“These were the storms that thrilled him. He could moan with the moaning wood; he could struggle with the strong oak’s struggling; he felt himself o’erthrown, as the lightning crushed it to the earth; and when the calm and the silence had followed, he could say to his pride of heart, ‘Thou seest how vain and how feeble is the might of the creature when it warreth with its God.’
“For the rest, he wondered that it did not make the porpoises dizzy to turn so many somersets; and when the hawks caught Mother Carey’s chickens, and brought them on board to eat them, he noticed that the little things were very fat, and presumed that but for their fishy taste, they would be very good in a pot-pie.”
Our limits warn us to quote no further, though we would do so willingly, and leave us only room to say that if this book do not make its mark, we cannot conjecture the reason why.
Men and Women of the Eighteenth Century. By Arsene Houssaye. New York: Redfield. 2 vols. 12mo.
This volume gives the most vivid picture of the manners, morals, and government of France during the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV., and the whole of that of Louis XV., we have ever seen. It enables the reader to understand the real character of that Ancien Régime which was overthrown by the Revolution of 1789, and exhibits a state of society bereft of all moral vigor, licentious, lazy, impudent, debilitated, dissolute, without religion, without shame, without any depth of passion, and superficial even in its wickedness. The author of the sketches, himself a Frenchman without much austerity of principle, glances lightly over his themes, bringing out with a certain French refinement of perception and phrase all the piquant littlenesses of his subject, and, a wit himself, taking great delight in making his readers familiar with the wit of others. He has sacked all the many memoirs of the time for materials; has selected with a nice tact all their stimulating matter, without burdening his page with their trash; and, before attempting the task of composition, evidently familiarized his imagination with the persons and events he describes, so that they moved before him picturesquely, enveloped in their own peculiar atmosphere. The result is quite a dramatic exhibition of kings, princesses, ministers of state, royal and noble mistresses, authors, poets, comedians, actresses, philosophers, artists, atheists, and savans, discriminated in their kind from all others, yet still agreeing with the radical principles of human nature, as those principles were combined in the Frenchman of the eighteenth century, and in a court in which virtue was a jest, vice a distinction, infamy a fashion, and marriage vows as false as dicers’ oaths. The sketch of Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour of the Crebillons, of Buffon, of Cardinal de Bernis, of Mademoiselle Clarion, of Sophie Arnould, of the Duc de Richelieu, (the universal rake,) of Dufresnoy, Marivaux, Dorat, Poson, Fontenelle, and La Fontaine, are representative of the whole. The society described is pretty well summed up by Crebillon, as consisting of “ruined gentlemen living upon their neighbors, rich actresses living with ruined gentlemen.” To an American, the most remarkable thing in the whole representation is the easy suspension of all moral rules whatever in this “good company.” Before he gets half through the book he almost forgets that there is such a thing as duty, or religion, or morality, or glory, or any thing but five senses, in human nature. He feels that the whole structure implies a frightful amount of misgovernment and oppression at home, and of scandalous mismanagement abroad, that France is given up to the plunder of roués and harlots, but the style of Arsene Houssaye is so smooth, and his epigrams so airy and keen, and the felicities he quotes so sparkling, that the whole representation seems to justify itself, and to exhibit quite a delightful scheme of government, “with youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm.” Indeed, though the book is invaluable as a picture of a defunct social state, it becomes tiresome at last with all its brightness and novelty, and the necessity of some affectation at least of noble sentiment is painfully felt to relieve the monotony of its brilliant baseness—some smiting sentences, here and there, to rend the gauzy veil that these flippant libertines have spread over the pandemonium on which their delicious palace of pleasure is built. The Louis the Fifteenth, whose court these volumes describe, is the same Louis whose death was thus announced by an eminent priest to the mob of courtiers who had shared with their monarch the pillage of France: “Louis, the well-beloved, sleeps in the Lord!” “If each a mass of laziness and lust sleep in the Lord, who, think you, sleeps elsewhere?” is Carlyle’s fierce answer.
A Legend of the Waldenses, and Other Tales. By Mary B. Windle. William Moore: Philadelphia.
We take some reproach to ourselves for having omitted to notice the third edition of this very unpretending but very agreeable little volume, which has been on our table for some time past, from the pen of an accomplished lady contributor to many of our monthly magazines. It has decided merit in itself, and gives promise of yet more when the fair writer shall wield a more exercised pen. The style is graceful and pleasant, though occasionally marred by an incorrectly formed and inharmonious word, such, for instance, as “Huguenotic,” where the ic is superfluous as to sense, and ungrateful as to sound. The descriptions of scenery are fresh and vivid; the characters often well conceived and forcibly drawn, and the incidents and conversations quite up to, if not above, the ordinary standard of historical romance.
The story which we like the most is that styled “The Lady of the Rock,” a tale of the trial and execution of the most unfortunate, though not the worst, of kings, Charles the First; who was, in truth, a martyr to principles which he undoubtedly believed to be true, and who died, rather because he would not yield prerogatives which were behind the age in which it was his unhappy fate to live, than because he grasped at powers unused by previous monarchs, or unauthorized by the then constitution. In this very able sketch the characters of the discrowned king, of the stern fanatic, Cromwell, of the serene and stately Milton, are delineated with rare truth and fidelity, and with a vigor which is equaled by few contemporary novelists. This tale, above any other in the volume, leads us to believe that the authoress might be successful were she to try her hand in a wider field of historical romance; should she do so, however, she must avoid, as in the tale called “Florence de Rohan,” wandering too far from the truth of actual history of well known personages; for it is an absolute rule of historico-romantic composition, that, although events and actions, which never really occurred, may be legitimately ascribed to real personages, provided they are in character and keeping with time, place, and person—real events, and real actions, if related at all, must be related as they occurred. In a word, that although it is allowable to add, it is forbidden to detract aught from the truth of history.