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days of the Indian Mutiny), were there to be some clear parting of the ways at which he might stand an instant taking breath and seeking for a decision with a full appreciation of all that lay before him at the end of the road which he might elect to tread-there can be little doubt but that the white man would discard his scruples and plunge into the battle with all his old, relentless energy. Unfortunately the decision is one which will have to be arrived at, not in a single place, but in a thousand different and widely-scattered localities, not once and for all, but at various times spreading over a protracted period. Should the decision be in favor of battle, it is white men, in easier circumstances and in safer places, who will be the first to cry shame upon those who begin the fight on behalf of the white race. Once again, the inability of the butterfly upon the road to understand the inner meaning of color-prejudice will warp the judgment of the stay-at-home, and I will make him bid the toad bear the tooth-points of the harrow with patience and contentment.

It may be urged, perhaps, that this was not the case in 1857; that the Mutiny was put down with fire and with sword, with a ruthless energy and a barbarous vindictiveness which have left between Anglo-Indians and the natives of Hindustan many an open sore that will not quickly heal; and that the sympathy of Englishmen at home was throughout on the side of the men who wreaked that dreadful punishment. This, all this, is true; but since the year 1857 public opinion and many other things in the British Isles and out of them have travelled very far indeed. In 1857 the electric telegraph did not connect Fleet Street with the remotest corners of British India; the war-correspondent was a being of recent creation, and the men who filled such posts under the great

LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXIV. 1803

newspapers were fewer in number, were inspired by a greater sense of national responsibility, by a deeper discretion, and by a smaller love of excitement and of scandal-mongering, than are some of their successors of our own time. In those days the halfpenny Press and the Yellow Press did not exist; the nation was perhaps less acutely humanitarian, and was certainly less nervously sentimental than it has since become; and responsible statesmen (though they could have shown better cause than was possible on more recent occasions) did not stoop to seek a party triumph by raising an outcry against "methods of barbarism."

Could history repeat itself, which God forbid, can any of us feel confident that a new Mutiny would be repressed as the Mutiny of 1857 was repressed, or that the attempt to exterminate the white race in India would be punished with the severity, aye, and with the ferocity that alone can serve to impress punishment upon the imagination of an Oriental people who do not easily distinguish between moderation and weakness? Can any man amongst us, who has observed the trend of recent public sentiment with a seeing eye, answer those questions in the af

firmative? If so, well and good.

There still remains some chance that when the hour of conflict dawns, as dawn it surely must sooner or later-in India, in Africa, south, east, west and central, in the United States of America (before any of them it may be), in the West Indian colonies of Great Britain, of France, of Holland,-the white men on the spot will hold their own and will have the sympathy and the support, moral as well as actual, of their own kind in places far removed from the scene of conflict. If an affirmative answer is impossible-and the present writer is bound to confess that this appears to him to be the case,then, absorption of the great white

stock into the lower races would seem to be only a question of time, time long-drawn out, it may be, but time inevitable and sure.

For-and this is the lesson which this paper has been written to inculcate,color-prejudice is ceasing, nay, has well-nigh ceased, to be what it originally was, a manifestation more or less unreasonable and unjust of blatant pride of race. Instead it must be recognized as an assertion of the instinct of racial self-preservation. The men who have least sympathy with it are precisely those who have not yet felt the pressure of the unnumbered colored populations which threaten the white race with eventual absorption; the men who carry it to its most logical, and, as stay-at-home Englishmen judge, its most bigoted extremes are those upon whom that pressure is already becoming acute. The sentiment is most keen to-day, it is probable, among white men in the United States and in the West Indies, the white men, be it noted, to whom the prospect of seeing their descendants merged into a race of Mulattos presents itself as an imminent and ever increasing probability. It is regarded as a mere prejudice, with hardly any greater justification than is the common lot of prejudices, by the people of Europe, more especially northern Europe whither the tide of Moorish conquest never penetrated. If any man desires to inform himself of the freedom from the sentiment that is to be found among the lower classes in England, for example, let him examine the records of all that happened when our. great Indian Army sent picked men from every regiment to camp near London on the occasion of His Majesty's Coronation, or obtain a census of the number of English women who during the last decade have voluntarily accepted colored men for their husbands. Yet, for the British Empire, with its

tiny bands of white men and its huge multitudes of colored races, it is the people at home who determine destiny and its policies, it is they who raise the cries, "India for the Indians!" "Africa for the Africans!" it is they who clamor for the spread of representative institutions, it is they who despise and cry shame upon what they call color-prejudice, and it is they who are surely but certainly handing over men of their own kind, bound hand and foot, into the grip of forces whose very existence they but dimly apprehend.

