tory mules and exorbitant demands on the part of the men. One mule pannier could not be locked, and we no ticed that the man in charge hurried on in a most unaccountable manner. This aroused my suspicion, so I hurried on and caught him up suddenly in a hollow way, where he was in the act of unloading the mule with the evident object of helping himself. The men showed a strong inclination to stop at Lakhos, which was overcome with some little trouble-after which every wine shop on the road claimed their attention, and it was late before they got into Canea. We walked down in a leisurely way, stopping at a little village called Fourné for some excellent coffee and oranges. Here we hired horses and jogged into town in the evening. It is a mistake for any one travelling in Crete to take a lot of supplies from home or from Athens. A few tinned provisions for an emergency are sufficient. Wine costs about three halfpence a bottle and is very drinkable and wholesome, though light. Vegetables can always be got, also lamb, very cheap. Eggs are a drug in the market, as the villages abound with fowls. Tea, coffee, and sugar (which will always be stolen if left open) must be The rustic natives, both taken out. Moslem and Orthodox Church, are not so black as they are painted; it is the town-dwellers, of whom our servants afforded a fair type, who are the black sheep and who have gained for this fertile and beautiful little island the reputation earned by it in the days of St. Paul and sustained without intermission to the present day. ON H. C. LowTHER. From Macmillan's Magazine. THE THEORY LOCAL COLOR. Local color is a phrase with a history; it is a phrase familiar also in current criticism and literary talk at the present moment. Only the other day an Ameri can critic proclaimed the fashion of with unusual rapidity. Dante, Shakespeare; we say Boileau;" so wrote Hugo scornfully in the preface to "Les Orientales." Shakespeare's name was much in the mouths of the Romantics, Stendhal's pamphlet on Racine and Shakespeare having saved them probably the shock of contact with the original. Perhaps the most naïf symptom of the fashion was the divine discontent of the young men with their own French names. Maxime du Camp has told us how after reading Hugo's "Romance Mauresque," he envied the happy mortal who not only carried a jewelled dagger as of course, but had a name like Don Rodrigue de Lara. Having to choose a title for a youthful book of his own, he called it "Wistibrock l'Islandais." Why Iceland, why Wistibrock, he asked himself with stupefaction in later years? Yet while indulging his fancy in fiction, he endured his own baptismal name. It was not so with others. What imaginative geography was responsible for the name of Pétrus Borel it is idle to conjecture; but when Théophile Dondey transformed himself into Philothée O'Neddy, and Auguste Maquet became Augustus MacKeat, the exotic intention is plainly, if inaccurately, indicated. MacKeat may not sound very Scotch on this side of the channel, nor Philothée O'Neddy convincingly Irish; but both were near enough for the Latin quarter. It may be remembered that Hugo introduced the bagpipes into a romance for local color, and contentedly called them "bugpipes" through chapter after chapter and edition after edition, without any protest from French readers. Young romantic bloods, cursed with the common name of Jean, revived the mediæval h, and called themselves, Jehan. For, as Gautier explained, the yearning for the foreign embraced time as well as space; their nostalgia, as he called it, was for other ages as well as other lands. His own red waistcoat at "Hernani" for example, about which all the fuss was made, was not a red waistcoat at all; it was a pourpoint rose. A red waistcoat would have smacked of modern politics; and mod ern politics were simply an offence to them. Pétrus Borel being the only republican among them. The pourpoint rose, on the other hand was a badge of mediævalism. Mediæval Gothic was for a while their only wear in religion and politics as well as art. It was quite a schism, Gautier said, when he introduced the antique. Gautier himself was happy in a Merovingian head of hair. If you could not look like Childeric or Clovis, it was well to have the appearance of a maharajah. A certain Bouchardy owed his prestige among the Romantics not so much to his ultraGothic designs and his inexhaustible memory for Hugo's verse, as to his Asiatic complexion. In muslin and turban he was an Indian prince to the life, said Gautier; and when he rose to leave their company they felt as if his palanquin was waiting at the door. He was the mildest-mannered of men, but the picturesque ferocity of his appearance gave, in the opinion of his friends, a very salutary shock to the prosperous citizen of Paris. Failing the physique of a maharajah and the Merovingian head of hair, the next best thing was to be of a livid and cadaverous countenance, with the gloom of fate on a Byronic brow. For this midsummer madness Gautier kept his zest to the end. After romanticism had gone out, and science and pseudo-science had come in, nay, after the iron of calamitous reality had entered the soul of Paris and of her children,-first capitulation, then famine, then bombardment, a disaster, as Gautier characteristically remarked Goncourt, completely satisfying every canon of art-even