Hours in a Library

Chapter 8

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_NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE_

The most obvious fact about Hawthorne is that he gave one solution of the problem what elements of romance are discoverable amongst the harsh prose of this prosaic age. How is the novelist who, by the inevitable conditions of his style, is bound to come into the closest possible contact with facts, who has to give us the details of his hero"s clothes, to tell us what he had for breakfast, and what is the state of the balance at his banker"s--how is he to introduce the ideal element which must, in some degree, be present in all genuine art? What precisely is meant by "ideal" is a question which for the moment I pretermit. Anyhow a mere photographic reproduction of this muddy, money-making, bread-and-b.u.t.ter-eating world would be intolerable. At the very lowest, some effort must be made at least to select the most promising materials, and to strain out the coa.r.s.e or the simply prosaic ingredients. Various attempts have been made to solve the problem since De Foe founded the modern school of English novelists, by giving us what is in one sense a servile imitation of genuine narrative, but which is redeemed from prose by the unique force of the situation. De Foe painting mere everyday pots and pans is as dull as a modern blue-book; but when his pots and pans are the resource by which a human being struggles out of the most appalling conceivable "slough of despond,"

they become more poetical than the vessels from which the G.o.ds drink nectar in epic poems. Since he wrote, novelists have made many voyages of discovery, with varying success, though they have seldom had the fortune to touch upon so marvellous an island as that still sacred to the immortal Crusoe. They have ventured far into cloud-land, and, returning to _terra firma_, they have plunged into the trackless and savage-haunted regions which are girdled by the Metropolitan Railway.

They have watched the magic coruscations of some strange "Aurora Borealis" of dim romance, or been content with the domestic gaslight of London streets. Amongst the most celebrated of all such adventurers were the band which obeyed the impulse of Sir Walter Scott. For a time it seemed that we had reached a genuine Eldorado of novelists, where solid gold was to be had for the asking, and visions of more than earthly beauty rewarded the labours of the explorer. Now, alas! our opinion is a good deal changed; the fairy treasures which Scott brought back from his voyages have turned into dead leaves according to custom; and the curiosities, upon which he set so extravagant a price, savour more of Wardour Street than of the genuine mediaeval artists. Nay, there are scoffers, though I am not of them, who think that the t.i.ttle-tattle which Miss Austen gathered at the country-houses of our grandfathers is worth more than the showy but rather flimsy eloquence of the "Ariosto of the North." Scott endeavoured at least, if with indifferent success, to invest his scenes with something of

The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet"s dream.

If he too often indulged in mere theatrical devices, and mistook the glare of the footlights for the sacred glow of the imagination, he professed, at least, to introduce us to an ideal world. Later novelists have generally abandoned the attempt, and are content to reflect our work-a-day life with almost servile fidelity. They are not to be blamed; and doubtless the very greatest writers are those who can bring their ideal world into the closest possible contact with our sympathies, and show us heroic figures in modern frock-coats and Parisian fashions. The art of story-telling is manifold, and its charm depends greatly upon the infinite variety of its applications. And yet, for that very reason, there are moods in which one wishes that the modern story-teller would more frequently lead us away from the commonplace region of newspapers and railways to regions where the imagination can have fair play.

Hawthorne is one of the few eminent writers to whose guidance we may in such moods most safely entrust ourselves; and it is tempting to ask, what was the secret of his success? The effort, indeed, to investigate the materials from which some rare literary flavour is extracted is seldom satisfactory. We are reminded of the automaton chess-player who excited the wonder of the last generation. The showman, like the critic, laid bare his inside, and displayed all the cunning wheels and cogs and cranks by which his motions were supposed to be regulated. Yet, after all, the true secret was that there was a man inside the machine. Some such impression is often made by the most elaborate demonstrations of literary anatomists. We have been mystified, not really entrusted with any revelation. And yet, with this warning as to the probable success of our examination, let us try to determine some of the peculiarities to which Hawthorne owes this strange power of bringing poetry out of the most unpromising materials.

In the first place, then, he had the good fortune to be born in the most prosaic of all countries--the most prosaic, that is, in external appearance, and even in the superficial character of its inhabitants.

