Front matter (continued 6)

Instead of this ... what a picture am I about to draw!

Thus ends the first book of the “Confessions.”

The picture Rousseau is “about to draw” has in it a certain Madame de Warens for a principal figure. This lady, a Roman Catholic convert from Protestantism, had forsaken a husband, not loved, and was living on a bounty from King Victor Amadeus of Sardinia. For Annecy, the home of Madame de Warens, our young Jean Jacques, sent thither by a Roman Catholic curate, sets out on foot. The distance was but one day’s walk; which one day’s walk, however, the humor of the wanderer stretched into a saunter of three days. The man of fifty-four, become the biographer of his own youth, finds no lothness of self-respect to prevent his detailing the absurd adventures with which he diverted himself on the way. For example:

Not a country-seat could I see, either to the right or left, without going after the adventure which I was certain awaited me. I could not muster courage to enter the mansion, nor even to knock, for I was excessively timid; but I sang beneath the most inviting window, very much astonished to find, after wasting my breath, that neither lady nor miss made her appearance, attracted by the beauty of my voice, or the spice of my songs—seeing that I knew some capital ones that my comrades had taught me, and which I sang in the most admirable manner.

Rousseau describes the emotions he experienced in his first meeting with Madame de Warens:

I had pictured to myself a grim old devotee—M. de Pontverre’s “worthy lady” could, in my opinion, be none other. But lo, a countenance beaming with charms, beautiful, mild blue eyes, a complexion of dazzling fairness, the outline of an enchanting neck! Nothing escaped the rapid glance of the young proselyte; for that instant I was hers, sure that a religion preached by such missionaries could not fail to lead to paradise!

This abnormally susceptible youth had remarkable experiences, all within his own soul, during his sojourn, of a few days only, on the present occasion, under Madame de Warens’s hospitable roof. These experiences, the autobiographer, old enough to call himself “old dotard,” has, nevertheless, not grown wise enough to be ashamed to be very detailed and psychological in recounting. It was a case of precocious love at first sight. One could afford to laugh at it as ridiculous, but that it had a sequel full of sin and of sorrow. Jean Jacques was now forwarded to Turin, to become inmate of a sort of charity school for the instruction of catechumens. The very day after he started on foot, his father, with a friend of his, reached Annecy on horseback, in pursuit of the truant boy. They might easily have overtaken him, but they let him go his way. Rousseau explains the case on behalf of his father as follows:

My father was not only an honorable man, but a person of the most reliable probity, and endowed with one of those powerful minds that perform deeds of loftiest heroism. I may add, he was a good father, especially to me. Tenderly did he love me, but he loved his pleasures also, and, since our living apart, other ties had, in a measure, weakened his paternal affection. He had married again, at Nyon; and though his wife was no longer of an age to present me with brothers, yet she had connections; another family circle was thus formed, other objects engrossed his attention, and the new domestic relations no longer so frequently brought back the remembrance of me. My father was growing old, and had nothing on which to rely for the support of his declining years. My brother and I had something coming to us from my mother’s fortune; the interest of this my father was to receive during our absence. This consideration did not present itself to him directly, nor did it stand in the way of his doing his duty; it had, however, a silent, and to himself imperceptible, influence, and at times slackened his zeal, which, unacted upon by this, would have been carried much farther. This, I think, was the reason, that, having traced me as far as Annecy, he did not follow me to Chamberi, where he was morally certain of overtaking me. This will also explain why, in visiting him many times after my flight, I received from him on every occasion a father’s kindness, though unaccompanied by any very pressing efforts to retain me.

Rousseau’s filial regard for his father was peculiar. It did not lead him to hide, it only led him to account for, his father’s sordidness. The son generalized and inferred a moral maxim for the conduct of life from this behavior of the father’s—a maxim, which, as he thought, had done him great good. He says:

This conduct on the part of a father of whose affection and virtue I have had so many proofs, has given rise within me to reflections on my own character which have not a little contributed to maintain my heart uncorrupted. I have derived therefrom this great maxim of morality, perhaps the only one of any use in practice; namely, to avoid such situations as put our duty in antagonism with our interest, or disclose our own advantage in the misfortunes of another, certain that in such circumstances, however sincere the love of virtue we bring with us, it will sooner or later, and whether we perceive it or not, become weakened, and we shall come to be unjust and culpable in our acts without having ceased to be upright and blameless in our intentions.

The fruitful maxim thus deduced by Rousseau, he thinks he tried faithfully to put in practice. With apparent perfect assurance concerning himself, he says:

I have sincerely desired to do what was right. I have, with all the energy of my character, shunned situations which set my interest in opposition to the interest of another, thus inspiring me with a secret though involuntary desire prejudicial to that man.

Jean Jacques at Turin made speed to convert himself, by the abjurations required, into a pretty good Catholic. He was hereon free to seek his fortune in the Sardinian capital. This he did by getting successively various situations in service. In one of these he stole, so he tells us, a piece of ribbon, which was soon found in his possession. He said a maid-servant, naming her, gave it to him. The two were confronted with each other. In spite of the poor girl’s solemn appeal, Jean Jacques persisted in his lie against her. Both servants were discharged. The autobiographer protests that he has suffered much remorse for this lie of his to the harm of the innocent maid. He expresses confident hope that his suffering sorrow, already experienced on his behalf, will stand him in stead of punishment that might be his due in a future state. Remorse is a note in Rousseau that distinguishes him from Montaigne. Montaigne reviews his own life to live over his sins, not to repent of them.

