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FRENCH NOVELISTS. 



GUSTAVE DROUINEAU.* 



IT is with a more than ordinary degree of satisfaction that we feel 

 called upon to notice some of the writings of the author, whose name 

 we have affixed to this article, inasmuch as they present us with the 

 solitary example of a modern French composer of fiction, who has 

 uniformly studied to interweave the soundest philosophy with the 

 more elegant graces of fiction, and to make the labours of the novelist 

 subservient to the inculcation of morality and religion. How great 

 was the desideratum, which it is the object of this founder of a new 

 school to supply, must have been obvious to every peruser of modern 

 French literature, and no slight praise is due to the judgment that 

 dictated, and the firmness and ability that effected, a return to a more 

 healthy and invigorating tone of composition. Hitherto we have 

 had cleverly executed pictures of society, clever satires upon modern 

 manners, involving the most daring speculations upon all high and 

 abstruse principles of politics and religion ; but they have been all 

 deficient in a moral end. Their object seems to have been to vex and 

 unsettle, rather than to soothe and allay, the troubled waters of society: 

 to perplex and lead astray the untutored intellect in the mazes of 

 scepticism, rather than to point out the necessity of its seeking a 

 support in some acknowledged system of morality and religious be- 

 lief. The benefits derived by France from her bloody revolution, 

 and her bloodier years of warfare, are undoubtedly great liberty of 

 thought and action, the destruction of privileges and monopolies, the 

 incessantly progressive right of electing her representatives, admissi- 

 bility to places, the gradual distribution of property, a well digested 

 system of jurisprudence, the adoption of the trial by jury, the liberty 

 of the press, liberty of the arts and sciences in fine, liberty civil and 

 religious. But all these are vain and nugatory without the binding 

 principles of moral and religious justice. Of what avail is the trial 

 by jury, when there is no sanctity accorded to an oath ? Is life less 

 secure when at the mercy of an arbitrary judge, than when it depends 

 upon the verdict of a man who acknowledges no moral responsibility. 

 Hence it is that the working of the new system has given so little 

 satisfaction. To make the trial by jury a serviceable safeguard to the 

 lives and liberties of the people, there must previously exist a moral 

 aptness and fitness in the community that adopts it to give force and 

 effect to its operations. It must be based upon conscientious feelings, 

 and a due respect to the inviolable sanctity of oaths, and these are 

 incompatible with the scepticism universally prevalent among our 

 neighbours ; in a word, it must rest upon religious conviction, what- 

 ever shape that conviction may assume. Another point of equal im- 

 portance to the due appreciation of the benefits and proper discharge 



* L'Ironie : a Novel. Paris. 



