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LITERATURE, CONTINENTAL, IN 1872. 



does not discredit the popular rumor about his 

 devilry, and very probably laughs in his sleeve. 

 His talent was something in common with 

 your witty old Congreve, our Dufresny, and 

 the Venetian Gozzi, a man of mark evidently. 

 What was legerdemain and escamotage with 

 Scribe, became more subtle and scientific in 

 Sardou. He has mysterious traps and hidden 

 means of preparing a surprise for his audience. 



Gondinet, Meilhac, Halevy, Pailleron, the 

 rivals of Sardou, are not without merit. Gon- 

 dinet has Ion ton and a gracious delicacy, 

 Meilhac a keen, ingenious vein, Hal6vy is a 

 most facetious and happy caricaturist, and 

 Pailleron knows how to wield the heaviest 

 dramatic weapons. His dramatic vein is rather 

 akin to your older dramatists' genius men 

 who wrote " A Woman Killed with Kindness " 

 and "Oronooko." Like them, he has fire, 

 moral intentions, a crude and incoherent sense 

 of reality and passion in number and middle 

 life. However, in every dramatic essay of the 

 last twelve months there is a visible lassitude, 

 an uncertain and unsteady handling, as if the 

 authors did not exactly know what to do and 

 what to think. The most decided success of 

 the whole year has been an archaeological tour- 

 de-force, the revival of Pathelin's farce, which 

 M. Fournier has very prettily modernized, and 

 where Got plays admirably well. 



We grow archaeological, statistical, positive, 

 much unlike our forefathers. I do not com- 

 plain of that. The better and best books of 

 the season, Taine's "Notes on England," for 

 instance, or Maxime du Camp's "Paris, its 

 Functions and Organisms," have something 

 about them that is un-French northern, ana- 

 lytical, matter-of-fact, thoughtful quite alien 

 to old Rousseau's fiery rhetoric or Voltaire's 

 flippant causticity. In France now, as in Italy 

 and Spain, a gradual change is going on, un- 

 perceived and slow, from the old formulas and 

 hypotheses of the Latin races to the deeper 

 sphere of science, inquiry, and truth. Cavour 

 was half-English, half- French ; Jovellanos, 

 Manzoni, Azeglio, Tocqueville, Thierry, half- 

 English too, leaned toward strict investigation, 

 a severe search after truth, and gave a prefer- 

 ence to facts over formulas. Phraseology is no 

 longer the essential and unique quality required 

 in an author. Men like Theophile Gatitier, 

 more sensuous than reflective, or like Scribe, 

 more clever than real, are quite at a discount. 

 The spirit of the age, even in France, grows 

 inquisitive. The intelligent few who can fur- 

 ther those ends, and satisfy such wants few 

 indeed, among us Frenchmen, but effective 

 become the secret leaders of the intellectual 

 march. Even if they show themselves deficient 

 in purity of language, elegance of style, origi- 

 nality, color, and grace, they find favor and 

 ready acceptance. Let the book be as ill-writ- 

 ten as can be, if there is solid stuif in it, many 

 readers will praise it it will be eagerly sought 

 for. Books of a procea verbal kind, with dry 

 ciphers, documents, raw and crude like Soulie's 



" Documents on Moliere's Life"" and Fournier's 

 numerous little books on our old authors, en- 

 joy a kind of restricted but desirable popu- 

 larity. They interest ; they seem a relief after 

 so many over-colored, over-stretched carica- 

 tures of fancy, satire, eloquence, and wit : so 

 that the chasm between imagination and fact, 

 between reason and fancy, widens every day. 



Excellent editions of Dante, Quevedo, Cer- 

 vantes, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc., with com- 

 mentaries, various readings, notes, and rectifi- 

 cations, are being published at Madrid, Flor- 

 ence, Vienna, London, etc. But nothing in 

 that way can be compared to the admirable 

 collection of our classics printed by the Maison 

 Hachette, under the surveyorship of M. Adolphe 

 Regnier. The last instalment, the " Memoires 

 de Retz," edited by M. Feillet, is a model of 

 good editorship. 



If accuracy of detail, exact erudition, and 

 strict verification of dates, receive now more 

 applause and are more generally honored than 

 are brilliancy of fancy, flow of eloquence, or 

 fertility of wit, the source of that preference 

 awarded to the most arid and untoward part 

 of the intellectual field is to be sought in the 

 utter disdain with which, for some ten or fif- 

 teen years, historic truth and real facts have 

 been handled by our most celebrated wits, 

 Jules Janin, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Gautier, 

 Capefigue, etc. 



GERMANY. The war of 1870, which brought 

 into being a politically united Germany, has 

 had as little effect upon letters as the war of 

 1866, which broke a political bond of union 

 between all German races that had long been 

 rotten, but did not destroy the literary unity 

 which links together the Germans who form 

 the " New Empire," and the separate races 

 which inhabit Salzburg, the Tyrol, Austria, 

 Styria, Carinthia, and German Bohemia. So 

 far as literature is concerned, the Germans 

 form after Sedan, as after Sadowa, one undi- 

 vided nation. The most important place in 

 the roll of this year's literature is filled by an 

 Austrian, a typical Viennese. The strangest 

 circumstance is that, although for many years 

 before his death regarded as dead, he has, at 

 least out of his native country, only begun to 

 live since his death. About twelve months 

 ago, Franz Grillparzer expired in his eighty- 

 first year, almost overwhelmed with tokens of 

 honor, which, long withheld, had at last been 

 showered upon him. The well-known proph- 

 ecy of Lord Byron, that the world would have 

 to learn to pronounce his unpronounceable 

 name, has at length been fully fulfilled. The 

 world till lately knew him only as a writer for 

 the stage, and, even in that capacity, chiefly 

 from the most severely impugned of his works, 

 "Die Ahnfrau," and from the one-sided and 

 fragmentary notices contained in the histories 

 of literature. Now it has been surprised by 

 the publication of a series of dramas which 

 had remained in his desk, of numerous lyrical 

 and gnomic poems, of prose works, partly 