Hawthorne himself reckoned this as an advantage, though in a very different sense from that in which we are speaking. It was as a patriot, and not as an artist, that he congratulated himself on his American origin. There is a humorous struggle between his sense of the rawness and ugliness of his native land and the dogged patriotism befitting a descendant of the genuine New England Puritans. Hawthorne the novelist writhes at the discords which torture his delicate sensibilities at every step; but instantly Hawthorne the Yankee protests that the very faults are symptomatic of excellence. He is like a sensitive mother, unable to deny that her awkward hobbledehoy of a son offends against the proprieties, but tacitly resolved to see proofs of virtues present or to come even in his clumsiest tricks. He forces his apologies to sound like boasting. "No author," he says, "can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, as is happily" (it must and shall be happily!) "the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easily-handled themes either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers need ruins to make them grow." If, that is, I am forced to confess that poetry and romance are absent, I will resolutely stick to it that poetry and romance are bad things, even though the love of them is the strongest propensity of my nature. To my thinking, there is something almost pathetic in this loyal self-deception; and therefore I have never been offended by certain pa.s.sages in "Our Old Home" which appear to have caused some irritation in touchy Englishmen. There is something, he says by way of apology, which causes an American in England to take up an att.i.tude of antagonism. "These people think so loftily of themselves, and so contemptuously of everybody else, that it requires more generosity than I possess to keep always in perfectly good humour with them." That may be true; for, indeed, I believe that all Englishmen, whether ostentatiously cosmopolitan or ostentatiously patriotic, have a peculiar type of national pride at least as offensive as that of Frenchmen, Germans, or Americans; and, to a man of Hawthorne"s delicate perceptions, the presence of that sentiment would reveal itself through the most careful disguises. But that which really caused him to cherish his antagonism was, I suspect, something else: he was afraid of loving us too well; he feared to be tempted into a denial of some point of his patriotic creed; he is always clasping it, as it were, to his bosom, and vowing and protesting that he does not surrender a single jot or t.i.ttle of it. Hawthorne in England was like a plant suddenly removed to a rich soil from a dry and thirsty land. He drinks in at every pore the delightful influences of which he has had so scanty a supply. An old cottage, an ivy-grown wall, a country churchyard with its quaint epitaphs, things that are commonplace to most Englishmen and which are hateful to the sanitary inspector, are refreshing to every fibre of his soul. He tries in vain to take the sanitary inspector"s view. In spite of himself he is always falling into the romantic tone, though a sense that he ought to be sternly philosophical just gives a humorous tinge to his enthusiasm. Charles Lamb could not have improved his description of the old hospital at Leicester, where the twelve brethren still wear the badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff. He lingers round it, and gossips with the brethren, and peeps into the garden, and sits by the cavernous archway of the kitchen fireplace, where the very atmosphere seems to be redolent with aphorisms first uttered by ancient monks, and jokes derived from Master Slender"s note-book, and gossip about the wrecks of the Spanish Armada. No connoisseur could pore more lovingly over an ancient black-letter volume, or the mellow hues of some old painter"s masterpiece. He feels the charm of our historical continuity, where the immemorial past blends indistinguishably with the present, to the remotest recesses of his imagination. But then the Yankee nature within him must put in a sharp word or two; he has to jerk the bridle for fear that his enthusiasm should fairly run away with him. "The trees and other objects of an English landscape," he remarks, or, perhaps we should say, he complains, "take hold of one by numberless minute tendrils as it were, which, look as closely as we choose, we never find in an American scene;" but he inserts a qualifying clause, just by way of protest, that an American tree would be more picturesque if it had an equal chance; and the native oak of which we are so proud is summarily condemned for "John Bullism"--a mysterious offence common to many things in England. Charlecote Hall, he presently admits, "is a most delightful place." Even an American is tempted to believe that real homes can only be produced by "the slow ingenuity and labour of many successive generations," when he sees the elaborate beauty and perfection of a well-ordered English abode. And yet he persuades himself that even here he is the victim of some delusion. The impression is due to the old man which stills lurks even in the polished American, and forces him to look through his ancestor"s spectacles. The true theory, it appears, is that which Holgrave expresses for him in the "Seven Gables," namely, that we should free ourselves of the material slavery imposed upon us by the brick-and-mortar of past generations, and learn to change our houses as easily as our coats. We ought to feel--only we unfortunately can"t feel--that a tent or a wigwam is as good as a house. The mode in which Hawthorne regards the Englishman himself is a quaint ill.u.s.tration of the same theory. An Englishwoman, he admits reluctantly and after many protestations, has some few beauties not possessed by her American sisters. A maiden in her teens has "a certain charm of half-blossom and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment." But he revenges himself for this concession by an almost savage onslaught upon the full-blown British matron with her "awful ponderosity of frame ... ma.s.sive with solid beef and streaky tallow," and apparently composed "of steaks and sirloins." He laments that the English violet should develop into such an overblown peony, and speculates upon the whimsical problem, whether a middle-aged husband should be considered as legally married to all the accretions which have overgrown the slenderness of his bride. Should not the matrimonial bond be held to exclude the three-fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? A question not to be put without a shudder. The fact is, that Hawthorne had succeeded only too well in misleading himself by a common fallacy. That pestilent personage, John Bull, has a.s.sumed so concrete a form in our imaginations, with his top-boots and his broad shoulders and vast circ.u.mference, and the emblematic bulldog at his heels, that for most observers he completely hides the Englishman of real life. Hawthorne had decided that an Englishman must and should be a mere ma.s.s of transformed beef and beer. No observation could shake his preconceived impression.

At Greenwich Hospital he encountered the mighty shade of the concentrated essence of our strongest national qualities; no truer Englishman ever lived than Nelson. But Nelson was certainly not the conventional John Bull, and, therefore, Hawthorne roundly a.s.serts that he was not an Englishman. "More than any other Englishman he won the love and admiration of his country, but won them through the efficacy of qualities that are not English." Nelson was of the same breed as Cromwell, though his shoulders were not so broad; but Hawthorne insists that the broad shoulders, and not the fiery soul, are the essence of John Bull. He proceeds with amusing unconsciousness to generalise this ingenious theory, and declares that all extraordinary Englishmen are sick men, and therefore deviations from the type. When he meets another remarkable Englishman in the flesh, he applies the same method. Of Leigh Hunt, whom he describes with warm enthusiasm, he dogmatically declares, "there was not an English trait in him from head to foot, morally, intellectually, or physically." And the reason is admirable. "Beef, ale, or stout, brandy or port-wine, entered not at all into his const.i.tution." All Englishmen are made of those ingredients, and if not, why, then, they are not Englishmen. By the same method it is easy to show that all Englishmen are drunkards, or that they are all teetotalers; you have only to exclude as irrelevant every case that contradicts your theory. Hawthorne, unluckily, is by no means solitary in his mode of reasoning. The ideal John Bull has hidden us from ourselves as well as from our neighbours, and the race which is distinguished above all others for the magnificent wealth of its imaginative literature is daily told--and, what is more, tells itself--that it is a mere lump of prosaic flesh and blood, with scarcely soul enough to keep it from stagnation. If we were sensible we should burn that ridiculous caricature of ourselves along with Guy Fawkes; but meanwhile we can hardly complain if foreigners are deceived by our own misrepresentations.

Against Hawthorne, as I have said, I feel no grudge, though a certain regret that his sympathy with that deep vein of poetical imagination which underlies all our "steaks and sirloins" should have been intercepted by this detestable lay-figure. The poetical humorist must be allowed a certain license in dealing with facts; and poor Hawthorne, in the uncongenial atmosphere of the Liverpool Custom-house, had doubtless much to suffer from a thick-skinned generation. His characteristic shyness made it a hard task for him to penetrate through our outer rind--which, to say the truth, is often elephantine enough--to the central core of heat; and we must not complain if he was too apt to deny the existence of what to him was unattainable. But the problem recurs--for everybody likes to ask utterly unanswerable questions--whether Hawthorne would not have developed into a still greater artist if he had been more richly supplied with the diet so dear to his inmost soul? Was it not a thing to weep over, that a man so keenly alive to every picturesque influence, so anxious to invest his work with the enchanted haze of romantic a.s.sociation, should be confined till middle age amongst the bleak granite rocks and the half-baked civilisation of New England? "Among ourselves," he laments, "there is no fairy land for the romancer." What if he had been brought up in the native home of the fairies--if there had been thrown open to him the gates through which Shakespeare and Spenser caught their visions of ideal beauty? Might we not have had an appendix to the "Midsummer Night"s Dream," and might not a modern "Faerie Queen" have brightened the prosaic wilderness of this nineteenth century? The question, as I have said, is rigidly unanswerable. We have not yet learnt how to breed poets, though we have made some progress in regard to pigs. n.o.body can tell, and perhaps, therefore, it is as well that n.o.body should guess, what would have been the effect of transplanting Shakespeare to modern Stratford, or of exiling him to the United States. And yet--for it is impossible to resist entirely the pleasure of fruitless speculation--we may guess that there are some reasons why there should be a risk in transplanting so delicate a growth as the genius of Hawthorne. There are more ways, so wise men tell us, of killing a cat than choking it with cream; but it is a very good way. Over-feeding produces atrophy of some of the vital functions in higher animals than cats, and the imagination may be enfeebled rather than strengthened by an over-supply of materials. Hawthorne, if his life had pa.s.sed where the plough may turn up an antiquity in every furrow, and the whole face of the country is enamelled with ancient culture, might have wrought more gorgeous hues into his tissues, but he might have succ.u.mbed to the temptation of producing mere upholstery. The fairy land for which he longed is full of dangerous enchantments, and there are many who have lost in it the vigour which comes from breathing the keen air of everyday life. From that risk Hawthorne was effectually preserved in his New England home.

