have abandoned? Will the people throng af- | she saved.'* They asked whether men had fectionately to the fabrics which have become 'ever pondered on the practical meaning of a common house of call to twenty different that word a State Church? Have they sects?—or pay much reverence to the pul- never looked into the dark, polluted, inner pits from which twenty different Gospels are chamber of which it is the door? Have preached? And what will be the political they never caught a glimpse of the loathstrength of a body of men whom no com- some things that live and crawl and gender mon aims, no common faith, no common as- there?' And their policy was as unsparsociations bind together? What supporting as their language. They aimed avowwill the laity accord to an organization edly at simple extermination. They sumwhich exists, not for the purpose of preach- moned-they still summon-round their ing a definite faith, but merely for the purpose of receiving revenues?

standard secular auxiliaries, tempting them by the rich spoil the Church of England of fers; but it is not that they may share the plunder. Their principles forbid them to desire any of it for their own body. They do not seek to grow fat upon her ruin, but only to bring her down to a level with themselves. They offer her property to the State to the Educationists-to the Landlords

There can be no question that Mr. Miall's policy is far-sighted and wise. Such an agitation as that which this Bicentenary inaugurates, and Lord Ebury consents to head, will do his work so thoroughly that even Dr. Foster and Mr. Samuel Morley will not be able to spoil it. When once the Act of Uniformity is gone, his enemy, the Estab- to any one, in fact, who will aid them to lished Church, will be an easy prey. He wrench it out of their great rival's hand. will have little need to organize an agitation Very different is the policy of the new anwhen the brotherhood which makes her now tagonists with whom she is confronted now. so strong shall have become a rope of sand. The other section of Nonconformists, who No virulent denunciations will be required now appear to be opening their trenches to persuade the nation into contempt of a against her position, are no ways disposed State machine, constructed, not to proclaim to so thriftless and prodigal a policy. They to men the one faith once delivered to the do not wish to give up to indiscriminate saints, but only to fulfil a function of police pillage a land flowing with milk and honby inculcating, upon the basis of a score of ey. They are too anxious to partake of the conflicting Gospels, the virtues which poli- vintage to desire to open the vineyard to ticians value. No Liberation Society will the trampling hoof of the secular wild be needed to free us from such a curse as that. When matters have come to that pass, we shall ourselves gladly join with Mr. Miall in demanding the abolition of a contrivance so admirably adapted for quenching all faith, and chilling all religion out of the souls of men.

boar. They are well content that a certain amount of property should be set apart to secure the due performance of God's worship. They are very willing to acquiesce in the existing state of things with a very slight modification. They have no conscientious objections to an Establishment. The only change they would suggest is, that they should be the Establishment themselves. Their object is not to destroy, but simply to transfer. or forty transfer. Consequently, though they are obliged to act with him, they look on Mr. Miall simply as a marplot. His violent opinions may wreck the cause of Establishments altogether before the gratifying change they contemplate can be effected. They are compelled to accept his aid, because they wish to frighten the Church into concession; but they would deplore his success as heartily as any. Their speeches are full of professions of good-will to the Established Church; and if they taunt her occasionally, it is not because she is an Estab

It is indispensable for their security that Churchmen should learn to recognise the change that has come over the battle they must fight. During the last thirty or forty years the struggle has been a simple one. The existence or the privileges of the Established Church were the subject matter of contest, and her friends and her enemies were the combatants on each side. In each battle that she lost, she was compelled to renounce some advantage that she had possessed before; and nothing less than her existence was the stake of the war in which she was engaged. She was fighting for dear life with inexorable foes. With them it was a war to the knife; they denounced her as a great aristocratic imposture a dis-lished Church, but only because she is gusting pretence --a falsehood cloaked in bigoted and exclusive." In fact, they are trutha life-destroying upas.' They painted her as 'destroying more souls than

*Nonconformist's Sketch Book,' pp. 16, 34.

*British Churches in relation t› the British People,' p. 250.