The end of several vicissitudes is, that young Rousseau gets back to Madame de Warens. She welcomes him kindly. He says:

From the first day, the most affectionate familiarity sprang up between us, and that to the same degree in which it continued during all the rest of her life. Petit—Child—was my name, Maman—Mamma—hers; and Petit and Maman we remained, even when the course of time had all but effaced the difference of our ages. These two names seem to me marvelously well to express our tone toward each other, the simplicity of our manners, and, more than all, the relation of our hearts. She was to me the tenderest of mothers, never seeking her own pleasure, but ever my welfare; and if the senses had anything to do with my attachment for her, it was not to change its nature, but only to render it more exquisite, and intoxicate me with the charm of having a young and pretty mamma whom it was delightful for me to caress. I say quite literally, to caress; for it never entered into her head to deny me the tenderest maternal kisses and endearments, nor into my heart to abuse them. Some may say that, in the end, quite other relations subsisted between us. I grant it; but have patience—I cannot tell everything at once.

With Madame de Warens, Rousseau’s relations, as is intimated above, became licentious. This continued until, after an interval of years (nine years, with breaks), in a fit of jealousy he forsook her. Rousseau’s whole life was a series of self-indulgences, groveling, sometimes, beyond what is conceivable to any one not learning of it all in detail from the man’s own pen. The reader is fain at last to seek the only relief possible from the sickening story, by flying to the conclusion that Jean Jacques Rousseau, with all his genius, was wanting in that mental sanity which is a condition of complete moral responsibility.

We shall, of course, not follow the “Confessions” through their disgusting recitals of sin and shame. We should do wrong, however, to the literary, and even to the moral, character of the work, were we not to point out that there are frequent oases of sweetness and beauty set in the wastes of incredible foulness which overspread so widely the pages of Rousseau’s “Confessions.” Here, for example, is an idyll of vagabondage that might almost make one willing to play tramp one’s self, if one by so doing might have such an experience:

I remember, particularly, having passed a delicious night without the city on a road that skirted the Rhone or the Saône, for I cannot remember which. On the other side were terraced gardens. It had been a very warm day; the evening was charming; the dew moistened the faded grass; a calm night, without a breeze; the air was cool without being cold; the sun in setting had left crimson vapors in the sky, which tinged the water with its roseate hue, while the trees along the terrace were filled with nightingales gushing out melodious answers to each other’s song. I walked along in a species of ecstasy, giving up heart and senses to the enjoyment of the scene, only slightly sighing with regret at enjoying it alone. Absorbed in my sweet reverie, I prolonged my walk far into the night, without perceiving that I was wearied out. At length I discovered it. I lay voluptuously down on the tablet of a sort of niche or false door sunk in the terrace wall. The canopy of my couch was formed by the over-arching boughs of the trees; a nightingale sat exactly above me; its song lulled me to sleep; my slumber was sweet, and my awaking still more so. It was broad day; my eyes, on opening, fell on the water, the verdure, and the admirable landscape spread out before me. I arose and shook off dull sleep; and, growing hungry, I gayly directed my steps toward the city, bent on transforming two pieces de six blancs, that I had left, into a good breakfast. I was so cheerful that I went singing along the whole way.

This happy-go-lucky, vagabond, grown-up child, this sentimentalist of genius, had now and then different experiences—experiences to which the reflection of the man grown old attributes important influence on the formation of his most controlling beliefs:

One day, among others, having purposely turned aside to get a closer view of a spot that appeared worthy of all admiration, I grew so delighted with it, and wandered round it so often, that I at length lost myself completely. After several hours of useless walking, weary and faint with hunger and thirst, I entered a peasant’s hut which did not present a very promising appearance, but it was the only one I saw around. I conceived it to be here as at Geneva and throughout Switzerland, where all the inhabitants in easy circumstances are in the situation to exercise hospitality. I entreated the man to get me some dinner, offering to pay for it. He presented me with some skimmed milk and coarse barley bread, observing that that was all he had. I drank the milk with delight, and ate the bread, chaff and all; but this was not very restorative to a man exhausted with fatigue. The peasant, who was watching me narrowly, judged of the truth of my story by the sincerity of my appetite. All of a sudden, after having said that he saw perfectly well that I was a good and true young fellow that did not come to betray him, he opened a little trap-door by the side of his kitchen, went down and returned a moment afterward with a good brown loaf of pure wheat, the remains of a toothsome ham, and a bottle of wine, the sight of which rejoiced my heart more than all the rest. To these he added a good thick omelette, and I made such a dinner as none but a walker ever enjoyed. When it came to pay, lo! his disquietude and fears again seized him; he would none of my money, and rejected it with extraordinary manifestations of disquiet. The funniest part of the matter was, that I could not conceive what he was afraid of. At length, with fear and trembling, he pronounced those terrible words, Commissioners and Cellar-rats. He gave me to understand that he concealed his wine because of the excise, and his bread on account of the tax, and that he was a lost man if they got the slightest inkling that he was not dying of hunger. Everything he said to me touching this matter, whereof, indeed, I had not the slightest idea, produced an impression on me that can never be effaced. It became the germ of that inextinguishable hatred that afterward sprang up in my heart against the vexations to which these poor people are subject, and against their oppressors. This man, though in easy circumstances, dared not eat the bread he had gained by the sweat of his brow, and could escape ruin only by presenting the appearance of the same misery that reigned around him.

