The Press. — London, England, 1854-12-16 00:00:00

DECEMBER 16, 1854. Yittraturt. Miscellanies, Critical, Imaginative, and Juridical. By Samuel Warren, D.O .L London: Black wood and Sons. As these papers have appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, and are, consequently, well known, they require only a notice of their appearance in a collective form. They show the versatility of Mr. Warren's mind, and show also his happy art of making every subject he discusses or na rrates attractive. His reviews, biographical sketches, and trials, possess as much interest —and interest of the same kind, too—as his fictions. He is always successful in engaging the reader's sympathies by imparting to his writing, of whatever kind it be, a strong human element. The famous declaration of Terence, Homo sum, &c., might appropriately serve as the motto to the collective edition of his works. We are sorry, however, to Observe that in the preface to these volumes he has, as we must think most unpardonably, printed a letter, which, if only from compassion to a great man's failings, ought never to have seen the light. It appears that when Mr. Warren had " scarcely entered his seventeenth year," he had, with a presumption which he is no doubt prepared to admit his youth and in experience could scarcely excuse, written to Sir Walter Scott (treating him as the author of the Waverley novels), and requested his advice as to the publication of a work which he had nearly ready for the press, and of which he favoured Sir Walter with an outline. Now, at this date every one knew that Sir Walter Scott, if the author of the Waverley novels, had some reasons which appeared to him cogent for preserving his authorship secret, and the letter must have appeared to him much like a trap to draw from him a secret which he was resolved to conceal. Probably this was the view of Scott, from the tone of his reply. Mr. Warren gives the letter a 4 highly creditable to its writer, "as an " evidence of the extraordinary good-nature " and condescension of that great writer to an " unknown correspondent," though we will undertake to say there is not one among the myriad admirers of Scott's genius and virtues who will read this letter without pain and a feeling of almost personal humiliation at observing the baseness to which a lofty nature, when warped by interest or whim, may descend : Abbotsford, 3rd August [1823]. Sir,—l am favoured with your letter of the 26th ult., which some business prevented my sooner replying to. I am not the author of those novels which the world chooses to ascribe to me, and am, therefore, unworthy of the praises due to that individual, whoever he may prove to be. It is need less, therefore, to add that 1 cannot be useful to you in the way you propose. Indeed, if you will take my advice, you will seek no other person's judgment or countenance on the project of publishing which you entertain than that of an intelligent bookseller who is in a good line in the trade. Although no great readers, or pretending to par ticular taste, these gentlemen, whose profession it is to cater for the public, acquire much more accurate know ledge of what will give satisfaction to the general reader than can be obtained by a man of letters in his closet. They have also ready access to good judges, and their own interest peremptorily commands them to give as much encouragement as possible to genius, or anything approach ing it. Excuse these hints from one who has bad some expe rience, and believe me, sir, your most obedient servant, WALTER SCOTT. Samuel Warren, Esq. If Mr. Warren really thinks this letter creditable to Scott's memory, he must, for so clever a man, be the blindest of his species. To us it is evident that he has published it from much the same kind of animus that would lead a callous operator to exhibit a tumour which he had cut from a great man's body. The public exhibition of deformity, whether mental or physical, must always be of an unwholesome tendency ; and in this case Mr. Warren whose claim to be con sidcred a moral writer we are quite willing to acknowledge—should have known that the deliberate and unnecessary falsehood of Scott can have no other effect than to weaken the sacred obligations of truth, by showing how lightly he regarded them. By some shuffling casuistry, Scott did, no doubt, persuade himself that on this particular subject he might lie as stoutly and as fro- THE PRESS. quently as he pleased without injury to his moral character. His honourable feeling, and even his clear sense, seem to have totally de serted him whenever his authorship of the novels was called in question ; for to assert that a man may always have recourse to down right falsehood to keep a secret is simply to say that truth may be sacrificed to every p Aty prompting of interest or convenience. There never was less occasion for deceit than in Scott's case. Silence would have served his purpose just as effectually as denial ; and, after all, if his authorship had bean known, who can suppose that his fame or his profits would have been in the slightest degree di minished ? All the casuistry by which he sought to defend himself was inapplicable, as the instances he alleged were essentially dis similar. The falsehood in the letter to Mr. Warren is the more revolting from being wholly gratuitous ; not life, or safety, or even fortune, was at stake. Were such false hood to become general, nothing would be gained by it, as there would be no belief. Some hold, indeed, that direct falsehood is not more criminal than equivocation. When Compton, Bishop of London, who had signed the invitation to William of Orange, was asked by James 11. whether there was any ground for the assertion in the Prince's manifesto that he came over at the instance of some peers, spiritual and temporal, the prelate re plied, " Sir, I am quite confident that there is " not one of my brethren who is not as guiltless " as myself in this matter ;" and when again interrogated the following day, answered, " I " gave your Majesty my answer yesterday." The historian who records these replies questions " whether the difference between the sin of such " equivocation and the sin of a lie be worth " any expense of ingenuity." But in such eases there is at least a profession of regard for truth, while direct falsehood treats it with open contempt. In the ordinary concerns of the world, what ever casuists may allege, there is