French Novelists of the Day20
We hear much lamentation among good people at the introduction of so many French novels among us, corrupting, they say, our youth by pictures of decrepit vice and prurient crime, such as would never, otherwise, be dreamed of here, and corrupting it the more that such knowledge is so precocious—for the same reason that a boy may be more deeply injured by initiation into wickedness than a man, for he is not only robbed of his virtue, but prevented from developing the strength that might restore it. But it is useless to bewail what is the inevitable result of the movement of our time. Europe must pour her corruptions, no less than her riches, on our shores, both in the form of books and of living men. She cannot, if she would, check the tide which bears them hitherward; no defences are possible, on our vast extent of shore, that can preclude their ingress. We have exulted in premature and hasty growth; we must brace ourselves to bear the evils that ensue. Our only hope lies in rousing, in our own community, a soul of goodness, a wise aspiration, that shall give us strength to assimilate this unwholesome food to better substance, or cast off its contaminations. A mighty sea of life swells within our nation, and, if there be salt enough, foreign bodies shall not have power to breed infection there.
We have had some opportunity to observe that the worst works offered are rejected. On the steamboats we have seen translations of vile books, bought by those who did not know from the names of their authors what to expect, torn, after a cursory glance at their contents, and scattered to the winds. Not even the all but all-powerful desire to get one’s money’s worth, since it had once been paid, could contend against the blush of shame that rose on the cheek of the reader.
It would be desirable for our people to know something of these writers, and of the position they occupy abroad; for the nature of their circulation, rather than its extent, might be the guide both to translator and buyer. The object of the first is generally money; of the last, amusement. But the merest mercenary might prefer to pass his time in translating a good book, and our imitation of Europe does not yet go so far that the American milliner can be depended on to copy any thing from the Parisian grisette, except her cap.
We have just been reading “Le Père Goriot,” Balzac’s most celebrated work; a remarkable production, to which Paris alone, at the present day, could have given birth.
In other of his works, I have admired his skill in giving the minute traits of passion, and his intrepidity, not inferior to that of Le Sage and Cervantes, in facing the dark side of human nature. He reminds one of the Spanish romancers in the fearlessness with which he takes mud into his hands, and dips his foot in slime. We cannot endure this when done, as by most Frenchmen, with an air of recklessness and gayety; but Balzac does it with the stern manliness of a Spaniard.
But the conception of this work is so sublime, that, though the details are even more revolting than in his others, you can bear it, and would not have missed your walk through the Catacombs, though the light of day seems stained afterwards with the mould of horror and dismay.
Balzac, we understand, is one of that wretched class of writers who live by the pen. In Paris they count now by thousands, and their leaves fall from the press thick-rustling like the November forest. I had heard of this class not without envy, for I had been told pretty tales of the gay poverty of the Frenchman—how he will live in garrets, on dry bread, salad, and some wine, and spend all his money on a single good suit of clothes, in which, when the daily labor of copying music, correcting the press, or writing poems or novels, is over, he sallies forth to enjoy the theatre, the social soirée, or the humors of the streets and cafés, as gay, as keenly alive to observation and enjoyment, as if he were to return to a well-stocked table and a cheerful hearth, encompassed by happy faces.
I thought the intellectual Frenchman, in the extreme of want, never sunk into the inert reverie of the lazzaroni, nor hid the vulture of famine beneath the mantle of pride with the bitter mood of a Spaniard. But Balzac evidently is familiar with that which makes the agony of poverty—its vulgarity.
Dirt, confusion, shabby expedients, living to live,—these are what make poverty terrible and odious, and in these Balzac would seem to have been steeped to the very lips.
These French writers possess the art of plunging at once in medias res, and Balzac places you, in the twinkling of an eye, in one of the lowest boarding-houses of Paris. At first all is dirt, hubbub, and unsavory odors; but from the vapors of the caldron evolves a web of many-colored life, of terrible pathos, and original humor, not unenlivened by pale golden threads of beauty, which had better never been.
All the characters are excellently drawn: the harpy mistress of the house; Mlle. Michonnet the spy, and her imbecile lover; Mme. Coutuner, with her purblind strivings after virtue, and her real, though meagre respectability; Vautrim, the disguised galley-slave, with his cynical philosophy and Bonaparte character; and the young students of medicine, cheering the dense fog with the scintillations of their wit, and the joyousness and petulance with which their age meets the most adverse circumstances, at least in France!
