THE

MONTHLY REVIEW.

AUGUST, 1839.

ART. I.-The Modern Literature of France. By GEORGE W. M. REYNOLDS, Member of the French Statistical and Agricultural Societies, &c. &c. London: G. Henderson.

1839.

We believe these are the first volumes which have gone forth to the English public on the interesting subject of the literature of our neighbours on the other side of the channel, as it has been modified and fashioned by the events of the last nine years. "Do they manage these things better in France?" has been the natural enquiry of many an English novel reader. "I will tell you how they do manage them," says Mr. Reynolds, and he forthwith proceeds to lay before us rapid and clever sketches of all the illustrious writers of the day, illustrated with well-executed translations of specimens of their particular styles. A long residence in Paris-and extensive acquaintance with the gossip of the literary world, and with the manners and habits of the people whom it has been the object of that literature to pourtray, have given him peculiar qualifications for the task, and enabled him to acquit himself with very tolerable success. Besides these advantages, there is no want of industry and enthusiasm in the prosecution of his undertaking. He has imbued himself thoroughly with the spirit of the writers he admires, and we must bear testimony to his zeal whatever we may think of his discretion. His chivalrous offer to break a lance with the writer of a celebrated article in No. LVI. of the Quarterly Review, may be taken as an act of noble daring; but if it shall be accepted, we fear the result will prove most disastrous to the doughty champion of French morality. For our parts, while we have admired many of the works mentioned by Mr. Reynolds, our opinion as to their moral tendency was very similar to that of the critic of the review in question. We have considered them as works sui generis, the offspring of a period of doubt, trouble, and anxiety.

They are melancholy evidences of the fatuity of the human intellect, which is as liable to get drunk with mysticism or rebellion VOL. II. (1839). No. IV.

as with brandy. To those who may feel an interest in contemplating the wild sports of the imagination while under the potent action of such influences and appliances-who may feel a pleasurable sensation, not entirely unallied with contempt, at witnessing the antic movements and grotesque postures of satyrs dancing, (satyrs less delicate than those of Poussin,) we would, by all means, recommend a perusal of the works which Mr. Reynolds eulogizes so highly, and to which the epithets "glorious, profound, pathetic, and powerful" are so unsparingly applied. But then they must never lose sight of the fact that these are madmen made mad by the political excitement of the times. Their phrenzy is the offspring of the hour-the intoxication of a moment of public excess-of a political earthquake which threatened to involve the political, the social, and moral systems then established in one common and indiscriminate ruin. In the first revolution, it has been said that France grew drunk with blood to vomit crime; this was the glorious commemoration brought about by the labours of the Encyclopædists. Clever men they undoubtedly were, able and ingenious writers, even far surpassing their successors of the late demonstration in knowledge, zeal, and ability. The highest praise which her admirers can award to Madame Dudevant is, that she has caught the style of Rousseau; and would any man of taste or judgment give one chapter of "Candide" for volumes of the melodramatic trash of Balzac, Janin, and his coadjutors? The subversion of the altar and the throne was the leading object of the writers of 1700. The subversion of the social system of the moral order of things has been the aim of those of 1830. The former made a revolution-the latter were made by it. The former raised the popular feeling; the latter watched it and wrote up to it. They noted its extravagances, and were determined to out-herod Herod. They found the public mind in a delirium, and they ministered to it accordingly. Their fictions were the agri somnia, the venæ species produced by the mingling of the fumes of brandy, punch, and tobacco. Murders, incests, parricides, sacrilege, and blasphemy of every description, formed the strong spices of their literary ragouts. The death's head and cross bones dance through every line. Their pages are smeared with blood, and the moral of their tales is invariably pointed with the single monosyllable "despair." Of how many suicides they have been the cause, Mr. Reynolds has not condescended to inform us; but we have reason to know that a great many have been attributed to their pernicious influence. There are few of the fictions of the modern French novels which are not founded on social positions and incidents which have no parallel in England. Such combinations are utterly unknown to us, except occasionally through the medium of a police report, while the French writers profess to draw from life and accommodate their

inspiration and their morality to the scenes and principles with which they are conversant. They surrounded the altars of literature not as enthusiasts or sincere worshippers, but as false priests who sought to live by the things of the altar, so as to make their profession of faith a stepping-stone to notoriety and their own worldly advancement: not for them is the solitude of the student's cell, the labour by the flickering of the midnight lamp. Their ambition seems to have been to pen something clever over night, and to awake in the morning and "find themselves famous."

The absence of any exalted or wide-reaching views in literature is manifest not only in the slavish submission to the opinions and vices of the times, but in the minuter details of composition and the general canons of criticism and taste. Wherever literature follows instead of leading, imitates instead of creating, flatters instead of opposing or reproving,-wherever nature is treated like the magazine of a magic lantern, in which beings the most beautiful or grotesque, angels or demons, fairy forms or hideous contortions, are all equally admissible, provided they make the spectator stare, and awaken the curiosity of that grown child "the public," whenever this is the case, a coarse, sketchy, and affected vivacity, without true depth or feeling, a cynical hardihood, both in the materials of literature and their application, are generally the result. This is eminently observable in the writings of De Balzac, who is a star of the first magnitude in the opinion of Mr. Reynolds. The style of the "Peau de Chagrin" is not an even continuous movement, but a succession of skips, bounds, and jerks, more resembling the grotesque gambols of the clown in the pantomime, than the easy motions of the practised dancer; or, as Sir Robert Peel wittily remarked of the eloquence of Mr. Sheil, it is the contortions of the sybil without her inspiration. The straining after effect becomes absolutely painful; the determination to invest small things with importance, wearisome in the extreme.

