The sustained and withering irony and censure in this sketch, which yet never goes out of the selected orbit of a boy's observation and experiences, seem to me to be perfect in their kind. The incompleteness of the child's understanding gives only a keener incisiveness to the satire embodied in his narrative. The general reader will never forgive such portraits as that of the elder Barbier, who, after shouting, 'Sursum Corda! Prenons serment de défendre le sol sacré de la Patrie!' accepts the large Prussian orders, sets his steam-saws going in his timber yard, and furnishes the wood for the besiegers of Paris; or of that of the tobacconist Legros, who, after crying, 'Un soldat qui renie son drapeau? Qu'il crêve comme un chien!' stands bareheaded with bent spine to sell cigars to Bavarian officers. This is human nature: human nature as commerce and modern teaching and the cheap Press have made it; but Barbier and Legros will never pardon the limner who thus portrays them. To the reproach that such portraits are nearly always those which he selects, Darien would, no doubt, reply that it is not his fault if they are what have been in his path to the exclusion of finer and nobler figures. He is a realist in the full sense of that often-abused word, and he has the courage to represent the realities which he finds.
The _Année Terrible_ casts its black shadows over the childhood of this writer, and as long as his life shall last the gloom it has left will stay with him. If France herself should ever forget, which Heaven forbid, he will not do so. His soul has been dipped in the Styx.
What will, no doubt, alienate from him a large number of readers will be his almost absolute want of human sympathy, or, at least, of expressions of such sympathy. It is exceedingly rare with him to give way to any sign of any emotion of pity. He sees human nature, in all its phases, with little compassion for it. He sees (and this is, too often, either through weakness or through policy, ignored by writers and thinkers) that the great majority of men are neither the martyrs nor the heroes, neither the victims nor the tyrants of their time, but a mass considerable alone by its numbers, inconsiderable by any mental or moral worth, and chiefly absorbed in different forms of selfishness and the desire of gain. It is probably an error, though one consecrated by usage and talent, to represent the generality of human beings as worthy subjects either of blessing or of curse. But the author who says so will never be forgiven by that mass of mediocrity which forms nine-tenths of the population of the world. Darien says it, and shows it, and it is this which will always make his works appear dreary and depressing to the general reader, who cannot accept and pardon this manner of looking at life for the sake of its veracity and courage.