+Nonconformist's Sketch Book,' p.16.

decidedly tender to her; though it resem- would take from the Church of England the bles more closely a lover's tenderness sinews of the spiritual war. Lord Ebury towards a wealthy heiress, or an epicure's would stifle within her the very life on tenderness towards his dinner, than any which her powers depend. If she were other form of that emotion. Whatever its stripped of all wealth, she still would genuine meaning, it is much pleasanter to preach the Gospel that has been committed deal with than the fulminations of Mr. to her, though within narrower limits and Miall, if only for its superior politeness and with feebler powers. But when she has good taste. But their antagonism, whether been deprived of that defmite faith, by and they mean it or not, is not the less real, and for which she lives, there will be disseminatnot the less deadly. On the contary, they ed in her name merely a mass of conflicting are in truth far the most dangerous assail- dogmas, breathing into the soul the ineradiants of the two. One attacks only the cable doubt whether Truth exists at all. temporal accidents, the other the spiritual This is the new peril which this new agitaessence of her character. Mr. Miall, if he tion against the Act of Uniformity opens to were successful, would destroy our religious our view; and all that we have hitherto community as an Establishment: Lord struggled to avert dwindles into insignifiEbury would, though he means it not, in-cance by its side.

evitably destroy it as a Church. Mr. Miall

LONDON

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. CCXXIV.

FOR OCTOBER, 1862.

ART. I.-Les Misérables. Par Victor Hugo. | might add, as stiff and unpicturesque) as the

Bruxelles, 1862.

lines in a schoolboy's copybook; bright as may be the lustre which he believes himself to 'Le livre que le lecteur a sous les yeux en ce have thrown over France by the less peaceful moment, c'est, d'un bout à l'autre, dans son triumphs of Magenta and Solferino with which ensemble et dans ses détails, quelles que he has saddled the gratitude of Italy; it will soient les intermittences, les exceptions ou les be a grave omission on the part of his histodéfaillances, la marche du mal au bien, de rian if he omit to notice that while he embell'injuste au juste, du faux au vrai, de la nuit lished the streets of Paris with marble and au jour, de l'appétit à la conscience, de la mortar, his era enervated the minds of its pourriture à la vie, de la bestialité au devoir, inhabitants with a literature as filthy, as frivode l'enfer au ciel, du néant à Dieu. Point lous, and as false as ever sapped the morals de départ la matière;-point d'arrivée of a nation or made the fortune of a publisher. l'âme. L'hydre au commencement, l'ange à Such works as 'Madame Bovary,' as 'Fanny,' la fin'.* Such are the words in which M. Daniel' et Confpagnie, reaching as they have Victor Hugo incidentally sets forth the pith done, some of them, a bonâ fide twentieth and gist of the ten volumes before us. Strange edition, and dragging in their trail the details words, indeed, to come from the pen of a of a medical treatise on the nervous diseases French novelist under the Second Empire; of women, poisoned by the nastiness of a pruand all the more strange because, we are rient mind and set out with all the artifice of thankful to say, they convey no vain boast. a showy pen, are not so much outrages on They are in the main true. It was observed decency as signs of the times amid which they by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that to crawled out of the dunghill-their authors' make the morals of her contemporaries square brains-to bask themselves in the sunny with the enactments of the Divine law, the étalage of the Rue Vivienne or of the Rue de printers of the Book of Common Prayer la Paix, of a Levy or an Amyot. Shut out ought in future to omit all the nots in the from all the inestimable benefits which poliDecalogue. In like manner it might be said, tical life confers, taught to believe meanwhile that if at each clause of the passage quoted that in order to have the full use of liberty above you were to insert a not-or, in other they must learn not to abuse it—which sounds words, if you were to read the passage back-like telling a man that to get the use of his wards-you would not in the slightest degree overstate the 'marche' which French fiction has taken during the last ten years. Proud as the Third Napoleon may be of the masterly manner in which his Parisian edility (as the French newspapers term it) have ruled out the capital in streets as straight (and we

limbs he must never stir but in a Bath chair

Frenchmen have allowed themselves to seek elsewhere for some substitute for that healthy excitement and play of mind which they can no longer find in the field of politics: we might add, which they no longer seek. Drowned in the beastly sinks of sensuality, zealous for nothing unless it be côté à la Bourse, the mind of France is only rescued

from that most fatal disease, political apathy, by the vigorous efforts of those faithful few, the dadox in the race after everything which constitutes the higher life of man, who, from the Aventine of a dignified Secession, protest against the reign of a coarse materialism, and sustain, in all their force and beauty, the traditions of one of the noblest bodies of literature that ever wedded lofty thoughts to words that burn.*

Considered, then, with reference to the works of fiction which have caused the greatest 'fureur' in France during the last ten years, this new novel of Victor Hugo's, conceived as it is in the spirit which its author justly vindicates for it in the words which we have placed at the head of this article, is a most welcome and noteworthy exception. Occasional grossness of expression indeed too frequently escapes him, but there is nothing that bewrays impurity of thought. The genius of the poet and the mind of the man have both of them been of too high an order to stoop to such lewdness, consciously and lovingly caressed, as seems to allure the readers and to absorb the minds of a Flaubert and a Feydeau. To what purpose, indeed, is Poesy a winged thing,' as Plato calls it, if it do not raise itself above the dirt and dust of the earth earthy, and become a 'sursum corda' to the world?