A hideously false world, that world of French society was, in Rousseau’s time. The falseness was full ripe to be laid bare by some one; and Rousseau’s experience of life, as well as his temperament and his genius, fitted him to do the work of exposure that he did. What one emphatically calls character was sadly wanting in Rousseau—how sadly, witness such an acted piece of mad folly as the following:

I, without knowing aught of the matter, ... gave myself out for a [musical] composer. Nor was this all: having been presented to M. de Freytorens, law professor, who loved music, and gave concerts at his house, nothing would do but I must give him a sample of my talent; so I set about composing a piece for his concert quite as boldly as though I had really been an adept in the science. I had the constancy to work for fifteen days on this fine affair, to copy it fair, write out the different parts, and distribute them with as much assurance as though it had been a masterpiece of harmony. Then, what will scarcely be believed, but which yet is gospel truth, worthily to crown this sublime production I tacked to the end thereof a pretty minuet which was then having a run on the streets.... I gave it as my own just as resolutely as though I had been speaking to inhabitants of the moon.

They assembled to perform my piece. I explain to each the nature of the movement, the style of execution, and the relations of the parts—I was very full of business. For five or six minutes they were tuning; to me each minute seemed an age. At length, all being ready, I rap with a handsome paper bâton on the leader’s desk the five or six beats of the “Make ready.” Silence is made—I gravely set to beating time—they commence! No, never since French operas began, was there such a charivari heard. Whatever they might have thought of my pretended talent, the effect was worse than they could possibly have imagined. The musicians choked with laughter; the auditors opened their eyes and would fain have closed their ears. But that was an impossibility. My tormenting set of symphonists, who seemed rather to enjoy the fun, scraped away with a din sufficient to crack the tympanum of one born deaf. I had the firmness to go right ahead, however, sweating, it is true, at every pore, but held back by shame; not daring to retreat, and glued to the spot. For my consolation I heard the company whispering to each other, quite loud enough for it to reach my ear: “It is not bearable!” said one. “What music gone mad!” cried another. “What a devilish din!” added a third. Poor Jean Jacques, little dreamedst thou, in that cruel moment, that one day before the king of France and all the court, thy sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and applause, and that in all the boxes around thee the loveliest ladies would burst forth with, “What charming sounds! what enchanting music! every strain reaches the heart!”

But what restored every one to good humor was the minuet. Scarcely had they played a few measures than I heard bursts of laughter break out on all hands. Every one congratulated me on my fine musical taste; they assured me that this minuet would make me spoken about, and that I merited the louded praises. I need not attempt depicting my agony, nor own that I well deserved it.

Readers have now had an opportunity to judge for themselves, by specimen, of the style, both of the writer and of the man Jean Jacques Rousseau. The writer’s style they must have felt even through the medium of imperfect anonymous translation, to be a charming one. If they have felt the style of the man to be contrasted, as squalor is contrasted with splendor, that they must not suppose to be a contrast of which Jean Jacques himself, the confessor, was in the least displacently conscious. Far from it. In the latter part of his “Confessions,” a part that deals with the author as one already now acknowledged a power in the world of letters, though with all his chief works still to write, Rousseau speaks thus of himself (he was considering at the time the ways and means available to him of obtaining a livelihood):

I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my genius, and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of thinking.... It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for a livelihood.

Is not that finely said? And one need not doubt that it was said with perfect sincerity. For our own part, paradoxical though it be to declare it, we are wholly willing to insist that Rousseau did think on a lofty plane. The trouble with him was, not that he thus thought with his heart, rather than with his head—which, however, he did—but that he thought with his heart alone, and not at all with his conscience and his will. In a word, his thought was sentiment rather than thought. He was a sentimentalist instead of a thinker. One illustration of the divorce that he decreed for himself, or rather—for we have used too positive a form of expression—that he allowed to subsist, between sentiment and conduct, will suffice. It was presently to be his fortune, as author of a tract on education (the “Emile”), to change the habit of a nation in the matter of the nurture for babes. French mothers of the higher social class in Rousseau’s time almost universally gave up their infants to be nursed at alien bosoms. Rousseau so eloquently denounced the unnaturalness of this, that from his time it became the fashion for French mothers to suckle their children themselves. Meantime, the preacher himself of this beautiful humanity, living in unwedded union with a woman (not Madame de Warens, but a woman of the laboring class, found after Madame de Warens was abandoned), sent his illegitimate children, against the mother’s remonstrance, one after another, to the number of five, to be brought up unknown at the hospital for foundlings! He tells the story himself in his “Confessions.” This course on his own part he subsequently laments with many tears and many self-upbraidings. But these, alas, he intermingles with self-justifications, nearly as many—so that at last it is hard to say whether the balance of his judgment inclines for or against himself in the matter. A paradox of inconsistencies and self-contradictions, this man—a problem in human character, of which the supposition of partial insanity in him, long working subtly in the blood, seems the only solution. The occupation finally adopted by Rousseau for obtaining subsistence was the copying of music. It extorts from one a measure of involuntary respect for Rousseau, to see patiently toiling at this slavish work, to earn its owner bread, the same pen which had lately set all Europe in ferment with the “Emile” and “The Social Contract.”