It is time surely that these truths should be realized, that the British nation should be taught to make up its mind once for all upon a question of tremendous import, and should be invited to have done with mischievous theories or with specious pretences. The alternative is clear. Either the British nation must accept the belief that government by the majority, is not a system capable of universal, eventual application, and having accepted it must declare boldly that white men mean to continue to govern in the lands that white men have won; or they must accept the result of their own handiwork and must deliberately, prepare for the ultimate evacuation of territories in which they have themselves suspended the operation of Nature's law of the survival of the fittest in its old, crude and brutal interpretation. If the first alternative be chosen (and to reject it means the eventual absorption of the white by the more numerous and more prolific colored races) then we must have done with make-believe, with promises that we do not intend to fulfil, with all attempts to train the subject-peoples for a self-government which we do not mean to confer upon them, and we must support our agents when grim necessity forces them to hold with the sword that which the sword has won.

The issue, perhaps, is not so remote as some of us might fancy, though it is like to present itself in a curiously complex and insidious guise. What action will Great Britain take-Great Britain, who has of late contracted the habit of screaming herself hoarse with cries of "Banzai!”—when public opinion in Japan demands the suspension in Japan's favor of the provisions of the law which excludes all who are not white from the Australian Commonwealth? This law, it must be remembered, is regarded by the Australians as a necessity of the economic existence of their country, and something more solid than British sentiment or British sentimentality will be needed to alter their conviction upon the point.

Here you will have a race that is not white, that is frugal and laborious to an extraordinary degree, that is content with a ve low standard of livMacmillan's Magazine.

ing, as Australian workmen judge such things, and that has recently proved its fitness to survive even in the open battle, which hitherto has been accounted the white man's peculiar field of victory, claiming to win a foothold in a country which is now the exclusive property of a white race, and to enter upon a competitive struggle which can only spell ruin to the working-classes of these great Colonies. What is to be the decision, what the principles upon which that decision is to be based? To such questions no man as yet may supply the answers, but it is possible that in the course of the controversy which must therefrom arise stay-athome Britons will at last learn something of the true reason and logic that lie at the back of the sentiment called color-prejudice, upon which it has so long been the custom to expend so much of scorn and of reprobation. A Looker-on.

SOME MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE.*

We believe that many right-minded people refuse to be interested in current French literature from a fear which, unfortunately, is not always unfounded, that their ideas of right and wrong will be shocked by much which they may there encounter; and others remain ignorant of much which is worthy of note in this literature because there is little in the daily or weekly papers to guide them to what

1" Le Disciple." Par Paul Bourget, de l' Académie Française. (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1889.) 2" La Terre qui Meurt." Par René Bazin, de l'Académie Française. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy.) 3 "L'Enfant à la Balustrade." Par R. Boylesve. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy.)

4 "Ramuntcho." Par Pierre Loti, de l'Académie Française. (Paris; Calmann-Levy, 1897.) 5 Le Désastre." Par Paul et Victor Margueritte. (Paris: Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1897.)

Le Sens de la Vie." Par Edouard Rod. (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1889.)

is best in it. A just idea of some few of the French authors who are at this moment most widely read in France might dissipate the first of these fears, and in the pages which follow an endeavor will be made to point out some works which need not be avoided, and are at the same time of considerable literary merit and interest. But while doing this, we feel that it is difficult to sum up the literary attitude or work

7" Etudes sur la Littérature Française." III Série. Par René Doumic. (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1899.)

8"Etudes de Littérature Contemporaine." Par G. Pellissier. (Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1898.) 9"Le Contemporains." III et Ve Série. Par Jules Lemaître, de l'Académie Française (Paris: Société Française d'Imprimerie et de Librairie, 1888, 1898.)

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of any living author, and to say that all he writes will be commendable because what he has already written is

So.

