Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 10, August, 1858», sayfa 12

As a consequence of this sifting process, to which we have given but a glance, a very decidedly depressing element is now being rapidly introduced into New England farming life. The Irish girls have found their way into the farmer's kitchen, and the Irish laborer has become the annual "hired man." At present, there are no means of measuring the effect of this new element; but it cannot fail to depress the tone of farming society, and surround it with a new swarm of menial associations.

In our judgment, there is but little in the improved modes of farming, in scientific discoveries, and new mechanical appliances, to be relied upon for the elevation of New England agriculture and the emancipation of New England farming life. The farmer needs new ideas more than he needs new implements. The process of regeneration must begin in the mind, and not in the soil. The proprietor of that soil should be the true New England gentleman. His house should be the home of hospitality, the embodiment of solid comfort and liberal taste, the theatre of an exalted family-life which shall be the master and not the servant of labor, and the central sun of a bright and happy social atmosphere. When this standard shall be reached, there will be no fear for New England agriculture. The noblest race of men and women the sun ever shone upon will cultivate these valleys and build their dwellings upon these hills; and they will cling to a life which blesses them with health, plenty, individual development, and social progress and happiness. This is what the farmer's life may be and should be; and if it ever rise to this in New England, neither prairie nor savanna can entice her children away; and waste land will become as scarce, at last, as vacant lots in Paradise.

LES SALONS DE PARIS. ²⁸

The title is an ambitious one, for the salons of Paris are Paris itself; and, from the days of the Fronde and of the Hôtel Rambouillet down to our own, you may judge pretty accurately of what is going on upon the great political stage of France by what is observable in those green-rooms and coulisses called the Parisian drawing-rooms, and where, more or less, the actors of all parties may be seen, either rehearsing their parts before the performance, or seeking, after the performance is over, the several private echoes of the general public sentiment that has burst forth before the light of the foot-lamps. Shakspeare's declaration, that "all the world's a stage," is nowhere so true as in the capital of Gaul. There, most truly may it be said, are

 
-–"All the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts."
 

Therefore might a profound and comprehensive study of the drawing-rooms of Paris be in a manner a history of France in our own times.

Madame Ancelot's little volume does not aim so high; nor, had it done so, would its author have possessed the talent requisite for carrying out such a design. Madame Ancelot is a writer of essentially second-rate and subordinate capacity, and consequently her account of those salons de Paris that she has seen (and she by no means saw them all) derives no charm from the point of view she takes. To say the truth, she has no "point of view" of her own; she tells what she saw, and (thus far we must praise her) she tells it very conscientiously. Having waited in every instance till the people she has to speak of were dead, Mme. Ancelot has a pretty fair field before her for the display of her sincerity, and we, the public, who are neither kith nor kin of the deceased, are the gainers thereby.

So interesting and so amusing is the subject Madame Ancelot has chosen, that, in spite of her decided want of originality or even talent in treating it, her book is both an amusing and an interesting one. It is even more than that; for those who wish to have a correct notion of certain epochs of the social civilization of modern France, and of certain predominant types in French society during the last forty years, Madame Ancelot's little volume is full of instruction. Perhaps in no society, so much as in that of France, have the political convulsions of the state reacted so forcibly upon the relations of man to man, revolutionizing the homes of private persons, even as the government and the monarchy were revolutionized. In England, nothing of this kind is to be observed; and if you study English society ten years, or twenty years, or fifty years after the fall of Charles I., after the establishment of the Commonwealth, or after the restoration of Charles II., the definitive exile of the Stuarts, and the advent of a foreign dynasty to the throne, you find everywhere its constitutive elements the same,–modified only by such changes of time, circumstance, and fashion, as naturally, in every country, modify the superficial aspect of all society. But in France, it is the very substratum of the social soil that is overturned, it is the constitutive elements of society that are displaced; and the consequence is a general derangement of all relative positions.

