my mode of taking her alarming proposition, for she retired into a
corner pouting, and sat down with great majesty. So there I left her,
and went my way to Vivian. He was out; but seeing books on his table,
and having nothing to do, I resolved to wait for his return. I had
enough of my father in me to turn at once to the books for company;
and by the side of some graver works which I had recommended, I found
certain novels in French that Vivian had got from a circulating library.
I had a curiosity to read these; for except the old classic novels of
France, this mighty branch of its popular literature was then new to
me. I soon got interested; but what an interest!--the interest that a
nightmare might excite if one caught it out of one's sleep and set to
work to examine it. By the side of what dazzling shrewdness, what deep
knowledge of those holes and corners in the human system of which Goethe
must have spoken when he said somewhere,--if I recollect right, and
don't misquote him, which I'll not answer for "There is something in
every man's heart which, if we could know, would make us hate him,"--by
the side of all this, and of much more that showed prodigious boldness
and energy of intellect, what strange exaggeration; what mock nobility
of sentiment; what inconceivable perversion of reasoning; what damnable
demoralization! The true artist, whether in Romance or the Drama, will
often necessarily interest us in a vicious or criminal character; but he
does not the less leave clear to our reprobation the vice or the crime.
But here I found myself called upon, not only to feel interest in the
villain (which would be perfectly allowable,--I am very much interested
in Macbeth and Lovelace), but to admire and sympathize with the villany
itself. Nor was it the confusion of all wrong and right in individual
character that shocked me the most, but rather the view of society
altogether, painted in colors so hideous that, if true, instead of a
revolution, it would draw down a deluge. It was the hatred, carefully
instilled, of the poor against the rich; it was the war breathed between
class and class; it was that envy of all superiorities which loves to
show itself by allowing virtue only to a blouse, and asserting; that a
man must be a rogue if he belong to that rank of society in which,
from the very gifts of education, from the necessary associations of
circumstance, roguery is the last thing probable or natural. It was all
this,