over my heart, and he resolved upon immediately bruised and disfigured, her long hair dishevelled and bringing us together. Six weeks after my reconciliation with Maria, I claimed her as my bride. We agreed to spend the honeymoon on her estates in New England; and Gerard promised to accompany us. We departed the next morning in the steamboat for Boston-a merry, happy party. Having a few calls to make in my passage to the boat, I requested my friend to conduct his sister to the wharf, where I promised to join them in due time. My heart rose proudly within me, as I stalked grandly down the street. I had drank deeply of the chalice of wretchedness and want-I had almost tasted the bitterness of death-but love had healed my bruised heart, and wealth-unbounded wealth-profusely gilded the present and the future, and the humble past was lost amidst the dazzling glare. My business had carried me to a low quarter of the city. I was returning towards the wharf, when the piercing shrieks of a woman, mixed with the sounds of heavy blows, issued from the recesses of an obscure and narrow alley. Several of the passers-by rushed up the court, and forced open the door of the room from whence the cries proceeded, in hopes of rendering assistance. I followed them; and peeping over the shoulders of the foremost, recognised in the shrieking woman, my former wife, the profligate mother of my child. She was lying on the floor, her countenance unbound, and her flaunting apparel torn and soiled. She was crying from the effects of the blows that had been inflicted on her by the ruffian Shoard, who was standing, stick in hand, over his prostrate victim. Both man and woman were evidently under the excitement of liquor, and coarse recrimination and foul language passed between them. Fortunately, I withdrew from the room without being recognised. A police officer, to whom I was well known, had been attracted by the screams, and was entering the alley. I explained to him the circumstances of the case; and, giving him the contents of my purse, requested that he would place the wretched female in some asylum, and promised that I would be answerable for her support. I reached the wharf a sadder but a wiser man. The smiles of my beauteous bride drove the dulness from my face, but could not erase from my mind the impression that I had received. I am now enjoying the highest possible felicity. Domestic bliss, worldly riches, health, friendship, and unbounded love, continue to bestow their blessings. But I bear all meekly. When the worldly vanity of human nature rises in my breast, the sad remembrances of the garden grave, the attempted suicide, and the horrible scene in the alley, sink into my soul, and blast the upward movements of my pride. (From the Literary Souvenir for 1838.) VICTOR HUGO HUGO AND AND THE FRENCH DRAMA. THE French Drama rules the modern stage. The thing Pindaric; no other writer would have said of English and Spanish comedies are both compounded from the refuse vaudevilles of the Parisian theatres; German Operas and Italian Ballets are but the refrain of some popular piece of French origin, garnished with original music and splendid scenery. The imaginations of M. Scribe and his dramatic brethren furnish plots for the whole (with a few paltry exceptions) of the English burlettas and farces that grace the boards of the London stage-and from whence they are transplanted to the American theatres. The head of the romantic school of dramatists, a new school of authorship that is much encouraged in France, is the celebrated Victor Hugo-we are about to examine the nature of his pretensions to the universal suffrages of the play-goers of Paris, and speculate on his influence upon the drama in general. In literary, as in political life, obstinate perseverance will ensure success for splendid errors. This is the secret of the power which Victor Hugo has deservedly won, and which he is likely to retain during the present generation. He is the Napoleon of the literary world, trampling on all the forms of ancient legitimacy, but substituting himself for a system; he has founded a dynasty which will have no heir, as it had no ancestor; we cannot complete the parallel, by quoting any glorious extravagance to serve as the literary despot's Russian campaign, nor can we venture to speculate on an author's St. Helena, but intellectual joins with political history in assigning determined limits to the sway of selfish principle. The very Sources of Victor Hugo's strength are also those of his weakness; he has based his edifice on ideality, and on it alone-not the ideality arising from the comparison and generalization of realities-but the ideality of isolation, the dreams of solitude, the visions of a hermit. Take a small room, close the shutters, make a small aperture, place in it a convex glass of irregular focus and imperfect purity: the images on the wall will be discolored and distorted, but they will be uniformly so; they will give an