Montaigne remarked that we can have no certain knowledge, because nothing is immovable, neither things nor intelligences, and the mind and its object are in perpetual motion. Lemaître applies this remark to our taste in literature: we would apply it to the authors of to-day. While we are deducing one attitude of mind from their books, that attitude may have undergone a change before our words are in print. In 1901 a weekly paper of deservedly high reputation was saying that Lemaître's radical scepticism on all philosophical questions gave little hope that he would ever be anything else than an absolute unbeliever: very shortly afterwards, in his Un Nouvel Etat d'Esprit, he or the friend, who, we must imagine, represents himself, is at Mass, and the sixty pages of the charming little brochure may be taken as a defence of Catholicism and prerevolutionary ideas. Huysman. too, although just now we hear less of him than we did a few years ago, was, at one time, a perpetual surprise to the literary world to which he finally presented a more astonishing volte-face

than that of M. Lemaître. And the same might be said from some points of view of M. Brunetière, whose recent death is a loss to the whole republic of letters. Writers who reveal themselves are apt to be phantasmagoria; all we can do is to gather what we can up to the last published utterance and not prophesy as to the future mental state of living authors.

Perhaps our prejudice (which, however, does not blind us to the serious faults of his work) makes us place M. Paul Bourget, at least in his later manner, at the head of the novelists of to-day. He is perhaps at the present time the most widely read of all French authors, and if all his books could be

classed with Un Divorce (1904) and his little volume of Nouvelles, Les Deux Sœurs, which succeeded it, there would be no discordant note in our praise. The first of these works must have had a profound effect on the minds of M. Bourget's contemporaries. Les Deux Sœurs, although slight, is full of pleasant writing, and has all the author's old charm of style; and both volumes are free from unpleasant incidents. But his books have not always been so; Le Disciple, on which M. Bourget will perhaps rest his fame, is to our minds a profoundly unpleasant book. A philosopher, amiable, guileless in his own life, discards Christianity, and sets forth his teaching in a work of 500 pages which he entitles La Psychologie de Dieu-a work which is best described in M. Bourget's own words:

La thèse de l'auteur consistait à démontrer la production nécessaire de "l'hypothèse-Dieu" par le fonctionnement de quelques lois psychologiques rattachées elles-mêmes à quelques modifications cérébrales d'un ordre tout physique. . . .1

The disciple is a weak undisciplined young man to whom the theory of the philosopher comes as a welcome excuse for throwing off the restraints of religion, who brings shame on a family from whom he has received only kindness, and who is finally shot by the brother of his victim. M. Bourget has shown the weakness of mere philosophy to control men's lives, and the philosopher himself may almost seem, when in the last pages he sees the agony of the mother over the body of her dead son, to doubt its efficacy or its value.

For the first time, finding his thought powerless to sustain him he humiliated himself, he bent, he sank, before the impenetrable mystery of destiny. The words of the only "Le Disciple," p. 14.

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prayer which he recalled from his faraway childhood: "Our Father which art in Heaven " came to his heart. Truly he did not pronounce the words. Perhaps he would never pronounce them. But if He existed, this Heavenly Father towards whom small and great turn themselves in hours of agony as towards the .only resource, is not this need of prayer the most touching of prayers? And if this Heavenly Father did not exist, should we experience this hunger and thirst for Him in such hours as this? . . . "You would not seek Me if you had not found Me!" At that moment even, and thanks to the clearness of thought which belongs to savants in all crises, Adrian Sixte recalled this admirable phrase of Pascal in his Mystère de Jésus-and when the mother rose from her knees. she could see that he was weeping!'

The "disciple" wearies us with dreary pages of egoism: there are episodes which do nothing to help forward the movement of the story and which if only hinted at would have brought the work of ruin which the author desired to portray as completely and more artistically before the reader without shocking his better sense. And it is this which turns what might have been a grand lesson, a sermon, as King Lear or Macbeth are sermons, into a work of a very different kind: a work which seems even to have troubled its author and to have led him to write a preface which might almost be called an apology. "Let neither the pride of life nor the pride of the intelligence make you a cynic or a jungler with ideas! In this time of troubled consciences and contradictory doctrines, attach yourself, as to the tree of salvation, to this word of Christ, "The tree is known,

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formulated as on the picture of life which it contains." *

And with such a work as Le Disciple before us we may well ask ourselves what is the moral value of M. Bourget's work-putting, however, Un Divorce on one side, for of the value of that we have no doubt.

"M. Paul Bourget," writes M. Georges Pellissier, "est un romancier mondain, un romancier psychologique et un romancier moraliste." That he is "romancier mondain" is written large over his works, that he loves to dwell on the psychological aspect of things is also obvious; but is he a moral teacher? The answer, we believe, will be that he has failed in this direction and is himself apparently conscious of it, as when he wrote the preface to the Disciple.

It is possible so to describe vice as to make it hateful. We believe that M. Bourget has not done so, and his failure in this respect we ascribe to that trait which some of his critics have called-unjustly, we believe-his "snobisme."

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