In what is still termed la vieille société Française, little or nothing was left to chance, and one of its great characteristics was order and the perfectly regular play of its machinery. Everything was set down, noted, as it were, beforehand,–as strictly so as the ceremonies of a grand diplomatic ceremony, after some treaty, or marriage, or other occasion of solemn conference. Under this régime, which endured till the Revolution of '93, (and even, strangely enough, beyond that period,) politeness was, of course, the one chief quality of whosoever was well brought up,–urbanity was the first sign of good company,–and for the simple reason, that no one sought to infringe. There was no cause for insolence, or for what in England is called "exclusiveness," because there was no necessity to repel any disposition to encroach. No one dreamed of the possibility of encroaching upon his neighbor's grounds, or of taking, in the slightest degree, his neighbor's place.

The first French Revolution caused no such sudden and total disruption of the old social traditions as has been generally supposed; and as far as mere social intercourse and social conventionalities were concerned, there was, even amongst the terrible popular dictators of 1793, more of the tone of the ci-devant good company than could possibly be imagined. In later times, every one who knew Fouché remembers that he was constantly in the habit of expressing his indignation at the want of good-breeding of the young exquisites of the Empire, and used perpetually to exclaim, "In my time" this or that "would not have been allowed," or, "In my time we were accustomed to do" so and so. Now Fouché's "time" was that which is regarded as the period of universal beheading and levelling.

It is certain, that, under the régime of the Revolution itself, bitter class-hatreds did not at first show themselves in the peaceful atmosphere of society,–and that for more than one reason. First of all, in a certain sense, "society," it may be said, was not. Next, what subsisted of society was fragmentary, and was formed by small isolated groups or coteries, pretty homogeneously composed, or, when not so as to rank and station, rendered homogeneous by community of suffering. It must not be imagined that only the highest class in France paid for its opinions or its vanities with loss of life and fortune. The victims were everywhere; for the changes in the governing forces were so perpetual, that, more or less, every particular form of envy and hatred had its day of power, and levelled its blows at the objects of its special antipathy. In this way, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie were often brought into contact; marriages even were contracted, whether during imprisonment or under the pressure of poverty, that never would have been dreamt of in a normal state of things; and whilst parents of opposite conditions shook hands in the scaffold-surveying charrettes, the children either drew near to each other, in a mutual helpfulness, the principle whereof was Christian charity, or met together to partake of amusements, the aim whereof was oblivion. For several years, the turn of every individual for execution might come, and therefore it was difficult, on the other hand, to see who might also not be a friend.

This began to be modified under the Empire, but in a shape not hitherto foreseen. Military glory began to long for what the genuine Revolutionists termed "feudal distinctions." Napoleon was desirous of a court and of an aristocracy; he set to work to create a noblesse, and dukes and counts were fabricated by the dozen. Very soon the strong love of depreciation, that is inherent in every Frenchman, seized upon even the higher plebeian classes, and, discontented as they were at seeing the liberties of the movement of '89 utterly confiscated by a military chief, and antipathetic as they have been, time out of mind, to what are called les traineurs de sabre, the civilians of France, her bourgeois, who were to have their day,–but with very different feelings in 1830,–joined with the genuine Pre-Revolutionary aristocrats, and the noblesse de l'Empire was laughed at and taken en grippe. Here was, in reality, the first wide breach made in France in the edifice of good-breeding and good-manners; and those who have been eye-witnesses to the metamorphosis will admit that the guillotine of Danton and Robespierre did even less to destroy le bon ton of the ancien régime than was achieved by the guard-room habits and morals of Bonaparte's glorious troopers, rushing, as they did, booted and spurred, into the emblazoned sanctuary of heraldic distinctions, and taking, as it were, la société by storm.

