She begins by commenting upon the lamentation general at that time, and not uncommon in this, over the depravity of taste and of life already becoming familiar to the youth of America through the medium of the French novel. Concerning this, she says:--
"It is useless to bewail what is the inevitable result of the movement of our time. Europe must pour her corruptions no less than her riches on our shores, both in the form of books and of living men. She cannot, if she would, check the tide which bears them hitherward. No defences are possible, on our vast extent of shore, that can preclude their ingress. Our only hope lies in 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 fain hope may be true to-day, that "our imitation of Europe does not yet go so far that the American milliner can be depended on to copy 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 gayety; 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 live,--these 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 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 praise-worthy 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 Père 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 novelist's merits, Margaret unites an equally comprehensive perception of his fatal defects of character. His scepticism regarding virtue she calls fearful, his spirit Mephistophelian. "He delights to analyze, 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 organized; 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."