We feel assured it is this writer, and the school of which he is the magnus Apollo, which has been thus pointedly described in a valuable little paper, published by Mr. Keratry, a French critic of a very high order of talent in the Livre des Cent et Un, and entitled "The Men of Letters of the present Day (1831-2)"

"How strange is the contradiction which exists in our manners? How just is the cause of apprehension which it affords. Cynicism has been banished from the domestic roof, from the most familar intercourse, but only to take refuge in our writings, in our books and our journals, in our pleadings, in our theatres. It is expelled from private life, it reigns supreme in public. The men of letters have contributed to this irregularity, they have hastened it; they have with their own hands broke down the barriers, which the good sense of the public has erected against licence in every nation, which boasts a constituted society. They seem

to have received from the Genius of Evil the sad mission of granting a bill of indemnity to all that is perverse and ungovernable in our nature. One would almost be tempted to believe that after transporting them to the pinnacle of the temple, and after showing them all the kingdoms of the earth, and the glories of them, the spirit of evil had said to them all these will I give you if ye will fall down and worship me.'

"Our writers have in fact created a new morality adapted to the use of the present generation. It is they who, disenchanting the scene about us, will no longer permit our tears to flow for innocence in danger, or misfortune contending with an unmerited destiny; it is they who seek in public to associate us with emotions which we should be ashamed to confess in the bosom of our families, or to interest us in the triumph of what in a well-regulated community would justly come under the lash of the law. Let us confess the truth. Is it not the same principle in literature, which at this moment invests the doctrines of an anti-social sect, (the St. Simonians), with a majesty borrowed from the sacred writings, and after giving a religious varnish to irreligion, an appearance of morality to immorality the most profound, labours at last to give the charm of decent voluptuousness to promiscuous intercourse.

A degeneracy of taste in literature has consequences more serious than are suspected. It will soon re-act with evil influence upon our domestic habits and civil relations. Thought cannot be sullied, nor the course of human sentiment perverted with impunity. Im noral writers like blind guides must lead society astray. Beware then legislators. All the world reads the morning papers, the romances of the day-all the world goes to the theatre, and the taint descending to the lower classes becomes incurable, when for the love of labour and the sentiments of religion, we have substituted the longing after happiness which it is not in their power to attain."

"The licence of the French stage has become its ruin; morality is as little respected as authority. One arrogates to himself the title of a man of letters, because, without regard to history, he has rendered into dialogue some historical fact where the characters are false, where government is systematically degraded, where an established religlon is exposed to ridicule. where names dear to fame are dragged through the dirt, and in which with a scandalous cynicism, the veil which protects public life and the nuptial bed, sanctuaries formerly impenetrable to a licentious curiosity is drawn aside. Their pretended dramatic works have by their very facility fallen into the ranks of commonplace, and it is not at the theatre we should go to seek for the true men of letters. A mother can no longer carry her daughter there, at least we should not be the person to advise it. They would be far safer at the opera; the only one of our spectacles which has preserved some remains of decency."

What will Mr. Reynolds say to this sweeping denuuciation? Is his Gallomania proof against such a pointed attack as this? While he vented his indignation against the partiality and prejudice of the remorseless critic of the " Quarterly Review," was he aware that an able and polished Frenchman had preceded that learned

men."

functionary in the scalping line, and had delivered precisely the same sentiments, but with far greater point and effect; it is not to be supposed that Mr. Keratry was ignorant of his subject, or that he was actuated by any unfair bias in thus forcibly reprobating the spirit of the literature of his fellow Frenchmen. Here is no room for the jealousy of the superior excellence of a rival nation, such as Mr. Reynolds attributes to the English critics. He could have no motive for wishing to "depreciate the value of foreign systems and institutions in the minds of the English." He wrote for his countrymen, to warn and correct them. Nor are we disposed to agree with our author, when he asserts that "the leading journals and periodicals of the English press are leagued together against the French, with all the bitterness and hate which characterized the sentiments of the nation in those times when Napoleon, (we give Mr. Reynolds' eloquent words), "drove his war chariot from the gates of Madrid to the palace of the Kremlin ;" nor can we participate in the "regret commingled with a sentiment of pity, or, indeed of contempt, for the narrowmindedness of our fellow countrySo far from this being the ease, we venture to assert, even in the teeth of such authority, that ample justice has been done to the literary talents of our neighbours in almost all the leading journals and periodicals. We, ourselves, have perused in the "Times" newspaper able and by no means depreciating criticisms on the very works which Mr. Reynolds lauds so highly, a very short time after their publication. In the Foreign Quarterly, the Edinburgh, the British, and Foreign Reviews, we can point to masterly sketches of modern French literature; and if Mr. Reynolds will turn to the pages of the " Athenæum" and "Monthly Magazine" of 1834, he will find that his panygerics have been anticipated years since, and that ample praise has been awarded far more we conscientiously believe than they deserved-to the merits of the works of which he gives us little more than the titles. In the last-named periodical in particular, we recollect reading a long analysis with copious extracts of the best works of Georges Sand, De Balzac, Sue and others; so that Mr. Reynolds is greatly mistaken, if he imagines that he is the first to give a correct view of those productions to the British public. But probably, the periodicals we have mentioned were too insignificant to attract the eye or fix the attention of our author, for he says further on, "We have carefully perused the various works lately written on this important subject, and we are sorry to have noticed that their principal contents have originated in the most deplorable ignorance, the worst feeling of spite and malignity, or an extraordinary facility of misapprehension and mistake." We suppose this compliment is intended for "the Paris and Parisians" of Mrs. Trollope, Lady Morgan, and Mr. Henry Bulwer, and we shall leave them to appre