and her elevation through, the senses. The poet has introduced Mephistopheles among her persons, who consist of Albertus the philosopher, Helene his ward, and Wilhelm Hanz, and others, his pupils, with a critic, a maestro, and a poet-Helene possesses a miraculous lyre-her father's spirit dwelling in it-and every while uttering truths, as she touches its informed strings. The whole thing is an allegory of the finest kind, and the most delicate conception. HONORÉ DE BALZAC, the next author in Mr. Reynolds's list, had written under the name of Horace St. Aubyn, with inconsiderable effect; but, partaking of the spirit of which the Three Days were a manifestation, his mind learned a new lesson, and instantly understood its mission. Says the author before us, "It enlarged his views, laid open to him a wide field for observation in the scrutiny of man's character, and made him probably one of the most acute observers in the literary world." It was in La Peau de Chagrin, that Balzac "presented himself to the world as a new man, with new views, and new passions," His peculiar forte is in the descriptions of locality, persons and manners, and some of his tales are good-such as Les Scènes de la Vie Privée, Les Scènes de la Vie de Provence, and Les Scènes de la Vie Parisienne. But according to Mr. Reynolds, he was mainly indebted for his success to La Femme de Trente Ans. Take the writer's own account. This story 66 won the hearts of those ladies who had arrived at an age, when they could never hope to be adopted as the heroines of a romancer. At thirty the French woman is older, in reference to taste, appearance and passions, than the English; and thus the extent of the compliment paid to the former, may be fully appreciated by the latter, were she to suppose, that at the age of five and thirty she was adored in a similar manner. The French are, moreover, frivolous and conceited; and very few married ladies, in the vortex of Parisian society, think of their domestic circles, their children, or their homes; but pleasure, adulation, noise, love, and the voluptuous dance, alone have charms for them. Balzac's work was therefore the means of securing him the favour of the married lady of thirty; and thus his popularity was as firmly established in the boudoir as it had already been in the circulating library and news-room. His publications became the study of the lady's maid, when the lady had devoured them; and the lady eulogised him to her husband and his friends, and the lady's maid to her friends again; and De Balzac, by a brilliant stroke of policy, enlisted a numerous and a powerful audience in his favour. Add to this happy circumstance, the beauty of his style, the deep interest which pervades his tales, and that unfinished mystery in which he delights to involve his heroes or heroines, and the secret of his vast popularity is revealed." These, for the most part, it must be confessed, are but sorry grounds of popularity-but then popularity itself is every where but a sorry thing. From a Byron to a Bulwer, it celebrates the infamous rather than the truly admirable. The titles of De Balzac's remaining works are, Eugenie Grandet, Medecin de Campagne Le Père Goriot, Le Lys de Vallée, Le Récherché de l'Absolu, Le Vicaire des Ardennes, and Annette et le Criminel. The claims asserted on behalf of EUGENE SUE, as a naval novelist, we take to be perfectly absurd. They are, in fact, given up by Mr. Reynolds, when he confesses that his novels are maritime in nothing but the supposed scene. Licentious as may be this writer's romances, we cannot see in them anything that in particular illustrates the period of time in which he lives; and therefore we pass him over, as not entering into the scope of this article. For the same reason we shall pretermit FREDERICK SOULIE with his Lewis, Ratcliffe, and Maturin revivals. M. ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE is a bird of other feather. This writer's name is well known; and we have so recently treated of his merits in a separate article in this magazine, that it is not now expedient to dwell much on them. There is much religious formalism about De Lamartine; in his Meditations Poetiques, his Harmonies, his Voyage en Orient, and his Jocelyn. They are written with an improvvisatore air of facility, but are vague in the impression that they make. We are presented with an analysis of Jocelyn, designed by its author as an episode in a sort of Mahabharata epopoeia. It is romantic, tender, but effeminate. De Lamartine has lately added another episode to this projected work. La Chûte d'un Ange-(the Fall of an Angel)-and promises a third, to be called Les Pécheurs. This poet's best friends advise him not to proceed in a task beyond his powers. A style at once artificial and extempore is ill-suited to an epic, and the affectation of inaccurate language, and careless rhyme is unworthy of any poet. La Chûte d'un Ange is a bad-a very bad allegory, in which the incarnation of the soul is portrayed by an angel falling in love with an Antediluvian girl, and acquiring thereby the use of human language, and afterwards sharing with her all manner of hair-breadth 'scapes, and out-of-the-way perils. In the moment of his fall, an oracular cry resounds in the angel's soul, to