But soon another alliance and other enmities were to be formed. The Empire fell; the Bourbons returned to France; Louis XVIII. recognized the noblesse of the Imperial government, and the constitution of society as it had been battled for by the Revolution. At the same time his court was filled with all the great historic names of the country, who returned, no longer avowedly the first in authority, and therefore prompt to condescend, but the first in presumption, and therefore prompt to take offence. The new alliance that was formed was that of the plebeian caste with the noblesse de l'Empire, against which it had been previously so incensed. Notwithstanding all the efforts sincerely made by Louis XVIII. to establish a constitutional government and to promote a genuine constitutional feeling throughout France, class-hatreds rose gradually to so violent a height that the king's only occupation soon grew to be the balancing of expediencies. He was forever obliged to reflect upon the choices he could make around him, since each choice made from one party insured him a hundred enemies in the party opposed. This, which was the political part of the drama,–that which regarded the scenes played upon the public stage,–had its instantaneous reflex, as we have already said in the commencement of these pages, in the salons, which were the green-rooms and coulisses. Urbanity, amenity of language, the bland demeanor hitherto characterized as la grâce Française, all these were at an end. Society in France, such as it had been once, the far-famed model for all Europe, had ceased to exist. The ambition which had once been identified with the cares of office or the dangers of war now found sufficient food in the bickerings of party-spirit, and revenged itself by salon jokes and salon impertinence for the loss of a lead it either could not or would not take in Parliament. The descendants of those very fathers and mothers who had, in many cases, suffered incarceration, and death even, together, set to hating each other cordially, because these would not abdicate what those would not condescend to compete for. The noblesse cried out, that the bourgeoisie was usurping all its privileges; and the bourgeoisie retorted, that the time for privilege was past. The two classes could no longer meet together in the world, but formed utterly different sets and cliques; and it must be avowed that neither of the two gained in good-manners, or what may be called drawing-room distinction.

From 1815 to 1830, the noblesse had officially the advantage. From 1830 to 1848, the bourgeoisie ruled over the land. But now was to be remarked another social phenomenon, that complicated salon life more than ever. The middle classes, we say, were in power; they were in all the centres of political life,–in the Chambers, in the ministries, in the king's councils, in diplomacy; and with them had risen to importance the Imperial aristocracy, whose representatives were to be found in every department of the public service. All this while, the old families of the ancien régime shut themselves up among themselves entirely, constituted what is now termed the Faubourg St. Germain, which never was so exclusive or so powerful (socially speaking) as under Louis Philippe, and a tacit combat between envy and disdain was carried on, such as perhaps no modern civilization ever witnessed. The Faubourg St. Germain arrogated to itself the privilege of exclusively representing la société Française, and it must be confessed that the behavior of its adversaries went far to substantiate its claims.

Our purpose in these pages is not to touch upon anything connected with politics, or we could show, that, whilst apparently severed from all activity upon the more conspicuous field of the capital, the ancient French families were employed in reëstablishing their influence in the rural provincial centres; the result of which was the extraordinary influx of Legitimist members into the Chamber formed by the first Republican elections in 1848. But this is foreign to our present aim. As to what regards French society, properly so called, it was, from 1804, after the proclamation of the Empire, till 1848, after the fall of Louis Philippe, in gradual but incessant course of sub-division into separate cliques, each more or less bitterly disposed towards the others. From the moment when this began to be the case, the edifice of French society could no longer be studied as a whole, and it only remained to examine its component parts as evidences of the tendencies of various classes in the nation. In this assuredly not uninteresting study, Mme. Ancelot's book is of much service; for a certain number of the different salons she names are, as it were, types of the different stages civilization has attained to in the city which chooses to style itself "the brain of Europe."

The description, given in the little book before us, of what in Paris constitutes a genuine salon, is a tolerably correct one. "A salon," says Mme. Ancelot, "is not in the least like one of those places in a populous town, where people gather together a crowd of individuals unknown to each other, who never enter into communication, and who are where they are, momentarily, either because they expect to dance, or to hear music, or to show off the magnificence of their dress. This is not what can ever be called a salon. A salon is an intimate and periodical meeting of persons who for several years have been in the habit of frequenting the same house, who enjoy each other's society, and who have some reason, as they imagine, to be happy when they are brought in contact. The persons who receive, form a link between the various persons they invite, and this link binds the habitués more closely to one another, if, as is commonly the case, it is a woman of superior mind who forms the point of union. A salon, to be homogeneous, and to endure, requires that its habitués should have similar opinions and tastes, and, above all, enough of the urbanity of bygone days to enable its frequenters to feel at home with every one in it, without the necessity of a formal introduction. Formerly, this practice of speaking to persons you had not been presented to was a proof of good-breeding; for it was well known that in no house of any distinction would there be found a guest who was not worthy to be the associate of whoever was noblest and best. These habits of social intercourse gave a value to the intellectual and moral qualities of the individual, quite independent of his fortune or his rank; and in these little republics the real sovereign was merit."

