It must be owned, that gallantry has a good deal to do in giving these works the name of history. They want all the vigour, all the philosophy, and all the eloquence of history. Of course, no human being will ever apply to them as authorities. Still, they have the merit of giving general statements to general readers, of supplying facts in their regular order, and probably, of inducing the multitude, who would shrink from the formalities of Hume or Gibbon in solemn quartos and ponderous octavos, to dip into pages having all the look and nearly all the slightness of the modern novel. At all events, if they do nothing else, they employ the time of pens, which might be much worse occupied; and that pens are often much worse occupied, we have evidence from hour to hour.
The French novels are making rapid way into our circulating libraries. Yet nothing can be more unfortunate, for nothing can be more corrupting than a French novel of the nineteenth century. France, always a profligate country, always had profligate writers. But they were generally confined to "Memoirs," "Court anecdotes," and the ridicule of the world of Versailles; their criminality was at least partially concealed by their good breeding, and their vice was not altogether lowered to the grossness of the crowd.
The Revolution created a new school. All there was hatred to duty, faith, and honour. The deepest profligacy was pictured as scarcely less than the natural right of man; and all the abominations of the human heart were excited, encouraged, and propagated by daring pens, sometimes subtle, sometimes eloquent, and in all instances appealing to the most tempting abominations of man.
But the Revolution fell, and with the ascendant of Napoleon another school followed. War, public business, the general objects of the active faculties, and strong ambition of a people with Europe at its feet, partially superseded alike the frivolous taste of the monarchy, and the rabid ferocities of revolutionary authorship. The Bulletins of the "Grande Armée" told a daily tale of romance, to which the brains of a Parisian scribbler could find no rival, and men with the sound of falling thrones echoing in their ears, forgot the whispers of low intrigue and commonplace corruption.
The "Three Glorious Days" of July 1830, have now produced another change; and peace has given leisure to think of something else than conquest and the conscription. The power of the national pen has turned again to fiction, and the natural wit, habitual dexterity, and dashing verbiage of France have all been thrown into the novel. Even the French drama, once the pride of the nation, has perished under this sudden pressure. A French modern tragedy is now only a rhymed melodrama. Even French history attracts popular applause only as it approaches to a three volume romance. Every man of name in French modern authorship has attained it only by the rapid production of novels. But no language can be too contemptuous, or too condemnatory, for the spirit of those works in general. Every tie of society is violated in the progress of their pages; and violated with the full approval of every body. Seduction is the habitual office of the hero. Adultery is the regular office of the heroine. In each the vice is simply a matter of course. Manly honour is a burlesque every where, but where the criminal shoots the injured husband in a duel. Female virtue is only a proof of dulness or decay, a vulgar formality of mind, or an unaccountable inaptitude to adopt the customs of polished society.
The hero is pictured with every quality which can charm the eye or ear; he is the handsomest, the most accomplished, and the most high-spirited of mankind, all sentiment, and all scoundrelism. The heroine, always a wife or a widow,—in the former instance, is the "lovely victim of a marriage in which her heart had no share," and in which she is entitled to have all the privileges of her heart supplied. And in the latter is a creature full of charms, about twenty-one, resolved to live for love, but never to be "chained in the iron links of a dull and obsolete ceremonial" again. She quickly fixes her eyes on some Adolphe, Auguste, or Hyppolite, "Officier de la Garde," who has performed prodigies of valour in Algiers, taken lions by the beard every where, and is the best waltzer in all Paris. They meet, flame together, swear an amitié eternelle, and defy the world, through three volumes.
In reprobating this detestable school, we certainly have no hope that our remarks will reform the French novelism of the day; but we call on the critical press of England to take up the rational and righteous task of reforming our own.
Within these few years, the English novels are rapidly falling into the imitation of the French. And we say it with no less regret than surprise, that the chief imitators are females. The novels written by men have generally some manliness, some recollection of the higher impulses which occasionally act on the minds of men; some reluctancy in revealing the more infirm movements of the mind; and some doubts as to the absorption of all human nature in one perpetual whirl of love-making.
But with the female pen in general, the whole affair is resolved into one impulse—all is "passion." The winds of heaven have nothing to do, but to "waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole." The art of printing is seriously presumed to have been invented only for "some banished lover, or some captive maid." Flirtation is the grand business of life. The maiden flirts from the nursery, the married woman flirts from the altar. The widow adds to the miscellaneous cares of her "bereaved" life, flirtation from the hearse which carries her husband to his final mansion. She flirts in her weeds more glowingly than ever. But she knows too well the "value of her liberty" to submit to be a slave once more; and so flirts on for life, in the most innocent manner imaginable, taking all risks, and throwing herself into situations of which the result would be obvious any where but in the pages of an English novel.
The French have no scruples on such subjects, and their candour leaves nothing to the imagination. Our female novelists have not yet arrived at that pitch of explicitness, and it is to be hoped will pause before they leap the gulf.