The National Review (Volume 4) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: nent of God,?then will Art enter upon its great ideal work, as the universal language of Religion?to give the portraiture of inward beauty,?to enable us to look more nearly upon the face of Christ,?to paint the features of a soul that is in the likeness of the Deity. Akt. III.?BALZAC EN PANTOUFLES. By LEON GOZLAN. Balzac en Pantoitfles. By Leon Gozlan. 1vol. Paris: Michel Levy. 1856. The works of some men stand alone, apart, and are in themselves self-sufficient. With those who wrote them you need have nothing to do; they are not necessarily referred to their creator, and the breath they breathe comes not immediately from him, nor does his life-blood seem to flow through them. Not so with Balzac. You are compelled to know him, or you can but dimly appreciate his works. Critically speaking, it is not our present purpose to touch upon these works, but upon their author only; we do not mean to point out how far they possessed or were wanting in merit, but why they were, and why, being as they were, they could derive their existence from no one else save him alone. Take any hero or heroine of Madame Sand (except Indiana), ?let it be Valentine, or Jacques, or Consuelo, or Mauprat, or any other,?and there is no reason why they should not spring from some other brain than hers. There would be nothing revolting to our sense in the supposition of their being conceived by Alfred de Musset, for instance, or any other like-minded writer. So, again, we might easily admit the notion that Alexandre Dumas had written Marie Tudor or Angela, instead of Victor Hugo; or accept the proof, were it afforded us, that Monte Cristo was the work of Eugene Sue, or Arthur that of Charles de Bernard. A fact, however, of which we feel instinctively and absolutely sure is, that not one of these cre...