1] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power,
writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which
still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of
morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal, is
worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers.
Something of the gift of Francois Millet, whose peasants are veritable
priests, of those older religious painters who could portray saintly
heads so sweetly and their merely human proteges so truly, seems indeed
to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre. In the Abbe Tigrane, in
Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with wonderful power and
patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture-- [122] shrewd,
passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though they are often of
peasant origin, are never by any chance undignified. The passions he
treats of in priests are, indeed, strictly clerical, most often their
ambitions--not the errant humours of the mere man in the priest, but
movements of spirit properly incidental to the clerical type itself.
Turning to the secular brothers and sisters of these peasant
ecclesiastics, at first sight so strongly contrasted with them, M.
Fabre shows a great acquaintance with the sources, the effects, of
average human feeling; but still in contact--in contact, as its
conscience, its better mind, its ideal--with the institutions of
religion. What constitutes his distinguishing note as a writer is the
recognition of the religious, the Catholic, ideal, intervening
masterfully throughout the picture he presents of life, as the only
mode of poetry realizable by the poor; and although, of course, it does
a great deal more beside, certainly doing the high work of poetry
effectively. For his background he has chosen, has made his own and
conveys very vividly to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in
spite of its almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose.
The large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the
Cevennes, are for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful
authors, Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian. In Les Courbezon, the French Vicar
of Wakefield, as Sainte-Beuve declared, with this imposing background,
the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes, the
priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest.
Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce,
unclerical