ART. VI. Hernani, ou l'Honneur Castillan. 2. Marion de Lorme. 3. Le Roi s'amuse. Drames. Par VICTOR HUGO. Paris. 1835.

"THE public mind," says M. Victor Hugo, in his Preface to Marion de Lorme, " has never been in a better state, never more enlightened and more sober, than at the present moment." We think all but Frenchmen will agree with us, that this passage, written by any but a Frenchman, would naturally be accepted as ironical. M. Hugo is, however, in very profound earnest; and we can only regret that we differ from him so entirely. Our reasons for so doing are, simply, the, moral and intellectual state of France, as exhibited in the proceedings and condition of governors and governed alike, the want of proper principles of public action on the part of those in power, the total absence of every thing like consistency on the part of the people; and further, (we regret to draw so different a conclusion, from the very grounds, whence, probably, M. Hugo derived his flattering opinion of the "public mind," the depraved condition of literature in France, and the extreme popularity which works such as those of M. Hugo have obtained there. This gentleman appears to us to embody most entirely, in his intellectual being, the vices and virtues by which his country is at this moment possessed. Possessed is the word; for the very good which struggles and strives, and will ultimately prevail, through the tumultuous tossings of opinions, forms, governments, and creeds in that land, is, in its vehement and inarticulate urgings, more like a possessing, than a guiding, or governing spirit. M. Hugo's works are already numerous, and additions to them are daily announced as in the press; they are full, as we said before, of the virtues and vices of his time and place, yet in some measure he is before his time, and above his place. His popularity and his influence are alike great with his countrymen; and his is decidedly the mind, which exercises the most power at this moment over the French literary world. His writings, which are all conceived in a truly republican spirit, are calculated to increase the breach between old forms and new ideas; and such of them as are apparently the most purely imaginative, contain sentiments and expressions of ultra-liberalism on all political subjects, which seldom fail

of being aptly applied to existing circumstances. This has rendered him an object of distrust and apprehension to the government, and more than once subjected the exhibition of his plays to vexatious and arbitrary suspension.

The French writers of the last years of the revolution derived the more spiritual tone of their works from the influence which the intellectual resurrection of Germany was beginning to exercise over the literature of Europe. The French authors of the last twenty years, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Delavigne, and their imitators, have drawn some portion of their characteristic qualities from the English cotemporary writers, Moore and Byron, whose popularity in France, has had no small share in the formation and growth of the École Romantique. M. Hugo persuades himself, that he is inspired with some measure of knowledge and feeling of Shakspeare. This were indeed at once a merit and an infinite reward; and for M. Hugo's sake we heartily wish it may be so; but, without wishing to appear skeptical as to the possibility of a Frenchman's understanding Shakspeare, we will only say, that should M. Hugo proceed in his study of that greatest mind, we hope he will hereafter arrive at some perception of the divine and undeviating morality which pervades those wonderful works. Not the cramped and sickly morality of words, or forms, or schools; but the same unerring, unobscured morality, which lies upon the wide surface of the universe; which is wrought out in every single thread of human existence, which is for ever and for ever multiplying its evidence for our teaching, through the hourly lessons of life; which, in the inner and spiritual world, bears witness to the truth and justice of God, our Maker, as, in the outer and visible creation, an all-pervading beauty reveals his mercy and his might.

At present, M. Hugo is far indeed from any such knowledge; and the first sin with which we have to charge him, is the moral darkness in which his mental conceptions are enveloped. There is indeed an occasional struggling after the truth, a groping as it were in search of higher things, devoted love, chivalrous honor, a noble indignation at all oppressions; these plead eloquently, in his impassioned language, his claim to our respect and sympathy. But these are but momentary visitations of his better angel; his most frequent conceptions are dark, deformed, and painfully destitute of a sane spirit.

M. Hugo's ideas of right and wrong have a decided twist; and he forcibly reminds us of the poor gentleman, who on his death-bed sending for a clergyman, the latter, after spending infinite time and pains in discoursing to him, abruptly took his leave, assuring the dying man that his moral perceptions were in such a state of inextricable confusion, that he did not know where to begin with him." Had M. Hugo been a professor of Byronism, all this would have surprised us less; but, in a man who reads (and understands?) Shakspeare, this blunted and imperfect sense of truth is, to say the least, curious.

