Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 06

								

and strongest passion of his life.  It might be seen in the paleness of
his brow, and that nameless expression of suffering which betrays itself
in the lines about the mouth, that his health was affected by the
conflict within him; and many a sudden fit of absence and abstraction,
many an impatient sigh, followed by a forced and unnatural gayety, told
the observant Valerie that he was the prey of a sorrow he was too proud
to disclose.  He compelled himself, however, to take, or to affect, an
interest in the singular phenomena of the social state around
him,--phenomena that, in a happier or serener mood, would indeed have
suggested no ordinary food for conjecture and meditation.
The state of visible transition is the state of nearly all the
enlightened communities in Europe.  But nowhere is it so pronounced as in
that country which may be called the Heart of European Civilization.
There, all to which the spirit of society attaches itself appears broken,
vague, and half developed,--the Antique in ruins, and the New not formed.
It is, perhaps, the only country in which the Constructive principle has
not kept pace with the Destructive.  The Has Been is blotted out; the To
Be is as the shadow of a far land in a mighty and perturbed sea.*


* The reader will remember that these remarks were written long

    before the last French Revolution, and when the dynasty of Louis

    Philippe was generally considered most secure.
Maltravers, who for several years had not examined the progress of modern
literature, looked with mingled feelings of surprise, distaste, and
occasional and most reluctant admiration, on the various works which the
successors of Voltaire and Rousseau have produced, and are pleased to
call the offspring of Truth united to Romance.
Profoundly versed in the mechanism and elements of those masterpieces of
Germany and England, from which the French have borrowed so largely while
pretending to be original, Maltravers was shocked to see the monsters
which these Frankensteins had created from the relics and the offal of
the holiest sepulchres.  The head of a giant on the limbs of a dwarf,
incongruous members jumbled together, parts fair and beautiful,--the
whole a hideous distortion!
"It may be possible," said he to De Montaigne, "that these works are
admired and extolled; but how they can be vindicated by the examples of
Shakspeare and Goethe, or even of Byron, who redeemed poor and
melodramatic conceptions with a manly vigour of execution, an energy and
completeness of purpose, that Dryden himself never surpassed, is to me
utterly inconceivable."
"I allow that there is a strange mixture of fustian and maudlin in all
these things," answered De Montaigne; "but they are but the windfalls of
trees that may bear rich fruit in due season; meanwhile, any new school
is better than eternal imitations of the old.  As for critical
vindications of the works themselves, the age that produces the phenomena