Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

political in her Preface; and her previous works having been, many of them, produced on the same plan, we cannot be surprised at the mode she has thus adopted to disseminate particular opinions and principles. With every deference for Miss Martineau's acknowledged abilities, we cannot think her plan a good one: writing tales up to abstract principles has a one-sided appearance, and gives a tameness to the narrative that no power of invention seems to be able to overmaster. When the object is thus openly displayed we lose all confidence in the facts related, and the deductions forced from them; every turn of the story is already apparent, and a disagreeable conflict is created in the mind, between the earnestness and importance of the subjects, and the comparative frivolity of the fortunes of the fictitious personages. It is the last remnant of the effort made by the pseudo-philosophers of the early part of the century, to make a royal road to everything. We had hoped that with Mrs. Hannah More and Miss Edgeworth the attempt would have ceased. Certainly the present age and its profoundest thinkers are convinced that abstract questions must be grappled with by patient and profound thought, and the battle fought out with the weapons appointed for such contests-passionate and earnest inquiry and argument-and not with toys and tales. Fiction undoubtedly can greatly aid in the dissemination of information, and may be and is used as an eloquent advocate; but then the advantage novels give to a cause is the lively and forcible way they convey to large masses of readers the actual state of persons and things-a very different kind of writing to the adapting facts and circumstances to produce a particular moral. The latter mode is superficial and offensive; and has long been abolished in the highest class of literature; and the apprentice who laughs at George Barnwell it is found can still be affected by the catastrophe of Othello, although the hangman is not there to "execute justice and maintain truth." We hope Miss Martineau will relieve her fine talents from shackles so encumbering, and give us either political economy or a free portrayal of life and manners.

No one can desire more than we do the entire abolition of all the remnants of the tyrannous and barbarous feudal system, and of course amongst its remains the pernicious game laws; and we therefore regret we cannot say we think these tales forcible or calculated to aid in so doing They seem to us (and we have read every one attentively) never to touch any of the principles of those laws as at present existing; and are rather illustrations of the History of England, adapted for intelligent young ladies. The upholders of the game laws will reply (and justly), that the few hints there are in these tales belong to ages and customs long since past, and tend rather to show how much better the tillers of the soil are now treated. We confess we have not been able to find a single argument against them, either more pointedly put or suggested by the narratives.

As tales they have not much interest, as the reader is engaged in seeking for the application of the events rather than interested by them.

There may be no anachronisms in them, but there is a total want of the spirit of the ages they treat of; and whoever is acquainted with the old contemporary authors will be sadly annoyed by the modern colouring and consequent rawness of the style and treatment. The Authoress is an admirable mistress of modern language, but seems to possess no #particle of sympathy with antique thoughts and sentiments. The chapter entitled "The Primate's Call," giving, or rather very faintly attempting to delineate, one of the most powerful and passionate assemblages that ever met-the barons and the primate debating the principles of Magna Charta-is so totally out of keeping that it is rather an injury than a benefit so to stimulate young minds to read history. Into the mouths of these personages are put a statement of causes and consequences which, if known at all, could be only known to a few gifted with profound legislative genius. Of its stormy passion, proud selfishness, and mingled motives and proceedings, nothing is intimated. And one of the debates most picturesque in its colouring, and dramatic from its varied and powerful elements, is narrated like a discussion on chemistry from an accomplished governess to her pupils.

We should not have been so elaborate in our notice of this work had not the celebrity of the Authoress led us to fear others would be following in the same track, and thus, by half discussion and feeble compromise, degrade to a logical wrangle questions that must be settled by the boldest discussion on the broadest principles of justice.

PAULA MONTI; or, The Hotel Lambert. By M. EUGENE SUE. From the French. With twenty Engravings from designs by Jules David. Med. 8vo. London: Chapman and Hall.

