THE RIVAL RACES.*
READERS who can enjoy penny novels, or wade through the
"Mysteries of London," or feel interested in the combination of grotesque horrors with impossible scenery, with which Gustave Aimard floods the cheap bookstalls, will find a rare treat in these three volumes. To the critic, however, their value consists chiefly Or solely in the fact that their author left them, though filling ten volumes in the original, still unfinished. The story is a eon- densed translation from Eugene Sue's "Mysteries of the People," the "Red" legend which he began in 1849, when lie was inter- rupted by the coup d'etat, and continued at intervals during his residence in Belgium and Piedmont, where lie died. The story, from the principle of its construction, might have been finished at any moment, or expanded into a hundred volumes, and con- sequently the author, wealthy, lazy, and middle-aged, neither brought it to a conclusion nor attempted to give it a high artistic polish. It is, therefore, a novel in the rough, a model half-made, with the marks of the sculptor's fingers on every limb and fold, and as the sculptor is believed by thousands to have been an artist of highest merit, it is worth while to study his process from the indications which he has left. If the analysis reveals that what has been taken for art is only audacious trickery, that the imagination displayed is but morbid fancy, that the learning so ostentatiously shown is only somewhat miscellaneous reading, the fault is not with the analyst, but with the subject of his experiment.
Eugene Sue's was one of those minds which possess in a high degree what we may call the magnifying power. Place any quantity of facts under that powerful lens, and they were revealed to the spectator magnified a thousandfold, and consequently hideous and disgusting. The skin of the fairest woman under a modern rniscroscope is but a collection of greasy cells, and a photograph from that reflection would give a real but utterly false idea. Sue placed particles of a rotten society under the lens, and the world had the "Mysteries of Paris," a book without a ehatm save the revelation it gave of the ugliness which lurks. in the fairest texture—an ugliness produced only by exaggeration, and which, could we magnify the particles sufficiently, would again become harmonious beauty. He placed the Order of Jesus under the glass, and the world had the "Wandering Jew," a picture of that society about as accurate as an engraving from the ten-millionth multiplication of some animalcule might be. The picture seems accurate, for do we not see veins, and stomach, and circulation ? only it is not the picture of a whale, which it looks, but of a wretched anim alcula. In the whole of that much admired book there is not a'ch erecter, unless it be thatof the Thug, who, though a Malay, worships the Hindoo Bhowanee, and who, being impossible, seems natural, whatever the attributes ascribed to him. Now the lens has been turned upon French society as it existed in ancient Gaul, and a horrible group of worms wriggle, and fight, and swallow, and perish before the amazed spectator. M. Sue having in some happy moment studied the work of Thierry, whose process applied to history was almost identically the same as his own, struck out a bright idea. He would depict in picturesque colours the contest M. Thierry had discovered as lasting throughout the ages between the conquering and conquered tribes. One family should relate its history from the first invasion of Gaul by Julius Ctesar, and ascending up through the centuries, should describe the horrible miseries through which its members passed, and inculcate the duty of vengeance for the wrongs which they had endured. Belonging to the Red party, M. Sue naturally made his family Gaul, and living in the midst of revolution,
• 2'he Rivet Races. By Eugene Sue. Triibner.
made his narrator a man of the people, a brave, firm, and sagacious linendraper, who, after conquering at the barricade, and suffering in the galleys, reads to his family, all adorned with the names current in old Gaul, and able to talk Breton, the history of his race.
All is prepared, the lens is fixed, and the objects have only to be shovelled under the glass. The mode of their collection is visible, as visible as if the reader were actually watching the process. M. Sue, as ignorant, we suspect, of the classics as most of his countrymen, and wholly unread in Gallic studies, had to
make his work easy to himself; so he collected all the translations he could secure, took out every hint about slavery, every story of feudal ferocity, every gibe at priestly debauchery, mashed them up in an electuary of " Red " ideas of the nineteenth century, oiled the mess with some strong denunciations from American writers on slavery, and placed the whole under the lens. Of course the resulting picture is most horrible, and the " artist " accepts the shudder which no human being can resist at the sight of a magnified worm, as evidence of his power. In the first story,
for example, the " point " is a human sacrifice offered by the Druids, coarsely copied out of a common history, but ex- plained as an heroic self-immolation performed by the victims in order to save their country. Their descendants are Roman slaves, and the process of manufacture becomes at once patent.
