_March 4, 1867._
29. The subject which I want to bring before you is now branched, and
worse than branched, reticulated, in so many directions, that I hardly
know which shoot of it to trace, or which knot to lay hold of first.
I had intended to return to those Japanese jugglers, after a visit to
a theater in Paris; but I had better, perhaps, at once tell you the
piece of the performance which, in connection with the scene in the
English pantomime, bears most on matters in hand.
It was also a dance by a little girl--though one older than Ali Baba's
daughter, (I suppose a girl of twelve or fourteen). A dance, so
called, which consisted only in a series of short, sharp contractions
and jerks of the body and limbs, resulting in attitudes of distorted
and quaint ugliness, such as might be produced in a puppet by sharp
twitching of strings at its joints: these movements being made to the
sound of two instruments, which between them accomplished only a quick
vibratory beating and strumming, in nearly the time of a
hearth-cricket's song, but much harsher, and of course louder, and
without any sweetness; only in the monotony and unintended aimless
construction of it, reminding one of various other insect and reptile
cries or warnings: partly of the cicala's hiss; partly of the little
melancholy German frog which says "Mu, mu, mu," all summer-day long,
with its nose out of the pools by Dresden and Leipsic; and partly of
the deadened quivering and intense continuousness of the alarm of the
rattlesnake.
While this was going on, there was a Bible text repeating itself over
and over again in my head, whether I would or no:--"And Miriam the
prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all
the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances." To which
text and some others, I shall ask your attention presently; but I must
go to Paris first.
30. Not at once, however, to the theater, but to a bookseller's shop,
No. 4, Rue Voltaire, where, in the year 1858, was published the fifth
edition of Balzac's 'Contes Drolatiques,' illustrated by 425 designs
by Gustave Dore.
Both text and illustrations are as powerful as it is ever in the
nature of evil things to be (there is no _final_ strength but in
rightness). Nothing more witty, nor more inventively horrible, has yet
been produced in the evil literature, or by the evil art, of man: nor
can I conceive it possible to go beyond either in their specialities
of corruption. The text is full of blasphemies, subtle, tremendous,
hideous in shamelessness, some put into the mouths of priests; the
illustrations are, in a word, one continuous revelry in the most
loathsome and monstrous aspects of death and sin, enlarged into
fantastic ghastliness of caricature, as if seen through the distortion
and trembling of the hot smoke of the mouth of hell. Take this
following for a general type of what they seek in death: one of the
most labored designs is of a man cut in two, downwards, by the sweep
of a sword--one half of him falls toward the spectator; the other half
is elaborately drawn in its section--giving the profile of the divided
nose and lips; cleft jaw--breast--and entrails; and this is done with
farther pollution and horror of intent in the circumstances, which I
do not choose to describe--still less some other of the designs which
seek for fantastic extreme of sin, as this for the utmost horror of
death. But of all the 425, there is not one, which does not violate
every instinct of decency and law of virtue or life, written in the
human soul.
31. Now, my friend, among the many "Signs of the Times" the production
of a book like this is a significant one: but it becomes more
significant still when connected with the farther fact, that M.
Gustave Dore, the designer of this series of plates, has just been
received with loud acclaim by the British Evangelical Public, as the
fittest and most able person whom they could at present find to
illustrate, to their minds, and recommend with grace of sacred art,
their hitherto unadorned Bible for them.
Of which Bible, and of the use we at present make of it in England,
having a grave word or two to say in my next letter (preparatory to
the examination of that verse which haunted me through the Japanese
juggling, and of some others also), I leave you first this sign of the
public esteem of it to consider at your leisure.