Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/240

Rh between the depth of poverty and the height of luxury co-existing in Parisian life, is much dwelt upon by Margaret, as well as the praiseworthy fact that he depicts with equal faithfulness the vices developed by these opposite conditions. His insight and mastery appear to her "admirable throughout," the characters "excellently drawn," especially that of the Perc Goriot, the father of two heartless women, for whom he has sacrificed everything, and who in turn sacrifice him without mercy to their own pleasures and ambitions. Admirable, too, she finds him in his description of look, tone, gesture. He has a keen sense of whatever is peculiar to the individual." With this acute appreciation of the great novelists merits, Margaret unites an equally comprehensive perception of his fatal defects of character. His seceptieism regarding virtue she calls fearful, his spirit Mephistophelian.

"He delights to analyse, to classify. But he has no hatred for what is loathsome, no contempt for what is base, no love for what is lovely, no faith for what is noble. To him there is no virtue and no vice; men and women are more or less finely organised; noble and tender conduct is more agreeable than the reverse—that is all." His novels show "goodness, aspiration, the loveliest instincts, stifled, strangled by fate in the form of our own brute nature."

Margaret did not, perhaps, foresee how popular strangling of this kind was destined to become in the romance of the period following her own.

Contrasting Eugène Sue with Balzac, she finds in the first an equal power of observation, disturbed by a more variable temperament, and enhanced by the heart and faith that Balzac lacks." She sees him standing, pen in hand, armed with this slight but keen