Having to abandon the poetry which is manufactured out of mere external circ.u.mstances, he was forced to draw it from deeper sources. With easier means at hand of enriching his pages, he might have left the mine unworked. It is often good for us to have to make bricks without straw.

Hawthorne, who was conscious of the extreme difficulty of the problem, and but partially conscious of the success of his solution of it, naturally complained of the severe discipline to which he owed his strength. We who enjoy the results may feel how much he owed to the very sternness of his education and the n.i.g.g.ard hand with which his imaginative sustenance was dealt out to him. The observation may sound paradoxical at the first moment, and yet it is supported by a.n.a.logy. Are not the best cooks produced just where the raw material is the worst, and precisely because it is there worst? Now, cookery is the art by which man is most easily distinguished from beasts, and it requires little ingenuity to transfer its lessons to literature. At the same time it may be admitted that some closer inquiry is necessary in order to make the hypothesis probable, and I will endeavour from this point of view to examine some of Hawthorne"s exquisite workmanship.

The story which perhaps generally pa.s.ses for his masterpiece is "Transformation," for most readers a.s.sume that a writer"s longest book must necessarily be his best. In the present case, I think that this method, which has its conveniences, has not led to a perfectly just conclusion. In "Transformation," Hawthorne has for once the advantage of placing his characters in a land where "a sort of poetic or fairy precinct," as he calls it, is naturally provided for them. The very stones of the streets are full of romance, and he cannot mention a name that has not a musical ring. Hawthorne, moreover, shows his usual tact in confining his aims to the possible. He does not attempt to paint Italian life and manners; his actors belong by birth, or by a kind of naturalisation, to the colony of the American artists in Rome; and he therefore does not labour under the difficulty of being in imperfect sympathy with his creatures. Rome is a mere background, and surely a most felicitous background, to the little group of persons who are effectually detached from all such vulgarising a.s.sociations with the mechanism of daily life in less poetical countries. The centre of the group, too, who embodies one of Hawthorne"s most delicate fancies, could have breathed no atmosphere less richly perfumed with old romance. In New York he would certainly have been in danger of a Barnum"s museum, beside Washington"s nurse and the woolly horse. It is a triumph of art that a being whose nature trembles on the very verge of the grotesque should walk through Hawthorne"s pages with such undeviating grace. In the Roman dreamland he is in little danger of such prying curiosity, though even there he can only be kept out of harm"s way by the admirable skill of his creator. Perhaps it may be thought by some severe critics that, with all his merits, Donatello stands on the very outside verge of the province permitted to the romancer. But without cavilling at what is indisputably charming, and without dwelling upon certain defects of construction which slightly mar the general beauty of the story, it has another weakness which it is impossible quite to overlook. Hawthorne himself remarks that he was surprised, in re-writing his story, to see the extent to which he had introduced descriptions of various Italian objects. "Yet these things," he adds, "fill the mind everywhere in Italy, and especially in Rome, and cannot be kept from flowing out upon the page when one writes freely and with self-enjoyment." The a.s.sociations which they called up in England were so pleasant, that he could not find it in his heart to cancel. Doubtless that is the precise truth, and yet it is equally true that they are artistically out of place. There are pa.s.sages which recall the guide-book. To take one instance--and, certainly, it is about the worst--the whole party is going to the Coliseum, where a very striking scene takes place. On the way they pa.s.s a baker"s shop.

""The baker is drawing his loaves out of the oven," remarked Kenyon. "Do you smell how sour they are? I should fancy that Minerva (in revenge for the desecration of her temples) had slyly poured vinegar into the batch, if I did not know that the modern Romans prefer their bread in the acetous fermentation.""

The instance is trivial, but it is characteristic. Hawthorne had doubtless remarked the smell of the sour bread, and to him it called up a vivid recollection of some stroll in Rome; for, of all our senses, the smell is notoriously the most powerful in awakening a.s.sociations. But then what do we who read him care about the Roman taste for bread "in acetous fermentation?" When the high-spirited girl is on the way to meet her tormentor, and to receive the provocation which leads to his murder, why should we be worried by a gratuitous remark about Roman baking? It somehow jars upon our taste, and we are certain that, in describing a New England village, Hawthorne would never have admitted a touch which has no conceivable bearing upon the situation. There is almost a superabundance of minute local colour in his American Romances, as, for example, in the "House of the Seven Gables;" but still, every touch, however minute, is steeped in the sentiment and contributes to the general effect. In Rome the smell of a loaf is sacred to his imagination, and intrudes itself upon its own merits, and, so far as we can discover, without reference to the central purpose. If a baker"s shop impresses him unduly because it is Roman, the influence of ancient ruins and glorious works of art is of course still more distracting. The mysterious Donatello, and the strange psychological problem which he is destined to ill.u.s.trate, are put aside for an interval, whilst we are called upon to listen to descriptions and meditations, always graceful, and often of great beauty in themselves, but yet, in a strict sense, irrelevant. Hawthorne"s want of familiarity with the scenery is of course responsible for part of this failing. Had he been a native Roman, he would not have been so preoccupied with the wonders of Rome. But it seems that for a romance bearing upon a spiritual problem, the scenery, however tempting, is not really so serviceable as the less prepossessing surroundings of America. The objects have too great an intrinsic interest. A counter-attraction distorts the symmetry of the system. In the shadow of the Coliseum and St. Peter"s you cannot pay much attention to the troubles of a young lady whose existence is painfully ephemeral.

