THE CHRISTIAN EXAMINER. NOVEMBER, 1839. ART. I.1. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. BY VICTOR HUGO. 2. Picciola, or, Captivity Captive. By M. D. SAIN TINE. The THESE two works give a pretty good idea of the two principal schools in the Romantic Literature of France. great popularity, which they have had with English readers, shows that our tastes are not unlike the French. It is hardly necessary to say, that the Hunchback of Notre Dame is lawless and monstrous enough to be regarded as a type of the whole race of novels to which it belongs. The readers of Picciola among us, and they have been numerous enough to demand a second edition, need not be told of the simplicity, faith, and love, that characterize this beautiful creation of ius. It is not our present purpose to criticise these productions, so much as to speak of two great tendencies in modern literature, from which these works spring, and which they characterize. gen It is justly the glory of our age, that it is the era of Freedom. And yet side by side with our best blessings, our worst evils have come, arrayed alike in the garb of Liberty. If in government, the age has shown the noblest specimens of free institutions, ever granted to man, it has also seen the vilest anarchy; if it has had its Washington, it has also had its Robespierre. In society, if there have been those, who have looked beyond the petty artificial distinctions of social life, and recognised the true law of social brotherhood, binding alike VOL. XXVII. 3D S. VOL. IX. NO. II. 19 upon all classes, there have been others, who have merely quarrelled with life's outside distinctions, and breathed nothing but discord and hate. In philosophy, if the brighter intelligences have seen through the errors and prejudices of many old opinions, and nobly vindicated truth from the follies, that have been wrapped around it, there have been others, so mad to destroy these follies, as to deny or forget the sacred truths, of which these are but the accidental appendages. If in morals, the better spirits of the times have explored the foundations of human duty, and found moral obligation to have a far deeper basis, than the authority of man, or the mere customs of society, there have been others, who have carried their inquiries no farther than to see the shallowness of worldly morality, to call all virtue, but a pretence, and to acknowledge no duty, save that of seeking the greatest amount of animal gratification. And in religion, if many noble souls in all lands and all denominations have vindicated Christianity from the attacks of its foes and its false friends, shown, that it is something more than a device of the despot or tool of the bigot, and asserted a faith sublimely spiritual and plainly practical, free, and yet strict, alike true to revelation and accordant with science, there have been others, who have used their liberty of thought only as an occasion of licentiousness, have carried their free inquiry no farther, than to examine and war with the human abuses of religion, and to pride themselves either in a sensual philosophy, that degrades man to a brute, or in a vague mysticism, that rests all faith in mere sentiment and all duty in fleeting impulse. In literature, which is generally a faithful mirror of the times, we may see the good and evil tendencies of our free age clearly imaged forth. In literature a large class of minds, and in many respects a noble class, impatient of the shackles of old authorities, and the formalities of artificial life, have rushed with rapture towards freedom, and ended only in rebellion and lawlessness. Other minds, and these of a nobler order and a happier lot, have been equally ardent to join in the free movement, but not content with warring against old errors and fretting at former bonds, they have persevered to the end and attained an independence, that is serene and reverential, and a liberty, that is founded upon law. The former class of minds may be justly called the Satanic School in literature. It is * We believe that Robert Southey, in the preface to his Vision of to a consideration of this Satanic School, and to the nobler class of minds, that have sprung up to be its reformers, that our attention will now be given. The bane and antidote are both before us. Although the influence of the Satanic School is evidently on the wane, it cannot be denied, that it has been the most popular literature of the age, and has exerted the most effect upon the minds of the rising generation, especially upon those of a more impassioned temper. It has made its way into all places, and been found in almost all hands. Its novels have been found alike in the parlor and the bar-room, on the student's table and in the steamboat library; its philosophy has been heard in the conversation of the grave theorist and in the harangue of the mad demagogue; its poems have been favorites in the ladies' boudoir and in the profligate's den; its songs have been yelled forth in the midnight orgies of bacchanalians, and warbled on gentle lips at the piano. It is much less hazardous to speak of the characteristics of the Satanic School, than to mention the writers by name. For many writers, who are great favorites with the public, are not free from the Satanic taint, and several, whose later influences have been pure, have in early life been foremost in the rebellious host. Indeed, in many of the impassioned minds of the age, the higher and lower elements of nature are so conflicting, the dust and the deity so warring, faith alternating with denial, and rebellion with reconciliation, that it is often hard to