From Rousseau’s “Confessions,” we have not room to purvey further. It is a melancholy book—written under monomaniac suspicion on the part of the author that he was the object of a wide-spread conspiracy against his reputation, his peace of mind, and even his life. The poor, shattered, self-consumed sensualist and sentimentalist paid dear in the agonies of his closing years for the indulgences of an unregulated life. The tender-hearted, really affectionate, and loyal friend came at length to live in a world of his own imagination, full of treachery to himself. David Hume, the Scotchman, tried to befriend him; but the monomaniac was incapable of being befriended. Nothing could be more pitiful than were the decline and the extinction that occurred of so much brilliant genius, and so much lovable character. It is even doubtful whether Rousseau did not at last take his own life. The voice of accusation is silenced in the presence of an earthly retribution so dreadful. One may not indeed approve, but one may at least be free to pity, more than he blames, in judging Rousseau.

Accompanying, and in some sort complementing the “Confessions,” are often published several detached pieces called “Reveries,” or “Walks.” These are very peculiar compositions, and very characteristic of the author. They are dreamy meditations or reveries, sad, even somber, in spirit, but “beautiful exceedingly,” in form of expression. Such works as the “René” of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau’s “Walks.”

This author’s books in general are now little read. They worked their work and ceased. But there are in some of them passages that continue to live. Of these, perhaps quite the most famous is the “Savoyard Curate’s Confession of Faith,” a document of some length, incorporated into the “Émile.” This, taken as a whole, is the most seductively eloquent argument against Christianity that perhaps ever was written. It contains, however, concessions to the sublime elevation of Scripture and to the unique virtue and majesty of Jesus, which are often quoted, and which will bear quoting here. The Savoyard Curate is represented speaking to a young friend as follows:—

I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible that the Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in his manners! What an affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What sublimity in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses! What presence of mind, what subtilty, what truth, in his replies! How great the command over his passions! Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness and without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest reward of virtue, he described exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the resemblance was so striking that all the Fathers perceived it.

What prepossession, what blindness, must it be to compare the son of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion there is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy, easily supported his character to the last; and if his death, however easy, had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted whether Socrates, with all his wisdom, was anything more than a vain sophist. He invented, it is said, the theory of morals. Others, however, had before put them in practice; he had only to say what they had done, and reduce their examples to precepts. Aristides had been just before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas gave up his life for his country before Socrates declared patriotism to be a duty; the Spartans were a sober people before Socrates recommended sobriety; before he had even defined virtue Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where could Jesus learn, among his compatriots, that pure and sublime morality of which he only has given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made known amidst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on the earth. The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing with his friends, appears the most agreeable that could be wished for; that of Jesus, expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared. Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks of fiction; on the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ. Such a supposition, in fact, only shifts the difficulty without removing it; it is more inconceivable that a number of persons should agree to write such a history, than that one only should furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospel, the marks of whose truth are so striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero.

So far in eloquent ascription of incomparable excellence to the Bible and to the Founder of Christianity. But then immediately Rousseau’s Curate proceeds:—

And yet, with all this, the same Gospel abounds with incredible relations, with circumstances repugnant to reason, and which it is impossible for a man of sense either to conceive or admit.

The compliment to Christianity almost convinces you—until suddenly you are apprised that the author of the compliment was not convinced himself!

Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the preface to his “Confessions,” appealed from the judgment of men to the judgment of God. This judgment it was his habit, to the end of his days, thanks to the effect of his early Genevan education, always to think of as certainly impending. Let us adjourn our final sentence upon him until we hear that Omniscient award.

In pendant to what we have said and have shown of Rousseau, some notice may here properly be given of another celebrated writer, or writer perhaps we should say of a celebrated book, who stands to Rousseau in the relation of sequel and echo. We mean St. Pierre, the author of “Paul and Virginia.”

This is a very famous little classic. It is a kind of prose idyll, a pastoral of lowly and simple life, a life lived by the subjects of it in the spirit of return to the conditions of nature, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau idealized the conditions of nature to be. The author’s own personal experience furnished him the hint, the ground, and the material, of his bucolic romance. It had happened to St. Pierre, in the course of a somewhat fruitless and vagabond life, to be sent in an official capacity to Mauritius, or the Isle of France. In this remote island, as in a kind of Utopia, the scene of the story of “Paul and Virginia” is laid.