Those mighty objects will not be relegated to the background, and condescend to act as mere scenery. They are, in fact, too romantic for a romance. The fountain of Trevi, with all its allegorical marbles, may be a very picturesque object to describe, but for Hawthorne"s purposes it is really not equal to the town-pump at Salem; and Hilda"s poetical tower, with the perpetual light before the Virgin"s image, and the doves floating up to her from the street, and the column of Antoninus looking at her from the heart of the city, somehow appeals less to our sympathies than the quaint garret in the House of the Seven Gables, from which Phoebe Pyncheon watched the singular idiosyncrasies of the superannuated breed of fowls in the garden. The garret and the pump are designed in strict subordination to the human figures: the tower and the fountain have a distinctive purpose of their own. Hawthorne, at any rate, seems to have been mastered by his too powerful auxiliaries. A human soul, even in America, is more interesting to us than all the churches and picture-galleries in the world; and, therefore, it is as well that Hawthorne should not be tempted to the too easy method of putting fine description in place of sentiment.

But how was the task to be performed? How was the imaginative glow to be shed over the American scenery, so provokingly raw and deficient in harmony? A similar problem was successfully solved by a writer whose development, in proportion to her means of cultivation, is about the most remarkable of recent literary phenomena. Miss Bronte"s bleak Yorkshire moors, with their uncompromising stone walls, and the valleys invaded by factories, are at first sight as little suited to romance as New England itself, to which, indeed, both the inhabitants and the country have a decided family resemblance. Now that she has discovered for us the fountains of poetic interest, we can all see that the region is not a mere stony wilderness; but it is well worth while to make a pilgrimage to Haworth, if only to discover how little the country corresponds to our preconceived impressions, or, in other words, how much depends upon the eye which sees it, and how little upon its intrinsic merits. Miss Bronte"s marvellous effects are obtained by the process which enables an "intense and glowing mind" to see everything through its own atmosphere. The ugliest and most trivial objects seem, like objects heated by the sun, to radiate back the glow of pa.s.sion with which she has regarded them. Perhaps this singular power is still more conspicuous in "Villette," where she had even less of the raw material of poetry. An odd parallel may be found between one of the most striking pa.s.sages in "Villette" and one in "Transformation." Lucy Snowe in one novel, and Hilda in the other, are left to pa.s.s a summer vacation, the one in Brussels and the other in pestiferous Rome. Miss Snowe has no external cause of suffering but the natural effect of solitude upon a homeless and helpless governess. Hilda has to bear about with her the weight of a terrible secret, affecting, it may be, even the life of her dearest friend. Each of them wanders into a Roman Catholic church, and each, though they have both been brought up in a Protestant home, seeks relief at the confessional. So far the cases are alike, though Hilda, one might have fancied, has by far the strongest cause for emotion. And yet, after reading the two descriptions--both excellent in their way--one might fancy that the two young ladies had exchanged burdens.

Lucy Snowe is as tragic as the innocent confidante of a murderess; Hilda"s feelings never seem to rise above that weary sense of melancholy isolation which besieges us in a deserted city. It is needless to ask which is the best bit of work artistically considered. Hawthorne"s style is more graceful and flexible; his descriptions of the Roman Catholic ceremonial and its influence upon an imaginative mind in distress are far more sympathetic, and imply a wider range of intellect. But Hilda scarcely moves us like Lucy. There is too much delicate artistic description of picture-galleries and of the glories of St. Peter"s to allow the poor little American girl to come prominently to the surface.

We have been indulging with her in some sad but charming speculations, and not witnessing the tragedy of a deserted soul. Lucy Snowe has very inferior materials at her command; but somehow we are moved by a sympathetic thrill: we taste the bitterness of the awful cup of despair which, as she tells us, is forced to her lips in the night-watches; and are not startled when so prosaic an object as the row of beds in the dormitory of a French school suggests to her images worthy rather of stately tombs in the aisles of a vast cathedral, and recall dead dreams of an elder world and a mightier race long frozen in death. Comparisons of this kind are almost inevitably unfair; but the difference between the two ill.u.s.trates one characteristic--we need not regard it as a defect--of Hawthorne. His idealism does not consist in conferring grandeur upon vulgar objects by tinging them with the reflection of deep emotion. He rather shrinks than otherwise from describing the strongest pa.s.sions, or shows their working by indirect touches and under a side-light. An excellent example of his peculiar method occurs in what is in some respects the most perfect of his works, the "Scarlet Letter."

There, again, we have the spectacle of a man tortured by a life-long repentance. The Puritan Clergyman, reverenced as a saint by all his flock, conscious of a sin which, once revealed, will crush him to the earth, watched with a malignant purpose by the husband whom he has injured, unable to summon up the moral courage to tear off the veil, and make the only atonement in his power, is a singularly striking figure, powerfully conceived and most delicately described. He yields under terrible pressure to the temptation of escaping from the scene of his prolonged torture with the partner of his guilt. And then, as he is returning homewards after yielding a reluctant consent to the flight, we are invited to contemplate the agony of his soul. The form which it takes is curiously characteristic. No vehement pangs of remorse, or desperate hopes of escape, overpower his faculties in any simple and straightforward fashion. The poor minister is seized with a strange hallucination. He meets a venerable deacon, and can scarcely restrain himself from uttering blasphemies about the Communion-supper. Next appears an aged widow, and he longs to a.s.sail her with what appears to him to be an unanswerable argument against the immortality of the soul.

Then follows an impulse to whisper impure suggestions to a fair young maiden, whom he has recently converted. And, finally, he longs to greet a rough sailor with a "volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths." The minister, in short, is in that state of mind which gives birth in its victim to a belief in diabolical possession; and the meaning is pointed by an encounter with an old lady, who, in the popular belief, was one of Satan"s miserable slaves and dupes, the witches, and is said--for Hawthorne never introduces the supernatural without toning it down by a supposed legendary transmission--to have invited him to meet her at the blasphemous Sabbath in the forest. The sin of endeavouring to escape from the punishment of his sins had brought him into sympathy with wicked mortals and perverted spirits.

This mode of setting forth the agony of a pure mind, tainted by one irremovable blot, is undoubtedly impressive to the imagination in a high degree; far more impressive, we may safely say, than any quant.i.ty of such rant as very inferior writers could have poured out with the utmost facility on such an occasion. Yet it might possibly be mentioned that a poet of the highest order would have produced the effect by more direct means. Remorse overpowering and absorbing does not embody itself in these recondite and, one may almost say, over-ingenious fancies.

