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ART. VII.-FRENCH FICTION: THE LOWEST DEEP.

Les Mystères de Paris; Atar-Gul. Par Eugène Sue.

La Dame aux Camélias; Le Demi-Monde, un drame; Le Roman d'une Femme. Par Alex. Dumas, fils.

Monte-Christo. Par Alex. Dumas, père.

Funny, une étude. Par Ernest Feydeau.

Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle. Par Alfred de Musset.

Elle et Lui, par George Sand. Lui et Elle, par Paul de Musset. Lui, par Mme. Louise Collet.

Ir is hard to say whether the current politics or the current literature of France conveys the more vivid impression of utter and profound demoralisation;-the willing servitude, the craven fear, the thirsty materialism, the absence of all liberal sentiment or noble aspiration, indicated by the one, -the abandonment of all self-control or self-respect, the surrender of all manliness, dignity, or reticence, the hunger after the most diseased, unholy, and extravagant excitement,-or the intense and unrebuked selfishness, the passionate and slavish worship of wealth and power, which is the basis and the soul of both alike. Of course there are exceptions in literature as in life. But we speak of the prevalent, the almost universal tone; we speak of the acting, voting, deciding, characterising mass in the one case, and of the books of the widest circulation, and the writers of the most popular repute and the most signal success, in the other. In politics there still exist a few men-fewer, alas, each day, as their numbers are thinned by death or by despair-the salt of the earth, but far too scanty to give it savour, the five righteous men, but not enough to save the city,—who mourn over their degradation and resent their shame, who, "rowing hard against the stream," strive manfully, and strive to the last, to warn their countrymen and to purify and rouse their country. But the national life, the political aspect of France, is undeniably what we have described it: the vast majority of the people in nearly every class, lost to all sense of personal dignity or public justice, is devoted to the pursuit of wealth and luxury, and ready to acquiesce in any régime and to worship any ruler that fosters this pursuit; and questions or kicks against despotism only when, in a momentary aberration of far-sightedness, it touches their immediate purse;-while even the constitutionalists, as

they term themselves the liberal frondeurs-are far more angry at us for fraternising with their despot than with themselves for tolerating and enthroning him, and hate him almost more bitterly for the unintentional aid he has rendered to Italian liberties than for his cynical, perfidious, and sanguinary extinction of their own. So in literature-especially in that branch of it in which alone there is or can be much activity at present, and with which we are now more immediately concerned, the literature of fiction-there are still a few writers who vainly offer to their countrymen from time to time a repast refined in tone and irreproachable in taste and morals ;-but the public appetite has been too long and too deeply vitiated to appreciate what is natural and pure, and turns away with a contempt which is almost loathing from dishes unseasoned by the voluptuous, the morbid, or the monstrous. From time to time noble and sound criticism appears in the more respectable reviews and journals, but it is powerless to alter the demand or to arrest the supply of the article the public asks for; the novels which are for the most part popular-the only ones that are run after, the only ones that pay, either in fame or money— are exclusively those which pander to the worst passions and the worst taste; till, without exaggeration, it is as rare to find a successful French novel that is not scandalous as an English one that is.

French fiction, always more or less diseased and indecorous, has in recent years passed through several distinct phases of disease, and may now almost be said to have left simple indecorum far behind. Had it continued to exhibit merely its normal features of ordinary license and voluptuousness, there would have been little temptation to approach the subject, and every motive to avoid it. That phase of it has been often enough animadverted upon in English publications; no pleasure could be derived from its contemplation, and no new lessons could be drawn from its analysis. But since we first began to be acquainted with it, a change, or rather a succession of changes, has come over it, so strange, so repellent, and in some respects so appalling, that some instruction, at least in the way of warning, may be hoped for from studying it in a right spirit; and it presents too marked and too extraordinary a psychological phenomenon to be ignored by any who desire to understand or penetrate the true aspect of their age. No such field was ever offered to the students of moral pathology before.

But in proceeding to treat of it, we are met on the threshold by an inherent and insuperable difficulty. Christian writers who endeavour to depict the moral renovation which

the religion of their great Master wrought in the world, and to deduce thence proofs of its excellence and its divinity, complain that they labour under this disadvantage; that it is impossible for them to paint in true colours and to describe in plain language the horrible demoralisation which Christianity cured and purged away, simply because no modern society would tolerate the delineation. They cannot give an adequate conception of the contrast, because they are compelled, out of very decency and mercy, to soften down the darker and more hideous features of the decaying times of Rome, Byzantium, or Alexandria. They cannot make us understand what Christianity did, because they dare not tell us nakedly what Paganism was. Something of the same embarrassment besets us in dealing with our present subject. We shall have to speak of French fiction without being able to show thoroughly what it is. We shall have to analyse its elements and its sources without being able adequately to exemplify or prove the correctness of our diagnosis by the most flagrant and conclusive specimens. We shall have to use the strongest language and to pronounce the most unmeasured condemnation, while we are precluded by the very nature of the case from justifying the sentence by adducing and detailing before our readers the most heinous of the offences which have called it forth.