St. Pierre was already thirty-one years old when he took his distant voyage; he stayed three years in Mauritius, and then he waited sixteen years, becoming therefore, fifty years old, before he made use of what he had experienced in publishing his romance of “Paul and Virginia.” He had meantime seen a great deal of Rousseau during the latter’s declining years, and from him had learned that art of writing by virtue of which he was destined to constitute the second of succession in a literary line to be continued after him in Chateaubriand and Lamartine, in Madame de Stael and George Sand.

It is the historical importance thus attaching to St. Pierre’s name, even more perhaps than it is the merit and the fame of his books, or of his book—for of his books other than “Paul and Virginia,” we need not trouble our readers with even the titles—that warrants us in listing him, as we do, among the select “immortals” of French literature. St. Pierre’s distinguishing note was the supposed return to nature and to natural unsophisticated sentiment accomplished in his writings.

But the return, with him, was by no means completely satisfactory. There was always something unreal in St. Pierre’s passion for nature; and the feeling with which he wrote seems, to us of to-day, to have been neither very deep nor very sincere. Still, all was accepted and was highly effective in its time; Europe was flooded with tears in reading “Paul and Virginia,” much as afterward it was flooded with tears in reading an equally notable, but far less wholesome book, that prose masterpiece of the youthful Goethe, “The Sorrows of Werther.” The “Corinne” of Madame de Stael afterward, later the “Jocelyn” of Lamartine, later again the passionate earlier novels of George Sand, served to their respective fresh generations of readers a somewhat similar office, that of stimulating and of expressing the vague longing and aspiration of youth.

The plot of “Paul and Virginia” is simplicity itself. Two young French widows—widows we may euphemistically call the women both, though the mother of Paul had never been married—meet, strangers to each other, in Mauritius, and their children, Paul and Virginia respectively, grow up from babyhood together, as if brother and sister, in a state of nature such as never was anywhere in the world outside of a romance, until at last, Virginia undertaking a vain voyage to France to bring round a rich alienated aunt of her mother’s, perishes by shipwreck on her return; in prompt sequel of which calamity, all the remaining personages of the tale, down to the very dog, naturally and sentimentally, one after another, die. The story is represented as told to a traveler in the Isle of France by a sympathetic old man who had been an eye-witness of all.

Two extracts, one from the beginning, and one from the end, of the romance, will sufficiently indicate its quality.

Paul and Virginia being now about twelve years of age, Virginia goes, accompanied by Paul, to restore to the master a runaway female slave to whom he had been cruel, and to intercede with him on the sufferer’s behalf. She has accomplished her purpose, and the two have set out to return. They lose their way. This is the state of the case at the point at which our first extract begins, as follows:

“God will have pity on us,” replied Virginia; “he listens to the voice of the little birds which ask him for food.” She had scarcely uttered these words when they heard the noise of water falling from a neighboring rock. They hastened to it, and, after having quenched their thirst at this spring clearer than crystal, they gathered and ate a few cresses which grew on its banks. As they were looking around them to find some more substantial nourishment, Virginia descried a young palm-tree among the trees of the wood. The cabbage which is found at the top of this tree, inclosed within its leaves, is an excellent food; but although its stalk is not thicker than a man’s leg it was more than sixty feet high. The wood of this tree is indeed composed only of a collection of filaments; but its internal bark is so hard that it blunts the sharpest hatchets, and Paul had not even a knife. He thought of setting fire to this palm-tree at its foot. Another difficulty—he had no steel to strike fire with, and besides, in this island so covered with rocks, I do not believe it would be possible to find a single flint. Necessity inspires industry, and often the most useful inventions have come from men reduced to extremity. Paul resolved to light a fire after the manner of the negroes. With the sharp end of a stone he made a small hole in the branch of a tree that was very dry, which he placed under his feet; he then with the edge of the stone made a point to another branch equally dry, but of a different kind of wood. He next placed the piece of pointed wood in the small hole of the branch which was under his feet, and turning it rapidly round in his hands, as one turns a mill to froth chocolate, he in a few moments perceived smoke and sparks arise from the point of contact. He collected together dry herbs and other branches of trees, and set fire to the foot of the palm-tree, which soon afterward fell with a violent noise. The fire served him also in stripping the cabbage of the long woody and prickly leaves which enclosed it. Virginia and he ate a part of this cabbage raw, and the rest cooked in the ashes, and they found them equally agreeable to the taste.... After their meal ... an hour of walking brought them to the banks of a large river, which barred their way.... The noise of its waters terrified Virginia; she dared not try to ford it. Paul accordingly took Virginia on his back, and passed thus laden over the slippery rocks of the river, regardless of the turbulence of the waters. “Fear not,” said he to her; “I feel myself very strong with you.” ... When Paul had passed over, and was on the bank, he wished to continue his journey laden with his sister, flattering himself that he could ascend in that manner the mountain of the Three Peaks, which he saw before him at the distance of half a league; but his strength soon began to fail, and he was obliged to set her on the ground and to throw himself down beside her.... Virginia plucked from an old tree, which hung over the banks of the river, some long leaves of hart’s tongue which hung down from its trunk. She made of these a kind of buskins with which she bound her feet, which the stones of the way had caused to bleed, for in her hurry to do good she had forgotten to put on her shoes. Feeling herself relieved by the freshness of the leaves she broke off a branch of bamboo and began to walk, leaning with one hand on the cane and with the other on her brother.

