The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 4 | Page 7

indulged in malicious and licentious conversation. Coll��, the younger Cr��billon and Bernard, who, notwithstanding his helplessness, was called le gentil, played the chief characters in this reunion, and the Gascon nature of Marmontel, which was always forward and intrusive, helped him into this society also. Baron Holbach, who was a native of the Palatinate, and the able Helvetius who was wanton merely from vanity, brought together expressly and intentionally at a later period, around their well-spread table, all those who declared open war against religion and morality. We must, however, return to these men in the following period.
Holbach for a whole quarter of a century had regular dinner-parties on Sundays, which are celebrated in the history of atheism. All those were invited, who were too bold and too out-spoken for Geoffrin; and even D'Alembert also at a later period withdrew from their society.
Grimm, whose copious correspondence has also been published in the nineteenth century, gives minutes and notices of all the memorable sayings and doings that served to entertain and occupy the polite world in Europe. Grimm also entertained and feasted these distinguished gentlemen. He was not at that time consul for Gotha, or employed and paid by that court or the Empress Catherine to collect Parisian anecdotes, neither had he then been made a baron, but was merely civil secretary of Count von Friese. Both J.J. Rousseau and Buffon belonged at first to these societies; but the former, in great alarm, broke off all intercourse with the people who then played the first parts in Paris, and the other quietly retired.
[Footnote 1: Mon Henri quatre et ma Za?re, Et mon Americaine Alzire, Ne m'ont valu jamais un seul regard du roi; J'eus beaucoup d'ennemis avec tr��s-peu de gloire. Les honneurs et les biens pleuvent enfin sur moi Pour une farce de la foire.--La Princesse de Navarro.]
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THE ATHEN?UM UPON HAWTHORNE.[2]
The London Athen?um, of the 15th June, has the following remarks upon the last work of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE:
"This is a most powerful and painful story. Mr. Hawthorne must be well known to our readers as a favorite of the Athen?um. We rate him as among the most original and peculiar writers of American fiction. There in his works a mixture of Puritan reserve and wild imagination, of passion and description, of the allegorical and the real, which some will fail to understand, and which others will positively reject,--but which, to ourselves, is fascinating, and which entitles him to be placed on a level with Brockden Brown and the author of 'Rip Van Winkle.' 'The Scarlet Letter' will increase his reputation with all who do not shrink from the invention of the tale; but this, as we have said, is more than ordinarily painful. When we have announced that the three characters are a guilty wife, openly punished for her guilt,--her tempter, whom she refuses to unmask, and who during the entire story carries a fair front and an unblemished name among his congregation,--and her husband, who, returning from a long absence at the moment of her sentence, sits himself down betwixt the two in the midst of a small and severe community to work out his slow vengeance on both under the pretext of magnanimous forgiveness,--when we have explained that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the badge of Hester Prynne's shame, we ought to add that we recollect no tale dealing with crime so sad and revenge so subtly diabolical, that is at the same time so clear of fever and of prurient excitement. The misery of the woman is as present in every page as the heading which in the title of the romance symbolizes her punishment. Her terrors concerning her strange elvish child present retribution in a form which is new and natural:--her slow and painful purification through repentance is crowned by no perfect happiness, such as awaits the decline of those who have no dark and bitter past to remember. Then, the gradual corrosion of heart of Dimmesdale, the faithless priest, under the insidious care of the husband, (whose relationship to Hester is a secret known only to themselves,) is appalling; and his final confession and expiation are merely a relief, not a reconciliation. We are by no means satisfied that passions and tragedies like these are the legitimate subjects for fiction: we are satisfied that novels such as 'Adam Blair,' and plays such as 'The Stranger,' maybe justly charged with attracting more persons than they warn by their excitement. But if Sin and Sorrow in their most fearful forms are to be presented in any work of art, they have rarely been treated with a loftier severity, purity, and sympathy than in Mr. Hawthorne's 'Scarlet Letter.' The touch of the fantastic befitting a period of society in which ignorant and excitable human creatures conceived