one expression at a time of the human aspects of Religion; but all the spiritual forces may be there in presence, under that one aspect, and each of them in its season the very medicine of the soul. It is as needful to us, betimes, to see the face of the hermit, the serene face of happy solitude, of inward contentment, and of rest in God, as to catch the eye of the good soldier of Jesus Christ.

Mr. Ruskin, in a remarkable note appended to his Lamps of Architecture-remarkable as a testimony to the importance and the difficulties of the question-has laid down the whole groundplan of the subject we have been imperfectly dealing with. We have reserved the passage, because it is a ground-plan that we are not capable of building upon. And we give it now both for the sake of its healthy cautions, and that by its suggestions and directions, our readers may at least have the benefit of its masterly outline of a fuller survey:

"Much attention has lately been directed to the subject of religious art, and we are now in possession of all kinds of interpretations and classifications of it, and of the leading facts of its history. But the greatest question of all connected with it remains entirely unanswered, What good did it do to real religion? There is no subject into which I should so much rejoice to see a serious and conscientious inquiry instituted as this; an inquiry undertaken neither in artistical enthusiasm nor in monkish sympathy, but dogged, merciless, and fearless. I love the religious art of Italy as well as most men; but there is a wide difference between loving it as a manifestation of individual feeling, and looking to it as an instrument of popular benefit. I have not knowledge enough to form even the shadow of an opinion on this latter point, and I should be most grateful to any one who would put it in my power to do so. There are, as it seems to me, three distinct questions to be considered. The first, What has been the effect of external splendour on the genuineness and earnestness of Christian worship? The second, What the use of pictorial or sculptural representation in the communication of Christian historical knowledge, or excitement of affectionate imagination? The third, What the influence of the practice of religious art on the life of the artist?

In answering these inquiries, we should have to consider separately every collateral influence and circumstance; and, by a most subtle analysis, to eliminate the real effect of art from the effects of the abuses with which it was associated. This could be done only by a Christian; not a man who would fall in love with a sweet colour or sweet expression, but who would look for true faith and consistent life as the object of all. It never has been done yet, and the question remains a subject of vain and endless contention between parties of opposite prejudices and temperaments." Seven Lamps of Architecture, second edition, p. 201.

We are utterly incompetent to the inquiry here mapped out,

and have directed our remarks not to the historical investigation and analysis, but rather to the kind of beneficial relations which Art is capable of sustaining towards Religion. That there are such relations, whatever be their exact limitations, cannot be doubted. The interests into which Churches now pour their most eager life, furnish no objects to Art. There is no universal agreement as to what it is in Christianity that is to be most intensely loved and realised; nothing, therefore, that can give inspiration, or take form, within the musing heart. We are far from the time, and farther from the feelings of the time, when a Picture worthily embodying a conception dear to the heart of a whole people could raise such emotions of enthusiasm that the part of the town whence it issued from the painter's studio is called to this day, though it is more than five hundred years ago, Borgo Allegri, the District of Joy. These feelings, with their then directions, never can return. Art made the most of them, and exhausted them, and died in their exhaustion. When she revives, it will be with an inspiration that shall never pass away. For the present, Theology, with its notional distinctions, every where prevails over that human impersonation of Religion which is the highest object of Art, as it was the only perfect embodiment of Revelation. But whenever it shall come to be universally felt that Christianity is the life of Christ-that Christianity is Christ-the glory of God in the face of Man, God manifest in the flesh-then religious Art shall be called—in a new spirit, and with a reverence for human nature, the very nature given to it to represent, never before known upon the earth-to an inexhaustible work. We have only to wait for a universal Christian realism, for the most glorious Art to take its rise. Whether in the solemn assemblies where the spirit of a man is to kindle and instruct the spirits of his fellows, the formative Arts are to be perpetual ministers, as presenting the nearest symbols of the presence of God in human nature, or whether, as fixing thought too much upon themselves, they are to be reserved for private excitement and delight in churches or elsewhere, we do not know, but there is a clear boundary which they cannot pass. Their sphere is man, not God. There need be no fear that the spirituality of Religion will not be jealously, reverently guarded. Art will ever know her own province. Architecture and Music, as of indefinite expression, may wing the soul to the Most High; Painting and Sculpture will give us more and more the visible presence of the Image of God in man. And when the universal heart of Christendom shall rest upon the intuitions of holy beauty that find their objective forms in the perfection of Jesus Christ through all the manifestations of his spirit, and the whole Church is at one as to what it loves and places first as the expo

nent of God, then will Art enter upon its great ideal work, as the universal language of Religion-to give the portraiture of inward beauty,-to enable us to look more nearly upon the face of Christ,-to paint the features of a soul that is in the likeness of the Deity.

ART. III.-BALZAC EN PANTOUFLES. BY LEON

GOZLAN.

Balzac en Pantoufles. By Léon Gozlan. 1 vol. Paris: Michel Levy. 1856.

THE works of some men stand alone, apart, and are in themselves self-sufficient. With those who wrote them you need have nothing to do; they are not necessarily referred to their creator, and the breath they breathe comes not immediately from him, nor does his life-blood seem to flow through them. Not so with Balzac. You are compelled to know him, or you can but dimly appreciate his works. Critically speaking, it is not our present purpose to touch upon these works, but upon their author only; we do not mean to point out how far they possessed or were wanting in merit, but why they were, and why, being as they were, they could derive their existence from no one else save him alone.