then, and till his death, his delight was to talk local color with congenial spirits and discuss the great days which the phrase recalled to him. to Mérimée did not remain so faithful to the doctrine in which he was brought up. He began bravely. Local color being, as he said, their Holy Grail, he and his young friend Ampère began by vowing themselves to its quest through the countries of the earth. They had enthusiasm but alack! they had no money, and in modern Europe not even knight errantry can be managed without money. In this difficulty they decided to lay on the local color out of their own heads at home, and afterwards to travel upon the profits of the books to see if their pictures were like. In prosecution of this hopeful plan, young Mérimée took Dalmatia to be his province, and in a fortnight, it is said, produced a volume of what purported to be translations from the Illyrian. This spirited essay in local color, if not remunerative in money, was so successful in accomplishment that the supposed product of Illyrian genius was gravely discussed by German savants, and was thought worthy of translation by the Russian poet Poushkine. The facile success, he told Taine afterwards, opened his eyes to the cheapness of the trick and killed at a blow his belief in the virtue of local color. So at least he used to say in the after years; yet perhaps it is not necessary to take him quite at his word. It was Mérimée's little way to mask his emotions and to make light of his convictions; nor will the judicious reader forget that there are no sounder monuments of the romantic use of local color than Mérimée's own little masterpieces, "Tamango," "Mateo Falcone," "Carmen," "Colomba." It was in "Colomba" that Mérimée published the recantation of his early faith. He drew a satirical portrait of a young English lady returning from Italy disgusted because she had failed to find there the local color she was in quest of, and being recommended to try her luck in Corsica. "Local color!" exclaims Mérimée, commenting on the young lady's fancy; "explain who can the meaning of the phrase, which I understood so well some years ago, but which I understand no longer." He understood the thing, however, so well still, that no traveller's kit to Corsica has since been complete without a copy of "Colomba." The young English lady's craving for the local color of Italy reminds us that the fashion was no new thing in the days of Mérimée and Gautier. The Italy of her dreams was the Italy of Childe Harold. Before Hugo and Musset was the English Byron. When the young French Romantics were playing at sultans and bandits in the purlieus of Paris, they acknowledged to themselves that they were vying on unequal terms with Milord Byron, with his real adventures and exotic loves and his draught of blood (or was it punch?) out of a hollow skull in the authentic vaults of Newstead Abbey. It was our own Byron and Scott and Ossian Macpherson who spread the romantic fashion for local color through Europe. And in France itself, before Hugo, there was Chateaubriand; and before Chateaubriand's descriptions of the virgin forests of America, Bernardin de SaintPierre had introduced into French literature the blazing flowers and luxuriant growths of the tropics. It is indeed to Saint-Pierre that French critics are inclined to give the credit of the initiation of what they call exotism. The exotism of the chief romantics was, it has to be admitted, rather superficial. "Les Orientales" was one of the flags about which the fight for local color fastened; but Hugo's Oriental coloring was the merest theatrical decoration. Hugo and Musset knew nothing whatever at first hand of the East or of Spain. Hugo ultimately got as far afield as to the Channel Islands, but it was a decree of banishment that took him there; and when Musset was offered the chance of travel in that Spain which was the romantic's land of promise, he refused to go. Théophile Gautier, on the other hand, was no inconsiderable traveller, and a traveller with an unusual eye for the picturesque. And the unhappy Gérard de Nerval, another of the vanguard of 1830, not only dwelt for some time in Constantinople and Cairo, but carried his cult of local color to the length of wedding an Abyssinian wife. His French friends were full of curiosity concerning her; and Gérard assured them gently that she was yellow all over. That the local color of Hugo and the rest was not so thorough as that of Gérard's Abyssinian wife was apparent to many minds even in the hey-day of boleth of revolution to be distinguished from the elementary maxims of art? In this catholic sense Homer was as much a master of local color as Théophile Gautier. This is probably what Mérimée meant when he said he no longer understood the meaning of the term. What in fact did Maupassant's lessons in style from Flaubert come to but this,—that whether he described a Carthaginian battle or a carriage passing the club window, it should be impossible for readers to mistake his particular battle or carriage for any other? The secret of style, in other words, lay in accurate local color; and thus the romantic battle cry is found transformed into the school maxim of realism. romanticism. When Amédée Jaubert, That the thing called realism was indeed the natural sequel and complement of romanticism has long been clear. It was so both by development