Hitherto we have allowed M. Victor Hugo to give his own version of the general tendencies of LES MISERABLES,' and this with the view of pointing out in limine the excep

tional position which he so honourably holds in the French literature of the day. We must now, however, look more closely into the matter, and furnish the reader with such details as may give him a more accurate idea of the scope of the work, the nature of the story, and the merits of the style.

First, then, as to the material bulk and formal division of 'Les Misérables.' It consists of ten volumes, divided into five parts of two volumes each. These five parts bear successively and respectively the following designations: I. FANTINE; II. COSETTE; III. MARIUS; IV. L'IDYLLE RUE PLUMET ET L'ÉPOPÉE RUE ST. DENIS; V. JEAN VALJEAN. Each part again is divided into eight or more books,' and each ‘book' into chapters, and to the chapters are affixed headings, selected apparently for the purpose of giving the reader the smallest possible idea of the nature of the contents. The farfetched conceits in which M. Hugo here indulges betray an amount of affectation scarcely compatible with good taste. 4000 pages, in round numbers, of which the ten volumes (Brussels edition) consist would make about 1300 pages of the same type as the Quarterly Review.'

The

It is not, we believe, very generally known that 'Les Misérables' is the work of two writers-the one a poet, the other a system-monger; the one richly endowed with feelings of the highest order, which come to him as naturally as instincts (and herein is he a poet); the other sententiously parading the crudest notions, the product of no thought, the result of no experience, as the very foundations of * From the strictures in which we have here inLaw and Order, as the only conditions on dulged on the light literature of France, it would which the happiness of a nation can be be an unpardonable omission not to except the secured, and the victory over Sin and Misery charming little works of M. J. T. de St. Germain-completed. The one great on the smallest a pseudonym of a very transparent character to any one who has ever had before his eyes the books on which it figures. A writer in the Saturday Review' (Sept. 20, 1862), in speaking of the dith culty which French writers seem to experience in writing with success on the side of virtue,' and of the futility of that species of warning which is based on the example of anomalous and monstrous folly, rightly adds, that the best device of the instructive novelist is to sketch an ideal, to kindle or foster the better feelings of readers by inspiring notions of something purer, nobler, and better than themselves.' Such is the object which M. J. T. de St. Germain has proposed to himself in the Légende pour une Epingle, in Mignon,' in 'Lady Clare,' and in Pour Parvenir,' &e. Not that the morality is offensively obtruded: it arises naturally out of the incidents related--it is put forth, not put on. those who have experienced the difficulty of meeting with books among the current works of French fiction which may safely be left about, and are as adapted virginibus puerisque as for the riper taste of a more advanced age, it may be useful to be furnished with the titles of the above works,

To

which in France at least have met with a success,

less noisy indeed, but scarcely less substantial, than that of their impure rivals.

theme-the gambols of an infant: the other small on the greatest theme-the relation of the Individual to the State, and the condition of the Dangerous Classes. This literary partnership has been productive of all the mischief which might be expected from the collaboration of two minds of so opposite a character. It is not only that we are indebted to it for the infliction of nearly one thousand Pages of digressions with which we could well have dispensed, but these digressions mar the interest by interrupting the sequence of the story, which they do nothing to develope, and everything to retard. So great, indeed, is the injury which the social and political quack has done to his colleague the poet, that many critics have been thrown, it would seem, off the scent; have been unable to reunite that thread of the story which these interminable episodical essays are ever breaking, and have thus denied to Victor Hugo the poet that artistic skill of which Victor

