Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 - Various
This is God's management for destroying routine within the law of
stated revolution, and for bringing the mind constantly into contact
with fresh influences. The soul, encased by a wall of adamantine
circumstances, and driven around a track of unvarying duties,
shrivels, or gets diseased. But these circumstances need not imprison
the farmer, nor these duties become the polished pavement of his
cell. He has his life among the most beautiful scenes of Nature and
the most interesting facts of Science. Chemistry, geology, botany,
meteorology, entomology, and a dozen other related or constituent
sciences,--what is intelligent farming but a series of experiments,
involving, first and last, all of these? What is a farm but a
laboratory where the most important and interesting scientific
problems are solved? The moment that any field of labor becomes
intelligently experimental, that moment routine ceases, and that field
becomes attractive. The most repulsive things under heaven become
attractive, on being invested with a scientific interest. All,
therefore, that a farmer has to do, to break up the traditional
routine of his method and his labor, is to become a scientific
farmer. He will then have an interest in his labor and its results
above their bare utilities. Labor that does not engage the mind has no
dignity; else the ox and the ass are kings in the world, and we are
but younger brothers in the royal family. So we say to every
farmer,--If you would make your calling attractive to yourself and
your boys, seek that knowledge which will break up routine, and make
your calling, to yourself and to them, an intelligent pursuit.
A recent traveller in England speaks enthusiastically of a visit which
he paid to an old farm-house in that country, and of the garden-farm
upon which it stood, which had descended from father to son through a
period of five hundred years. He found a family of charming
intelligence and the politest culture. That hallowed soil was a
beautiful body, of which the family interests and associations were
the soul. To be dissociated from that soil forever would be
regarded by its proprietors as almost equivalent to family
annihilation. Proprietorship in English soil is one of the prime
ambitions of the true Englishman; but we do not find in New England
any kindred sentiments of pride in landed property and family
affection for the paternal acres. The nomadic tribes of Asia would
seem to have quite as strong local attachments as Yankee landholders,
most of whom will sell their homesteads as readily as they will their
horses. This fact we cannot but regard as one among the many causes
which have conspired to despoil the farmer's calling of some of its
legitimate attractions. The son slips away from the old homestead as
easily as he does from the door of a hotel. Very likely his father has
rooted up all home attachments by talking of removing Westward ever
since the boy saw the light. This lack of affection for the family
acres is doubtless owing somewhat to the fact that in this country
landed property is not associated with political privilege, as it has
been in England; but this cannot be the sole reason; for the sentiment
has a genuine basis in nature, and, in not a few instances, an actual
existence amongst us.
Resulting from the operation of all the causes which we have briefly
noticed, there is another cause of the deterioration of farming life
in New England, which cannot be recovered from in many years. Actual
farming life has been brought into such harsh contrast with other
life, that its best materials have been sifted out of it, have slid
away from it. An inquiry at the doors of the great majority of farmers
would exhibit the general fact, that the brightest boys have gone to
college, or have become mechanics, or are teaching school, or are in
trade, or have emigrated to the West. There have been taken directly
out from the New England farming population its best elements,--its
quickest intelligence, its most stirring enterprise, its noblest and
most ambitious natures,--precisely those elements which were necessary
to elevate the standard of the farmer's calling and make it what it
should be. It is very easy to see why these men have not been retained
in the past; it is safe to predict that they will not be retained in
the future, unless a thorough reform be instituted. These men cannot
be kept on a routine farm, or tied to a home which has no higher life
than that of a workshop or a boarding-house. It is not because the
work of the farm is hard that men shun it. They will work harder and
longer in other callings for the sake of a better style of individual
and social life. They will go to the city, and cling to it while half
starving, rather than engage in the dry details and the hard and
homely associations of the life which they forsook.
The boys are not the only members of the farmer's family that flee
from the farmer's life. The most intelligent and most enterprising of
the farmer's daughters become school-teachers, or tenders of shops, or
factory-girls. They contemn the calling of their father, and will,
nine times in ten, marry a mechanic in preference to a farmer. They
know that marrying a farmer is a very serious business. They remember
their worn-out mothers. They thoroughly understand that the vow that
binds them in marriage to a farmer seals them to a severe and homely
service that will end only in death.
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.[1]
The title is an ambitious one, for the _salons_ of Paris are
Paris itself; and, from the days of the Fronde and of the Hotel
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 societe Francaise_, 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
_regime_, 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
Fouche 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 Fouche's "time" was that which is
regarded as the period of universal beheading and levelling.
It is certain, that, under the _regime_ 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 regime_ 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 societe_ 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 grace Francaise_, 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 regime_ 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 societe Francaise_, 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 reestablishing 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 _habitues_ 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 _habitues_ 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 Stael, 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 _Presidente 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
_reunions_ 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 _habitues_ 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. Gerard, Mme. d'Abrantes, Mme. Recamier, 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. Gerard--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 _regimes_ to meet upon what might be
termed neutral ground. Mme. d'Abrantes 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. Recamier, 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.
Gerard, 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.