Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/239

224 lies ill rousing in our own community a soul of goodness, a wise aspiration, that shall give us strength to assimilate this unwholesome food to better substance, or to cast off its contaminations."

In view of the translation and republication of these works, Margaret remarks that it would be desirable for our people to know something of the position which the writers occupy in their own country. She says, moreover, what we would tain hope may he true to-day, that "our imitation of Europe does not yet go so far that the American milliner can be depended on to eojiy anything from the Parisian grisette, except her cap."

Margaret speaks at some length of Balzac's novel, Le Père Goriot, which she had just read. The author," she says, "reminds one of the Spanish romancers in the fearlessness with which he takes mud into his hands, and dips his foot in slime. We cannot endure this when done, as by most Frenchmen, with an air of recklessness and gaiety; but Balzac does it with the stern manliness of a Spaniard."

The conception of this novel appears to her "so sublime," that she compares its perusal to a walk through the catacombs, which the reader would not willingly have missed; "though the light of day seems stained afterwards with the mould of horror and dismay."

She infers from much of its tenor that Balzac was "familiar with that which makes the agony of poverty—its vulgarity. Dirt, confusion, shabby expedients, living to livethese are what make poverty terrible and odious; and in these Balzac would seem to have been steeped to the very lips" The skill with which he illustrates both the connection and the contrast