Take any hero or heroine of Madame Sand (except Indiana), -let it be Valentine, or Jacques, or Consuelo, or Mauprat, or any other, and there is no reason why they should not spring from some other brain than hers. There would be nothing revolting to our sense in the supposition of their being conceived by Alfred de Musset, for instance, or any other like-minded writer. So, again, we might easily admit the notion that Alexandre Dumas had written Marie Tudor or Angelo, instead of Victor Hugo; or accept the proof, were it afforded us, that Monte Cristo was the work of Eugène Sue, or Arthur that of Charles de Bernard. A fact, however, of which we feel instinctively and absolutely sure is, that not one of these creations could be the work of Balzac, nor could one of his emanate from any of the celebrated writers we have named. Let us again repeat, that it is no question of talent with us just now, but merely a question of individuality, and of the double impossibility in the case of Balzac-that he should not write his works, and that any other but he should write them.

His entire sincerity, his absence of all scepticism (not in a

religious, but in a moral and intellectual point of view), and his total want of affectation, render Balzac one of the most interesting studies that human nature, fashioned and complicated by the hyper-civilisation of modern France, has to offer us. Out of all those who in France have achieved glory within the last thirty years by works of fiction, Balzac only is himself, always himself, and nothing but himself. Soy quien soy, he may say with the Spanish proverb; and neither can the public nor even posterity disturb his imagination in the smallest degree. "He took no pains to dress up his own ghost," as M. Gozlan truly says; Il ne faisait pas la toilette à son ombre. No, he lived his own works, if the expression may be allowed; and the public merely succeeded to them after they had been enjoyed by their creator. Balzac resembles the Maria Wuz of Jean Paul, who, being too poor to purchase the works he hears of, imagines and writes for himself a whole library full of books corresponding to the titles that take his fancy most. He showers his riches upon himself first, and then calls in the world to partake of what remains. The author is simply a consequence of the man; but the man, what was he? Two passages in M. Gozlan's little volume will tell us; for in those two passages is contained all Balzac.

It was on the 15th of March 1840, a Sunday, at about noon. The night before had taken place that extraordinary representation of Vautrin, at the Porte Saint-Martin, at which half Paris was present, and which was barely allowed by the audience to come to a close. Careless of the results, whether to others or to himself, possessed by the idea of representing the forms which surrounded him on all sides, and which he regarded as constituting "society," the author of Le Père Goriot had thrust pellmell upon the stage peers, princes, forçats, fraudulent bankrupts, grandes dames, footmen, dandies, thieves, and saints; all "rubbing clothes" together, and more or less attached to those same wires, which, according to him, moved directly or indirectly all the puppets of the comédie humaine. "Society" was scared; and when Frederick Lemaître, who played the hero of the piece which he expected to revive the fame of Robert Macaire-when Frederick in the last act appeared so inimitably like Louis Philippe in dress, attitude, countenance, and manner, that no possibility existed of ignoring the resemblance, the Duc d'Orleans, then prince royal, who had sat through the whole, had the satisfaction of seeing the Paris bourgeoisie rise indignantly and loudly protest against what was felt to be an insult cast upon itself in the person of its incarnation-supreme. The blow was, it might be thought, a severe one for Balzac; for -jumping at once and immediately, as he always did, from a plan to its perfect completion-he had, during the time that

Vautrin was being rehearsed, believed himself actually in possession of the autocracy of the theatrical world, and in the receipt of hundreds of thousands of francs! The scene described by M. Gozlan opens, then, as we have said, upon the very morrow of the day on which such high-flown golden-pinioned illusions were dashed to earth; and we sympathise with the feelings of a friend who is resolved to be the first to console, yet who is not without a secret desire that "the visit were well over," and the task of condolence with ill-luck ended. But if the visitor is painfully embarrassed, not so he who occasions his embarrassment. Balzac is perfectly calm; and with what his chronicler so justly calls "his solar eyes" fixed on space, is absorbed in the contemplation of another idea, that, in the lapse of twelve hours, has already taken root in his brain, grown up, and been born, for him, into the world of quite tangible realities. He shakes hands with Léon Gozlan, and without leaving him time to open his mouth, he exclaims

"My dear fellow, just look at that strip of ground at the bottom of the garden. Do you see?" "Yes; well, and what then?" "Why, in a few days hence, I shall have established there a dairy which will entirely furnish all the surrounding population with the best milk in the world; a thing they cannot have at this present moment, because they are just between Paris and Versailles-two sponges that absorb every drop of milk;" and flying from detail to detail, the illustrious romancier proves to his visitor how he has secured for himself an annual revenue of 3,000 frs. by milk! But this is not all. Before M. Gozlan can venture upon a remark—“A little further on," continues Balzac, "you perceive a splendid piece of ground". . . "Where nothing at all is growing," the listener this time cannot refrain from interrupting. "For the moment, nothing!" echoes Balzac; but then comes pouring down the full tide of description of all that is to be! That barren piece of earth, "where nothing at all is growing," is quite incontestably to yield more than the mud-manured banks of the Nile! and here is the reason thereof: La Quintinie, the head-gardener of Louis XIV., used to grow the vegetables destined for the king's table alone, in a reserved spot of the gardens of Versailles; and since the middle of the 17th century these royal plants have continued generation after generation (in spite even of the Revolution), as surely as the occupants of the throne themselves; artichokes and asparagus, cabbages and French beans, have succeeded each other in all their pride and privilege of race, even as Louis XVI. succeeded Louis XV., and Louis Philippe took the place of Charles X. and Louis XVIII. La Quintinie's vegetables are still the glory of the royal table of France; but of the royal table only. "Now," cries Balzac exultingly, "I possess the seeds of every vegetable in La Quintinie's kitchen-garden; and I will extend the benefit of the possession to all such as are rich enough to pay for it. I will sow them all in that piece of ground yonder; and there again (to make a

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