arriving at success. They aimed solely at that sordid popularity which might be called the prize of extravagance. They intoxicated each other by speech-making and ready applause. They commenced by being merely artists in eccentricity, and ended by becoming desperadoes. At the same time flourished the press of the revolutionary" Bohemia." It had commenced with the" Marseillaise" and ended with the "Mot d'Ordre," and the "Cri du Peuple." What this press was, may be easily conjectured. The money question played a far more important part in it than the idea question. The traffic in lies and scandals became a lucrative business, and we know of infamous newspaper articles that secured as many as four extra editions a day. the unfortunates who had received no other moral education than the one they found in these books, conducted themselves through real life, as if they lived actually in that world of coarse and corrupting fictions which the sensational novel had created for them. They determined to get along in the world at all hazards, and remove the obstacles they could not overcome. Another influence of which account ought to be taken in the moral history of the last times, is that of the singular philosophies which have invaded and ruled literary Bohemia. To designate them by their true name, and without much ceremony, we shall simply call them Atheism. Heaven forbid I should carry the weighty questions which have divided philosophers into the domain of politics, nor would I insult the doctrine of Rationalism by supposing it destined to become the official philosophy of the Commune! But we cannot deny that its various disciples, the men who prepared the 18th of March, had for many years adopted some of its theories, and these had been boisterously published in their sheets and in their books. A flood of small periodicals, styled literary, appeared and disappeared at different periods, concealing under different names the same monotonous phraseology-the same doctrine repeated over and over again, and paved thereby the way for the slowly advancing En In what such principles finally end, we have seen, and the world still shudders at it. One might trace the gradual descent of some of these journals. They proved schools of public demoralization before they became the secret laboratories and offices of public robberies. The first stage in this fatal descent is marked by an absolute want of seriousness-by a complete disrespect for everything time-honoured by a most fanciful cynicism. The second opens a period of perpetual agitation, and an attempt to revive the reign of terror by abuse pushed to hyperbole, by the most violent polemics sub-cyclopædia of the New School. Around the stituted for a dignified discussion of ideas. In the third stage, the journal becomes the most active instrument of this new reign of terror, which it has so loudly invoked, and for which it has so industriously laboured. We may well ask what influences have brought "Bohemia" to such a degree of moral and intellectual depravity? What has driven to madness and crime these vanities, at first so inoffensive? It may be accounted for in many ways; one of the chief causes, however, is the literary influence of the times; it is that which transformed the literary adventurer into the political adventurer, ready to dare anything in order to acquire wealth or power. Yes, the modern novel may claim a large and heavy share of responsibility in the recent events. The examples it gave of elegant scoundrelism and intellectual depravity, have dazzled and fascinated a number of feeble minds whom the uncertain morality of the society and time in which we live but ill-protected against their own evil propensities. Many of chief of the latter, the capitalist of the sect, gathered the larger brains of the school, the thinkers, all those that had advanced far enough in their studies to handle with impunity dangerous formulas. United with the partisans of Positivism, vagrant disciples of experimental science, they formed a large battalion, well prepared for intellectual struggles, until the hour for political struggles should strike. Among the writers that played in this new Encyclopædia the parts of those who wrote in the former one, endeavouring, as that did, to bring about a social renovation by a renovation of ideas, we can easily recognize the magistrates, the ædiles, the great office-holders of the Commune, and even those of the socialistic Republic ensconced since the 4th of September in some of the municipalities in Paris. The teaching of this school was not purely theoretical, confined to special sheets which no one read, or to that monumental Encyclopædia which but few consulted; it descended briskly into the political papers of the party, and even into the popular clubs. But there, in order to appear with advantage, it had to undergo a certain transformation; it had to put aside the pedantries of the physiologist, the dissertations about first and final causes of the professor of Atheism; the learned reasonings of doctors on the physiological conditions of the phenomenon called soul; the clever demonstrations of the chemist, who explains the mystery of life without needing to have recourse to that old hypothesis called God; the assertions of the critic in regard to the quantity of bile or blood it takes to write a poem, a drama, or a sermon. All these heavy doctrines, passing through the crucible of the Parisian mind, evaporated into light clouds that fell back upon the press in a shower of fine ironies and sharp sarcasms against old beliefs, old superstitions, the old fogies of philosophy and superannuated gods. Down it came like a thick and piercing hailstorm, upsetting the old order of things and making room for a new one. It was a great treat for the idlers; never before had grave subjects and long-honoured people been handled so cavalierly. All this