Our next quarrel with M. Hugo is upon the score of his extravagance; and here we must complain, not only of his conceptions, but of their execution. He has quite power enough not to be violent; and, by the by, we do wish somebody would convince the times, that power and violence are not one and the same thing. They are no more so, than the words are synonymous; nobody confounds the two words, but there is a fatal and very general confounding of the two things. "A powerful book" has become a regular hack encomium, bestowed by every friendly reviewer, upon every other of the modern night-mares with which literature has been adorned; till of late years it has become like an endless temptation of St. Anthony, or Dance of Death; each succeeding publication surpassing its predecessor in grotesque absurdity and hideous extravagance. Now, a really powerful book is really an uncommon thing; and as for the majority of those which are so called by courtesy, we should say, that, far from indicating strength, they betrayed evident tokens of such mental weakness, as to render it very doubtful whether or not the authors were in possession of their senses at the time of composing them. Such delineations of human character are brought before us daily, by these powerful writers, as remind us of nothing in the world, but the distorted and fantastical imitations of human forms, which might be found on the walls of a madman's cell. These good authors all seem to us to be in a phrensy; and we should as soon think of admiring the vigor of their intellectual lunes, as we should commend, as an exhibition of wholesome strength, the frantic exertions of some feverish wretch, who required three men to hold him.

Now M. Hugo has very strong fits occasionally. He

betrays a want of intellectual self-possession, an absence of sobriety, a lack of power to govern his own strength, which is by no means like a great master. He appears to excite himself while exciting his reader, and the consequence is, that his work is like a real piece of madness, compared with a fine representation of it. He gets astride upon his fancy, like his own Quasimodo on the great bell of Notre Dame, and swings away, till the whirl, and the din, and the dizziness of his mental belfry bid fair to outvie that of the Hunchback, and to leave its occupant with as few wits at the end of these outrageous intellectual exercises.

Up to a certain point, the excitement created by fine and vigorous works of art is good; not only a pleasurable stimulus in itself, but necessary, as deepening the after impression, which their spiritual meaning should make upon us, and in which consists their subtler and more divine essence. But these emotions must be kept within some bounds; nor must the higher end be lost sight of, in the means employed to attain it; or else the work becomes a poisonous fire-draught instead of a wholesome stimulant, creating phrensy instead of renovation, and leaving feebleness instead of health and vigor. The invisible guardians of the magic ring, into which we enter while under the spell of a great master, are truth, the moral sense of good and evil, a sound judgment, and a pure taste. These must encircle alike the magician and those who are beholding his incantation. The charmed bounds once passed, they both fall under the influence of the spell they have used, and the spirits they have invoked; and the oracles of genius, instead of coming clear and high and solemn to the ear and heart of the listener, will be uttered like the ravings of the Pythoness, amid the frantic convulsions of one possessed with an infernal spirit, not possessing a divine one.

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We have another strong general objection to make against M. Hugo's works, his women. What is the reason that he invariably makes such naughty women his heroines? In almost every one of his compositions, we are brought into company with ladies whose principles are so very lax, that, in spite of M. Hugo's assertion that his plays are moral, we cannot help thinking that they have very little chance of remaining so, unless he cuts out all his

female characters; they are enough to corrupt all the rest of the dramatis persona. Such of his heroines, as are the daughters of his fancy, are by no means so correct as we should like our daughters to be, and his historical selections are yet more unfortunate;-Lucretia Borgia, Marion de Lorme; why not Nell Gwynn, why not Ninon de L'Enclos? The catastrophe which winds up the career of the latter, is altogether a subject after M. Hugo's taste; we wonder it has hitherto escaped being made into a moral play by him. We recommend to him, among the other peculiarities of Shakspeare, to meditate upon his female characters; and to learn under what aspects it is, that a woman claims our sympathy, our love, our admiration, and our veneration; and he will not then write books which no honest man or woman can read without indignation at the libels on female nature, which he has thought fit to perpetrate in them.

As no society can be pure, in which the women are not chaste and holy, so no book can be moral, in which the delineations of female character are vicious. In spite, therefore, of M. Hugo's assertion, and of the precision with which he has squared out the moral of Le Roi s'amuse, as an illustration of that assertion, we beg to assure him that his books are immoral; for his women are worthless, and that is enough.

We have less fault to find with the execution of these works, than with the spirit in which they are conceived. M. Hugo has abundance of ability; pity it is so ill employed. His style is vigorous, startling, and effective; but his power wants repose, his contrasts are often harsh and unmellow, and his effects are frequently theatrical. We do not now speak of those dramatic situations, which are essentially good, only in proportion as they are theatrically effective. These M. Hugo conceives powerfully, and introduces skillfully. But his language, his feelings, his spirit, is theatrical, (not dramatic ;) his very thoughts attitudinize, and we object to that; it is however a national defect, and to expect him to be entirely free from it, were unjust and unreasonable. It is no small merit, that he has succeeded in rendering the cramped versification, to which his language condemns him, so natural and so pathetic. Poetical it never can be ; but it is an unspeakable relief to

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