not the slightest occasion for that falsehood which Sir Walter Scott most unhappily thought in some way or other essential to his inte rests. The subject is a painful one ; we would willingly have avoided it. Mr. Warren thrusts it on our notice ; and, not only so, but compels us to speak plainly on it, by representing the letter as creditable to Scott's character. If this be his real opinion, we are very sorry for the deadness of his moral per ceptions. It is unpleasant to expose a great man's faults, but, whenever they do come before us, let us in heaven's name, with all charitable regard for the individual, call his offences by their right name, and without quirk or quibble condemn them as honest sense requires, even when we mourn over them most. Histoire des Livres Populaires. By Ch. Nisard. Paris : Amyst. Amorasx the many services which the Govern ment of the Emperor Napoleon 111. has un• questionably rendered to France, one of the greatest, though perhaps not one of the most showy, was the establishment two years ago of a special commission charged to examine what the French call lea livres du colportage, that is the almanacs, books, and publications of all kinds prepared for the lower orders, especially the peasantry, and hawked about for sale by professional hawkers. M. Latour-Dumoulin, at that time Directeur de la Librairie de l'lmprimerie et de la Presse, and at present member of the Corps Legislatif, was charged with the organisation of this commission, and with the general superintendence of its labours. All the works, of whatever kind— they formed a mighty mass—sold by the colporteurs were subject to a rigid examina tion ; and the result was that the commission found, to its astonishment, that far the greater part of them were silly or stupid, or scanda lously immoral and irreligious, or flagrantly seditious. The commission, thereupon, in virtue of powers intrusted to it by the Govern ment, peremptorily prohibited the further cir culation of these pernicious publications ; and, having since been transformed into a perma nent institution, it has taken effectual means to prevent for the future any but works of 1191 an instructive, or at least an innocuous, cha racter being sold to the multitude. But amongst the works presented to the commis sion, and even amongst those it has been found necessary to proscribe, were many of great historical, political, or literary interest, either from their antiquity, or peculiar character, or as showing the mental pabulum of the bulk of the French people in the nineteenth century, and of their fathers before them. Accordingly, it was determined that a book should be written on the subject of them. The task of executing this work was confided to M. Nisard, the very able secretary of the commis• sion. In two goodly volumes he has classified, condensed, and commented on the more ancient portion of the vast materials col lected by the commission ; the more modern portion he reserves for a future work. When completed the book will form a most compre hensive history of the literature of the vulgar —a subject which never before obtained in France, or, indeed, in any other country, the attention it deserves. The first thing that strikes us in reading this book is that we knew little about France. We knew, indeed, like everybody else, her past and present history, her literature, her distinguished men ; we knew that she was and is mighty in war, brilliant in intelligence, and in some respects one of the foremost nations of the earth. But we did not know that the great mass of her population read no other books, and had no other books to read, than almanacs filled with absurd and contradictory predictions; treatises on magic ; collections of very silly, very old, and very obscene jokes ; profane quizzes on sermons, funeral eulo giums, and other things worthy of all respect ; wildly improbable romances and tales ; learned disquisitions on the art of seduction and adul tery ; slang dictionaries ; and lucubrations pro fessing to be on morality and religion, but teeming with incredible silliness, or disgrace ful scoffing, or irreverential remarks on the most holy things, or positive, downright in decency. In learning that such, and such only, has been the intellectual food supplied for centuries to the millions of Frenchmen who toil in towns or plough in fields, it is impossi ble not to feel that the ignorance of that people must have been very profound, their immorality very great, their contempt of religion fearful. We must feel, too, that it is such things, more than the turbulence of revolutionists, and the violence of rulers, which during the last half century have made Franc' the victim of repeated revolutions, and as such an enigma to statesmen. Quitting, however, the political view of this book for the literary one, we with some confi dence venture to proclaim it one of the most valuable additions which has been made to French literature for many a day. In the first place, it lets in a flood of light on the character of the great commonalty of France ; in the second place, it abounds in literary antiqua rianism, which the author of the " Curiosities of Literature " would have delighted in, and which he would have treated with a master hand if he had had the opportunity of pro curing the materials ; and, in the third place, it rescues from impending destruction the rude and singular wood-engravings which have tAtused the wonder and delight of eneration after generation of the " low people ' in Gaul. Precluded by want of space from attempting a detailed examination of the book before us— it runs to upwards of 1,100 pages—we must content ourselves with a rapid indication of its contents. It treats, then, in the first place, of the people's almanacs, which have always been widely sold and highly esteemed in France. From the chapter on this subject we learn that the first French almanac dates from 1493, and that there are two others, aged re spectively three hundred and two hundred and fifty years. The contents of these venerable brochures and of all kindred publications is substantially the same : predictions on public events, almost always contradictory, and never by any chance verified, but continued with imperturbable assurance year after year ; pro phecies on the weather for every day in each season ; cabalistic calculations, interpretations of dreams, medical counsels, agricultural dim tions, tales, legends, kc.