Madame Ancelot is right here, and there were in Paris several of these salons, which served as the models for those of all the rest of Europe. Under the Restoration, two illustrious ladies tried to recall to the generation that had sprung from the Empire or from emigration what the famous salons of old had once been, and the Duchesse de Duras and the Marquise de Montcalm (sister to the then minister, the Duc de Richelieu) drew around them all that was in any way distinguished in France. But the many causes we have noted above made the enterprise a difficult one, and the various divergences of society, politically speaking, rendered the task of the mistress of a house one of surpassing arduousness. Mme. de Staël, who, by her very superiority perhaps,–certainly by her vehemence,–was prevented from ever being a perfect example of what was necessary in this respect, acquired the nickname of Présidente de Salons; and it would appear, that, with her resolute air, her loud voice, and her violent opinions, she really did seem like a kind of speaker of some House of Commons disguised as a woman. That the management of a salon was no easy affair the following anecdote will prove. The Duchesse de Duras one day asked M. de Talleyrand what he thought of the evening réunions at her house, and after a few words of praise, he added: "But you are too vivacious as yet, too young. Ten years hence you will know better how to manage it all." Mme. de Duras was then somewhere about fifty-four or five! We perceive, therefore, that, according to M. de Talleyrand, the proper manner of receiving a certain circle of habitués was likely to be the study of a whole life.

We select from Mme. Ancelot's book sketches of the following maitresses de maison, because they seem to us the types of the periods of transformation to which they correspond in the order of date:–Mme. Lebrun, Mme. Gérard, Mme. d'Abrantès, Mme. Récamier, Mme. Nodier. Mme. Lebrun corresponds to the period when Pre-Revolutionary traditions were still in force, and when the remembrance yet subsisted of a society that had been a real and not a fictive unity. Mme. Gérard–or we should rather say her husband, for she occupied herself little with her guests, whom the illustrious painter entertained–represents the period of the Empire, prolonging itself into the Restoration, and seeking by the immunities of talent and intelligence to bring the two régimes to meet upon what might be termed neutral ground. Mme. d'Abrantès is the type of that last remnant of the half-heroic, half-sentimental epoch which tried to endure even after the first days of 1830, and of which certain verses of Delphine Gay, certain impossible portraits of invincible colonels, certain parts played by the celebrated Elleviou, and the Troubadourish "Partant pour la Syrie" of Queen Hortense, are emblematical. Mme. Récamier, although in date all but the contemporary of Mme. Lebrun, is, in her position of mistress of a salon, essentially the impersonation of a foible peculiar to the present day; she typifies the class of women who, in Paris, are absolutely absorbed by the thought of their salons, for whom to receive is to live, and who are ready to expire at the notion of any celebrity not being a frequenter of their tea-table. Mme. Nodier's–and here, as with Mme. Gérard, we must substitute the husband for the wife, and say Charles Nodier's–salon was the menagerie whither thronged all the strange beings who, after the Revolution of July, fancied they had some special and extraordinary "call" in the world of Art. Nodier's receptions at the Arsenal represent the literary and artistic movement of 1830.

To begin, then, with Mme. Lebrun. This lady was precisely one of those individualities who, since the days of Louis XIV., had found it easy to take their place in French society, who, under the ancien régime, were the equals of the whole world, and who, since "Equality" has been so formally decreed by the laws of the land, would have found it impossible, under the Citizen King, Louis Philippe, or under the so-called "Democratic Empire" of Louis Napoleon, to surround themselves with any society save that of a perfectly inferior description.