The connection between this abject poverty and the highest luxury of Parisian life is made naturally by Eugene, connected to his misfortune with a noble family, of which his own is a poor and young branch, studying a profession and sighing to live like a duke, and Le Père Goriot, who has stripped himself of all his wealth for his daughters, who are more naturally unnatural than those of Lear. The transitions are made with as much swiftness as a curtain is drawn upon the stage, yet with no feeling of abruptness, so skilfully are the incidents woven into one another.
And be it recorded to the credit of Balzac, that, much as he appears to have suffered from the want of wealth, the vices which pollute it are represented with as terrible force as those of poverty.
The book affords play for similar powers, and brings a similar range of motives into action with Scott’s “Fortunes of Nigel.” If less rich than that work, it is more original, and has a force of pencil all its own.
Insight and a master’s hand are admirable throughout; but the product of genius is Le Père Goriot. And, wonderful to relate, this character is as much ennobled, made as poetical by abandonment to a single instinct, as others by the force of will. Prometheus, chained on his rock, and giving his heart to the birds of prey for aims so majestic, is scarcely a more affecting, a more reverent object, than the rich confectioner whose intellect has never been awakened at all, except in the way of buying and selling, and who gives up his acuteness even there, and commits such unspeakable follies through paternal love; a blind love too, nowise superior to that of the pelican!
Analyze it as you will, see the difference between this and the instinct of the artist or the philanthropist, and it produces on your mind the same impression of a present divinity. And scarce any tears could be more sacred than those which choke the breath at the death-bed of this man, who forgot that he was a man, to be wholly a father, this poor, mad, stupid, father Goriot. I know nothing in fiction to surpass the terrible, unpretending pathos of this scene, nor the power with which the mistaken benediction given to the two medical students whom he takes for his daughters, is redeemed from burlesque.
The scepticism as to virtue in this book is fearful, but the love for innocence and beautiful instincts casts a softening tint over the gloom. We never saw any thing sweeter or more natural than the letters of the mother and sisters of Eugene, when they so delightfully sent him the money of which he had been wicked enough to plunder them. These traits of domestic life are given with much grace and delicacy of sentiment.
How few writers can paint abandon, without running into exaggeration! and here the task was one of peculiar difficulty. It seemed as if the writer were conscious enough of his power to propose to himself the most difficult task he could undertake.
A respectable reviewer in “Les Deux Mondes” would wish us to think that there is no life in Paris like what Balzac paints; but we can never believe that: evidently it is “too true,” though we doubt not there is more redemption than he sees.
But this book was too much for our nerves, and would be, probably, for those of most people accustomed to breathe a healthier atmosphere.
Balzac has been a very fruitful writer, and, as he is fond of jugglers’ tricks of every description, and holds nothing earnest or sacred, he is vain of the wonderful celerity with which some of his works, and those quite as good as any, have been written. They seem to have been conceived, composed, and written down with that degree of speed with which it is possible to lay pen to paper. Indeed, we think he cannot be surpassed in the ready and sustained command of his resources. His almost unequalled quickness and fidelity of eye, both as to the disposition of external objects, and the symptoms of human passion, combined with a strong memory, have filled his mind with materials, and we doubt not that if his thoughts could be put into writing with the swiftness of thought, he would give us one of his novels every week in the year.
Here end our praises of Balzac; what he is, as a man, in daily life, we know not. He must originally have had a heart, or he could not read so well the hearts of others; perhaps there are still private ties that touch him. But as a writer, never was the modern Mephistopheles, “the spirit that denieth,” more worthily represented than by Balzac.
He combines the spirit of the man of science with that of the amateur collector. He delights to analyze, to classify; there is no anomaly too monstrous, no specimen too revolting, to insure his ardent but passionless scrutiny. But then he has taste and judgment to know what is fair, rare, and exquisite. He takes up such an object carefully, and puts it in a good light. But he has no hatred for what is loathsome, no contempt for what is base, no love for what is lovely, no faith in what is noble. To him there is no virtue and no vice; men and women are more or less finely organized; noble and tender conduct is more agreeable than the reverse, because it argues better health; that is all.
