Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete
itself in the lines about the mouth, that his health was affected by the
conflict within him; and many a sudden fit of absence and abstraction,
many an impatient sigh, followed by a forced and unnatural gayety, told
the observant Valerie that he was the prey of a sorrow he was too proud
to disclose. He compelled himself, however, to take, or to affect,
an interest in the singular phenomena of the social state around
him,--phenomena that, in a happier or serener mood, would indeed have
suggested no ordinary food for conjecture and meditation.
The state of _visible transition_ is the state of nearly all the
enlightened communities in Europe. But nowhere is it so pronounced as
in that country which may be called the Heart of European Civilization.
There, all to which the spirit of society attaches itself appears
broken, vague, and half developed,--the Antique in ruins, and the New
not formed. It is, perhaps, the only country in which the Constructive
principle has not kept pace with the Destructive. The Has Been is
blotted out; the To Be is as the shadow of a far land in a mighty and
perturbed sea.*
* The reader will remember that these remarks were written long
before the last French Revolution, and when the dynasty of Louis
Philippe was generally considered most secure.
Maltravers, who for several years had not examined the progress of
modern literature, looked with mingled feelings of surprise, distaste,
and occasional and most reluctant admiration, on the various works which
the successors of Voltaire and Rousseau have produced, and are pleased
to call the offspring of Truth united to Romance.
Profoundly versed in the mechanism and elements of those masterpieces
of Germany and England, from which the French have borrowed so largely
while pretending to be original, Maltravers was shocked to see the
monsters which these Frankensteins had created from the relics and the
offal of the holiest sepulchres. The head of a giant on the limbs of
a dwarf, incongruous members jumbled together, parts fair and
beautiful,--the whole a hideous distortion!
"It may be possible," said he to De Montaigne, "that these works are
admired and extolled; but how they can be vindicated by the examples
of Shakspeare and Goethe, or even of Byron, who redeemed poor and
melodramatic conceptions with a manly vigour of execution, an energy and
completeness of purpose, that Dryden himself never surpassed, is to me
utterly inconceivable."
"I allow that there is a strange mixture of fustian and maudlin in all
these things," answered De Montaigne; "but they are but the windfalls of
trees that may bear rich fruit in due season; meanwhile, any new
school is better than eternal imitations of the old. As for critical
vindications of the works themselves, the age that produces the
phenomena is never the age to classify and analyze them. We have had a
deluge, and now new creatures spring from the new soil."
"An excellent simile: they come forth from slime and mud,--fetid and
crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the
New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and
creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a
Corneille should ever spawn forth a -----! And with these rickety and
drivelling abortions--all having followers and adulators--your Public
can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the
day when they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can
bear to hear ----- proclaimed a sublime genius in the same circles which
sneer down Voltaire!"
Voltaire is out of fashion in France, but Rousseau still maintains his
influence, and boasts his imitators. Rousseau was the worse man of the
two; perhaps he was also the more dangerous writer. But his reputation
is more durable, and sinks deeper into the heart of his nation; and
the danger of his unstable and capricious doctrines has passed away.
In Voltaire we behold the fate of all writers purely destructive;
their uses cease with the evils they denounce. But Rousseau sought to
construct as well as to destroy; and though nothing could well be more
absurd than his constructions, still man loves to look back and see even
delusive images--castles in the air--reared above the waste where
cities have been. Rather than leave even a burial-ground to solitude, we
populate it with ghosts.
By degrees, however, as he mastered all the features of the French
literature, Maltravers become more tolerant of the present defects,
and more hopeful of the future results. He saw in one respect that that
literature carried with it its own ultimate redemption.
Its general characteristic--contradistinguished from the literature of
the old French classic school--is to take the _heart_ for its study; to
bring the passions and feelings into action, and let the Within have its
record and history as well as the Without. In all this our contemplative
analyst began to allow that the French were not far wrong when they
contended that Shakspeare made the fountain of their inspiration,--a
fountain which the majority of our later English Fictionists have
neglected. It is not by a story woven of interesting incidents, relieved
by delineations of the externals and surface of character, humorous
phraseology, and every-day ethics, that Fiction achieves its grandest
ends.
In the French literature, thus characterized, there is much false
morality, much depraved sentiment, and much hollow rant; but still it
carries within it the germ of an excellence, which, sooner or later,
must in the progress of national genius arrive at its full development.
Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that nothing really immoral is
ever permanently popular, or ever, therefore, long deleterious; what is
dangerous in a work of genius cures itself in a few years. We can now
read "Werther," and instruct our hearts by its exposition of weakness
and passion, our taste by its exquisite and unrivalled simplicity of
construction and detail, without any fear that we shall shoot ourselves
in top-boots! We can feel ourselves elevated by the noble sentiments
of "The Robbers," and our penetration sharpened as to the wholesale
immorality of conventional cant and hypocrisy, without any danger
of turning banditti and becoming cutthroats from the love of virtue.