MONS. SUE has a right to be tested by the highest standard: he is and has been received as an artist of the first class; he is not a hack scribbler for the circulating libraries, who escapes from and defies criticism by declaring that he writes merely to amuse, and that the sale of his books is a sufficient guarantee of his talents. He is removed from this sordid and injurious class by his genius, and by those higher aspirations which ever accompany the possession of the faculty divine. The writer of fiction in its finest form must be a philosopher, and should be a philanthropist : his aim is to develop human nature, and add to the stores of experience genius has already garnered on this inexhaustible subject. The modern Esop has also undertaken the office of legislator, and by his vivid pictures of social and political evils has sought to relieve large masses of his fellow men from the evils and errors of misgovernment. This new application of an old power cannot be too frequently presented to the consideration of the reflective; in our present phase of society, it is undoubtedly one of the most important intellectual engines existing more potent, because more enduring than the daily press, of which, indeed, it may be considered an extended species.

"Paula Monti" is, however, not one of this class of novels, and differs essentially from the "Mysteries of Paris" and the other novels of Sue that we have looked into. There is no doubt in it an aim beyond the development of mere artistic skill: and, unacquainted as we are with the Parisian life it professes to portray, we still think that its aim and tendency is to show the hollowness and evil arising from the conventions governing it. Whether it be only an artistical portrayal of a certain class, or whether it be, as we think, a philosophical exposition of the evils of a system, certainly no one can peruse it without abhorring and condemning the false and factitious sentiment that seems to be the ruling principle of French character. To substitute for this exotic and unhealthy temperament a more wholesome and reasonable state of feeling is a very high aim, and a very noble effort. It would be curious to see in what light the Parisian public receive this work; whether as an exciting story of criminal indulgence and high-wrought sentiment, or as a well-tempered castigation of a feverish and vicious constitution. We cannot but consider it as the last; and very skilfully and even elegantly, it appears to us, has the author administered the drastic dose. On so polite a class, vehemence and violence would be thrown away, and he has, therefore, very deliberately and very skilfully dissected and laid bare the horrors of the subject: he has given to sentiment all its charm, and to high manner all its blandishment: he has sublimated sensuality until all its grosser particles are completely precipitated; and, by so doing, he has given the very essence of French feeling-sentiment. This powerful element, which forms the substrata of so many characters, has never been sufficiently analysed: it penetrates into all phases and conditions of character, creating frequently apparent contradictions that have puzzled many plodding theologians and moralists: it is a mirage that has misled many critical philosophers (Burke particularly), and a power that has given universal popularity to many poets. It is difficult to define this false-true and bad-good mystery. It is a reality though it eludes a definition; it produces noble actions occasionally, though it is in itself false. Sentiment it was undoubtedly made Nero weep at a tragedy, though he could order his most intimate associate to the torture; and it is the same operation that made the French mob revel in the executions of the guillotine, and in the pathos of Rousseau. If a definition may be ventured of this powerful emotion, it may be said to be that intellectual acknowledgment of virtue and beauty, or what is considered such, which engenders an almost unconscious imitation of, and passion for, the qualities or things thus admired. It is thus totally different from those emotions and passions and affections that spring up spontaneously in persons of kindly nature: these latter have no intellectual reflection in them: they are not the result of the imagination being ignited by a train of eloquent reasoning:-a good English cottager's wife loves her child instinctively, and not because motherly love is a beautiful thing. But it has been said by competent authorities, that the French lady will be more often found to be in love

with love, than really to be possessed with the passion. And this brings us round again to the novel in question, from which we may appear to have needlessly wandered. It is, however, this factitious sentiment-this imitative passion-that lays at the root of French character, and, perhaps, of all character bred in highly convential societies-education of every kind fosters it, by emulation, by the eloquence of teachers and authors, and human beings are not made to develop their natural characteristics, but their sensibilities are excited to an admiration and imitation of good feelings by any and every means. We are beginning to discover how feeble a guard for principle and how weak a substitute for spontaneous feeling this is. Every capital of Europe abounds with innumerable females thus educated, reduced to a state of prostitution. At the first assault of genuine feeling or appetite the imaginative virtue gives way. And so with men, although the unjust clemency of society towards their vices may make it less apparent.