erroneous representation of the great drama of life, but the representation will be consistent. Just such is Victor Hugo's deli neation of humanity; he has closed the shutters on the real world of life and business, he views it through a clouded and distorted medium, he laughs history to scorn, and sets probability at defiance. No writer ever drew so largely and determinately on the stores of his own consciousness, or has more sternly refused to compare the images of his solitary fancy with living humanity. Quasimodo, " He looked like a giant that had been broken in pieces and badly soldered together." He has written odes, novels, dramas, essays, dissertations, and criticisms, at least works that come nominally under these heads, but, with the exception of the odes, all his works should rather be called Hugoisms, for they have a common spirit and substance, a very slight difference in form, and they violate every rule that has heretofore been deemed stringent on the novelist, the essayist, and the dramatist. In fact, his tales are irregular odes, with the commentary worked into the text; his dramas are lyrical ballads of action, and his criticisms are Pindaric essays. His works are but little known in America, and in England he is principally distinguished as a novelist; Hans of Iceland, Bug Jargal, and above all, that extraordinary production Notre Dame de Paris, have been the chief sources from which the English have drawn any esti mate of his power; but in France he is far more remarkable as a dramatist; he has devised plans for restoring the theatre to its former supremacy, and every one who possesses a taste for dramatic literature, is deeply engaged in speculating on his certain success or assured overthrow. Indeed, it is on his dramas that the author himself rests his claims to fame; he deems that it is his destiny to become the Martin Luther of the stage; he believes that the theatre ought to be, and may be, made the great school of civilization, the chief instrument of moral advancement; but that it should be able to discharge such functions, he deems that it must be regenerated, and he unhesitatingly offers himself to work out the difficult task of its renovation. Now, before we examine how far Victor Hugo has succeeded, it is necessary to make some preliminary inquiry respecting the feasibility of his project. Can the theatre be restored to its former eminence in the scale of civilisation?-is it capable of such an application in the present state of society as would render it so efficient for the instruction of this generation as it was for the teaching of the grandfathers of our grandfathers? The hermit of the dark room, the observer through the imperfect convex glass, never dreams of mooting the question; though it is the most essential consideration in his enterprise. We have no hesitation in declaring that the revival of theatrical influence appears to us just as hopeless, and every whit as absurd, as Don Quixote's efforts to restore chivalry. The Drama was at one time the sermon, the newspaper, the novel, and even the history; Victor Hugo's style is as peculiar as his concep it concentrated in itself all the means by which inteltions; his geni.us is essentially lyrical; he is prone to lectual power can work on mind; the priest preached exaggerations, abrupt transitions, reflections generally in the mysteries, the statesman roused popular feeling startling and sometimes profound, singular forms of by a dramatic representation of the national enemy; expression, and extraordinary metaphors and figures. the strolling story-teller and ballad-singer of a former His most humorous delineations have in them some-age added acting and scenery to his tales and songs ; and it was almost exclusively on the stage that ances- | sounds very oddly to the ear, yet it is only saying in tral records had “a local habitation and a name." other words" there is no general rule without an exception," the adherence of a dramatist or novelist to truths purely individual would change the exception into the rule and the rule into the exception. There was once a methodist preacher haranguing in our presence on the immorality of the stage. "Does it not," said he, "begin and end in lies; a man comes in and says to another, not at all related to him, But though the theatre can hot be restored to its ancient pride of place, we must not be understood to assert that it may not or ought not to possess a certain influence, and that too of a commanding nature. Such a speculation has floated through the minds of many able men, but every effort to realise it has been frustrated. We stop not to inquire the cause of these repeated disasters in others: we confine ourselves to Victor Hugo's plans. Let us just see what is the ideal form of drama by which he proposes to restore the dynasty of the stage. 