called licentious novels; for Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderotthough they did worse-if worse can be can hardly, for the reasons before stated, be included in this particular category: while, on the other hand, there is an illustrious list of men, and more particularly of women, who really have deserved Warburton's praise of having improved the charms of fictitious narratives, with the higher graces of morality and occasionally of piety.

The first burst of the Revolution drowned all literature-bad as well as good-in a deluge of blood. The powers of imagination fell prostrate before the despotic realities. No romance could be so terrific-no drama so bloody-no tale so profligate as the passing events and the prevailing manners. But, when on the fall of Robespierre, something like security and order revived, the novelists re-appeared, though with altered features: the nation had supped so full of horrors,' that it had no taste for the sensibilities of fictitious distresses; and the upper ranks of society, which had hitherto afforded the personages of the novel of manners, were utterly exterminated, so that those two great sources of description were dried up. Authors were, therefore, driven-the graver and the more moral (a select few) into the historic romance and the less scrupulous majority into the broad humour and loose gaieties of low or middle life.

These productions-of which Pigault Le Brun's may be cited as the most remarkable-are for the most part tainted with vulgarity and indecency, and though they have none of the deep corruption of Crebillon or La Clos, they give but a bad impression of the manners and morals of the society in which they acquired so much popularity. Under the Empire and the Restoration, all violent outrages against either morals or religion were restrained; but there still continued a coarseness and laxity, which was, however, we think, gradually disappearing, when the July Revolution gave a new and formidable appearance to a species of writing which had hitherto (notwithstanding a few culpable exceptions) exhibited nothing which indicated either the existence of an extensive or profound immorality in the nation at large, or the danger that such a state of immorality might be created.

Unfortunately, the present state of things indicates both― that there must be already a wide immorality, and that, under such powerful excitements, the contagion is likely to spread beyond all control. If one or two authors, in one, or two, or three works, had been seduced by a depraved taste or betrayed by a too lively fancy into culpable excesses, we should have seen cause of regret rather than alarm; but the enormity of the evil, both in mass and matter, gives the whole affair its distinctive character. Three novels of Crebillon were enough to give

the

the romance literature of France a bad name for half a century; within five years we have had twice fifty publications, each of which equals Crebillon in personal profligacy, and superadds, what he never dealt with, details of swindling, robbery, and murder-as scenes of private life in France-of which the most depraved imagination of former times had never formed any conception.

We are far from believing, because an individual author calls his work an image of real life, that it really is so; but when all who affect to paint from the life agree in one general character of society, it is impossible not to fear that there must be some existing prototype of such unconcerted resemblances. M. Scribe, the comic dramatist, and one whose muse borrows little or none of her reputation from profligacy or terror, was lately elected into the French Academy. In his speech of reception, the facetious author amused his auditory by a paradox -from his mouth peculiarly piquant-of denying that the stage exhibited a picture of real life-for, added he, if that were to be taken as a criterion, life in France must be reckoned as little else than one black tragedy of adultery, incest, and murder.' M. Scribe was evidently faisant ses farces-and M. Villemain, the president of the night, reproved him with equal keenness and good sense for the absurd levity of his discourse; but M. Villemain is a hot partisan of the July Revolution, and one of the happy few who have got anything by it-for he has been made a peer of France. He could not, therefore, do full justice on M. Scribe without confessing more than he was willing to do of the effects of the late Revolution;-else he might have reminded M. Scribe that it was not the theatre alone which indicated so diseased a state of society-he might have told him that, between the day of his election and that of his reception, there had been exhibited before the various tribunals of France a series of trials, proving a greater proportion of all species of crime than we believe he could have paralleled in any equal period of the judicial annals of his country-quite enough to have furnished a tragic drama of the most revolting details to every one of the rival theatres of Paris. Nay, at the moment M. Scribe was indulging in what he and his auditory thought, no doubt, an agreeable 'persiflage,' the three chief actors of one of the most wholesale murders ever perpetrated were lying-in dungeons within a street's length of the room in which he was speaking-under the intermittent agonies of a trial at which M. Villemain himself had an hour before been sitting as a judge.

M. Scribe might indeed, and, if he had been serious, would no doubt have alleged, and M. Villemain might have admitted as we are ready to do that there is, and always was, one class

of

of dramatic pieces which makes no pretension to paint existing manners-we mean those which represent foreign subjects and distant days; but even these must be admitted to evidence the taste at least of the times which produce them. The Tour de Nesle of the sixteenth century, and the Lucrèce Borgia of Italy, are not to be admitted as standards of the manners of France at the present day, but what shall we say of them as indexes of the taste of contemporary audiences? And what would M. Scribe say of Antony, a professed copy of existing life, and of its eighty representations, and of the necessity in which the government felt itself of arresting by a vigour beyond the law the course of such a scandalous spectacle? But again: if we admit that the scenes which the French dramatist may select from by-gone times and distant countries are no more to be taken as pictures of real French life than the story of Atreus or Edipus would be of Athenian manners, or Shakspeare's Richard III.' of the court of Queen Elizabeth, yet we would ask M. Scribe whether he can extend the same indulgent construction to the novels of the day, which profess to lay their scenes in Paris, to fix their date at the year 1835-to copy their personages from the existing population-and which one and all concur in representing the actual state of society as redundant with every species of crime? And, above all, what answer will he make when we repeat, what we shall presently prove in detail, that every number of the Gazette des Tribunaux teems with instances of the actual commission of crimes only differing from those most in favour with the novelists by being often deeper in degree? If M. Scribe will soberly and satisfactorily answer these questions, his reply will do more honour to his country than his lively speech at the academy, or the gay farces which caused his election into that grave and illustrious body.

