Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 06

								

ever permanently popular, or ever, therefore, long deleterious; what is
dangerous in a work of genius cures itself in a few years.  We can now
read "Werther," and instruct our hearts by its exposition of weakness and
passion, our taste by its exquisite and unrivalled simplicity of
construction and detail, without any fear that we shall shoot ourselves
in top-boots!  We can feel ourselves elevated by the noble sentiments of
"The Robbers," and our penetration sharpened as to the wholesale
immorality of conventional cant and hypocrisy, without any danger of
turning banditti and becoming cutthroats from the love of virtue.
Providence, that has made the genius of the few in all times and
countries the guide and prophet of the many, and appointed Literature as
the sublime agent of Civilization, of Opinion, and of Law, has endowed
the elements it employs with a divine power of self-purification.  The
stream settles of itself by rest and time; the impure particles fly off,
or are neutralized by the healthful.  It is only fools that call the
works of a master-spirit immoral.  There does not exist in the literature
of the world one popular book that is immoral two centuries after it is
produced.  For, in the heart of nations, the False does not live so long;
and the True is the Ethical to the end of time.
From the literary Maltravers turned to the political state of France his
curious and thoughtful eye.  He was struck by the resemblance which this
nation--so civilized, so thoroughly European--bears in one respect to the
despotisms of the East: the convulsions of the capital decide the fate of
the country; Paris is the tyrant of France.  He saw in this inflammable
concentration of power, which must ever be pregnant with great evils, one
of the causes why the revolutions of that powerful and polished people
are so incomplete and unsatisfactory, why, like Cardinal Fleury, system
after system, and Government after Government--



       .  .  .  "floruit sine fructu,

       Defloruit sine luctu."*


* "Flourished without fruit, and was destroyed without regret."
Maltravers regarded it as a singular instance of perverse ratiocination,
that, unwarned by experience, the French should still persist in
perpetuating this political vice; that all their policy should still be
the policy of Centralization,--a principle which secures the momentary
strength, but ever ends in the abrupt destruction of States.  It is, in
fact, the perilous tonic, which seems to brace the system, but drives the
blood to the head,--thus come apoplexy and madness.  By centralization
the provinces are weakened, it is true,--but weak to assist as well as to
oppose a government, weak to withstand a mob.  Nowhere, nowadays, is a
mob so powerful as in Paris: the political history of Paris is the
history of snobs.  Centralization is an excellent quackery for a despot
who desires power to last only his own life, and who has but a