the effect that as he had chosen to descend, his decay would proceed to the utter extinguishment of his splendour-and that in order to his restoration, he must redeem, drop by drop, his immortality, thus lost for woman. And at the end of the poem, a similar inward admonishment is again felt "To ope thy native heaven nought shall avail, Hast climbed, and every step shall burn thy foot." But further than by this mechanical repetition, the moral which ought clearly to have pervaded every sentiment and incident in it as the omnipresent spirit of the poem, is nowhere suggested. To borrow from a contemporary journal* a phrase or two-" the original idea has been absorbed by the symbol; the principle, the creed, the theological point of view, has disappeared under the drama-under the complicated, we might say, entangled narrative of facts." The critic from whom we have quoted, says truly, that he can trace neither Fall nor Angel-neither expiation nor progressive re • The British and Foreign Review, No. xvii.-p. 217. habilitation-in the plot or its workings. Nothing remains, then, but a mere story of human loves and woes; and as such, the one before us is wild, extravagant, and carelessly told. Will the learned editor of this review permit us to make rather a long extract from his admirable article on De Lamartine's Chute d'un Ange? When," says the critic, "the first Meditations appeared in 1830, they made a sensation in France such as few books can make. It was poetry of a perfectly new species, raising its voice at the very moment when a generation, sick of the cold and measured versification of the empire, was asserting that all poetry was dead, and that henceforward to prose-a lofty and poetic prose-appertained the expression of the thoughts of the epoch. This poetry looked to the future by the nature of the ideas, or more properly of the sentiments, and by its aim; whilst by a certain chastity of form, by respect for the language, and even by some few old classical reminiscences, although proclaiming the independence of Art as a right, it preserved a connecting link with national literary traditions. It satisfied all demands, and was entitled to find favour with all schools. The author's poetic talent was, moreover, truly and incontestably powerful. Never had France known such elegy. Never had hope breathed amidst ruins hymns so sweetly melancholy. But besides-we should say above-all this, high above the literary point of view, there was something more. There was in men's souls an anxiety for the reknitting of earth to heaven-a yearning after that something which may for moments be lulled to sleep, but never extinguished in the hearts of nations-the sense of the Infinite, of the Imperishable-the tendency to sound the abyss that conceals the solution of the mysteries of the soul-the innate desire to know, at least to surmise, something of the starting point and the goal of mundane existence; in a word, religious faith. So many ruins had accumulated during the twenty or thirty years that had just elapsed! So much human grandeur had been eclipsed! Well might they who had seen, first the Revolution, then Napoleon moulder away, think that all things were nothing, save in relation with the eternal idea, the hidden design, which God verifies through the world. The empire had just fallen, and men understood that a whole world concluded with the empire-that a new world was to arise from its gigantic ruins. During the empire, one-half of the soul had been smothered. Matter-in the service of an idea, indeed, for only at that price is matter active; but this was not taken into account-had eclipsed mind; force had stifled conscience; and conscience, with all its provisions, with all its rapid intuitions of the things of heaven, was, in its turn, vigorously reacting. Conscience asked for a return to a superior, immutable order of facts, which might explain the evanescent, and often apparently contradictory facts of the day-for the reinthronisation of moral unity, governing from on high the crisis of thought, the successive revolutions, the movement, so abrupt and irregular, on the surface of the human mind it asked for a common religious faith, affording in its bosom a fixed point amidst the whirlwind of things; an assured asylum against the scepticism with whose genius it had been in : oculated by an all-dissolving philosophy; against the despair that sometimes seized it at the sight of the instability of human foundations, and of the bitter deceptions every moment experienced from the external world. Lamartine stood forward as the interpreter of this imperious want. He associated the flights of his muse with all the protests that were fermenting unexpressed in men's hearts. He moaned the complaint of all, he murmured the hope of all. He became the harmonious echo of the anxieties, of the internal struggles of a whole generation. He painted himself in his verses, as suffering from the disease of his age, and labouring to cure both himself and it. In a word, he assumed the attitude of the religious poet. As such, he was evidently accepted, as was Victor Hugo simultaneously, as Chateaubriand had previously been; and here lay, in great part, the secret of his talent and of his fame." This searching critic goes on to prove, that, notwithstanding all this De Lamartine was not a religious poet. If he had the malady of the age, he had not the remedy. He shews religionism, but no religion a yearning to believe, but not belief. The mission of the religious poet is to console, to strengthen, to guide. His God is the God of love.