Mme. Lebrun was the daughter of a very second-rate painter of the name of Vigée, the sister of a poet of some talent of the same name, and was married young to a picture-dealer of large fortune and most expensive and dissipated, not to say dissolute habits, M. Lebrun. She was young,–and, like Mme. Récamier and a few others, remained youthful to a very late term of her existence,–remarkably beautiful, full of talent, grace, and esprit, and possessed of the magnificent acquirements as a portrait-painter that have made her productions to this day valuable throughout the galleries of Europe. She was very soon so brilliantly in fashion, that there was not a grand seigneur of the court, a grande dame of the queen's intimacy, a rich fermier-général, or a famous writer, artist, or savant, who did not petition to be admitted to her soirées; and in her small apartment, in the Rue de Cléry, were held probably the last of those intimate and charmingly unceremonious réunions which so especially characterized the manners of the high society of France when all question of etiquette was set aside. The witty Prince de Ligne, the handsome Comte de Vaudreuil, the clever M. de Boufflers, and his step-son, M. de Sabran, with such men as Diderot, d'Alembert, Marmontel, and Laharpe, were the original habitués of Mme. Lebrun's drawing-room. At the same time used to visit her the bitter, bilious, discontented David, the painter, who, though very young, was annoyed at a woman having such incontestable proficiency in his own art, and whose democratic ideas were hurt at her receiving such a number of what he styled "great people." Madame Lebrun, one day,–little dreaming that she was addressing a future coupe-tête of the most violent species, (perhaps the only genuine admirer of Marat,)–said, smilingly, to the future painter of Les Sabines, "David, you are wretched because you are neither Duke nor Marquis. I, to whom all such titles are absolutely indifferent, I receive with sincere pleasure all who make themselves agreeable." The apostrophe apparently hit home, for David never returned to Mme. Lebrun's house, and was no well-wisher of hers in later times. But on this occasion she had not only told the truth to an individual, she had touched upon the secret sore of the nation and the time; and vast classes were already brooding in silence over the absurd, vain, and empty regret at being "neither Duke nor Marquis." The Revolution was at hand, and the days rapidly approaching when all such pleasant assemblies as those held by Mme. Lebrun would become forever impossible. At some of these, the crowd of intimates, and of persons all acquainted with each other, was so great, that the highest dignitaries of the realm had to content themselves with sitting down upon the floor; and on one occasion, the Maréchal de Noailles, who was of exceedingly large build, had to request the assistance of several of his neighbors before he could be brought from his squatting attitude to his feet again.

Mme. Lebrun emigrated, like the majority of her associates,–going to Russia, to Italy, to Germany, to England, and everywhere increasing the number of her friends, besides preserving all those of former times, whom she sedulously sought out in their voluntary exile, and to whom, in many cases, she even proved an invaluable friend. In the commencement of the Restoration, Mme. Lebrun returned to France, and established herself definitively at Paris, and at Louveciennes near Marly, where she had a delightful summer residence. Here, as in her salons in the metropolis, she tried to bring back the tone of French society to what it had been before the Revolution, and to show the younger generations what had been the gayety, the grace, the affability, the exquisite good-breeding of those who had preceded them. The men and women of her own standing seconded her, but the younger ones were not to be drawn into high-heartedness; and an observer might have had before him the somewhat strange spectacle of old age gay, gentle, unobservant of any stiff formality, and of youth preoccupied and grave, and, instead of being refined in manners, pedantic. "The younger frequenters of Mme. Lebrun's salon," says Mme. Ancelot, "were strangers to the world into which they found themselves raised; those who surrounded them were of an anterior civilization; they could not grow to be identified with a past which was unknown to them, or known only through recitals that disfigured it.... Amidst the remnants of a society that had been historical, there was, as it were, the breath of a spirit born of our days; new ideas, new opinions, new hopes, nay, even new recollections, were evident all around, and served to render social unity impossible; but, above all, what failed in this one particular centre was youth,–there were few or no young people." This was perfectly true; and Mme. Lebrun's salon is interesting only from the fact of its being the last, perhaps, in which French people of our day can have acquired a complete notion of what the Pre-Revolutionary salons of France were.

The evening réunions at the house of Gérard, the celebrated painter, were among the most famous features of the society of the Restoration. The gatherings at Mmes. de Duras's and de Montcalm's splendid hotels were all but exclusively political and diplomatic; whereas at Gérard's there was a mixture of these with the purely mundane and artistic elements, and, above all, there was a portion of Imperialist fame blended with all the rest, that was hard to be found anywhere else. Gérard, too, had painted the portraits of so many crowned heads, and been so much admitted into the intimacy of his royal models, that, whenever a foreigner of any note visited Paris, he almost immediately asked to be put in a way to be invited to the celebrated artist's Wednesday receptions. This was, to a certain degree, an innovation in regular French society; the French being most truly, as has been said, the "Chinese of Europe," and liking nothing less than the intermixture with themselves of anything foreign. But Gérard was one of those essentially superior men who are able to influence those around them, and bring them to much whereto no one else could have persuaded them. Gérard, like many celebrated persons, was infinitely superior to what he did. As far as what he did was concerned, Gérard, though a painter of great merit, was far inferior to two or three of whom France has since been justly proud; but in regard to what he was, Gérard was a man of genius, who had in many ways few superiors. Few men, even in France, have so highly deserved the reputation of un homme d'esprit. He was as spirituel as Talleyrand himself, and almost as clear-sighted and profound. Add to this that nothing could surpass the impression made by Gérard at first sight. He was strikingly like the first Napoleon, but handsomer; with the same purity of outline, the same dazzlingly lustrous eyes, full of penetration and thought, but with a certain sympathetic charm about his whole person that the glorious conqueror of Marengo and Dictator of Gaul never possessed.