Hawthorne does not give us so much the pure pa.s.sion as some of its collateral effects. He is still more interested in the curious psychological problem than moved by sympathy with the torture of the soul. We pity poor Mr. Dimmesdale profoundly, but we are also interested in him as the subject of an experiment in a.n.a.lytical psychology. We do not care so much for his emotions as for the strange phantoms which are raised in his intellect by the disturbance of his natural functions. The man is placed upon the rack, but our compa.s.sion is aroused, not by feeling our own nerves and sinews twitching in sympathy, but by remarking the strange confusion of ideas produced in his mind, the singularly distorted aspect of things in general introduced by such an experience, and hence, if we please, inferring the keenness of the pangs which have produced them. This turn of thought explains the real meaning of Hawthorne"s antipathy to poor John Bull. That worthy gentleman, we will admit, is in a sense more gross and beefy than his American cousin.

His nerves are stronger, for we need not decide whether they should be called coa.r.s.er or less morbid. He is not, in the proper sense of the word, less imaginative, for a vigorous grasp of realities is rather a proof of a powerful than a defective imagination. But he is less accessible to those delicate impulses which are to the ordinary pa.s.sions as electricity to heat. His imagination is more intense and less mobile.

The devils which haunt the two races partake of the national characteristics. John Bunyan, Dimmesdale"s contemporary, suffered under the pangs of a remorse equally acute, though with apparently far less cause. The devils who tormented him whispered blasphemies in his ears; they pulled at his clothes; they persuaded him that he had committed the unpardonable sin. They caused the very stones in the streets and tiles on the houses, as he says, to band themselves together against him. But they had not the refined and humorous ingenuity of the American fiends.

They tempted him, as their fellows tempted Dimmesdale, to sell his soul; but they were too much in earnest to insist upon queer breaches of decorum. They did not indulge in that quaint play of fancy which tempts us to believe that the devils in New England had seduced the "tricksy spirit," Ariel, to indulge in practical jokes at the expense of a n.o.bler victim than Stephano or Caliban. They were too terribly diabolical to care whether Bunyan blasphemed in solitude or in the presence of human respectabilities. Bunyan"s sufferings were as poetical, but less conducive to refined speculation. His were the fiends that haunt the valley of the shadow of death; whereas Hawthorne"s are to be encountered in the dim regions of twilight, where realities blend inextricably with mere phantoms, and the mind confers only a kind of provisional existence upon the "airy nothings" of its creation. Apollyon does not appear armed to the teeth and throwing fiery darts, but comes as an unsubstantial shadow threatening vague and undefined dangers, and only half-detaching himself from the background of darkness. He is as intangible as Milton"s Death, not the vivid reality which presented itself to mediaeval imaginations.

This special att.i.tude of mind is probably easier to the American than to the English imagination. The craving for something substantial, whether in cookery or in poetry, was that which induced Hawthorne to keep John Bull rather at arm"s length. We may trace the working of similar tendencies in other American peculiarities. Spiritualism and its attendant superst.i.tions are the gross and vulgar form of the same phase of thought as it occurs in men of highly-strung nerves but defective cultivation. Hawthorne always speaks of these modern goblins with the contempt they deserve, for they shocked his imagination as much as his reason; but he likes to play with fancies which are not altogether dissimilar, though his refined taste warns him that they become disgusting when grossly translated into tangible symbols. Mesmerism, for example, plays an important part in the "Blithedale Romance" and the "House of the Seven Gables," though judiciously softened and kept in the background. An example of the danger of such tendencies may be found in those works of Edgar Poe, in which he seems to have had recourse to strong stimulants to rouse a flagging imagination. What is exquisitely fanciful and airy in Hawthorne is too often replaced in his rival by an attempt to overpower us by dabblings in the charnel-house and prurient appeals to our fears of the horribly revolting. After reading some of Poe"s stories one feels a kind of shock to one"s modesty. We require some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting images; whereas Hawthorne"s pure and delightful fancies, though at times they may have led us too far from the healthy contact of everyday interests, never leave a stain upon the imagination, and generally succeed in throwing a harmonious colouring upon some objects in which we had previously failed to recognise the beautiful. To perform that duty effectually is perhaps the highest of artistic merits; and though we may complain of Hawthorne"s colouring as too evanescent, its charm grows upon us the more we study it.

Hawthorne seems to have been slow in discovering the secret of his own power. The "Twice-Told Tales," he tells us, are only a fragmentary selection from a great number which had an ephemeral existence in long-forgotten magazines, and were sentenced to extinction by their author. Though many of the survivors are very striking, no wise reader will regret that sentence. It could be wished that other authors were as ready to bury their innocents, and that injudicious admirers might always abstain from acting as resurrection-men. The fragments which remain, with all their merits, are chiefly interesting as ill.u.s.trating the intellectual development of their author. Hawthorne, in his preface to the collected edition (all Hawthorne"s prefaces are remarkably instructive) tells us what to think of them. The book, he says, "requires to be read in the clear brown twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages." The remark, with deductions on the score of modesty, is more or less applicable to all his writings. But he explains, and with perfect truth, that though written in solitude, the book has not the abstruse tone which marks the written communications of a solitary mind with itself. The reason is that the sketches "are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart, but his attempts ... to open an intercourse with the world." They may, in fact, be compared to Brummel"s failures; and, though they do not display the perfect grace and fitness which would justify him in presenting himself to society, they were well worth taking up to ill.u.s.trate the skill of the master"s manipulation. We see him trying various experiments to hit off that delicate mean between the fanciful and the prosaic, which shall satisfy his taste and be intelligible to the outside world.