In this manner they walked on slowly through the woods; but the height of the trees and the thickness of their foliage made them soon lose sight of the mountain of the Three Peaks, by which they had directed themselves, and even of the sun, which was already setting. After some time they quitted, without perceiving it, the beaten path which they had till then followed, and found themselves in a labyrinth of trees, shrubs, and rocks, which had no farther outlet. Paul made Virginia sit down, and ran almost distracted in search of a path out of this thick wood; but he wearied himself in vain. He climbed to the top of a lofty tree, to discover at least the mountain of the Three Peaks, but he could perceive nothing around him but tops of trees, some of which were illuminated by the last rays of the setting sun. Already the shadow of the mountains covered the forests in the valleys; the wind was going down, as is usual at sunset; a profound silence reigned in these solitudes, and no noise was heard but the cry of the stags who came to seek repose in these unfrequented recesses. Paul, in the hope that some hunter might hear him, cried out as loud as he could: “Come! Come! and help Virginia!” But only the echoes of the forest answered to his voice and repeated several times successively: “Virginia! Virginia!”

Paul now descended from the tree, overcome with fatigue and disappointment; ... he began to weep. Virginia said to him: “Do not weep, my dear, unless you wish to overwhelm me with grief.... O! I have been very imprudent.” And she began to shed tears. Nevertheless, she said to Paul, “Let us pray to God, my brother, and he will have pity on us.” Scarcely had they finished their prayer when they heard the barking of a dog.... “I believe,” said Virginia, “it is Fidèle, our house-dog.”

Of course all turned out happily. A rescue party had come in search of the estray, and they were soon brought with rejoicing home.

Such as the foregoing passage will have served to show is the charm of unfallen simplicity and innocence represented by St. Pierre to have been cast, forming as if an Eden in the wilderness, about these happy children of nature on whom society had had no chance to exercise its baneful power. True, they suffered, though in Eden. True, others sinned, as well as suffered, about them, for there was slavery and there was cruelty; but that was in the wilderness outside; in Eden they did not sin. It was all Rousseauism in experiment and reduced to absurdity. By Rousseauism we indicate the doctrinal dream of that dreamer; by no means the actual waking practice of the man that dreamed.

It may seem a strange marring of the idea of a sufficiency in nature, let nature but be unhindered by society, to renew the world in the purity of paradise, that the end of the idyll of Paul and Virginia should have come about through an effort on the part of Virginia’s mother, made quite in the spirit of the present artificial order of things, to secure a bequest from an aunt of hers in France, whom the niece had offended by marrying as she did; but so it was. Virginia undertakes the necessary voyage, and, as we have already said, perishes by shipwreck on the coast of Mauritius in returning. The heart-rending agony of the final catastrophe we have no space to exhibit. The author seems to hint that Virginia might have been saved, could she have brought herself to assent to the desire of an entreating honest stalwart seaman that she should disembarrass her person of her clothes. It is almost the step taken from the sublime to the ridiculous for the author to make his heroine perish thus as a martyr to her own invincible modesty.

The bereaved mother has visions of her departed daughter’s accomplished felicity in the world unseen. These she describes to the neighbor, who, a venerable old man, tells the traveler the tale. Now for the final extract from the text of the book:

“O my worthy neighbor!” said she [Paul’s mother] to me [the old man who tells the whole story]: “I thought last night I beheld Virginia clothed in white, in the midst of groves and delicious gardens. She said to me: ‘I enjoy the most desirable happiness.’ Then she approached Paul with a smiling air and bore him away with her. As I endeavored to retain my son I felt that I myself was quitting the earth, and that I was following him with inexpressible pleasure. I then wished to bid my friend farewell, when I perceived her following us with Mary and Domingo. [These are negro slaves of the two mothers.] But what seems still more strange is, that Madame de la Tour [Virginia’s mother] had the same night a dream attended with similar circumstances.”

I replied to her, “My friend, I believe that nothing happens in the world without the permission of God. Dreams do sometimes foretell the truth.”

Madame de la Tour related to me that the same night she had also had a dream entirely similar. I had never observed in these two ladies the least propensity to superstition; I was therefore struck with the resemblance of their dreams, and I had no doubt but that they would be soon realized. This opinion, that truth sometimes presents itself to us during our sleep, is generally spread among all the nations of the earth. The most illustrious men of antiquity have entertained it, amongst others, Alexander, Cæsar, the Scipios, the two Catos, and Brutus, who were by no means inclined to superstition. The Old and the New Testament supply us with a variety of examples of dreams that have been realized....

