JULES JANIN, AND THE PARIS FEUILLETONISTES.
Jules Janin, whose name, of so constant recurrence in the contemporary history of light literature, artistic criticism, and feuilleton, is the Prince Royal of the brilliant court of gifted, tasteful, witty and spirituel writers, who compose the body of Parisian feuilletonistes. These are men who write, not because they have any thing especial to say—for their peculiar function is to say nothing, in a pointed and brilliant manner—but because they love leisure and luxury, the opera, pictures, and beautiful ballet girls, and must themselves make the golden lining to their purses, which they can do by the very simple process of weaving the similar lining of their brains into a feuilleton. They are often scholars, men of fine cultivation and genius, whose tastes however are so imperious, and who enjoy so much the ease thus facilely achieved, that they accomplish no great work, win no lasting name. Of course the feuilletonist proper is to be distinguished from the author or novelist who publishes a work in the Feuilleton, as Lamartine his Confidences, and Sue and Dumas and George Sand, their romances. We propose now to follow briefly the sparkling career of Jules Janin as the type of the life, character, and success of the feuilletonistes.
He came to Paris, a Jew: as Meyerbeer, Heine, Grisi, Rachel, and the long luminous list of contemporary artists who have made fame in Paris, are Jews. He supported himself by teaching—doing nothing, but very conscious that he could do something—at all events he could lecture upon the Syrian language, if for a week he could prepare himself. Then he wrote in little theatrical papers, and received twenty-five francs a month. But in 1830 he happily succeeded to his present position in the Journal des Debats. He is now a rich man. He gives splendid soirees in his saloons glittering with oriental luxury, and artists and authors bow before him. Like Henry Heine, his contemporary, whom he as much resembles in talent as in manner, he declared now for the Republic and Freedom, now for the Church and King, until his connection with the Debats impressed upon him the conservative seal. He since loudly declaims for public morality—against the prostitution of the press; but his early works were the most licentious of any that have swarmed from the fertile French genius of social protestantism. His first novel, published in 1829, The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman, is the history of a prostitute, from the brothel, to the murder of her child, and her execution, garnished with Byronic sentimentalities upon the transitoriness of things temporal.
Jules Janin's next work was one of the most instructive illustrations of the character of French romance at that period when literary feeling and taste seemed to reach the artificial point that is artistically achieved by the melo-dramas of Chatham-street and the Strand. We record it as a literary curiosity, as the work of a "fast" Frenchman, a Parisian Vivian Grey, on a small scale. It is called The Penitent, and was published in 1830. It opens with a marriage. The bride, who has been violently dancing, retires, overcome with sleep, and the husband in his rage at her sleepiness smothers her. It is nominally supposed that she has been stricken with apoplexy, but a Jesuit, who meditates many mysteries, understands the whole matter, yet observes the most discreet silence. The young man, who is somewhat conscience-pricked, still persists in profligacy, until he is overwhelmed by remorse, and rushes to the church to receive absolution. He seeks a trusty confessor, and of course finds the old Jesuit; but as he finds it difficult to obtain access to him, makes the acquaintance of a girl, with whom the Jesuit has some kind of relation, and in order to win her to his will, seduces her! Then comes the Jesuit and begins to fulminate excommunications and damnations. But the youth bursts into a passionate strain of repentance, and is told by the old Jesuit, that the difficulty in his case, is a religious one, that in fact the murder was "a circumstance" arising from his irreligious state, and that by genuine repentance the matter will be arranged. Presto: The youth repents and enters the church, is made Bishop and proceeds through an endless course of fat capon and Château Margaux to an edifying end!
The boldest efforts of young France and young Germany, are feeble by the side of this extraordinary effort. His earlier tales, which are somewhat in the style of Hoffmann, Jules Janin published in the year 1833, under the title of Fantastic Tales, and a series of works of less size and importance followed, until the series of papers, half fiction, half fact, which, in the novel form, treated a great variety of historico-literary subjects. His last romance is the Nun of Toulouse, written during the revolution of '48. It sparkles with the same sprightly skepticism and spiritual coquetry that distinguished his earlier works, yet he celebrates in it those beautiful times, the "old times," in which the serenity of faith was never ruffled by impertinent thought; and in his recent letters from the Great Exhibition, he indulges in the same strain, and sighs for the magnificence of the monarchy.