Nor is this from an intellectual calmness, nor from an unusual power of analyzing motives, and penetrating delusions merely; neither is it mere indifference. There is a touch of the demon, also, in Balzac, the cold but gayly familiar demon; and the smile of the amateur yields easily to a sneer, as he delights to show you on what foul juices the fair flower was fed. He is a thorough and willing materialist. The trance of religion is congestion of the brain; the joy of the poet the thrilling of the blood in the rapture of sense; and every good not only rises from, but hastens back into, the jaws of death and nothingness; a rainbow arch above a pestilential chaos!
Thus Balzac, with all his force and fulness of talent, never rises one moment into the region of genius. For genius is, in its nature, positive and creative, and cannot exist where there is no heart to believe in realities. Neither can he have a permanent influence on a nature which is not thoroughly corrupt. He might for a while stagger an ingenuous mind which had not yet thought for itself. But this could not last. His unbelief makes his thought too shallow. He has not that power which a mind, only in part sophisticated, may retain, where the heart still beats warmly, though it sometimes beats amiss. Write, paint, argue, as you will, where there is a sound spot in any human being, he cannot be made to believe that this present bodily frame is more than a temporary condition of his being, though one to which he may have become shamefully enslaved by fault of inheritance, education, or his own carelessness.
Taken in his own way, we know no modern tragedies more powerful than Balzac’s “Eugenie Grandet,” “Sweet Pea,” “Search after the Absolute,” “Father Goriot.” See there goodness, aspiration, the loveliest instincts, stifled, strangled by fate, in the form of our own brute nature. The fate of the ancient Prometheus was happiness to that of these, who must pay, for ever having believed there was divine fire in heaven, by agonies of despair, and conscious degradation, unknown to those who began by believing man to be the most richly endowed of brutes—no more!
Balzac is admirable in his description of look, tone, gesture. He has a keen sense of whatever is peculiar to the individual. Nothing in modern romance surpasses the death-scene of Father Goriot, the Parisian Lear, in the almost immortal life with which the parental instincts are displayed. And with equal precision and delicacy of shading he will paint the slightest by-play in the manners of some young girl.
“Seraphitus” is merely a specimen of his great powers of intellectual transposition. Amid his delight at the botanical riches of the new and elevated region in which he is travelling, we catch, if only by echo, the hem and chuckle of the French materialist.
No more of him!—We leave him to his suicidal work.
It is cheering to know how great is the influence such a writer as Sue exerts, from his energy of feeling on some subjects of moral interest. It is true that he has also much talent and a various experience of life; but writers who far surpass him here, as we think Balzac does, wanting this heart of faith, have no influence, except merely on the tastes of their readers.
We observe, in a late notice of Sue, that he began to write at quite mature age, at the suggestion of a friend. We should think it was so; that he was by nature intended for a practical man, rather than a writer. He paints all his characters from the practical point of view.
As an observer, when free from exaggeration, he has as good an eye as Balzac, but he is far more rarely thus free, for, in temperament, he is unequal and sometimes muddy. But then he has the heart and faith that Balzac wants, yet is less enslaved by emotion than Sand; therefore he has made more impression on his time and place than either. We refer now to his later works; though his earlier show much talent, yet his progress, both as a writer and thinker, has been so considerable that those of the last few years entirely eclipse his earlier essays.
These latter works are the “Mysteries of Paris,” “Matilda,” and the “Wandering Jew,” which is now in course of publication. In these, he has begun, and is continuing, a crusade against the evils of a corrupt civilization which are inflicting such woes and wrongs upon his contemporaries.
Sue, however, does not merely assail, but would build up. His anatomy is not intended to injure the corpse, or, like that of Balzac, to entertain the intellectual merely. Earnestly he hopes to learn from it the remedies for disease and the conditions of health. Sue is a Socialist. He believes he sees the means by which the heart of mankind may be made to beat with one great hope, one love; and instinct with this thought, his tales of horror are not tragedies.