But whether this opinion concerning dreams be true or not, those of my unfortunate friends were speedily realized. Paul died two months after the death of his dear Virginia, whose name he incessantly pronounced. Margaret [Paul’s mother] beheld her end approach a week after that of her son with a joy which virtue only can feel. She bade Madame de la Tour the most tender farewell, “in the hope,” she said, “of a sweet and eternal reunion. Death is the greatest of all blessings,” added she; “we ought to desire it. If life be a punishment we ought to wish for its end; if it be a trial, we should wish it short.”

The governor took care of Domingo and Mary, who were no longer able to labor, and who did not long survive their mistresses. As for poor Fidèle, he pined away about the same time as he lost his master.

I conducted Madame de la Tour to my house. She bore up under these heavy afflictions with an incredible fortitude of mind. She had comforted Paul and Margaret up to their last moments, as if she had only their misfortune to support. When she no longer beheld them, she spoke of them every day as of beloved friends who were in the neighborhood. She survived them, however, but a month....

The body of Paul was placed by the side of Virginia, at the foot of the same bamboos; and near the same spot the remains of their tender mothers and their faithful servants were laid. No marble was raised over their humble turf, no inscription engraved to celebrate their virtues; but their memory remains indelible in the hearts of those whom they have assisted.

If we have treated somewhat lightly this romance of sentimentalism and of naturalism it is because of the taint of ungenuineness—that is, of unreality more or less conscious on the author’s part—that we seem to ourselves to discover in its pages. But the masterpiece of Bernardin de St. Pierre is after all a serious literary fact. For instance, if “Paul and Virginia” had never been written it is doubtful if we should ever have had that series of romantico-realistic little pieces of fiction from the pen of George Sand, out of one of which we shall presently exemplify this woman of genius to our readers. A production in literature is to be judged not only by its own inherent quality, but also, perhaps not less by its entail of influence.

“Paul and Virginia,” in becoming a school-book for the learning of French, may be said to have bought increase of celebrity at the price of some diminution in fame. In our own opinion, however, which, after all that we have said, hardly needs to be thus expressly stated, the book still remains quite as famous as its intrinsic merits entitle it to be. Its chief security of renown in the future lies, and will continue more and more to lie, in the striking fact of its renown in the past.

We formally part with Rousseau and with his first literary foster-child. But we shall trace their features still, again and again, persisting in authors to follow who could not escape a tell-tale impress, open to all to see, stamped from that singularly fecund, and singularly potent, literary paternity.

XVIII.

THE ENCYCLOPÆDISTS.

A cenotaph is a monument erected to the memory of one dead, but not marking the spot in which his remains rest. The present chapter is a cenotaph to the French Encyclopædists. It is in the nature of a memorial of their literary work, but it will be found to contain no specimen extracts from their writings.

Everybody has heard of the Encyclopædists of France. Who are they? They are a group of men who, during the eighteenth century, associated themselves together for the production of a great work to be the repository of all human knowledge,—in one word, of an encyclopædia. The project was a laudable one; and the motive to it was laudable—in part. For there was mixture of motive in the case. In part, the motive was simple desire to advance the cause of human enlightenment; in part, however, the motive was desire to undermine Christianity. This latter end the encyclopædist collaborators may have thought to be an indispensable means subsidiary to the former end. They probably did think so—with such imperfect sincerity as is possible to those who set themselves, consciously or unconsciously, against God. The fact is, that the Encyclopædists came at length to be nearly as much occupied in extinguishing Christianity as in promoting public enlightenment. They went about this their task of destroying in a way as effective as has ever been devised for accomplishing a similar work. They gave a vicious turn of insinuation against Christianity to as many articles as possible. In the most unexpected places, throughout the entire work, pitfalls were laid of anti-Christian implication, awaiting the unwary feet of the explorer of its pages. You were nowhere sure of your ground. The world has never before seen, it has never seen since, an example of propagandism altogether so adroit and so alert. It is not too much to say further that history can supply few instances of propagandism so successful. The Encyclopædists might almost be said to have given the human mind a fresh start and a new orbit. The fresh start is, perhaps, spent; the new orbit has at length, to a great extent, returned upon the old; but it holds true, nevertheless, that the Encyclopædists of France were for a time, and that not a short time, a prodigious force of impulsion and direction to the Occidental mind. It ought to be added that the aim of the Encyclopædists was political also, not less than religious. In truth, religion and politics, Church and State, in their day, and in France, were much the same thing. The “Encyclopædia” was as revolutionary in politics as it was atheistic in religion.

The leader in this movement of insurrectionary thought was Denis Diderot. Diderot (1713-1784) was born to be an encyclopædist, and a captain of encyclopædists. Force inexhaustible, and inexhaustible willingness to give out force; unappeasable curiosity to know; irresistible impulse to impart knowledge; versatile capacity to do every thing, carried to the verge, if not carried beyond the verge, of incapacity to do anything thoroughly well; quenchless zeal and quenchless hope; levity enough of temper to keep its subject free from those depressions of spirit and those cares of conscience which weigh and wear on the overearnest man; abundant physical health—gifts such as these made up the manifold equipment of Diderot for rowing and steering the gigantic enterprise of the “Encyclopædia” triumphantly to the port of final completion, through many and many a zone of stormy adverse wind and sea, traversed on the way. Diderot produced no signal independent and original work of his own; probably he could not have produced such a work. On the other hand, it is simply just to say that hardly anybody but Diderot could have achieved the “Encyclopædia.” That, indeed, may be considered an achievement not more to the glory than to the shame of its author; but whatever its true moral character, in whatever proportion shameful or glorious, it is inalienably and peculiarly Diderot’s achievement—at least in this sense, that without Diderot the “Encyclopædia” would never have been achieved.

