And liberal applications lie In Art, like Nature, dearest friend; Should hook it to some useful end. Every work of Art, says Hegel, has its moral; but the moral depends on him that draws it. We should prefer, however, the Tennysonian development of that principle* to the Hegelian. In his preface to an intermediate work between "Pelham" and "My Novel" to both of which, allusion has been made in the foregoing pages-Sir E. B. Lytton takes some pains to discuss the "important question," so much ventilated by critics, especially in Germany (the native land of criticism), whether to please or to instruct should be the end of Fiction-whether a moral purpose is or is not in harmony with the undidactic spirit perceptible in the higher works of the imagination: and the general result of the discussion he reports to be in favour of those who have contended that Moral Design, rigidly so called, should be excluded from the aims of the Poet; whose Art should regard only the Beautiful, and be contented with the indirect moral tendencies, which can never fail the creation of the Beautiful. Sir Edward, for his part, fully admits that to elevate man from life's grovelling realisms into a higher and ideal region may, without other moral result or object, satisfy the Poet-meaning by that term any writer, whether in verse or prose, who invents or creates-and may constitute the highest and most universal morality he can effect. But he contends, at the same time, that, subordinate to this, which is not the duty but the necessity of all Fiction that outlasts the hour, the writer of imagination may well permit to himself other purposes and objects, taking care that they be not too sharply defined, and too obviously meant to contract the poet into the lecturer, the fiction into the homily. "The delight in Shylock is not less vivid for the Humanity it latently but profoundly inculcates; the healthful merriment of the Tartufe' is not less enjoyedt for the exposure of the Hypocrisy it denounces. We need not demand from Shakspeare or Molière other morality than that which Genius unconsciously throws around it-the natural light which it reflects; but if some great principle which guides us practically in the daily intercourse with men becomes in the general lustre more clear and more pronounced-we gain doubly, by the general tendency and the particular result."+ Notwithstanding a foregone plethora of illustration, we must here take note of the quite note-worthy protests, consistently renewed when • Of Mr. Froude's "Nemesis of Faith" it was remarked at the time, in the pages too of a Review virtually at one with himself in antagonism to orthodoxy, that the writer seemed to have been seduced by the high-flying theory, that an author ought to pour forth from the depths of his soul without caring for a moral. "This is all well, if the soul be itself in perfect harmony with truths and God; for then the moral will find itself: so again, it is well if he utters in truth his own deepest and most matured feelings; for it will then be our fault if we cannot make a moral for ourselves. But if fictitious characters and events are to be paraded before us, and mere amusement is not aimed at, we must exact some unity in the story and some truth to be elucidated by it." By the way, not every one "enjoys" le Tartufe. Not every shrewd, satiricallydisposed, cultivated man of the world even. Witness Mr. Thackeray. See his Irish Sketch-Book. Preface to "Night and Morning." (1845.) ever occasion arises, by the most vigorous and influential of our recently established Reviews-which has next to no mercy, in fact, for stories "written for an instructive purpose"-with a mission to preach sanitary reform, homœopathy, church principles, general philanthropy, or the advantages of a decimal coinage. "Rather would we wade through all the metaphysics north of the Tweed than encounter one of these atrocious violations of the principles of good taste and common sense, in which the facts are twisted to suit the argument, and the argument weakened to harmonise with the facts." Again, of another hybrid class: "It is a pity that these untiring preachers cannot appreciate the distinction between moralising and inculcating a moral. To construct an amusing story which shall leave a wholesome lesson engraved on the reader's mind, is a work which is neither useless nor ephemeral; but an alternation of love-scenes and copy-book apophthegms, an attempt to macadamize a sermon into a bed of romance, is apt to produce a tendency to somnolence very fatal to edification." Elsewhere again: "The didactic novel appears to be the peculiar heritage of this generation. . . . Nothing spoils a tale like a moral purpose. As soon as the verisimilitude of the character and the plot become, not the first, but the second consideration, they necessarily suffer in their truth to nature. It is impossible to make a story point a moral without making the actors in it incar nations of the qualities which the author intends to reprobate or praise." At the same time-in another place-this authority affirms that a reflective story-teller is never without a specific purpose-which purpose in inferior hands degenerates into a moral or religious lesson, which the story is supposed to teach; but, with a great writer, it is nothing but the outpouring of the particular thoughts which happen to fill the author's mind at the time of composition. The clearest exposition, however, of this journal's views is perhaps contained in its review of M. Masson's Thirty Years of French Literature," when referring to that gentleman's "severity" upon the principle of art pour l'art-of writing, that is, without any specific moral purpose. Surely, his critic argues, in so far as art is regulated by essential and eternal rules, it is its own justification. The argument is, that Art is