There is yet another difficulty. The fact which forms the basis of nearly all the tales and romances on which we shall have to animadvert, is the habitual prevalence in France of those lawless loves, and, worse still, those liaisons where no love is, which English fiction is forbidden to describe and almost to allude to. Of course we are too well aware that such things are far from being unknown among ourselves, but at least they have no recognised existence: wisely or unwisely, they are decently ignored both in general society and in literature designed for general reading; the novelist may not work them up as part of his ordinary stock in trade; the critic, even if he have an æsthetic or an ethical aim in view, must speak of them only in veiled language and with much periphrasis. In England they are not regarded as legitimate materials for the excitement of interest or the development of character if the writer of fiction uses them at all, he is obliged to use them with the utmost reticence and moderation; whereas the French romancer never dreams of dispensing with them, and often relies on little else for the construction of his plot or the fascination of his tale. With us all such violations of the moral and the social law meet with the severest and most unqualified condemnation: -long may it continue so, provided only the condemnation be sincere, consistent, and free from all taint of unholy or malig

nant pharisaism! Among our neighbours a far more lax and lenient view is taken of such transgressions; they are classed among the common and nearly unavoidable frailties of a nature never perfect and seldom strong; in ordinary life and ordinary fiction they call forth only gentle blame, faint regret, and no surprise. This being the case, we must to a certain extent accept, or at least recognise, the point of view of the writers and readers of the society of which we speak ; that is to say, without for one moment admitting that their estimate of illicit passion is a just one, we must allow that it is the usual and accepted one among them, before we proceed to draw warning and instruction from observing to what lengths this fatal license has conducted the light literature of their country. We have only, as a preliminary, to clear our path by asking our readers to understand, once for all, that, as the normal prevalence of the errors, or vices, or frailties in question (however we may choose to designate them), is assumed by all the literature we are about to estimate, it must be assumed likewise by ourselves.

The inspiration of French fiction,-the source from which flow half its deformities, its vile morality and its vitiated taste, is the craving for excitement that has so long been characteristic of the nation. It is not difficult to see how this craving has been stimulated and nourished till it has grown into a passion that will take no denial and knows no satiety. Two generations of ceaseless revolution, of dazzling conquests and bewildering defeats, of alternations of wild frenzy and prostrate depression, of vicissitudes as strange, as rapid, as extreme as any to be witnessed at the gaming-table, have goaded what was always a desire into an imperious necessity. The present race of Frenchmen, and their fathers even more, were born and bred amid scenes and deeds which made the battle of life a confused and desperate mélée, the race of life a feverish scurry, the banquet of life a dish of mere spice, alcohol, and pepper. Glance back for a moment over the first magnificent convulsion of 1789. Call to mind all the stirring and disturbing thoughts of emancipation and of progress which the writers of that day had been diligently instilling into the popular brain, till half a century of new ideas acting on five centuries of old oppressions wrought a fermentation which found issue and utterance in such an overthrow of established notions and established things as the world had never witnessed since its birth. Grand and generous dreams of indefinite improvement; fierce and selfish longings for satisfying vengeance; the prospect of a new era; the fancy of a heaven realised on earth; that universal liberation from all bonds, and almost from all obedience, that

sweeping disbelief or doubt as to every settled axiom of religion, of morals, and of law, which is so unhinging even to trained and philosophic minds, and which was then diffused over all the uneducated intelligence and turbulent sensibility of France; the sudden overthrow, nay the actual disappearance, in little more than a year of the aristocracy, the monarchy, the Church, of all, in a word, that men had been accustomed to reverence or fear; the king and the noble cast down, the serf and the valet lifted up; the first last, and the last first. Amid excitements so tremendous as these, what simple or quiet tastes could grow up or survive? After stimulants like these, how could the relish for a pure milk-diet be recovered? Then followed reaction and disenchantment as extreme as the wild hopes which they replaced,-the guillotine, the prison massacres, the Reign of Terror; and to the excitement of passionate aspirations succeeded the more absorbing and degrading excitement of a deadly fear. No one who has not studied that terrible period in detail can form an idea of the depth to which its influence penetrated into the national life. Simultaneously with this phase, but prolonged beyond it, came the marvellous victories of the half-clad, half-disciplined troops, poured forth to the frontiers by the Convention and the Directory; followed by the early and brilliant conquests of the young Napoleon, when every post brought tidings of some new achievement; and terminated by the coup-de-main which made him supreme ruler of an exhausted and admiring nation. For a while there was comparative quiet, as the work of reconstruction succeeded that of abolition. But, as if ten years of such convulsions had not sufficed to demoralise the nation, they were to be continued and crowned by fourteen years of another sort of feverish excitement, different, indeed, but almost more disturbing. In this point of view, as in most others, the reign of Napoleon was an irreparable mischief to his country. His triumphal march over Europe-so rapid, so resistless, and so sure, that every month seemed barren, dull, and idle that did not inaugurate a new victory and annex a new realm-made all sober careers stupid and monotonous. Years spent in feverish expectation and in frantic jubilee demoralise the rest of life. The Russian campaign, the European coalition, the desperate struggle of 1813, the abdication, the almost fabulous recovery, the final catastrophe of Waterloo and St. Helena, kept up and enhanced the mad excitement. Henceforward tame and ordinary existence became unendurable to Frenchmen, except during brief moments of absolute exhaustion; and the revolution of 1830, the republic of 1848, the terrible days of June, the coup-d'état, and the second empire,

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