73 ART. III.-1. Lea Cornelia. By the Author of 'L'Ame Exilée.' Paris. 2 vols. 8vo. 1838. 2. Les Romans et le Mariage. By the Author of 'Il Vivere.' Paris. 2 vols. 8vo. 1837. 3. Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau, Parfumeur, &c. By M. de Balzac. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris. 66 1838. 'I AM not ignorant," says the German-French metaphysician, Lerminier,*" that it is the fashion of the day to put into everything a little Christianity. Our literature overflows with Christianity. If a dramatic poet+ presents on the stage a Roman Emperor who began to reign four years after the death of Jesus Christ, he will season his Pagan drama with a conversion to Christianity. In many novels the heroes at present are Christians-I am in error-they are themselves rejected, persecuted Christs." There is something irreverent in the tone of this remark; but in its substance, it is sufficiently borne out in the three works placed at the head of our article, though we have taken them pretty much at hazard from amongst the latest published novels; since the first has for its moral the necessity of religious instruction; the second is directed against the "power and passion school; and in the third, Balzac has threaded his infinite personages and incidents again on a tale of quiet heroism and suffering for duty's sake, in persons whose virtues are under the safeguard of religion. Not that the vein of martyrdom which runs through all modern French fiction is always, or even as yet often, Christian; but it is borrowed from Christianity, and would not have existed if Christianity were not. In romance as well as in reality, the day of fanatical infidelity, and that of scoffing infidelity, are alike past: the value of Christianity is historically recognized by all: it is done homage to, if not as divine truth, yet as the best human philosophy and system of discipline yet produced-the grandest step ever made in the education of the human race. And the form of philosophic infidelity now most prevalent in France is not a denial of the glories of Christianity, but a dream of something more glorious yet to come, which is to comprehend all Christianity as but a part of itself. These are not evil signs, nor is what follows to be taxed with immorality, however it may with extraLetter to George Sand. † Alexandre Dumas, Caligula. vagance:-"There is a modern philosophy," says Lerminier, by the same law of progress which gave the human race Christianity after polytheism. It is better," he adds, "to philosophise under the influences of Christianity than in the presence of those thousand idols." Elsewhere, after quoting Marcus Aurelius and Boetius on Resignation, the same writer says, "Here, then, is the last word, the ultimatum, of Stoicism and of Christianity; but is this all the truth? No-and humanity in our day seems to meditate on some new development of its intelligence and its spiritual strength." While he and many other French writers are calling for this new avatar, this new and more comprehensive form of religion, this third dispensation as it were the number is daily increasing (even in the highest ranks of literary eminence) of those who say, that the world needs not seek what it already possesses; and that all the qualities which these visionaries demand in their new religion, they will find in Christianity, when they have learnt to penetrate the whole of its meaning, and not merely, as at present, a small part of it. un The time has gone by, then, when French philosophy could be dismissed with a summary verdict of "irreligious," or French romance with that of "immoral." Even the religious should learn to recognize, as part of the arrangements of Providence for carrying on the scheme of human improvement, the existence of a literature which considers every opinion as settled-as under discussion: a literature which is still seeking the word of the enigma of human life, seeking it through the most minute exhibition and sifting of all external and internal fact—which is trying all things, and listening to every tone, true or false, that rebounds through the human heart, till, by dint of searching and philosophizing, it either lands in faith or at least hope, or stops at indifference or despair. At present, whilst we are decreeing that all is evil because it is through infinite mistakes and exaggerations that the idea of duty and its sanctions are being slowly, bit by bit, and in forms of many colours, evoked, we remain quite unaware of the spirit and meaning of a popular literature which is rising up by our side, and must soon revolutionize the corresponding portion of ours. "The mania of scribbling," says Fenimore Cooper,† "is very wide spread here in London, but it does not embrace, as in Paris, every age and every station, from the King to the cabriolet-driver." As we stand on the shores of the vast literary ocean thus created, we feel about to be overwhelmed by throng * Etudes d'Histoire et de Philosophie. + England. ing waves of rolling books. In 1835 the French press produced one hundred and twenty-five millions of printed sheets, or sixteen times that number of octavo pages: in 1836, a falling off occurred of nearly twenty millions, chiefly in reprints of classic authors and in religious works; apparently this latter deficiency at least will have been last year made up. Of novels, on an average, three new volumes are furnished every two days, to that bourgeois class whose chief reading they form a fact which will be often heard of with a shudder on our side of the channel; and yet "I do not believe," says one of the personages in 'Les Romans et le Mariage,' "that a more moral race exists than our middle classes in France," and though this is a novel like our English ones, stuffed with fortunes and titles, we know very well that is no reason why its author should not be quite at home in a humbler rank, and a competent witness as to it. Here, already, we have a contradiction to the received English idea of French novels-which is strengthened by the works at the head of our article; but before we look any closer at them, we are tempted to illustrate a little the proposition with which we began, that the French fiction of the day is busily employed searching and trying, in however occasionally strange or trifling a form, the highest interests of humanity. We ever loved the old literature of France; our earliest literary pleasures are associated with the noble, stately, polished style and thoughts, so free from all pretension, all clap-trap, of her Bossuet, her Fénélon, her Racine, her Boileau, and her other great and pleasant names. We