Life Without and Life Within Part 12

We fear the reader will have to wade through a great deal of "rubbish"

in "Festus" before he gets at the theology. However, there it is, in sufficient quant.i.ties to give dignity to any book. In seriousness, it may compete with Pollok's "Course of Time." In "splendor and power," we feel ourselves safe in saying that, as sure as the sun shines, it cannot be outdone in the English tongue, thus far, short of Milton. So there is something for all cla.s.ses of readers, and we hope it will get to their eyes, albeit Boston books are not likely to be detected by all eyes to which they belong.

To ourselves the theology of this writer, and the conscious design of the poem, have little interest. They seem to us, like the color of his skin and hair, the result of the circ.u.mstances under which he was born.

Certain opinions came in his way early, and became part of the body of his thought. But what interests us is not these, but what is deepest, universal--the soul of that body. To us the poem is

"... full of great dark meanings like the sea:"

and it is these, the deep experiences and inspirations of the immortal man, that engage us.

Even the poem shows how large is his nature--its most careless utterance full of grandeur, its tamest of bold n.o.bleness. This, that truly engages us, he spoke of more forcibly when the book first went forth to the world:--

"Read this, world. He who writes is dead to thee, But still lives in these leaves. He spake inspired; Night and day, thought came unhelped, undesired, Like blood to his heart. The course of study he Went through was of the soul-rack. The degree He took was high; it was wise wretchedness.

He suffered perfectly, and gained no less A prize than, in his own torn heart, to see A few bright seeds; he sowed them, hoped them truth.

The autumn of that seed is in these pages."

Such is, in our belief, the true theologian, the learner of G.o.d, who does not presumptuously expect at this period of growth to bind down all that is to be known of divine things in a system, a set of words, but considers that he is only spelling the first lines of a work, whose perusal shall last him through eternity. Such a one is not in a hurry to declare that the riddles of Fate and of Time are solved, for he knows it is not calling them so that will make them so. His soul does not decline the great and persevering labors that are to develop its energies. He has faith to study day by day. Such is the practice of the author of Festus, whenever he is truly great. When he shows to us the end and plan of all things, we feel that he only hides them from us. He speaks only his wishes. But when he tells us of what he does really know, the moods and aspirations of fiery youth to which all things are made present in foresight and foretaste,--when he shows us the temptations of the lonely soul pining for knowledge, but unable to feel the love that alone can bestow it,--then he is truly great, and the strings of life thrill oftentimes to their sublimest, sweetest music.

We admire in this author the unsurpa.s.sed force and distinctness with which he casts out single thoughts and images. Each is thrown before us fresh, deep in its impress as if just s.n.a.t.c.hed from the forge. We admire not less his vast flow, his sustained flight. His is a rich and s.p.a.cious genius; it gives us room; it is a palace home; we need not economize our joys; blessed be the royalty that welcomes us so freely.

In simple transposition of the thought from the mind to the paper, that wonder, even rarer than perfect,--that is, simple expression, through the motions of the body, of the motions of the soul,--we dare to say _no_ writer excels him. Words are no veil between us and him, but a luminous cloud that upbears us both together.

So in touches of nature, in the tones of pa.s.sion; he is absolute. There is nothing better, where it is good; we have the very thing itself.

We are told by the critics that he has no ear, and, indeed, when we listen for such, we perceive blemishes enough in the movement of his line. But we did not perceive it before, more than, when the aeolian was telling the secrets of that most spirit-like minister of Nature that bloweth where it listeth, and no man can trace it, we should attempt to divide the tones and pauses into regular bars, and be disturbed when we could not make a tune.

England has only two poets now that can be named near him: these two are Tennyson and the author of "Philip Van Artevelde." Tennyson is all that Bailey is not in melody and voluntary finish, having no less than a Greek moderation in declining all undertakings he is not sure of completing. Taylor, n.o.ble, an earnest seer, a faithful narrator of what he sees, firm and sure, sometimes deep and exquisite, but in energy and grandeur no more than Tennyson to be named beside the author of Festus.

In inspiration, in prophecy, in those flashes of the sacred fire which reveal the secret places where Time is elaborating the marvels of Nature, he stands alone. It is just true what Ebenezer Elliott says, that "Festus contains poetry enough to set up fifty poets,"--ay! even such poets, so far as richness of thought and imagery are concerned, as the two n.o.ble bards we have named.

But we need call none less to make him greater, whose liberal soul is alive to every shade of beauty, every token of greatness, and whose main stress is to seek a soul of goodness in things evil. The book is a precious, even a sacred book, and we could say more of it, had we not years ago vented our enthusiasm when it was in first full flow.

FRENCH NOVELISTS OF THE DAY.[20]

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 sh.o.r.es, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 a.s.similate 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, amus.e.m.e.nt. But the merest mercenary might prefer to pa.s.s 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 Pere 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 pa.s.sion, 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 soiree, or the humors of the streets and cafes, as gay, as keenly alive to observation and enjoyment, as if he were to return to a well-stocked table and a cheerful hearth, encompa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 n.o.ble family, of which his own is a poor and young branch, studying a profession and sighing to live like a duke, and _Le Pere 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 Pere Goriot_. And, wonderful to relate, this character is as much enn.o.bled, 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!

a.n.a.lyze 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 surpa.s.s 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 surpa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion, 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 a.n.a.lyze, to cla.s.sify; there is no anomaly too monstrous, no specimen too revolting, to insure his ardent but pa.s.sionless 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 n.o.ble. To him there is no virtue and no vice; men and women are more or less finely organized; n.o.ble 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 surpa.s.ses 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.