did not as yet present any great danger; but look a few rounds down the ladder, and you will see what the tendency of all this impious babble and flippant raillery will be. I have followed with a sad curiosity the degradation of an idea, from the literature of elegant circles down to that of hovels, where it died in some mob newspaper, and was finally thrown into the rag-picker's basket; I have followed it in its sad wanderings through journals of the most varied origin, tone and size, down to the "Père Duchêne." The distance between refined scepticism and gross abuse is shorter than one would think. Never before had such treacherous and varied means been employed to demoralize the people and destroy in them all faith and ideal, creating a vacuum in their minds without providing the wherewithal to fill it again, except by unlawful pleasures and unwholesome appetites. This sketch, hastily drawn, is evidently in complete, but on the whole it is exact. We should have to go far back, in the history of our national education, to find the origin of the revolutionary sentiments blended in our minds with the first intellectual impressions we have received. We know only two sorts of history, and those but indifferently: that of classic an tiquity and that of the French Revolution. All the rest has gradually been wiped out; but these two groups of events move and live in our imagination; they stand out in bold relief on a vague | ground of extinct notions and languid memories. We mix the heroes of ancient republics with those of our present history; it becomes a sort of illustrious company that haunts our minds with graceful attitudes, with sublime speeches on republican virtues, on liberty, on the country. All is on a large scale, larger than nature; it assumes superhuman proportions through our feverish sentiments, our indomitable pride, our language where the man is lost in the hero; all this is lit up by too glaring a light, and placed in a perspective of immortality. It is a world slightly overdone, somewhat declamatory, which resembles nothing that has really existed, and which is the result of our classical education, combined with the fictions for which the French Revolution furnishes inexhaustible themes. This is the basis of our political education, such as most Bohemians acquire in the colleges and schools, amidst the rough struggles of life, and the great dangers of modern society, in the conflict of their poverty with the wealth displayed on all sides, and its accompanying power, the lustre of which dazzles their eyes and attracts their wild dreams. All serious study concerning the conditions of social existence, the progress of nations and the price at which this progress is bought; all deep meditation on the true laws of history, on the feebleness of certain big words, on the vanity of certain formulas, on crimes disguised under pompous names, all this was unknown to them. The judicial, truthful history of the Revolution was not to their mind; they cared very little for the teaching of the masters that had brought it back to a true perspective by reducing its men to just proportions. They wanted something more fanciful. It was not the drama of ideas that pleased their frivolous and feeble minds-it was the tumult of facts, the agitation on the public squares, the scenes of the Convention, the horrors of the Conciergerie; nay, they delighted in the mere theatrical paraphernalia of the Revolution, its stage effects, its scarfs, its feathers, its trumpery; they relished particularly its pompous harangues and violent language, its sudden vicissitudes of fortune, splendours and ruins, passing before them as in a dazzling and sinister dream brought out in their eyes the grand idea, illumined by the blue-lights of poetry and rhetoric, and perceived from afar as in an apotheosis. Our generation has been fed too much on these spectacles, this phantasmagoria, in which the French Revolution becomes a drama of scene shiftings and high-sounding phrases. Who was it that thus flattered these frivolous imaginations by presenting to them false ideals in regard to the events and men of that time, when the plainer duty was to bring them to a proper conception of human morality? Who was it fostered, in violent and feeble minds, so morbid an enthusiasm for an epoch where such great and noble aspirations were so foolishly compromised, so sadly sullied; for an epoch one must beware of commending, for fear of becoming an accomplice in the unatoneable crimes of the past, or in baleful imitations for the future? The answer may be found on all lips. We know some of these poets and rhetoricians who have wilfully transformed history, in order that they might glorify it with their endless dithyrambics, or their unreserved amnesties. These are the real culprits. of public events, but the real Marat would have shuddered at the puppet trying to impersonate him : the new one only succeeded in defaming his prototype, persecuting and denouncing his victims instead of executing them. Barrère was seen no later than yesterday, the same as ever, a honey-tongued revolutionist, ready at any time to tune his flexible soul to the key of almost any event. All this resembles a bloody masquerade, a lugubrious and atrocious jest. It is but a miserable parody! '93, minus its ardent convictions, an artificial '93 ; and since it has been asserted that the reign of terror was a religion, let us say that this new reign of terror through which we have just passed is far more monstrous and criminal than the first, for it is a religion without faith. It is through such ideas and examples, taken from high quarters, through this revolutionary eloquence so applauded in books, in the theatres, and on the rostrum, that this "Bohemia," already undermined by its own vices, was brought to ruin. But, however severely we may judge it in its downfall, we must not