I don’t wish to carry this any farther, or to say a word in defence of the doctrine which Mrs. Dudevant has found “incomplete”;—here, at least, is not the place for discussing its merits, any more than Mrs. Sand’s book was the place for exposing, forsooth, its errors: our business is only with the day and the new novels, and the clever or silly people who write them. Oh! if they but knew their places, and would keep to them, and drop their absurd philosophical jargon! Not all the big words in the world can make Mrs. Sand talk like a philosopher: when will she go back to her old trade, of which she was the very ablest practitioner in France?
I should have been glad to give some extracts from the dramatic and descriptive parts of the novel, that cannot, in point of style and beauty, be praised too highly. One must suffice,—it is the descent of Alexis to seek that unlucky manuscript, Spiridion.
“It seemed to me,” he begins, “that the descent was eternal; and that I was burying myself in the depths of Erebus: at last, I reached a level place,—and I heard a mournful voice deliver these words, as it were, to the secret centre of the earth—‘He will mount that ascent no more!’—Immediately I heard arise towards me, from the depth of invisible abysses, a myriad of formidable voices united in a strange chant—‘Let us destroy him! Let him be destroyed! What does he here among the dead? Let him be delivered back to torture! Let him be given again to life!’