The Press. — London, England, 1855-01-20 00:00:00

64 and an appearance of suffering, he receives the visits of his acquaintances, who either condole or rejoice with him as the case may be. Without pretension to literary merit, Dr. Dalton's work is well composed, and affords a complete exposition in all respects of the past bisitory told present state of the colony. La Conscience. By Alexandre Dumas. Paris : Taride. NOBODY but Alexandre Dumas could, or would, have produced this work. Nobody but he could have had the. astounding impudence to take three well known German plays, Yerb>•e oho*atw Eirgoix, Row, and Siihsung, to meltthem down into one, and to bring out that one as his own original production, without saying a single word of, or making a single reference to, them, or their victimised author, Iffland. Nobody, on the other hand, could, out of the huge mass of incidents they presented, have had the skill to evolve a play of such great interest and such really remarkable dramatic power as this one, have transformed as he has done their heavy talk into dialogue always effective, occasionally brilliant, and here and there studded with thoughts that breathe ex pressed in words that burn, or, with his wizard-like touch, have changed their sickly sentiment* into those sterling natural emotions which draw floods of tears from the eyes of women, and create a commotion in the stern breasts of men. Nobody assuredly but he, whilst giving to the world a drama of which he has reason to be proud, would have placed at the head of it a dedication of such grotesque absurdity as this : It is to you, my dear Hugo, that I dedicate my drama, Conscience. Receive it as the testimony of a friendship which has survived onile, and which, I hope, will survive even death. I believe in the immortality of the soul. A. DUMAS Nobody but he would have run the risk of getting himself laughed at by indulging in the outrageous vanity of saying in his preface It is only , practical dramatists who can understand the immense difficulty of my subject—three acts devoted to the qcoomplishment of a crime, and three to its chastise ment and ezpiatinn. But that difficulty I have triumphed over ! practical men alone can understand the resources to be drawn from the opposition between three acts of a drama passed in a bourgeois family, and three amongst the highest aristocracy. But these resources I have turned to account ! Nobody, finally, but he would put his name to such a prose-gone-mad description as this : Laferriere, who played the principal part, was admirable, prodigious, complete as Edward. Never was an actor— And 1 speak of the greatest actors, do you hear?—in a Aggie evening more overwhelmed, more feverish, more (Wm, more poetical, Mere loving, more deepening, more ( t e tirious, more joyogs, more excited, more crushed (eerasi), than was Laferriere. He alone bore the weight of the play, and to the end he bore it without stopping, witliont bending, without being out of breath. It is true that in the interval between each act I went to hica to o him by the hand, and to pay him the compliments of Madame de Girardin and George Sand. A man goes a long way, doesn't he, Laferriere, with such refreshments (tie) on the road? The consequence was that Laferriete went as far and rose as high as it is given to dramatic Went to do l W, have often woodered whether the name of Dumas will dewend to posterity. In his works there is talent and genius enough to make them live, and there is trash enough to eitilit them iti the gulf of oblivion deeper 41,93,1 ever plotornet sounded. tot if they should live, the New Zealanders—who, as Mr. Ma caulay tells us, are to be our posterity, and of ei;)tple hs knows—will, we should fancy, take 1;747 great interest indeed in Alexandre Itas. If, for example, they should, as for om twe can tell they may, estimate the value ofbooks by weight or by the space they cover, as the puke of Newcastle (loci; army medi cines and VIA, they will give hint the tbreniost place in litera%ure, for no man, hying cr dead, ites written ao many volumes ; they amount to hundreds already, and are constantly on the increase ; whereas Voltaire and Walter Scott, the most voluminous writers of renown hitherto, cannot boast of a hundred volumes eAch, though every kiCIV they penned is thrust into the editions of their "complete works." If the Zealandera should have some regard for quality as well as quantity, they will be pleased to And that none of his contemporary couotrymen have displayed iu light litera ture more dash and brilliancy, more wit, MC*e iertilAy vi invention, mere power of THE PRESS. amusing—and few, indeed, anything like as much. If they should judge by the extent of renown, they will hold him in the highest respect; for certain it is that of all writers now living he is the only one who counts his readers by millions, and can boast of having been translated into every living language in which books are printed. If they look for singularity of character, they will find none of these days more singular than his—they will find that None but himself can be his parallel! He is the vainest and the silliest of mankind. His impudence is unbounded. He thinks himself one of the greatest dramatists that ever lived, and never hesitates to write " I, Euripides, and Shakspeare." As a romancer he pats Waiter Scott condescendingly on the head. His vanity makes him so credulous that a few months ago he devoutly believed an Englishman who, by way of hoax, told him that the manager of one of the London theatres would give him 4,0001. down for a pantomime, and that on its first representa tion the Queen would make him a Knight of the Garter, with the title of " Sir Dumas." He affects to be a republican of the Spartan school, and yet fawns like a spaniel at the feet of princes or great nobles when any of them allow him to approach them, as not a few do, or have done, out of regard for his literary celebrity. He has earned more by his pen than ever man did before—infinitely more even than Scott—and yet be has not saved a sixpence. Ask what has become of it, and he will answer that he is not what is called a debauched man—at least for Paris —nor fond of riotous living, nor a gambler, nor a keeper of costly horses—he really cannot tell, parolit dlsonneur ! But others know that it has been wasted in gifts to false friends and loans to acquaintance, who never think of paying, and in a thousand ways of ex treme foolishness. At present, though his popularity has