaos were one,' writes Lamartine, before the budding forth of the material world. Darkness and chaos cleave Vol. 2.-No. 6. together L |