But his weekly contributions to the Debats, the rapid dashing review of the dramatic novelties and incidents in a metropolis where alone a living drama survives, and which he serves up garnished with the most felicitous verbal graces and the most charming intellectual conceits, every Monday morning—these are the flowers whence the brilliant Jules Janin builds the honey hive of his reputation. He has decreed the fashion of the Feuilleton, and the other Parisian critics flash and snap and sparkle, as much like Jules Janin as possible. Their articles are the streak of light in the dimness of the preponderating political literature of the week. They hold high holiday at the bottom of the page, although the history of revolutions, and woes, and the rumors of wars and impending millenniums may throw their sombre shadows along the columns above. They raise their banner of a butterfly's wing, emblazoned with Vive la Bagatelle, and march on to the tournament of wit and beauty. They belong to France; their game is the gambol of the exuberance of French genius. They are more than witty, they are spirituel; and they have more than talent, they have taste.
In a day of such rapid and facile printing as ours, this department of literary labor was a necessity. Every man who has a conceit and can write, may parade it before the world. In the mass of pleasant common-place, what is bizarre may supplant the symmetrically beautiful. To seize therefore what every man saw, and with nimble fingers to weave a transparent tissue of gorgeous words through which every man's impressions of what he saw look large and graceful and piquant—to sum up a vaudeville in a bon mot, and a ballet in a voluptuous trope,—voila! c'est fait, you have the recipe of a successful feuilletoniste. Hence, the influence of these writers, upon words, has been remarkable. The French language, long so precise, is now among the most dissolute of tongues. It reels through the columns of a feuilleton, drunk and dim-eyed with expletives and exaggerations and beatified adjectives, so that, fascinated with the casket, you quite forget the jewel. The language of dramatic and operatic criticism in Paris is now inexplicable to any one but an habitué. If you should tell John Bull, who wishes to go to the opera, that Alboni's singing is pyramidale, he would expect to see the fair and fat contralto sharpened to a point at top,—but, I grant, if you should call it "jolly" or "stunning," he would entirely comprehend that you meant to express your admiration in superlatives.
I must not longer gossip as these gay gossips do, these fanciful feuilletonistes, nor seek more deeply to draw the outline of these rainbow bubbles upon the stream of the time, whether it flow turbid or transparent. One cannot live upon sugar and nutmeg, or even upon allspice. But our friends are a literary phenomenon not to be omitted, and if you love the Muses, you will not omit to snuff the azure incense offered weekly by the feuilletonistes.
Jules Janin shall show us out of this article as he ushered us in. The Great Mogul of the Feuilleton had purchased a carriage whose luxury, and taste of appointment, and perfection of footman, was unsurpassed in the Champs Elysée. But the gods are jealous and the feuilletonistes have thus the highest authority for jealousy. So, on one evening when the exquisite equipage awaited its master at the grand opera, a crowd of lesser critical luminaries gathered around it, and both reviled and envied the fortunate owner. While they were thus engaged, the great critic came out of the opera house and saw his contemporaries engaged in longing and envious remark. Now tact is the sublimest secret of success—and smilingly Jules Janin advanced cheerily, greeted his friends cordially, and piled into the carriage all of them who lived in his neighborhood.
They naturally reserved the seat of honor for the owner, but this great General seizing the most inimical of all the party who lived in a quarter of the city farthest from his own home, pushed him into the vacant seat, ordered his coachman to set him down first, and then humming the finale of the opera, lighted a cigar and sauntered leisurely down the street. It was like Jules Janin to make his own marriage the subject of a Feuilleton. In his case the man and the feuilletoniste are the same.