609 



THE FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS. 



(Concluded from page 532.) 



WE now come to Alexandra Dumas. Speaking- of the ll Souvenirs 

 d'Antony," the critic of the " Quarterly" says, "The scene of the first 

 tale is Naples during its occupation by the French. A reward is 

 offered for the head of a certain captain of banditti that infested the 

 neighbourhood. Two peasant boys find him asleep, and recollecting 

 dear children (they are all along called enfans) how they had seen a 

 sheep killed, cut his throat, &c." Now this sentence corroborates 

 our assertion relative to the critic's ignorance of the French language. 

 These two boys had numbered seventeen summers, and the French 

 as often apply the word enfant as garron to individuals of that age. 

 Fathers of families call their sons enfans even when they are thirty 

 or forty years old. 



But to continue. We must inform the writer in the " Quarterly" 

 that the two first and the last of M. Dumas' five tales are founded on 

 facts, that he gathered those facts himself in Naples, ard that all 

 Frenchmen understand as much. We must moreover remind the 

 same gentleman for from his language we naturally suppose the 

 author of the article entitled "French Novels" to be of the male sex 

 that there are two schools of novels, the romantic and the fashion- 

 able, and that M. Dumas' tales come under the former denomination. 

 We may also add, that because the days of Ann Radcliffe, Maturin, 

 Goethe, Schiller, Clara Reeve, Monk Lewis, &c. &c., are gone by, 

 there is no reason wherefore M. Dumas should not choose to be their 

 imitator, if his taste or his talent induce him to follow their footsteps, 

 and to study in the halls which, when they retired, became, as it 

 were, deserted. 



Having lashed Dumas with as little ceremony and as little reason 

 as the others who went before him, the critic turns his arms against 

 De Balzac, and his comments upon this author are perhaps the only 

 fair and unprejudiced portion of the whole article. Balzac is ne- 

 vertheless a beautiful, though a dangerous writer, full of senti- 

 ment, of philosophy, of metaphysical reasoning, and of energy; but 

 his works have certainly now and then an immoral tendency, although 

 not to the extravagant extent described in the "Quarterly." As 

 literary productions De Balzac's novels are the first in France ; and 

 if the descriptive portions of his works be occasionally wearisome 

 and tedious, as in the " Lys de Vallee," and the " Peau de Chagrin," 

 the elegance of the language and the vivacity of the ideas amply 

 compensate for this fault. The critic in the " Quarterly" has a par- 

 ticular regard for the word vulgar, and applies it not only as fre- 

 quently as opportunities occur, but also where it is an inappropriate, 

 a false, and an unjust epithet. The coarse ribaldry of " Joseph 

 Andrews" is not extenuated even by the admirable wit that abounds 

 in its pages ; but no one can truly say that De Balzac's works " are 

 a series of unconnected tales of the vulgarest and most licentious 

 character." 



JUNE, 1837. 2R 