Sometimes he gives us a fragment of historical romance, as in the story of the stern old regicide who suddenly appears from the woods to head the colonists of Ma.s.sachusetts in a critical emergency; then he tries his hand at a bit of allegory, and describes the search for the mythical carbuncle which blazes by its inherent splendour on the face of a mysterious cliff in the depths of the untrodden wilderness, and lures old and young, the worldly and the romantic, to waste their lives in the vain effort to discover it--for the carbuncle is the ideal which mocks our pursuit, and may be our curse or our blessing. Then perhaps we have a domestic piece--a quiet description of a New England country scene touched with a grace which reminds us of the creators of Sir Roger de Coverley or the Vicar of Wakefield. Occasionally there is a fragment of pure _diablerie_, as in the story of the lady who consults the witch in the hollow of the three hills; and more frequently he tries to work out one of those strange psychological problems which he afterwards treated with more fulness of power. The minister who, for an unexplained reason, puts on a black veil one morning in his youth, and wears it until he is laid with it in his grave--a kind of symbolical prophecy of Dimmesdale; the eccentric Wakefield (whose original, if I remember rightly, is to be found in "King"s Anecdotes"), who leaves his house one morning for no particular reason, and though living in the next street, does not reveal his existence to his wife for twenty years; and the hero of the "Wedding Knell," the elderly bridegroom whose early love has jilted him, but agrees to marry him when she is an elderly widow and he an old bachelor, and who appals the marriage party by coming to the church in his shroud, with the bell tolling as for a funeral--all these bear the unmistakable stamp of Hawthorne"s mint, and each is a study of his favourite subject, the border-land between reason and insanity. In many of these stories appears the element of interest, to which Hawthorne clung the more closely both from early a.s.sociations and because it is the one undeniably poetical element in the American character.

Shallow-minded people fancy Puritanism to be prosaic, because the laces and ruffles of the Cavaliers are a more picturesque costume at a masked ball than the dress of the Roundheads. The Puritan has become a grim and ugly scarecrow, on whom every buffoon may break his jest. But the genuine old Puritan spirit ceases to be picturesque only because of its sublimity: its poetry is sublimed into religion. The great poet of the Puritans fails, as far as he fails, when he tries to transcend the limits of mortal imagination--

The living throne, the sapphire blaze, Where angels tremble as they gaze, He saw: but blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night.

To represent the Puritan from within was not, indeed, a task suitable to Hawthorne"s powers. Carlyle has done that for us with more congenial sentiment than could have been well felt by the gentle romancer.

Hawthorne fancies the grey shadow of a stern old forefather wondering at his degenerate son. "A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life, what mode of glorifying G.o.d, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" And yet the old strain remains, though strangely modified by time and circ.u.mstance. In Hawthorne it would seem that the peddling element of the old Puritans had been reduced to its lowest point; the more spiritual element had been refined till it is probable enough that the ancestral shadow would have refused to recognise the connection. The old dogmatical framework to which he attached such vast importance had dropped out of his descendant"s mind, and had been replaced by dreamy speculation, obeying no laws save those imposed by its own sense of artistic propriety. But we may often recognise, even where we cannot express in words, the strange family likeness which exists in characteristics which are superficially antagonistic. The man of action may be bound by subtle ties to the speculative metaphysician; and Hawthorne"s mind, amidst the most obvious differences, had still an affinity to his remote forefathers. Their bugbears had become his playthings; but the witches, though they have no reality, have still a fascination for him. The interest which he feels in them, even in their now shadowy state, is a proof that he would have believed in them in good earnest a century and a half earlier. The imagination, working in a different intellectual atmosphere, is unable to project its images upon the external world; but it still forms them in the old shape. His solitary musings necessarily employ a modern dialect, but they often turn on the same topics which occurred to Jonathan Edwards in the woods of Connecticut. Instead of the old Puritan speculations about predestination and free-will, he dwells upon the transmission by natural laws of an hereditary curse, and upon the strange blending of good and evil, which may cause sin to be an awakening impulse in a human soul. The change which takes place in Donatello in consequence of his crime is a modern symbol of the fall of man and the eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. As an artist he gives concrete images instead of abstract theories; but his thoughts evidently delight to dwell in the same regions where the daring speculations of his theological ancestors took their origin. Septimius, the rather disagreeable hero of his last romance, is a peculiar example of a similar change. Brought up under the strict discipline of New England, he has retained the love of musing upon insoluble mysteries, though he has abandoned the old dogmatic guide-posts. When such a man finds that the orthodox scheme of the universe provided by his official pastors has somehow broken down with him, he forms some audacious theory of his own, and is perhaps plunged into an unhallowed revolt against the Divine order. Septimius, under such circ.u.mstances, develops into a kind of morbid and sullen Hawthorne. He considers--as other people have done--that death is a disagreeable fact, but refuses to admit that it is inevitable. The romance tends to show that such a state of mind is unhealthy and dangerous, and Septimius is contrasted unfavourably with the vigorous natures who preserve their moral balance by plunging into the stream of practical life. Yet Hawthorne necessarily sympathises with the abnormal being whom he creates. Septimius ill.u.s.trates the dangers of the musing temperament, but the dangers are produced by a combination of an essentially selfish nature with the meditative tendency. Hawthorne, like his hero, sought refuge from the hard facts of commonplace life by retiring into a visionary world. He delights in propounding much the same questions as those which tormented poor Septimius, though, for obvious reasons, he did not try to compound an elixir of life by means of a recipe handed down from Indian ancestors. The strange mysteries in which the world and our nature are shrouded are always present to his imagination; he catches dim glimpses of the laws which bring out strange harmonies, but, on the whole, tend rather to deepen than to clear the mysteries. He loves the marvellous, not in the vulgar sense of the word, but as a symbol of perplexity which encounters every thoughtful man in his journey through life. Similar tenants at an earlier period might, with almost equal probability, have led him to the stake as a dabbler in forbidden sciences, or have caused him to be revered as one to whom a deep spiritual instinct had been granted.

Meanwhile, as it was his calling to tell stories to readers of the English language in the nineteenth century, his power is exercised in a different sphere. No modern writer has the same skill in so using the marvellous as to interest without unduly exciting our incredulity. He makes, indeed, no positive demands on our credulity. The strange influences which are suggested rather than obtruded upon us are kept in the background, so as not to invite, nor indeed to render possible, the application of scientific tests. We may compare him once more to Miss Bronte, who introduces, in "Villette," a haunted garden. She shows us a ghost who is for a moment a very terrible spectre indeed, and then, very much to our annoyance, rationalises him into a flesh-and-blood lover.