know their vocabulary is not large, their ideas are numbered, rarely do they startle or astonish us by what they say or the manner in which they say it, and half of their power and half of their artistical merit escapes a hasty or unfamiliar eye, although there is in them not merely exquisite art and wisdom, but originality, invention, and power. To the taste of our day they seem somewhat stiff and pedantic, but not with the foreign and extraneous learning that made our English pedants, for they were themselves classics. Calmly they moved on, and with simplicity, in the proud consciousness that from them the world was taking its example, that they were the observed of all observers; and, as of old in classic Greece and Rome, they did not desire to learn of barbarians. In those times there was no public universal necessity of knowledge or of sentiment; if any knew or felt, it was the consequence of individual position or individual character. There existed two educations, such as they were; one in the practices and traditions of the cloister, the other in the forms and idolatries of the court; but that cloister was one of the most learned and liberal, that court the most polished of Europe, and they were blended together, and acted on each other. "It is enough for a girl to know how to make a curtsey," said Madame de Sevigné, who, nevertheless, read and learnt and judged for herself, as it was likely that all strong-minded persons would read and learn and judge, who possessed leisure, and had their wits sharpened by the caustic spirit of a court, and their imaginations awed by the testimony which, in the midst of earthly power and enjoyment, Catholic Christianity, with all her flatteries and servilities, was, nevertheless, ever breathing forth by the side of the crown and the rose garland, against the vanity and nothingness of these things. Such were the few; the many were children or slaves, and thus even the few were objectless of wide and worthy objects, and the public, to which literature addressed itself, critical and refined, could almost be individually counted, named, charactered. What a narrow and guarded path was here for it! and when the soil was worn out, where should there be found virgin lands, and when experience had led to discouragement, and prosperity to satiety, whence was the new life to come? Lerminier says, "It is a mistake to suppose that ancient society ceased to make progress, from what we should call its proudest era: minds were opening and preparing for the Christianity which in another part of the world was preparing for them." Were minds, then, thus in France preparing for the modern philosophy? Upon that old classical society of Rome the barbarians rushed in, following and meeting the new doctrines, which, with so much difficulty, and risking perhaps to be assimilated and lost among the old, were diffusing themselves through that society. And into the French classical society the barbarians also forced their way, following and meeting the new philosophy; not indeed this time a deluge bursting over from without, but one rising from beneath; a people, ready to receive the new knowledge and new impulses which Rousseau and Voltaire had brought from other lands to fertilize their soil, and which from that time forward have never wanted foreign aid and influences. It was, on the whole, a refined and generous despotism, that old French monarchy-though under it remained the two distinct races of serfs and freemen, almost as Frank and Norman conquest had left them; though, through the gay vallies of France, La Bruyere tells us of black and toil-worn forms that scarce seemed human, spread through the fields, drudging for a wretched subsistence, and who, as the gent taillable et corvéable (taxable and forced-labourable) scarcely appear in history, save to pay their tax and perform their corvée. Still, in the strife to be first among peers, not only were the French Kings much indebted to a portion of the people, and to the magistracy, who were of the people-whom they therefore at times raised and courted, but there was fostered a taste for all the trappings of royalty; for any means of outshining; especially for the patronage of letters, at a moment when the human mind, just shaking off the long paralysis of Germanic invasion, was asserting itself (especially among the quick-witted Gauls) as it ever does after a period of depression, and literature was standing forth one of the greatest of earthly powers, the giver and destroyer of Fame. Men's eyes so far opened would not close again. The Monarchy of France was proud of being thus gilded and glorified by her Intellect, and, the one mutually supporting the other, the King became the impersonation of the greatness of both. Through him France was one nation, not many broken parts; him she flattered, and through him was flattered by all the voices of her Intellect, until the rising sound of the approaching revolution silenced the courtier Pæan. Howsoever a greater activity of the human intellect may often precede and even prepare the way for political convulsion, and amidst the sombre agitation of the coming tempest mighty forms move silently among the waiting elements; yet during the catastrophe, in the presence of action and suffering, thought and inquiry are silent. But again, as the external force relaxes, the literary mind springs onward, with a coarse, a hearty, a mocking laugh, proclaiming its re-awakening; yet weak and as it were numbed is it in parts, for, through all the finer faculties of the soul, the past has breathed weariness and dread: but silently and by degrees, in holes and corners, here and there, men begin to collect together the lost fragments of the past literature, and to prepare a new one, whilst for a long time the whole imagination, as of children prematurely introduced to trying scenes, runs over with wild, disjointed echoes. Thus was it after that great change of the ancient into the modern world, and thus in its degree was it in France, after that terrible explosion of the forgotten part of her citizens-barbarians desiring to enter the pale of her civilization-which is called the French Revolution. Out of such periods, as out of a new birth (and they are indeed the birth of a vast increase to the before existing public of intelligence) come forth new existences. 6 "Must we say," inquire the two Inhabitants of La Ferté sous Jouarre,' "*"with our fashionable authors, that we live at an epoch when there exist no illusions? an assertion at which some weep and others laugh. Let us be satisfied to acknowledge an incontestable * Letter to the Revue des Deux Mondes.' |