say which preponderates. All of these are of a noble race, and even in their rebellion and degradation show features like those of "Arch-angel ruined." It may be said of almost the whole school what Byron, himself one of the leaders, perhaps the very Coryphæus of the band, says of his Manfred; "This should have been a noble creature; he Had they been wisely mingled; as it is, It is an awful chaos, - light and darkness, And mind and dust, and passions and pure thoughts, Mixed and contending without end or order, All dormant or destructive." Judgment, was the first to use this term. But the term has a meaning in itself independent of any particular application. It represents one of the movements of the passing age. The characteristic of the Satanic School, which first strikes the mind, is its impatience of all restraint, its wild, rebellious spirit. It mocks at human authorities, it has no reverence for man, or his dignities; the principles of some of its chief names, such, for instance, as Rousseau, have been watch-words on the lips of those, who have sought to overturn modern thrones. Shelley, in so far as his opinions can be gathered from such works as his Revolt of Islam, would seem to scoff at all human laws, and place his Utopia in a state of nature. The wayward Byron scorned every restraint, whether social or moral; he satirized his king, ridiculed the laws of his country, and delighted in detracting from the glory of her proudest victories; he was indeed an ardent champion of the liberal party, and this in itself was well; but his republicanism savored more of Cataline than Brutus, more of the piqued and disappointed aristocrat, than the patriot and lover of man. - There has been enough in the political institutions even of our age to provoke the more generous to rebellion, and there is much true nobleness in the strains of proud defiance, in which the master spirits of this rebellious literature treat the pretensions of human authorities. But their defiance does not stop here, but extends to almost every cherished social institution, and every moral rule. It jests at the sanctity of the marriage bond, and ridicules the idea of giving permanence by law to connexions, that have no just rule, but that of impulse. It delights, as well it may, in stripping off the mask of pretended morality, in revealing the selfish hypocrite under the solemn. robe of the Pharisee. But in warring with pretence and formality, it often wars with the real virtues, of which these are the counterfeit garb; it casts down the moral law, and enthrones in its place a Proteus code, called impulse. It delights in confounding the common notions of virtue, by showing the noblest sentiments beating in the hearts of those whom society has branded with infamy; and this would be well, if the effect were to teach humility to boasted virtue, or to make the reader glory to see the lineaments of a common humanity in the most depraved bosom. But the tendency has often been to confound good and evil, to exalt the robber, like Paul Clifford, into an hero, a murderer, like Eugene Aram, into an interesting enthusiast, a faithless woman, like Rousseau's Julia, into a fascinating sentimentalist. The rebellious spirit has even ventured to scorn the holiest truths of religion; and although in gifted natures, the soul cannot be utterly defrauded of her rights, and in the page of Byron and of Shelley, strains of the loftiest religious sentiment are found, these strains seem like the voices of fallen angels, singing, in a dream in the lower world, one of the not yet forgotten chants of heaven, and when the fugitive dream has fled, again joining in the rebellious shouts of hell. The choice and mode of treating of such subjects, as Cain and Prometheus, show that these two master-spirits of the Satanic School, do not feel that Faith is wiser than doubt, and Reverence is nobler -than rebellion. Another characteristic of the Satanic School, and nearly akin to that already mentioned, is its discontent. Impassioned, as most of its authors are, and keenly sensible to enjoyment, they seem to have ended all their searches for happiness in fits of disgust. Rousseau was weary of society and even of life, before he quitted it, and died not without suspicion of suicide; and the school of French novelists, who have copied his worst features and left unapproached the nobler elements of his singular nature, delight in tales of suicide; and the tide of the river Seine and the annals of the Morgue show, in the number of weekly victims, how successful these romancers are in teaching the worthlessness of life and the glory of self-murder. The same disgust, that haunted the poor garret of Rousseau, has not spared the most favored of his disciples. A coronet, a fame which threw all titled distinctions into the shade, the adulation of all society, the wide range of the world, the delights of Italy, the glories of Florence, and the pleasures of Venice, could not take from Byron his disgust at life; the intoxicating bowl lost its power to excite him, and his expedition to Greece seemed but a desperate effort to find stimulus enough to cure the discontent, which death at last relieved. His restless and diseased mind had tried every fountain of worldly joy, and found no abiding refreshment; love, fame, every pleasure and every excitement, all had been tried: "Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst, - - And death the sable smoke, where vanishes the flame." These words well express the bitter moral, which existence taught the noble poet and his school. Of course such impatience of all restraint, and such restless |