but a version of life so contrived as to make a deep impression on the imagination. "Unless, therefore, life is immoral, art can hardly be so. If, in point of fact, the wicked are not plagued like other men, neither tormented like other men, why should not the novelist say so? If the lessons of history are sometimes stern and hard to read, why should not those of fiction, which is its shadow, be so too? A novelist is no more disrespectful to morality in simply imitating the world as he finds it, than the analyst is disrespectful to geometry in representing the conic sections under algebraical forms. If, indeed, the novelist represents the world as worse than it is, that is a fault of art; and it is the more serious because it may have bad moral consequences." The reviewer would by no means deny, for example, that French writers of fiction have often erred in this matter, or that many of their books are very immoral indeed; but they do seem to him to have kept in view a fact which some of our most popular English novelists appear altogether to forget the fact that a work of imagination ought to be considered, not as a child's plaything, but as a great and serious undertaking, to be executed according to the rules of its own art, and not to be mutilated for the sake of pointing any moral which may strike the fancy of the writer.* M. Eugène Poitou, who has distinguished himself in the home crusade against immoral fiction, is careful against being supposed to ask the novel to become a preceptor of morals. He expressly maintains that neither lectures on virtue nor sermons of any sort are within the sphere of art. It is not the aim of drama or prose-fiction, says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, to vanquish or extinguish human passions, but to make use of them as an exhibition which will please a man, because it moves him through the emotions of others. The duty of drama and prose-fiction simply is, not to make the image of passion more corruptive than passion itself-not to mingle with it sophism or exaggeration-not to turn pleasure into poison.+ This, M. Poitou remarks, is not asking too much from literature, but it is asking a good deal: let its pictures be true, and they will cease to be dangerous. To ensure which, however, the painter must be a true artist, with a true heart in his bosom, as well as a true eye in his head. * M. Taine, the well-known French critic, who goes un-English lengths in his opposition to didactic fiction, makes war upon Mr. Thackeray even, for an afflicting tendency to sermonise. "Il nous semble entendre des instructions de collége ou des manuels de séminaire." "Ces vieilles moralités, quoique utiles et bien dites, sentent le pédant payé, si commun en Angleterre, l'ecclésiastique en cravate blanche planté comme un piquet au centre de sa table, et débitant pour trois cent louis d'admonestations quotidiennes aux jeunes gentlemen que les parents ont mis en serre chaude dans sa maison." This assiduous presence of a moral intention, M. Taine continues, is hurtful alike to the romance and its author. "Confess it we must: a volume of Thackeray's has the cruel misfortune of repeating Miss Edgeworth's novels or Canon Schmidt's tales. . . . We have no wish to go back to school: we shut the book, and recommend it as a pill to our little cousin. . . . . It is clear from the first page that the author wants to make us affable, and we kick against an invitation so direct; we have no fancy to be scolded in a novel; we lose our temper at this intrusion of the schoolmaster. We meant to go to the play, but have been duped by the play-bill, and so we growl in under tones at having to hear a ser mon. "One consolation there is: the characters of the story suffer as much as we do ourselves; the author spoils them while preaching to us; they, too, like us, are sacrificed to satire. They are not beings he gives life to, but puppets he makes act. . . . The events and sentiments of real life are not arranged in a manner to form contrasts so well calculated and combinations so clever. Nature does not invent these jeux de scène; we soon discover that we are"-in the critic's own language-"devant une rampe, en face d'acteurs fardés, dont les paroles sont écrites et dont les gestes sont notés." And then follows a comparison between Thackeray and Balzac-or rather between the Rebecca Sharp of " Vanity Fair" and the Valérie Marneffe of "Les Parents pauvres"-which is far too long, not to say too invidious (the constant epithet of such comparisons), to allow of further citation. See, whosoever will, Essais de Critique et d'Histoire, par H. Taine (1858), pp. 193 sqq. † Saint-Marc Girardin, Cours de Littérature dram. t. iii. p. 47. Du Roman et du Théâtre contemporains, par M. Eugène Poitou (1857), p. 327. HONORÉ DE BALZAC. In those fabulous times, when men and wild beasts stood on a more familiar footing to each other than is the case in our degenerate days, a mighty hunter once showed a lion a picture of the monarch of the desert being maltreated by his two-legged opponent. "Ah!" replied the lion, sagely applying his claw to his nose, "but suppose the lion had painted the picture ?" This apologue appears to us specially applicable to the relations subsisting between author and publisher; we have heard the one side of the story usque ad nauseam, but the publisher has hitherto maintained silence. Authors may hiss, but he consoles himself by reckoning up the money safely stowed away in his chest. At length, however, this rule has been broken by M. Edmond Werdet,* who has produced a very amusing and characteristic book about the great French author to whose lâches he owed his ruin. Before analysing it, we will first show how the connexion commenced between Balzac and Werdet. The latter was engaged as commercial traveller to a publishing house, and thus was commissioned to make an offer to the rising young author for a new book. So large was its sale that M. Werdet determined on turning publisher and making his fortune by subsidising the "future marshal of French. literature." He had but modest resources at his command-just 1207.