This is the secret of the deep interest he has awakened in this country, that he shares a hope which is, half unconsciously to herself, stirring all her veins. It is not so warmly outspoken as in other lands, both because no such pervasive ills as yet call loudly for redress, and because private conservatism is here great, in proportion to the absence of authorized despotism. We are not disposed to quarrel with this; it is well for the value of new thoughts to be tested by a good deal of resistance. Opposition, if it does not preclude free discussion, is of use in educating men to know what they want. Only by intelligent men, exercised by thought and tried in virtue, can such measures as Sue proposes be carried out; and when such associates present themselves in sufficient numbers, we have no fear but the cause of association, in its grander forms, will have fair play in America.
As a writer, Sue shows his want of a high kind of imagination by his unshrinking portraiture of physical horrors. We do not believe any man could look upon some things he describes and live. He is very powerful in his description of the workings of animal nature; especially when he speaks of them in animals merely, they have the simplicity of the lower kind with the more full expression of human nature. His pictures of women are of rare excellence, and it is observable that the more simple and pure the character is, the more justice he does to it. This shows that, whatever his career may have been, his heart is uncontaminated. Men he does not describe so well, and fails entirely when he aims at one grand and simple enough for a great moral agent. His conceptions are strong, but in execution he is too melodramatic. Just compare his “Wandering Jew” with that of Beranger. The latter is as diamond compared with charcoal. Then, like all those writers who write in numbers that come out weekly or monthly, he abuses himself and his subject; he often must; the arrangement is false and mechanical.
The attitude of Sue is at this moment imposing, as he stands, pen in hand,—this his only weapon against an innumerable host of foes,—the champion of poverty, innocence, and humanity, against superstition, selfishness, and prejudice. When his works are forgotten,—and for all their strong points and brilliant decorations, they may ere long be forgotten,—still the writer’s name shall be held in imperishable honor as the teacher of the ignorant, the guardian of the weak, a true tribune for the people of his own time.
One of the most unexceptionable and attractive writers of modern France is De Vigny. His life has been passed in the army; but many years of peace have given him time for literary culture, while his acquaintance with the traditions of the army, from the days of its dramatic achievements under Bonaparte, supply the finest materials both for narrative and reflection. His tales are written with infinite grace, refined sensibility, and a dignified view. His treatment of a subject shows that closeness of grasp and clearness of sight which are rarely attained by one who is not at home in active as well as thoughtful life. He has much penetration, too, and has touched some of the most delicate springs of human action. His works have been written in hours of leisure; this has diminished their number, but given him many advantages over the thousands of professional writers that fill the coffee-houses of Paris by day, and its garrets by night. We wish he were more read here in the original; with him would be found good French, and the manners, thoughts, and feelings of a cosmopolitan gentleman.
To sum up this imperfect account of the merits of these Novelists: I see De Vigny, a retiring figure, the gentleman, the solitary thinker, but, in his way, the efficient foe of false honor and superstitious prejudice; Balzac is the heartless surgeon, probing the wounds and describing the delirium of suffering men for the amusement of his students; Sue, a bold and glittering crusader, with endless ballads jingling in the silence of the night before the battle. They are all much right and a good deal wrong; for instance, all who would lay down their lives for the sake of truth, yet let their virtuous characters practise stratagems, falsehood, and violence; in fact, do evil for the sake of good. They still show this taint of the old régime, and no wonder! La belle France has worn rouge so long that the purest mountain air will not, at once, or soon, restore the natural hues to her complexion. But they are fine figures, and all ruled by the onward spirit of the time. Led by that spirit, I see them moving on the troubled waters; they do not sink, and I trust they will find their way to the coasts where the new era will introduce new methods, in a spirit of nobler activity, wiser patience, and holier faith, than the world has yet seen.
Will Balzac also see that shore, or has he only broken away the bars that hindered others from setting sail? We do not know. When we read an expression of such lovely innocence as the letter of the little country maidens to their Parisian brother, (in Father Goriot,) we hope; but presently we see him sneering behind the mask, and we fear. Let Frenchmen speak to this question. They know best what disadvantages a Frenchman suffers under, and whether it is possible Balzac be still alive, except in his eyes. Those, we know, are quite alive.
To read these, or any foreign works fairly, the reader must understand the national circumstances under which they were written. To use them worthily, he must know how to interpret them for the use of the universe.