forget that a large share of the responsibility rests with the illustrious personages who were linked with it, who courted its journals for their own selfish ends, lavishing upon it their most approving smiles, their most delicate flatteries, carrying on with the poor fools a commerce of adulation and coquetry that captivated them completely. Proud of the appreciation of those they considered their betters, the poor wretches trumpeted all round the civic virtues of their patrons, and opened to them a way to easy triumphs. It was an active propaganda and a fatal contagion. We repent of it now; may it not be too late! Thus sprang up among us the religion, or rather the idolatry. of the so-called infallible, impeccable, immaculate, Revolution; a worship supported by the imagination even more than by passion. The Revolution has its theologians, its mystics, and fanatics, its hypocrites even, without whom a religion is not complete. Everything concerning it is holy and sacred; the right by which it is most honoured, is to imitate it on all points. Its pompous rhetoric, the bluntness of its language, its big phrases, the attitudes and gestures of its personages are all reproduced with a labourious exactitude. Most happy are they who, by dint of study and observation, have succeeded in seizing upon some of the features of these consecrated types! Each endeavours to cut himself out a part in this history, and take out from the great picture some figure under which he may introduce himself to the public. We have had Camille Desmoulins again, his very devil-may-care gait, and cruel impertinence, minus his bet-bered such speeches and behaved accordingly? ter parts, his fits of true sensibility, and the chivalrous promptings of his soul. You have shuddered at recognizing Danton's loud voice; the same sonorousness and power; but its lightning effects were wanting. Marat, too, was seen crossing again the bloody stage The men of '93 had this advantage over the feeble comedians that have tried to imitate them, that their hearts burned with patriotism. Where do you find any trace of the same sacred flame among the modern Jacobins? The country, they said (and clubs and cafés applauded the witticism),—the country is but a post guarded by a custom-house officer. Is it to be wondered that some of our soldiers should later have remem All this makes up our present history. Add to these diverse influences the complicity of a petulant middle class applauding, without foreseeing the end, the work of social demolition; add the profound indifference of a society absorbed in business, money and pleasures, without thought for anything else; between the writers themselves, and above all, and, below this surface already undermined, the on an absolute respect for ideas. But for this it ardent passions of fanatics digging the abyss is evidently necessary that there be no longer a wherein we well-nigh perished, in sympathy confusion possible between the healthy libwith the over-excited appetites of the multi-eral ideas which represent civilization through tude and the conspiracy of the "Internationale," liberty and justice, and the false anti-social and you will no longer wonder at the depth of ideas which represent a return to barbarism our fall, and at the number of ruins that cover by arbitrary acts, violence and crime. To efnow the soil of France. fect this, it will be very necessary in future to guard against idealizing under the charming names of fancy, of independent life and freedom, the unwholesome passions and the disorders in the morals and brains which have thrown out of their orbits, and hopelessly destroyed, talents intended by nature to be devoted to the making of " Vaudevilles or to landscape painting, and not to the getting up of revolutions. The events themselves illustrate the moral of this essay. One of the most essential conditions upon which the regeneration of France depends now, more essential even than the form of the institutions which are to govern us, is a reconstruction of the literature and the press, a reconstruction based on seriousness of thought, on hard work, on dignity of life, on mutual respect DAG THE LAST TOURNAMENT.* BY ALFRED TENNYSON, D.C.L. (From "The Contemporary Review" for December.) AGONET, the fool, whom Gawain in his A maiden babe; which Arthur pitying took, moods Had made mock-knight of Arthur's Table Round, And toward him from the Hall with harp in And from the crown thereof a carcanet Of ruby swaying to and fro, the prize Of Tristram in the jousts of yesterday, For Arthur and Sir Lancelot riding once Then gave it to his Queen to rear: the Queen * This poem forms one of the "Idylls of the King." Its place is between "Pelleas” and “Guinevere." Slid from my hands, when I was leaning out May win them for the purest of my maids." She ended, and the cry of a great joust But on the hither side of that loud morn “My churl, for whom Christ died, what evil Hath drawn his claws athwart thy face? or fiend? Man was it who marr'd Heaven's image in thee thus ?" Then, sputtering thro' the hedge of splinter'd teeth, My knights are all adulterers like his own, Then Arthur turn'd to Kay the seneschal, now Make their last head like Satan in the North. My younger knights, new-made, in whom your flower Waits to be solid fruit of golden deeds, Move with me toward their quelling, which The loneliest ways are safe from shore to shore. Only to yield my Queen her own again? Thereto Sir Lancelot answer'd, "It is well : Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt Yet better if the King abide, and leave "He took them and he drave them to his tower— Save that he sware me to a message, saying- My tower is full of harlots, like his court, Then Arthur rose and Lancelot follow'd him, Turn'd to him saying, "Is it then so well? He spoke, and taking all his younger knights, Down the slope city rode, and sharply turn'd |