-to commence the campaign, but he was young and hopeful. He made the offer to De Balzac, who laughed at him, and he quitted his presence in disgust. In less than a fortnight, however, the author was in want of money, and recommenced negotiations, which ended in Werdet's purchasing the reprint of "Le Médecin de Campagne," for which he paid his entire capital. But this was not all: Werdet determined on becoming exclusive publisher of Balzac's works, and there was some difficulty in getting them together, for the author had no less than six publishersprobably on the principle of the bankrupt, who had half a dozen banking accounts that he might overdraw them all. At last, however, M. Werdet succeeded in carrying out his design, and for seven years he enjoyed the ruinous honour of being Balzac's banker and publisher. At length, when he was obliged to confess himself ruined, owing to Balzac's delay in sending in copy, the author coolly turned on his heel, saying that his publisher must be a millionnaire, and resold the copyrights at an advance to another enterprising publisher, leaving to M. Werdet the glory of having been his sole publisher, and the costly honour of his intimacy. In the present volume, M. Werdet, then, gives an animated account of their connexion, and from it we shall be enabled to draw up a description of one of the greatest novelists France has yet possessed. Honoré de Balzac was born at Tours on the 16th of May, 1799. His father had been saved from the guillotine in 1793, by being appointed commissary to the army of the north; in 1797, he married the daughter of one of his colleagues, and retired to Tours, where he enjoyed an easy competency. At the age of seven, young Honoré was sent to the College *Portrait intime de Balzac, sa Vie, son Humeur et son Caractère, par Edmond Werdet, son ancien libraire-éditeur. Paris: E. Dentu. de Vendôme, then conducted by the Oratorians, where he remained seven long years without a single holiday. At the expiration of this time, the lad was attacked by a species of coma, and his father bore him home to be cured. Soon after, the family removed to Paris, where the father had been appointed commissary-general to the first division, and Honoré, having recovered his health, was placed at a private school in the Marais, being the despair of his master by his inattention and carelessness. At the age of eighteen he took his bachelor's degree, and was received as avocat when twenty. In obedience to his father's wishes he entered as clerk in the office of Guyonnet de Merville, where he met with Eugène Scribe and Jules Janin, both equally disgusted with their profession; and the result was that Honoré refused all the excellent offers of partnership, and decided on becoming a literary man. This decision could not have been arrived at during a worse moment, for his father had been superseded, and had lost a heavy amount by bad speculations; but nothing would move the young man from his determination. He occupied the traditional garret, receiving an allowance of five pounds a month, and had a fine prospect of starvation before him. Of course, he began with a tragedy, on the subject of Cromwell, which was read in family council in 1825, and Andrieux, a literary authority, asserted that it did not contain the slightest trace of talent. But the young man would not own defeat; Cromwell was consigned to the flames, and he began writing a romance; but even at the outset his fatal habit of indecision was predominant : It was the period when the "Manuels Roret" were creating an intense excitement. Young Balzac, in a toilet which required renovation from head to foot, went one day to Levavasseur, the publisher, with the idea of a work, to be called "Manuel de l'Homme d'Affaires." The idea was accepted, and the author received on account 200 fr., on promise of delivering the copy a month later. Of course he did not keep his word, and at length Levavasseur went to look up the author. The latter, to pacify his severe creditor, offered to read him some passages from a romance he was then writing. The proposition was accepted, and the publisher was so struck by the originality of the novel, that he said, "I will buy your MS. for 2000 fr., and annul the bargain for the Manuel. Come with me, and I will give you 1000 fr. on account, and you shall receive the other 800 fr. the day the MS. is delivered in. Does that suit you?" Balzac gladly accepted, and, although the MS. was delayed a very long time, Levavasseur at last published, in 1829, "La Physiologie du Mariage," which produced an enormous sensation. From that day literature counted a master-France a new Molière. But before the new author woke up one morning to find himself famous, he had many a bitter ordeal to undergo. Pressed by his family to undertake some respectable enterprise, he had accepted the money a friend advanced, and started as publisher of one-volumed editions of the French Classics. On the failure of this scheme he determined on becoming a printer in partnership with Barbier, neither of them knowing anything of the business. Very naturally they soon raised a flourishing crop of bad debts. Balzac was just on the verge of bankruptcy, when his mother came forward with 50,000 fr. and saved him. Then his resolve was fixed: as printing had robbed him of a fortune, he must recover it from the same source; he buckled resolutely to work, and by the year 1831 he had attained the position he coveted. It was at this period that his connexion with Werdet commenced, who Balzac glowingly expected would become the |