Hawthorne would neither have allowed the ghost to intrude so forcibly, nor have expelled him so decisively. The garden in his hands would have been haunted by a shadowy terror of which we could render no precise account to ourselves. It would have refrained from actual contact with professors and governesses; and as it would never have taken bodily form, it would never have been quite dispelled. His ghosts are confined to their proper sphere, the twilight of the mind, and never venture into the broad glare of daylight. We can see them so long as we do not gaze directly at them; when we turn to examine them they are gone, and we are left in doubt whether they were realities or an ocular delusion generated in our fancy by some accidental collocation of half-seen objects. So in the "House of the Seven Gables" we may hold what opinion we please as to the reality of the curse which hangs over the Pyncheons and the strange connection between them and their hereditary antagonists; in the "Scarlet Letter" we may, if we like, hold that there was really more truth in the witch legends which colour the imaginations of the actors than we are apt to dream of in our philosophy; and in "Transformation" we are left finally in doubt as to the great question of Donatello"s ears, and the mysterious influence which he retains over the animal world so long as he is unstained by bloodshed. In "Septimius"

alone, it seems to me that the supernatural is left in rather too obtrusive a shape in spite of the final explanations; though it might possibly have been toned down had the story received the last touches of the author. The artifice, if so it may be called, by which this is effected--and the romance is just sufficiently dipped in the shadow of the marvellous to be heightened without becoming offensive--sounds, like other things, tolerably easy when it is explained; and yet the difficulty is enormous, as may appear on reflection as well as from the extreme rarity of any satisfactory work in the same style by other artists. With the exception of a touch or two in Scott"s stories, such as the impressive Bodach Glas, in "Waverley," and the apparition in the exquisite "Bride of Lammermoor," it would be difficult to discover any parallel.

In fact Hawthorne was able to tread in that magic circle only by an exquisite refinement of taste, and by a delicate sense of humour, which is the best preservative against all extravagance. Both qualities combine in that tender delineation of character which is, after all, one of his greatest charms. His Puritan blood shows itself in sympathy, not with the stern side of the ancestral creed, but with the feebler characters upon whom it weighed as an oppressive terror. He resembles, in some degree, poor Clifford Pyncheon, whose love of the beautiful makes him suffer under the stronger will of his relatives and the prim stiffness of their home. He exhibits the suffering of such a character all the more effectively because, with his kindly compa.s.sion there is mixed a delicate flavour of irony. The more tragic scenes affect us, perhaps, with less sense of power; the playful, though melancholy, fancy seems to be less at home when the more powerful emotions are to be excited; and yet once, at least, he draws one of those pictures which engrave themselves instantaneously on the memory. The grimmest or most pa.s.sionate of writers could hardly have improved the scene where the body of the magnificent Zen.o.bia is discovered in the river. Every touch goes straight to the mark. The narrator of the story, accompanied by the man whose coolness has caused the suicide, and the shrewd, unimaginative Yankee farmer, who interprets into coa.r.s.e, downright language the suspicions which they fear to confess to themselves, are sounding the depths of the river by night in a leaky punt with a long pole. Silas Foster represents the brutal, commonplace comments of the outside world, which jar so terribly on the more sensitive and closely interested actors in the tragedy. "Heigho!" he soliloquises, with offensive loudness, "life and death together make sad work for us all. Then I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I"m getting to be an old fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads, if I thought anything had really happened to Zen.o.bia, I should feel kind o"

sorrowful." That is the discordant chorus of the gravediggers in "Hamlet." At length the body is found, and poor Zen.o.bia is brought to the sh.o.r.e with her knees still bent in the att.i.tude of prayer, and her hands clenched in immitigable defiance. Foster tries in vain to straighten the dead limbs. As the teller of the story gazes at her, the grimly ludicrous reflection occurs to him that if Zen.o.bia had foreseen all "the ugly circ.u.mstances of death--how ill it would become her, the altogether unseemly aspect which she must put on, and especially old Silas Foster"s efforts to improve the matter--she would no more have committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public a.s.sembly in a badly-fitting garment."

_BALZAC"S NOVELS_

Balzac exacts more attention than most novel-readers are inclined to give; he is often repulsive, and not unfrequently dull; but the student who has once submitted to his charm becomes spell-bound. Disgusted for a moment, he returns again and again to the strange, hideous, grotesque, but most interesting world to which Balzac alone can introduce him. Like the opium-eater, he acquires a taste for the visions that are conjured up before him with so vivid a colouring, that he almost believes in their objective existence. There are perhaps greater novelists than Balzac; there are many who preach a purer morality; and many who give a far greater impression of general intellectual force; but in this one quality of intense realisation of actors and scenery he is unique.

Balzac, indeed, was apparently himself almost incapable of distinguishing his dreams from realities. Great wits, we know, are allied to madness; and the boundaries seem in his case to have been most shadowy and indistinct. Indeed, if the anecdotes reported of him be accurate--some of them are doubtless rather overcharged--he must have lived almost in a state of permanent hallucination. This, for example, is a characteristic story. He inhabited for some years a house called _les Jardies_, in the neighbourhood of Paris. He had a difficulty in providing material furniture, owing to certain debts, which, as some sceptics insinuated, were themselves a vast mystification. He habitually ascribed his poverty to a certain "deficit Kessner," a loss which reposed on some trifling foundation of facts, but which a.s.sumed monstrous proportions in his imagination, and recurred perpetually as the supposed cause of his poverty. In sober reality, however, he was poor, and found compensation in creating a vast credit, as imaginary as his liabilities. Upon that bank he could draw without stint. He therefore inscribed in one place upon the bare walls of his house, "Ici un revetement de marbre de Paros;" in another, "Ici un plafond peint par Eugene Delacroix;" in a third, "Ici des portes, facon Trianon;" and, in short, revelled in gorgeous decorations made of the same materials as the dishes of the Barmecides" feast. A minor source of wealth was the single walnut-tree which really grew in his gardens, and which increased his dream-revenue by 60_l._ a year. This extraordinary result was due, not to any merit in the nuts, but to an ancient and imaginary custom of the village which compelled the inhabitants to deposit round its foot a material defined by Victor Hugo as "du guano moins les oiseaux." The most singular story, however, and which we presume is to be received with a certain reserve, tells how he roused two of his intimate friends at two o"clock one morning, and urged them to start for India without an hour"s delay. The cause of this journey was that a certain German historian had presented Balzac with a seal, valued by the thoughtless at the sum of six sous. The ring, however, had a singular history in Balzac"s dreamland. It was impressed with the seal of the Prophet, and had been stolen by the English from the Great Mogul. Balzac had or had not been informed by the Turkish amba.s.sador that that potentate would repurchase it with tons of gold and diamonds, and was benevolent enough to propose that his friend should share in the stores which would exceed the dreams of Aladdin.