1 "Were there any man who could realize the drama such as we comprehend it, that drama would be the human head, the human heart, the human passions, the human will: it would be the resurrection of the past for the benefit of the present: it would be the history of our fathers contrasted with our own deeds; it would be the mixture on the stage of all that we behold commingled in life; it would be here an insurrection and there a peaceful chat between lovers; the lovers' conversation containing instruction for the people, and the insurrection an appeal to the heart it would be laughter: it would be tears; it would be the good, the evil, the high, the low, fatality, providence, genius, chance, society, the world, nature, life; with an undefinable sublimity hovering and flitting over all.” This description is not of course to be taken as a strict logical definition, but though it is thus freed from the rules of a severe analysis, it is open to the objection of being vague and rather unintelligible. We gather from it, however, that the poet has not accurately settled in his mind the relations of truth and fiction, and as this is one of the most important elements in the inquiry, we shall say a few words on the subject. For some half dozen centuries it has been the fashion with novelists and penny scribblers to call upon the world to hold up their hands in wonderment at some circumstance illustrating the hackneyed truism, "Truth is often much stranger than fiction." To be sure it is: it would be exceedingly strange if it were not; nay, in a certain very important sense, fiction ought to be generally more true than truth itself. Fiction is based on statistics, it has a calculus of its own, and its estimate of probabilities often presents problems more difficult than the solution of Cardan's rule. It is not enough for the novelist or dramatist to seize on circumstances that have happened, he must also choose such as are likely to happen again; fiction deals not in the exceptions but the generalities of life, it is more or less the estimate of the mean proportional of humanity according to the most approved tables of Quetelet and Babbage. Take Hamlet for instance; every word he speaks finds an echo in your bosom as he does in ours, but Hamlet is neither you, gentle reader, nor is he any one of us; he is at once all and none-Hamlet "I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain time to walk the night,' &c. Could the devil, who is the father of lies produce a more monstrous falsehood?" Every body with a grain of common sense in their heads of course sees and laughs at the stupid absurdity of the ranter; but many of the laughers fall into the self-same error when they speak of fiction as opposed to truth, when it is in fact an inference from truth. The question then is not as Victor Hugo elsewhere puts it, “Should limits be assigned to invention ?” because in strict accuracy, inference, not invention, is the foundation of fiction. The real question is, “Are the fictions true-do they give accurately the form and pressure of the time that they profess to portray!" Tried by this test, Victor Hugo is found sadly wanting. It is not in history, it is not in human nature that we are to seek for the originals of his dramas: it is in the depths of the author's own mind. He does not profess to develope and reproduce any authentic event; he takes his models from his consciousness, he appeals neither to annals nor to chronicles, but to the most abstracted species of truth, and the most mysterious laws of human nature. In fine, he professes to have gone to the very highest point in mental analysis, to have abstracted not merely the limits of time and place, but of age, country, and condition. To examine productions so constituted, we must, if possible, trace out the process of their development; let us for a time direct our attention to one of the author's most celebrated plays, “Le Roi s'amuse." A very brief consideration of this drama reduces the number of actors to three; a king, a young girl, a father. The entire plot is concerned with these personages alone, the others are introduced only to aid the development. The king is introduced to us in the first act, a passionless libertine, a capricious despot, a debauchee whose heart has never been touched, and whose senses are over excited; consequently, a wretch who scruples not to use every means to gratify unbridled passion. The second act introduces us to a father who has no consolation, no earthly happiness but the beauty and chastity of a beloved daughter, whose pure bosom is a heaven on which his soul, tossed by the tempests and storms of the world, anchors assured of safety. In the third act the father has lost his last earthly stay; the shrine where his spirit loved to dwell has been polluted by royal lust and ruffian violence; the flower that he fostered with anxious care is blighted and flung away as a worthless thing, to be tramp'ed or scorned by any who may pass by. But the unhappy girl loves the author of her ruin, and inter cedes with her father for his pardon. He sternly swears vengeance, and