Gérard was not entirely French; born in Rome in 1770, his father only was a native of France, his mother was an Italian; and from her he inherited a certain combination of qualities and peculiarities that at once distinguished him from the majority of his countrymen. Full of poetic fire and inspiration, there was in Gérard at the same time a strong critical propensity, that showed itself in his caustic wit and, sometimes, not unmalicious remarks. There was also a perpetual struggle in his character between reflection and the first impulse, and sometimes the étourderie of the French nature was suddenly checked by the caution of the Italian; but, take him as he was, he was a man in a thousand, and those who were in the habit of constantly frequenting his house affirm loudly and with the deepest regret, that they shall never "look upon his like again."

Gérard had built for himself a house in the Rue des Augustins, near the ancient church of St. Germain des Près; and there, every Wednesday evening, summer and winter, he received whatever was in any way illustrious in France, or whatever the other capitals of Europe sent to Paris, en passant. "Four small rooms," says Mme. Ancelot, "and a very small antechamber, composed the whole apartment. At twelve o'clock tea was served, with eternally the same cakes, over which a pupil of Gérard's, Mlle. Godefroy, presided. Gérard himself talked; his wife remained nailed to a whist-table, attending to nothing and to nobody. Evening once closed in, cards were the only occupation of Mme. Gérard."

From Mme. de Staël down to Mlle. Mars, from Talleyrand and Pozzo di Borgo down to M. Thiers, there were no celebrities, male or female, that, during thirty years, (from 1805 to 1835,) did not flock to Gérard's house, and all, how different soever might be their character or position, agreed in the same opinion of their host; and those who survive say of him to this day,–"Nothing in his salons announced that you were received by a great Artist, but before half an hour had elapsed you felt you were the guest of a distinguished Man; you had seen by a glance at Gérard's whole person and air that he was something apart from others,–that the sacred fire burned there!"

The regret felt for Gérard's loss by all who ever knew him is not to be told, and speaks as highly for those who cherished as for him who inspired it. His, again, was one of the salons (impossible now in France) where genius and social superiority, whether of birth or position, met together on equal terms. Without having, perhaps, as large a proportion of the old noblesse de cour at his house as had Mme. Lebrun, Gérard received full as many of those eminent personages whose political occupations would have seemed to estrange them from the world of mixed society and the Arts. This is a nuance to be observed. Under the Empire, hard and despotic as was the rule of Bonaparte, and anxious even as he was to draw round him all the aristocratic names that would consent to serve his government, there was–owing to the mere force of events and the elective origin of the throne–a strong and necessary democratic feeling, that assigned importance to each man according to his works. Besides this, let it be well observed, the first Empire had a strong tendency to protect and exalt the Arts, from its own very ardent desire to be made glorious in the eyes of posterity. Napoleon I. was, in his way, a consummate artist, a prodigiously intelligent metteur en scène of his own exploits, and he valued full as much the man who delineated or sang his deeds, as the minister who helped him to legislate, or the diplomatist who drew up protocols and treaties. The Emperor was a lover of noise and show, and his time was a showy and a noisy one. Bonaparte had, in this respect, little enough of the genuine Tyrant nature. Unlike his nephew, he loved neither silence nor darkness; he loved the reflection of his form in the broad noon of publicity, and the echo of his tread upon the sounding soil of popular renown. Could he have been sure that all free men would have united their voices in chanting his exploits, he would have made the citizens of France the freest in the whole world. Compression with him was either a mere preventive against or vengeance for detraction.