Hugo the quack has done so much to mask | Christianity. The portrait, we may remark, the grandeur and to mar the effect. It will is generally believed to be more or less from be our endeavour in the following remarks to the life, and to refer to Monseigneur Miollis.* eliminate as far as may be the disastrous results He resides in the episcopal town-but not in which have ensued from this untoward colla- the episcopal palace, which he has given up boration of two unequal wits lodged under as a hospital, making the old hospital his one cranium. We shall make it our business, palace-with his sister, Mademoiselle Baptisby a searching analysis of the two first vol- tine, and his old servant, Madame Magloire. umes (for it is in them that the kernel of the Mademoiselle Baptistine is thus beautifully nut is to be found), to unsphere the spirit described in language which it is impossible which has presided over the conception of the to translate :— entire work. We shall thus be enabled to disentangle the idea which, in spite of all unseemly obstructions, does, in fact, knit together the different parts of 'Les Misérables,' and so to vindicate that artistic power to which Victor Hugo's critics have done such scanty justice. This more searching analysis completed, we shall follow it up by a hasty summary of the sequel of the story, sufficient to bring out the 'consensus partium' of which we shall previously have furnished the key. We shall then offer some remarks on other portions of the work which seem to call for special censure or special praise, as the case may be.

go

We think it will be seen on the whole that, amid all its defects, this work has something more than the beauties of an exquisite style, and the word-compelling power of a literary Zeus, to recommend it to the tender care of a distant posterity: that in dealing with all the emotions, passions, doubts, fears, which to make up our common humanity, M. Victor Hugo has stamped upon every page the hall-mark of genius, and the loving patience and conscientious labour of a true artist. We sit here as utterly dispassionate judges. Unlike his own countrymen, we have no personal pique against the author, no old scores to pay off, no literary côterie to serve, no political principles to denounce, no bugbear of socialisin to defy. We approach M. Victor Hugo, indeed, with all the tenderness which is due to an exile, and with all the respect which is due to a man of genius -Solem quis dicere falsum-but beyond that, it is needless to assure M. Victor Hugo that we have no purpose to serve but that of saying with all frankness what we think of this important addition to a literature of which we are ever anxious to hail the glory, and to deplore the decay.

The work opens with a highly-finished portrait of a Christian bishop. Nothing seems so much to have exasperated M. Hugo's hostile critics as his audacity in attempting such a portrait. The so-called religious party seem to consider he is poaching on their serves, and we doubt not would infinitely have preferred that he should have pointed the finger of scorn both at Bishops and at

'Elle était une personne longue, pâle, mince, douce; elle réalisait l'idéal de ce qu'exprime le mot "respectable;" car il semble qu'il soit nécessaire qu'une femme soit mère pour être vénérable. Elle n'avait jamais été jolie; toute sa vie, qui n'avait été qu'une suite de saintes œuvres, avait fini par mettre sur elle une sorte de blangagné ce qu'on pourrait appeler la beauté de la cheur et de clarté; et, en vieillissant, elle avait bonté. Ce qui avait été de la maigreur dans sa jeunesse était devenu, dans sa maturité, de la transparence; et cette disphanéité laissait voir l'ange. C'était un âme plus encore que ce n'était une vierge. Sa personne semblait faite d'ombre; à peine assez de corps pour qu'il y eût là un sexe; un peu de matière contenant une lueur; de grands yeux toujours baissés: un prétexte pour qu'une âme reste sur la terre.'-(i. p. 11.)

The words we have placed in italics remind us of what is undoubtedly true, that old age, so it be found in the way of righteousness, gives to the features a beauty not their own. If the motions of the mind be good, the lines of the face will but become more and more beautiful as time wears, and as the more sensuous beauty wanes.

The life and conversation of the good Bishop-whom the people called Monseigneur Bienvenu, choosing from his numerous Christian names celui qui leur présentait un sens'

are described at great length by M. Hugo. The notion that the portrait is in part from the life, seems to be warranted by these word (P. 25):-Nous ne prétendons pas que le portrait que nous faisons ici soit vraisemblable: nous.nous bornons à dire qu'il est ressemblant.' It is not without a purpose that these details and traits of character are given with such fulness. They prepare us for the crowning act of what we should call Christian loving-kindness, if we had not some scruples

*Charles François Melchior Bienvenu Miollis, This preformerly Bishop of Digne, in Provence. late was born at Aix in the year 1753, and was made Bishop of Digne in 1805, an office which he adorned with simple, unostentatious virtues till the infirmities of age made him resign in 1838, five pre-have not been slow to protest against the historiyears before his death. His friends and admirers cal substratum which the author of Les Misérables' would have his readers suppose underlies the portrait of the Bishop of the story.