-Lamartine, like an African Santon, addresses fear. "The God whom he adores is the God of the East, before whose omnipotence he perceives but two possible parts for man-blasphemy or annihilation. Betwixt these two states the poet, as he himself tells us, long oscillated." We are not therefore surprised that his devotion leads to despondency, and his poetry to indifference. He looks on the poetic art as an amusement, not as an occupation. In this we detect the character of the Frenchman in the uncertainty in which he hovers between hope and fear, we recognise the character of the age. Verily, the present age of the world exhibits it, and all things in it, as in the middle state of Hades. The fruition, whether of punishment or recompence, is yet future. : The name of VICTOR HUGO has been mentioned in connection with that of Lamartine, and we can afford to pass over many names to arrive at his. The novelist, the dramatist, and the poet, says Mr. Reynolds, are united in Victor Hugo. "His romantic genius was appalled by no literary undertaking; he shrunk from no labour, however difficult, however lofty, however diversified the subject. He wrote historical novels, and in one he ably competed with the great northern writer now no more; he wrote poetry, and his name is well worthy of forming the Lepidus of the triumvirate, of which Byron and Lamartine are the Augustus and the Antony; he wrote plays, and M. Dumas felt that he was a rival." There is something too indiscriminate in a panegyric like this: we regret that it must suffer abatement. Victor Hugo's dramas are decidedly bad-his novels guilty of a Spanish extravagance and his poetry of worse than Byronic obscurity. Nevertheless, the man has been baptised by the genius of the time with the spirit and the fire that are not of the gross world-to him, therefore, be due honour! His Notre Dame de Paris is an unforgettable book, with its Esmeralda, and its Quasimodo-and its Claude Frollo. That tale of innocent vaga bondism-of pious lechery, and a great soul in a dwarfed body— has elements to attract and to repel, which, skilfully combined, suspend the reader's attention in a medium of love and loathing. Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné, is, we are afraid, a vulgar horror. As to the Hans d'Islande and Bug Jargal, even Mr. Reynolds condemns them. "The hero of the former is a human monster-of the latter, a horrible negro." Hugo, as we learn from the preface to his Chants du Crepuscule (Songs of Twilight), looks upon society in its present state as enveloped in a species of illuminated fog. He prepares his reader to expect ebullitions of hope mingled with doubt-couplets of tenderness concluded with others of complaint-a calmness touched with melancholy-sights of delight-feebleness suddenly reviving-resigned infelicity-profound sorrow exciting the very surface of the sea of poetry-serene contemplations of political tumults-holy wanderings from public to domestic matters-the dread lest all should proceed darkly in the world-and then intervals of joyous and burning hope, that the human species may yet flourish to excel! Thus he knows not whether, in his own Orientales, he has not been looking to the West instead of the East, contemplating the sun-set rather than the day-break. His Ode, written after July, 1830, is strong and solemn, yet wanting in concentration and philosophical insight. He argues upon the crisis of the Three Days as if it were an end in itself, and not a mean to a better future. It teaches, according to him, that the breath of a king is the spark to the panThe musket explodes-and its victim is man!" and relative to the priesthood, that "Less welcome to the Lord on high, Is grandeur than sincerity." Well! but what shall this lead to? In truth, the Ode was written too near the time (Aug. 10, 1830) to have much permanent value. It presents us with a literal transcript of the facts attending the Parisian catastrophe, but had no leisure for results. In a word, it looks to the past—the cycle just closed, with its closing-not much to the present-not to the future at all. An Ode which should present the present position and future possible destiny of European Republics would be a work indeed! Similar remarks apply to his Odes to the Column of Napoleon, and on Napoleon II. "In deploring the fall of Napoleon and his son," says Mr. Reynolds, "the cry of Victor Hugo is the voice of France. He has identified the effusions of his muse with the wail of his native land, and with tears and sighs he laments the fall of those who were dear to his country." This may be:-let, however, "the dead bury their dead!" Victor Hugo has felt rightly that the mission of the modern poet is a religious one; and we had hoped that, in Les Voix Intérieures, the inward voices to that mission had been heard, calling not loudly but deeply. But no. The French poet is still a sceptic. He is an historian, but no prophet. What has been displeases—what is |