endeavors to inspire her with a maddening sense of her wrongs. forgetful of the ruin he has wrought: the father exhibits him to his daughter toying with a worthless courtesan, and addressing to this wretched hireling the very same profession of undying love that he had The worthless king appears in the fourth act utterly used the night before to his unhappy victim. We need not quote any of the repulsive scene be- ❘ the subject of a noble tragedy. But the original contween the king and the courtesan; the unhappy daughter consents to her father's plan of vengeance, but she displays so much weakness that her sire sends her out of the way. She returns just as a hired assassin is about to murder the king, offers her innocent bosom to the knife, and saves her perjured lover by the sacrifice of her heart's blood. In the fifth act the unhappy father enters, beholds the corpse, mistakes it for the king, triumphs in his imagined vengeance, resolves to wash his hands in the blood, and stooping down, discovers his daughter. This may be regarded as the germ of the play, such as it first presented itself to the mind of the poet, and there are few who will not confess that it might form ception was a mere possibility; the artistic skill of the poet was necessary to convert it into a probability. In almost every step of the process Victor Hugo has signally failed. His first blunder is the baptism of the characters; he names the king Francis I., a prince of many and great faults, but surely not liable to the imputation of heartlessness. But what is far worse, indeed almost inconceivable, he makes the noble father, the very model of paternal love, to be none other than Triboulet, the Court Jester, the pander to his master's lusts, the viliain that most frequently stimulated the monarch's desires, and prompted his debauchery. Let us look at one of the scenes between this Roman father and his sovereign. Of his fate there is no one will dare to complain, Is the wretch thus introduced-a monster of personal deformity, Whose mountain back might well be said is a court-jester, wearing a chain like a dog, clothed in the livery of a slave, ready to suggest and share in every detestable crime-capable of the sublimity of sorrow ascribed to a sensitive and agonised father? Victor Hugo refuses to appear at the bar of reality, he appeals to the unrestricted feelings of the heart; fearlessly we accompany him to that tribunal, convinced that it will decide Triboulet to be an impossible creation or existence. But the author has a right to be heard in his own defence, and he must state his own conception of Triboulet. incessantly pointing out to him a wife to seduce, a sister to steal, a daughter to dishonor. The king, in Triboulet's hands, is but the Punch of a puppet-show, breaking every doll against which his force is directed by the juggler behind the curtain. One day, in the midst of a feast, at the very moment when Triboulet is urging the king to carry off the Countess of Cosse, M. de St. Vallier forces his way into the king's presence, and sternly reproaches him for the dishonor of his daughter Diana de Poitiers. Triboulet rallies and insults the hapless complainant. The father raises his arm and pronounces a malediction on Triboulet. From this the entire action of the drama is derived. The true subject of the drama is the Curse of St. Vallier." "Triboulet is deformed, he is sickly, he is the buffoon of the court, and this triple misery renders him depraved. Triboulet hates the king, because he is a king; the lords, because they are lords; and all man- The existence of such a monster of depravity as kind, because all men have not humped backs. His Victor Hugo describes, is barely possible; but we doubt only delight is constantly to knock the king and the whether the most licentious buffoon of the most licenlords against each other, breaking the weaker againsttious court would, under the circumstances, have in. the stronger. He depraves, corrupts, and brutalises sulted St. Vallier as Triboulet is described to have the king; he urges him to tyranny, to ignorance, to done. A short specimen will suffice. vice he lets him loose against every noble family,' TRIBOULET. Well, now for new mischief: 'twere sure a good thing, To play in his turn some trick on the king. Enter a SERVANT (who whispers to Triboulet.) Monsieur de Vallier is waiting below, Enfeebled by age, and heart-broken by wo: TRIBOULET. The charge of his answer, my liege, let me claim. (Turns to St. Vallier, and continues in a pompous theatrical tone.) My lord; you were guilty of treason, your head Was forfeit to law, the just sentence was said, But your merciful monarch restored you to life; So far good. Now, what causes this rage and this strife? Of his visage no painter could tell you the tints, Pale, yellow, and brown; it is said too he squints: He's pot-bellied, just like my friend whom you see (points to M. Cossè,) And he's hump-back'd and crooked, exactly like me, |