declined, and though the dimi nutiou of newspapers has lessened the market for his feuilletons, he has sufficient occupation to require him to work fourteen hours a day, and through every one of the fourteen he toils most conscientiously ; yet though his labours must produce what for a professional author is a splendid income, he is often obliged to make the appeal "My dear fellow ! Lend me sf. to pay for my dinner." On the whole, Dumas is an extraordinary compound. In making money by his pen, he displays all the worldly shrewdness of the modern author ; nay, he is even vehemently suspected of being so imbued with the mer cantilism of the age as to have palmed on the public, under the popularity of his name, works which he never wrote. But, though thus keen in the pursuit of gold, he no sooner gets it than he squanders it with all the reek lessness of the professional author of a hun dred years ago. His genius, for genius 4e has, is unquestionably of a high and varied order ; and yet it would not be easy to find any man who is so much of a fool. Had he employed his high qualities with prudence, and lived a regular and decorons life, he would now, no doubt, be loaded with wealth, ho nours, arid dignities; but he has wasted his op portunities gs he has his fortune, and has in Bulged in such gross vanity and charlatanism, that be is commonly called, and is content to call himself, "the greatest humbug in all " France !" The Chinese Empire. Forming a Sequel to the Work entitled "Recollections of a Journey "through. Tartary and Thibet." By M. Huc. London : Longmans. M. Hue is favourably remembered by his " Travels in Tartary," and from his fourteen years' residence in China ho is peculiarly fitted to give us a correct description of the country and its inhabitants. The main value of his book, irrespective of the interest at tached to his personal narrative and adven tures, consists in his dispelling our prejudices upon certain points connected with the Chi nese character. We have always supposed them to be a most homogeneous nation, so that if you knew one Chinese you knew them all ; but M. Hue undeceives us upon this point, as upon many others. There are certain characteristics, he tells us, which constitute SATURDAY, the Chinese type, but they are distinguished by such well-defined varieties that you can not only tell whether a man comes from the north, south, east, or west of the empire, but can distinguish a Pekin from a Nanking man at a glance. Again, we have supposed the Chinese people to be the most unpolitical, do cile, and industrious of human beings, content to be governed, pay taxes, and work hard ; but here we find that the Chinese present in their history much the same phases as the Euro pean nations. Equally inconstant and scep tical in the matters of religion and government, they have changed the one quite as often as they have altered the other, and finally lapsed into a state of utter indifference to both. Islam ism, Brahmism, Buddhism, Grand Lamaism have all been welcomed, tried, and condemned, with hosts of other creeds, including Christi anity, and they now live without a religion at all ; and in the history of their Government every maxim, combination, and political ex periment has been tried, including revolutions, changes of dynasty, cutting off kings' heads, and civil war ; for China in twelve hundred years, from 420 to the conquest of the country by the Mantchoo Tartars in 1644, underwent fifteen frightful revolutions, all accompanied terrible civil wars and a bloody extermination of the dethroned families. This love of novelty is a weakness not peculiar to the Chinese. Again, we have always supposed the Chi nese to be the most exclusive people in the world, but history and M. Huc tell us the very reverse. In old times Arabs and Indians traded by sea to all the Chinese ports ; while the Persians, Bucharians, and the whole of the tribes upon the north-west frontier carried and carry on the most important land trade. It is not the character of the Chinese to be so exclusive. M. Huc tells us their whole soul is wrapped up in trade, and if ever there was a nation of shop keepers, China is the one. But their Tartar conquerors, from motives of policy, closed the ports and restricted foreign trade, and the Go vernment which once took in Marco Polo and made him a viceroy of a province would now, if possible, prevent a single foreigner from lauding in the country. The picture which China of to-day presents to us as a civilised nation, is, according to M. Huc, that of a people imbued with mar vellous industry, living in a country thickly populated to its area, with numerous cities and towns, numbering in each some millions of inhabitants, more or less, governed by a highly centralised system of paternal administration, yet enjoying perfect freedom of association, perfect independence of motion, liberty to travel when and where they please without gendarmes or passports, the utmost freedom of the press and speech, and, in conclusion, the greatest facility of communication by land and water throughout the vast empire—a fact expressive of the immense internal trade which flourishes, and the high commercial spirit of the people. And this freedom is not a modern advancement in the art of Chinese statesmanship, for the people have enjoyed it for the last two thousand years ! Yet in this nation are the seeds of mortal decay now rapidly bearing fruit in rank unwholesome• ness. The Mantchoo Tartars who seized the government and the throne in 1644, discovered their numerical weakness compared with the conquered nation, and felt themselves lost unless precaution was taken to prevent con spiracy and consolidate their own power. Reserving the command of the army and the fortified places for Tartar generals, they did not attempt to supersede the native Man darins and other public officers, but decreed that henceforth no Mandarin should exercise the functions of his office in his own district, and, moreover, that he should never perform the administration of justice for more than three years in one place. The consequenees of this step were obvious to the Chinese statesmen of the day as fatal to the well-being of the empire. The administration of justice was no longer cared for, and the interests of the people became wholly neglected. The Man darins and public functionaries, having no tie attaching them to the population of the place, being even unable to speak the dialect of the province, sought only to enrich themselves by