How far these and other such fancies were a merely humorous protest against the harsh realities of life, may be a matter of speculation; but it is less doubtful that the fict.i.tious personages with whom Balzac surrounded himself lived and moved in his imagination as distinctly as the flesh-and-blood realities who were treading the pavement of Paris.

He did not so much invent characters and situations as watch his imaginary world, and compile the memories of its celebrities. All English readers are acquainted with the little circle of clergymen and wives who inhabit the town of Barchester. Balzac has carried out the same device on a gigantic scale. He has peopled not a country town but a metropolis. There is a whole society, with the members of which we are intimate, whose family secrets are revealed to us, and who drop in, as it were, in every novel of a long series, as if they were old friends.

When, for example, young Victurnien d"Esgrignon comes to Paris he makes acquaintance, we are told, with De Marsay, Maxime de Trailles, Les Lupeaulx, Rastignac, Vandenesse, Ajuda-Pinto, the d.u.c.h.esses de Grandlieu, de Carigliano, de Chaulieu, the Marquises d"Espard, d"Aiglemont, and De Listomere, Madame Firmiani, the Comtesse de Serizy, and various other heads of the fashionable world. Every one of these special characters has a special history. He or she appears as the hero or heroine of one story, and plays subsidiary parts in a score of others. They recall to us innumerable scandalous episodes, with which anybody who lives in the imaginary society of Balzac"s Paris feels it a duty to be as familiar as a back-stairs politician with the gossip of the House of Commons. The list just given is a mere fragment of the great circle to which Balzac introduces us. The history of their performances is intimately connected with the history of the time; nay, it is sometimes essential to a full comprehension of recent events.

Bishop Proudie, we fear, would scarcely venture to take an active part in the Roman Catholic emanc.i.p.ation; he would be dissolved into thin air by contact with more substantial forms; but if you would appreciate the intrigues which were going on at Paris during the campaign of Marengo, you must study the conversations which took place between Talleyrand, Fouche, Sieyes, Carnot, and Malin, and their relations to that prince of policemen, the well-known Corentin. De Marsay, we are told, with audacious precision of time and place, was President of the Council in 1833. There is no tendency on the part of these spectres to shrink from the light. They rub shoulders with the most celebrated statesmen, and mingle in every event of the time. One is driven to believe that Balzac really fancied the banker Nucingen to be as tangible as a Rothschild, and was convinced that the conversations of Louis XVIII. with Vandenesse were historic facts. His sister tells us that he discussed the behaviour of his own creations with the utmost gravity, and was intensely interested in discovering their fate, and getting the earliest information as to the alliances which they were about to form. It is a curious question, upon which I cannot profess to speak positively, whether this voluminous story ever comes into hopeless conflict with dates. I have some suspicions that the brilliant journalist, Blondet, was married and unmarried at the same period; but, considering his very loose mode of life, the suspicion, if true, is susceptible of explanation. Such study as I have made has not revealed any case of inconsistency; and Balzac evidently has the whole secret (for it seems harsh to call it fict.i.tious) history of the time so completely at his fingers" ends, that the effect upon the reader is to produce an unhesitating confidence. If a blunder occurs one would rather believe in a slip of the pen, such as happens to real historians, not in the substantial inaccuracy of the narrative. Sir A. Alison, it may be remembered, brings Sir Peregrine Pickle to the Duke of Wellington"s funeral, which must have occurred after Sir Peregrine"s death; and Balzac"s imaginary narrative may not be perfectly free from anachronism.

But, if so, I have not found him out. Everybody must sympathise with the English lady who is said to have written to Paris for the address of that most imposing physician, Horace Bianchion.

The startling realisation may be due in part to a mere literary trick.

We meet with artifices like those by which De Foe cheats us into forgetfulness of his true character. One of the best known is the insertion of superfluous bits of information, by way of entrapping his readers into the inference that they could only have been given because they were true. The snare is more worthy of a writer of begging-letters than of a genuine artist. Balzac occasionally indulges in somewhat similar devices; little indirect allusions to his old characters are thrown in with a calculated nonchalance; we have bits of antiquarian information as to the history of buildings; superfluous accounts of the coats-of-arms of the princ.i.p.al families concerned, and anecdotes as to their ancestry; and, after he has given us a name, he sometimes takes care to explain that the p.r.o.nunciation is different from the spelling.

As a rule, however, these irrelevant minutiae seem to be thrown in, not by way of tricking us, but because he has so genuine an interest in his own personages. He is as anxious to set De Marsay or the Pere Goriot distinctly before us, as Carlyle to make us acquainted with Frederick or Cromwell. Our most vivid painter of historical portraits is not more charmed to discover a characteristic incident in the life of his heroes, or to describe the pimples on his face, or the specks of blood on his collar, than Balzac to do the same duty for the creations of his fancy.

De Foe may be compared to those favourites of showmen who cheat you into mistaking a flat-wall painting for a bas-relief. Balzac is one of the patient Dutch artists who exhaust inconceivable skill and patience in painting every hair on the head and every wrinkle on the face till their work has a photographic accuracy. The result, it must be confessed, is sometimes rather trying to the patience. Balzac"s artistic instinct, indeed, renders every separate touch more or less conducive to the general effect; but he takes an unconscionable time in preparing his ground. Instead of launching boldly into his story, and leaving his characters to speak for themselves, he begins, as it were, by taking his automatons carefully to pieces, and pointing out all their wires and springs. He leaves nothing unaccounted for. He explains the character of each actor as he comes upon the stage; and, not content with making general remarks, he plunges with extraordinary relish into the minutest personal details. In particular, we know just how much money everybody has got, and how he has got it. Balzac absolutely revels in elaborate financial statements. And constantly, just as we hope that the action is about to begin, he catches us, as it were, by the b.u.t.ton-hole, and begs us to wait a minute to listen to a few more preparatory remarks. In one or two of the stories, as, for example, in the "Maison Nucingen," the introduction seems to fill the whole book. After expecting some catastrophe, we gradually become aware that Balzac has thought it necessary to give us a conscientious explanation of some very dull commercial intrigues, in order to fill up gaps in other stories of the cycle. Some one might possibly ask, what was the precise origin of this great failure of which we hear so much, and Balzac resolves that he shall have as complete an answer as though he were an accountant drawing up a balance-sheet. It is said, I know not on what authority, that his story of "Cesar Birotteau" has, in fact, been quoted in French courts as ill.u.s.trating the law of bankruptcy; and the details given are so ample, and, to English readers at least, so wearisome, that it really reads more like a legal statement of

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