and reaction. For the Orientalism and mediævalism of their predecessors the French Realists substituted the local color of the province and the gutter. It need not be supposed that this later local color is always of unimpeachable accuracy. The realist, being for the most part but the romantic topsy-turvy, is quite as fond, after his own fashion. of forcing and falsifying his tones for effect. Still the free license of the imagination is undoubtedly more restrained in dealing with things which lie under the writer's and reader's nose: and the more exacting standard of aecuracy required on familiar ground reacted in turn on the imaginative freedom of unfamiliar description. Moreover, the whole trend of the postromantic generation was in the direction of science and observation. Indeed, romanticism itself was both a symptom and a stimulus of awakening interest in things remote in place and time, which was bound to lead and did lead, to exploration and research. The effect of the change on the old romantic cult of local color was naturally considerable, and the immediate effect may be observed in Flaubert, who in this as in other matters, has the interest for criticism of occupying a transitional Flaubert grew up a romantic of the romantics, and his literary ambition was to produce a masterpiece of local color. This aspiration of his early years took form, in the fulness of time and after protracted labor, in the Carthaginian romance of "Salammbô." "Salammbo" is a book of local color all compact; but it is local color not at all of the earlier romantic pattern. The formula was the same, but the spirit is altered. The yearning for a climate more flamboyant than the native grey of his Norman skies, the itch to startle the conventional Frenchman, are quite in the romantic tradition; but the spirit of the later generation asserts itself in Flaubert's extraordinary anxiety to make his exotic color true. The Carthage of "Salammbo" is, I dare say, not a little unlike the real Carthage; but that Flaubert took all possible pains to make it as like as he could was abundantly proved in his controversies with his critics. Not only had he travelled in Africa and explored the site, though so much locomotion as was needed for a walk round his garden was irksome to him, but he furthermore made himself acquainted with every document which could throw light on Carthaginian history or character. And what was the effect of this elaborately studied color? Sainte Beuve expressed what, I think, must be the general verdict, when he complained that this tour de force of local color lacked all human interest. Flaubert retorted that his critic's distaste was the measure of his own success, that it was precisely because the local color was genuine and not a mere romantic decoration, that his critic missed the kind of human interest he looked for. What he would have liked, said Flaubert, was a set of sentimental Frenchmen masquerading in Carthaginian fancy dress; the real barbaric Moloch-worshipping Carthaginian was not nice to a Parisian taste. And when again Sainte Beuve protested that he was unable to feel the fascination of a beauty daubed with vermilion and poisoned with perfume. Flaubert begged him to take his Bible and to use his nose; Judith and Esther, he assured him, were every bit as much poisoned with perfume as his own “Salammbô.” As is always the case in controversy between competent antagonists, there was truth on both sides. But it is pertinent to observe that Flaubert's citation of Esther and Judith tells against himself; if he had written their stories there would have been no need of the admonition to use our noses. The Oriental writers, on the other hand, not being set upon executing a tour de force of local color, make, in spite of all the Oriental coloring, the human story the predominant interest. And this brings us to the question which is of something more than historical interest, the practical question, what is the true method and manner of local color under our modern conditions? Some incompatibility there does seem to be between the new knowledge and the old romance. When a certain critic objected to "The Story of an African Farm" that there were no lions in it, the author replied that that kind of African romance was best written in Piccadilly. Well, there are not a few who still prefer the old-fashioned stories, with lions in them, written in Piccadilly to such a sample of the new fashion as "The Story of an African Farm." They argue that Defoe never got much further from home than to the pillory, and that Crusoe's island is good enough for them. They protest that Charles Kingsley depicted the West Indies very nicely out of the windows of his English parsonage. They remember that when Tom Moore complacently recorded the compliments he received on his description of Cashmere in "Lalla Rookh," the very point he was proud of was that he had never set foot in the country. And such too was the boast of Harriet Martineau for her "Feats on the Fjords," which till lately was an ordinary English guide to Norway. And yet even those who rate romance above barren knowledge must confess that the day for this easy-going kind is over. Geographical science it might have survived, but scarcely an era of steam, and Cook's tours, and special correspondents. A man will hardly venture to lay on his local color |