Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 06

								

is never the age to classify and analyze them.  We have had a deluge, and
now new creatures spring from the new soil."
"An excellent simile: they come forth from slime and mud,--fetid and
crawling, unformed and monstrous.  I grant exceptions; and even in the
New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and
creative power of Victor Hugo.  But oh, that a nation which has known a
Corneille should ever spawn forth a -----!  And with these rickety and
drivelling abortions--all having followers and adulators--your Public can
still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the day when
they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can bear to
hear ----- proclaimed a sublime genius in the same circles which sneer
down Voltaire!"
Voltaire is out of fashion in France, but Rousseau still maintains his
influence, and boasts his imitators.  Rousseau was the worse man of the
two; perhaps he was also the more dangerous writer.  But his reputation
is more durable, and sinks deeper into the heart of his nation; and the
danger of his unstable and capricious doctrines has passed away.  In
Voltaire we behold the fate of all writers purely destructive; their uses
cease with the evils they denounce.  But Rousseau sought to construct as
well as to destroy; and though nothing could well be more absurd than his
constructions, still man loves to look back and see even delusive
images--castles in the air--reared above the waste where cities have
been.  Rather than leave even a burial-ground to solitude, we populate it
with ghosts.
By degrees, however, as he mastered all the features of the French
literature, Maltravers become more tolerant of the present defects, and
more hopeful of the future results.  He saw in one respect that that
literature carried with it its own ultimate redemption.
Its general characteristic--contradistinguished from the literature of
the old French classic school--is to take the heart for its study; to
bring the passions and feelings into action, and let the Within have its
record and history as well as the Without.  In all this our contemplative
analyst began to allow that the French were not far wrong when they
contended that Shakspeare made the fountain of their inspiration,--a
fountain which the majority of our later English Fictionists have
neglected.  It is not by a story woven of interesting incidents, relieved
by delineations of the externals and surface of character, humorous
phraseology, and every-day ethics, that Fiction achieves its grandest
ends.
In the French literature, thus characterized, there is much false
morality, much depraved sentiment, and much hollow rant; but still it
carries within it the germ of an excellence, which, sooner or later, must
in the progress of national genius arrive at its full development.
Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that nothing really immoral is