It is then, we conceive, at this monstrosity of the intellect and the feelings that Mons. Sue aims this novel. It is to show how rank the soil is that produces such beautiful but poisonous weeds. It is but another portion of the same society, eaten into by the same evil, that Mons. Michelet has exposed in his "Priests, Women, and Families." It is not to uphold it, as has been unjustly, though perhaps ignorantly charged upon him, by much of our press, and more particularly the religious portion of it. And these writers themselves are as anxious to create sentiments, to arouse the sensibilities, and turn the intellect to the admiration of what they think virtuous and beautiful, as they accuse the French writers of being.

The religious papers have dealt mercilessly, not only with the novel, but with the author, branding him as a pander to the worst appetites, and a defender of the greatest infamies. But these writers, zealous for their own sentimentalities, have no measure in their hatred to those of others. As regards "Paula Monti" there is nothing alluring in the crimes she contemplates; and an unprejudiced mind-a mind not alarmed at the heavy blows dealt to conventional society by the exposition of its falseness and errors by such writers as Sue and Michelet-could see nothing but a very true, careful, and well-depicted exposure of the feebleness of conventions which sanction and promote marriage without love, polished manners without benevolence of heart, and outward deference to position without any inward reverence for genuine goodness and greatness.

The subject deserves a much more profound and lengthened consideration than our circumscribed pages will afford; but circumscribed as they are, we cannot refrain from intimating the profundities which a work of true genius must always more or less trench upon. Mons. Sue and such writers are as important in their sphere (and their sphere is fast extending) as men who seem more directly to govern the affairs of nations. They frequently generate the opinion, which, in its countless

waves, is at last to float the legislator to some great national enactment. The time is past when fiction is only to be considered as an instrument of amusement.

Considered artistically, some faults might be pointed out in the conduct of the story and in the development of character, but these we cannot now analyse. Like our old dramatists of the second class, Sue delights in the eccentricities of human character, and fashions beings who seem rather mad than criminal: not without great apparent truth, though, being exceptions to human nature, more curious than instructive. And in this novel at least it must be said, that viewed merely artistically, he belongs rather to that inferior class that seeks more to idealise reality, than to that creative class which has the highest of all literary powers, the power to realise an ideality.

DUNSTER CASTLE. An Historical Romance of the Great Rebellion. By The Rev. J. T. HEWLETT, M.A. 3 vols. post 8vo. London: H. Colburn. THE remarks made on Mr. James's new novel apply in a remarkable manner to the present work, and prove in what a merely mechanical mode this kind of literary ware is produced. The time and scene of Dunster Castle are that of Arrah Neil-England in 1642. The Dramatis Personæ are also curiously similar; the chief difference being that in the former the hero's birth and fortunes are a mystery, and in the latter the heroine's. The little approach to humour that either makes, consists in the eating and drinking propensities of a roystering cavalier. There are much the same descriptions of interiors and scenery; quarrels and interviews; skirmishes and escapes; and other moving accidents by flood and field, all recited in the usual stereotyped phraseology In Dunster Castle, however, it must be said there is a little more vigour of delineation both as regards character and circumstances. The king of course is introduced, and in much the same style of portraiture; a very faint sketch in a washy style. Mr. Hewlett admits however into his pages one most important personage-Pym, a giant of the age, of whose real proportions and characteristics the author has no idea whatever, although had he perused Mr. Forster's Life of that true man, he must have been elevated to a more just estimate of one of the most remarkable men of that remarkable age. That he and the generality of such novelists take no genuine interest in the era that they pretend to delineate is proved by their utter disregard of its style, tone of feeling, manners and customs. A sufficiency of flavour is, they think, given if they now and then decorate their pages with a few cavalier's oaths and put some canting scriptural quotations into the mouth of a Presbyterian tradesman. In fact these productions have become to the circulating library what melodrama has to the theatre; neither have any novelty of invention or force of conception, but abound with reiterated movements, situations and dialogues, expressed each

« AnteriorContinuar »