The worst hints of Juvenal are described as facts, and in the style familiar in England only to the readers of penny novels. Juvenal somewhere remarks that Roman mistresses pricked their
slave girls with pins for trilling offences, and the sentence, pro- bably a generalization from a single and horrible fact, is amplified under the lens into this disgusting picture :— "Philene, guilty of awkwardness, still kneeling, awaited her fate treml■ling. Faustina looked at her for a moment with an air of ferocious satisfaction, and said, "The pin-cushion —' At the words, the slave extended towards her mistress her suppliant hands ; but she, without even appearing to see the imploring gesture, said to the gigantic negro, Erebus, uncover her bosom, and hold her tight.' The black, delight- ing in the task, executed the great lady's order ; who then took from the hands of one of her women a singular and horrible instrument of torture. It consisted of a bug stem of steel, very flexible, terminated by a round plate of gold, covered with a cushion of red silk; in tho cmhion were fixed a great number of needles. Then, amidst silence, Faustina, leaning on the cushion, her cheek resting on her left hand, gave a slight motion to the flexible stem, and struck the bosom of Philene, held in the nervous arms of the Ethiopian. At this acute pain, the poor child gave a sharp cry, and her white bosom was stained with a few drops of blood oozing from the skin. At the sight of this blood, at the cry of the victim, the black eyes of Faustina flashed, the monster's smile grew terrible; and she said, as she rose with a sort of sweet and passionate ferocity, 'Cry, my sweet treasure ! cry, it excites use I cry, my pretty Lesbian ! cry, my dove I cry aloud!' Suddenly throwing away the cushion, the great lady, half-closing her eyes, said languidly, as she fell back on her cushion, while her victim, half fainting with pain, fell into the arms of her companions, I am thirsty again."
The whole book is in that style, unrelieved by one touch of feeling, one description of character, one effort to throw goodness, or mercy, or even the unconscious kindness of nature, into relief.
All the worms wriggle horribly, and all are immensely enlarged. Slaves suffer the tortures possible only in the second century with the feelings of Poles in the nineteenth. If a slave plots revenge, he forms a society after the manner of a modern freemason. If he is beaten, he sings an ancient Marseillaise, and talks of his patriotic devotion, not to this or that province, but to undivided France. If a slave girl is stripped for flogging, she screams, not with pain, but with the fear of exposure which was most certainly no feature of Gallic life. Petronius Arbiter, as far, at least, as the writer dare, and he dares in his realism rather more than an English public approves, is imported bodily into the hook; but the most singular specimen of manufacture occurs in the chapter from which we have taken this extract. The object is to describe one of the family whose adventures are the connecting chain of the book, as crushed by slavery in soul as well as in body. Of course, the writer being French, the destroyed one is a beautiful girl, and, of course, also, be approaches the verge which separates the voluptuous fiom the indecent. But he also, by a total blunder, even in French art, wants to give her soul to the Evil One, in whom neither he nor his imaginary nairator believes ; the scene in which he achieves this purpose is intended to he the gem of the book, and did, we dare say, sell it, and was admired as a wonderful speci- men of the fantastic. We read it with a feeling at first of disgust, then with a belief that Sue had somewhere or other obtained materials not natural even to his imagination, and finally, with a clear but undeterminate sense that we had read all that before. It is a cool theft from Apuleius. Sue has taken Horace's hints about Canidia, and realized them like the line of Juvenal, then borrowed the description in the Golden Ass of the- grisette's witch mistress, and then amplified, and to all tastes but the lovers of the horrible, spoilt it. So hasty has been the appro- priation, that the thief has not even taken the trouble to explain his possession of such property. That Lucius, who is relating a mere legend, an avowed fairy tale of the Roman type, should describe how Byrrluena metamorphosed herself into any creature she pleased, and should talk nonsense about magic arts and magic unguents, is sound art enough. But to import such a story of magic as a reality into what professes to be a family history, written by a man of the nineteenth century, mid leave it unexplained, is an atrocious blunder. The truth is, M. Sue thought the story would be a telling one, and so borrowed it, and was too lazy or too =inventive to fit it into the rest of the book. The result is to reveal his machinery, and show that the picture on which he prides himself is a mere copy of horrible things seen through a powerful, but dull and distorting lens. He has not even the poor merit of inventing the atrocities he de- scribes. Be only exaggerates other men's ideas.
The moral of the book is a simple one, and will not do much harm in England, whatever may be its effect in France. The duty of every man who is poor is, according to M. Sue, to as- sume that he comes of a subject race, and kill the rich, as an act of reparation towards the memory of his ancestors. The use of Christianity is to restrain the poor from performing this act of justice through the fear of hell, an invention of priests to terrify the few whom the nobles could not torture into submission.
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