Let us now endeavour to support our view of this important matter by a slight analysis of some of the works to which we have alluded. We say endeavour, not from any difficulty which we should feel in making such an analysis, but from our doubt how we can manage even the most cautious sketch of such a mass of impurities so as to render it tolerable to an English eye.

We begin by M. CHARLES PAUL DE KOCK, the earliest, we believe, the gayest, and by no means the most offensive of the batch. De Kock's works have already reached eighty volumes, most of them anterior to the July Revolution. Those were of the Pigault Le Brun school, coarse and loose, rather than deeply licentious, and belonged rather to the grivois than to the criminal style-but his last work, Ni jamais ni toujours (in 4. vols.), has taken the colour of the times, and is quite in character with its worst contemporaries. The title has no relation that we can discover with

the

the story, which is that of two young men of those classes of society which have replaced in modern French novels the Viscomtes and Chevaliers of the old school-a igay homme de lettres, M. Arthur, and a grave etudiant, M. Adolphe. The novel opens by a visit paid, in a rainy night and on foot, to M. Arthur by Madame de Menerville, the young wife of a wealthy and elderly gentleman. M. Adolphe, less aspiring, contents himself with a soidisante widow of the name of Juliette-who has, at the same time, an intrigue with his livelier friend Arthur-who, again, is not more faithful to Madame de Menerville than she is to her husband. These two women by ill luck meet at Arthur's lodgings. Madame Juliette, who has no scruples of her own, becomes possessed of the secret of Madame de Menerville's frailty, of which in due time she makes the natural use. M. Adolphe, who, though a student in law, has the misfortune to be a dolt, is entrapped into a marriage with Madame Juliette, who eventually rewards him by introducing to his acquaintance, society, and purse, an old friend of hers-a convicted felon. M. Arthur, who has hitherto been a discarded son, is now acknowledged by his father, the Baron de Harleville, who, not contented with the acquisition of this amiable young man to his family, marries an amiable young lady, whose character is not quite as good as her person-for she had been an old street acquaintance of his son's. This excellent young woman is of so domestic a turn, that she shows no equivocal disposition to treat Arthur with more than maternal affection, and is the rather surprised and disappointed at his coldness, as she had recently helped him to seduce her own sister. Madame Juliette, on some personal slight from the ungrateful Arthur, now springs her mine on Madame de Menerville, and of course causes her expulsion from the house of her husband, who, to console his solitude, brings home and recognizes an illegitimate son whom he had, some years before, acquired with the help of that universally obliging person Juliette. M. de Menerville, dying soon after, bequeaths to this son the portion of his fortune which he could dispose of, while the great bulk of it by the wise and equitable code of France-passes to his disgraced wife, who hastens to bestow it, as she had already done her fame and her person, upon Arthur. It might be expected that, in the last page at least, M. Paul de Kock would have endeavoured to solder up the reputation of his hero and heroine by uniting Arthur and his rich and beautiful widow in lawful wedlock, but such a denouement is now quite usé and de mauvais ton in France.

'You naturally expect,' says Arthur in the last sentence of the work, that we are about to conclude our long and tender intercourse

by

by a legitimate union-but no-we are so happy as we are, why should we change our condition!'

It is impossible to describe the mutual infidelities, the debauchery, the treachery, the knavery of all the principal and subordinate characters in this novel, which are detailed with the most ingenuous impudence. M. de Kock, we are told, only deals in the gaieties of life; and, indeed, we must bear witness that he rejects two excellent opportunities of incest and murder, and is so little fond of blood that there is but one suicide, and, we believe, only two criminal convictions to be found in the whole novel, though there is hardly one of the dramatis persona who, in the hands of more rigorous justice, ought not to have been hanged! Our readers, we suppose, will ask for no further specimens of the morality of M. Paul de Kock!

VICTOR HUGO our readers will recollect as the author of Marion de Lorme, Le Roi s'amuse, and Lucrèce Borgia, three of the worst in point of moral, and of the best in point of talent, of the dramas we have so often referred to. His novels are (except one) of an earlier date, and exhibit little, in our opinion, of the vices or merits of his dramas. They do not belong to our subject, for they do not affect to describe the manners of the day. Hans d'Island is a Norwegian, and Bug Jargal a West-Indian tale; Notre Dame de Paris carries us back to the reign of Louis XI., and is an imitation of Sir Walter Scott-whom, soit dit en passant, it resembles as Goose Gibby in his helmet and buff coat might resemble the noble chivalry of Lord Evandale. But Hugo's last romance, Le dernier jour d'un Condamné,' belongs to recent days. We have nothing to object to it, except the depraved taste which the author shows in himself, and imputes to the French public, by drawing out into a volume the agonies of a dying wretch. To be sure M. Hugo has contrived that even in this way his volume should be less offensive than it seems, for it is printed in so diffuse a style, divided into so many chapters, and each chapter is so short and so carefully separated by blank leaves and open spaces, that of 312 pages, of which the volume consists, there are but 158, or about one-half, of letter-press, the rest being-what without our previous explanation would seem a miracle in modern French literature-quite pure. This style of book-making may not be altogether new, but it has never before been our good fortune to buy so much white paper while we thought we were purchasing a ! book; yet, so far are we from complaining of this substitution, that we should have liked our bargain still better if the printer's ink had not spoiled any of the pages.

We suspect, from the prefaces and notices which he is apt to affix to his works, that M. Hugo is somewhat sore to even the

gentlest