Providence, that has made the genius of the few in all times and
countries the guide and prophet of the many, and appointed Literature as
the sublime agent of Civilization, of Opinion, and of Law, has endowed
the elements it employs with a divine power of self-purification. The
stream settles of itself by rest and time; the impure particles fly
off, or are neutralized by the healthful. It is only fools that call the
works of a master-spirit immoral. There does not exist in the literature
of the world one _popular_ book that is immoral two centuries after it
is produced. For, in the heart of nations, the False does not live so
long; and the True is the Ethical to the end of time.
From the literary Maltravers turned to the political state of France his
curious and thoughtful eye. He was struck by the resemblance which this
nation--so civilized, so thoroughly European--bears in one respect to
the despotisms of the East: the convulsions of the capital decide the
fate of the country; Paris is the tyrant of France. He saw in this
inflammable concentration of power, which must ever be pregnant with
great evils, one of the causes why the revolutions of that powerful and
polished people are so incomplete and unsatisfactory, why, like Cardinal
Fleury, system after system, and Government after Government--
... "floruit sine fructu,
Defloruit sine luctu."*
* "Flourished without fruit, and was destroyed without regret."
Maltravers regarded it as a singular instance of perverse ratiocination,
that, unwarned by experience, the French should still persist in
perpetuating this political vice; that all their policy should still be
the policy of Centralization,--a principle which secures the momentary
strength, but ever ends in the abrupt destruction of States. It is, in
fact, the perilous tonic, which seems to brace the system, but
drives the blood to the head,--thus come apoplexy and madness. By
centralization the provinces are weakened, it is true,--but weak to
assist as well as to oppose a government, weak to withstand a mob.
Nowhere, nowadays, is a mob so powerful as in Paris: the political
history of Paris is the history of snobs. Centralization is an excellent
quackery for a despot who desires power to last only his own life,
and who has but a life-interest in the State; but to true liberty
and permanent order centralization is a deadly poison. The more the
provinces govern their own affairs, the more we find everything, even
to roads and post-horses, are left to the people; the more the Municipal
Spirit pervades every vein of the vast body, the more certain may we be
that reform and change must come from universal opinion, which is slow,
and constructs ere it destroys,--not from public clamour, which is
sudden, and not only pulls down the edifice but sells the bricks!
Another peculiarity in the French Constitution struck and perplexed
Maltravers. This people so pervaded by the republican sentiment; this
people, who had sacrificed so much for Freedom; this people, who, in
the name of Freedom, had perpetrated so much crime with Robespierre, and
achieved so much glory with Napoleon,--this people were, as a people,
contented to be utterly excluded from all power and voice in the State!
Out of thirty-three millions of subjects, less than two hundred thousand
electors! Where was there ever an oligarchy equal to this? What a
strange infatuation, to demolish an aristocracy and yet to exclude a
people! What an anomaly in political architecture, to build an inverted
pyramid! Where was the safety-valve of governments, where the natural
vents of excitement in a population so inflammable? The people itself
were left a mob,--no stake in the State, no action in its affairs, no
legislative interest in its security.*
* Has not all this proved prophetic?
On the other hand, it was singular to see how--the aristocracy of birth
broken down--the aristocracy of letters had arisen. A Peerage, half
composed of journalists, philosophers, and authors! This was the
beau-ideal of Algernon Sidney's Aristocratic Republic, of the Helvetian
vision of what ought to be the dispensation of public distinctions;
yet was it, after all, a desirable aristocracy? Did society gain; did
literature lose? Was the priesthood of Genius made more sacred and more
pure by these worldly decorations and hollow titles; or was aristocracy
itself thus rendered a more disinterested, a more powerful, or a more
sagacious element in the administration of law, or the elevation of
opinion? These questions, not lightly to be answered, could not fail to
arouse the speculation and curiosity of a man who had been familiar with
the closet and the forum; and in proportion as he found his interest
excited in these problems to be solved by a foreign nation, did the
thoughtful Englishman feel the old instinct--which binds the citizen
to the fatherland--begin to stir once more earnestly and vividly within
him.
"You, yourself individually, are passing like us," said De Montaigne one
day to Maltravers, "through a state of transition. You have forever left
the Ideal, and you are carrying your cargo of experience over to the
Practical. When you reach that haven, you will have completed the
development of your forces."
"You mistake me,--I am but a spectator."
"Yes; but you desire to go behind the scenes; and he who once grows
familiar with the green-room, longs to be an actor."