We have already, in discussing Voltaire, adverted sufficiently to Mr. John Morley’s volumes in honor of Diderot and his compeers. Diderot is therein ably presented in the best possible light to the reader; and we are bound to say that, despite Mr. Morley’s friendly endeavors, Diderot therein appears very ill. He married a young woman whose simple and touching self-sacrifice on her husband’s behalf he presently requited by giving himself away, body and soul, to a rival. In his writings he is so easily insincere that not unfrequently it is a problem, even for his biographer, to decide when he is expressing his sentiments truly and when not, insomuch that, once and again, Mr. Morley himself is obliged to say, “This is probably hypocritical on Diderot’s part,” or something to that effect. As for filthy communication out of his mouth and from his pen—not, of course, habitual, but occasional—the subject will not bear more than this mention. These be thy gods, O Atheism! one, in reading Mr. Morley on Diderot, is tempted again and again to exclaim. To offset such lowness of character in the man it must in justice be added that Diderot was, notwithstanding, of a generous, uncalculating turn of mind, not grudging, especially in intellectual relations, to give of his best to others, expecting nothing again. Diderot, too, as well as Voltaire, had his royal or imperial friends, in the notorious Empress Catherine of Russia, and in King Stanislaus of Poland. He visited Catherine once in her capital, and was there munificently entertained by her. She was regally pleased to humor this gentleman of France, permitting him to bring down his fist in gesture violently on the redoubtable royal knee, according to a pleasant way Diderot had of emphasizing a point in familiar conversation. His truest claim to praise for intellectual superiority is, perhaps, that he was a prolific begetter of wit in other men.

D’Alembert (Jean le Rond, 1717-1783) was an eminent mathematician. He wrote especially, though not at first exclusively, on mathematical subjects for the “Encyclopædia.” He was, indeed, at the outset, published as mathematical editor of the work. His European reputation in science made his name a tower of strength to the “Encyclopædia,”—even after he ceased to be an editorial coadjutor in the enterprise. For there came a time when D’Alembert abdicated responsibility as editor and left the undertaking to fall heavily on the single shoulder, Atlantean shoulder it proved to be, of Diderot. The celebrated “Preliminary Discourse,” prefixed to the “Encyclopædia,” proceeded from the hand of D’Alembert. This has always been esteemed a masterpiece of comprehensive grasp and lucid exposition. A less creditable contribution of D’Alembert’s to the “Encyclopædia” was his article on “Geneva,” in the course of which, at the instance of Voltaire, who wanted a chance to have his plays represented in that city, he went out of his way to recommend to the Genevans that they establish for themselves a theater. This brought out Rousseau in an eloquent harangue against the theater as exerting influence to debauch public morals. D’Alembert, in the contest, did not carry off the honors of the day. D’Alembert’s “Éloges,” so called, a series of characterizations and appreciations written by the author in his old age, of members of the French Academy, enjoy deserved reputation for sagacious intellectual estimate, and for clear, though not supremely elegant, style of composition.

Diderot and D’Alembert are the only men whose names appear on the title-page of the “Encyclopædia;” but Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot, Helvétius, Duclos, Condillac, Buffon, Grimm, Holbach, with many besides whom we must not stay even to mention, contributed to the work.

The influence of the “Encyclopædia,” great during its day, is by no means yet exhausted. But it is an influence indirectly exerted, for the “Encyclopædia” itself has long been an obsolete work.

There is a legal maxim that the laws are silent when a state of war exists. Certainly, amid the madness of a revolution such as, during the closing years of the eighteenth century, the influence of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopædists, with Beaumarchais, reacting against the accumulated political and ecclesiastical oppressions of ages, precipitated upon France, it might safely be assumed that letters would be silent. But the nation meantime was portentously preparing material for a literature which many wondering centuries to follow would occupy themselves with writing.

XIX.

MADAME DE STAEL.

1766-1817.

In Madame de Stael we encounter a truly redoubtable figure in literature.

But Madame de Stael in her day seemed more than a writer, more even than a writer of what the Germans would call world-importance; she was, or she seemed, a prodigious living personal force. For her tongue was not less formidable than her pen. In truth, the fame of Madame de Stael is due to the twofold power which, during her life-time, she exercised, and exercised in very uncertain proportions, first perhaps as a talker and second as a writer. She is generally allowed, and that upon the most incontestable authority, to have been one of the most brilliant and most effective talkers in the history of the human race.

This power in Madame de Stael of personal impression you are not free to ascribe to any charm that she owned of physical beauty; for Madame de Stael was not a beautiful woman. By her friend, Madame Récamier, that charm was exercised to the full, and that charm Madame de Stael, did not despise. So far from it, she is said once (thus at least the present writer seems to remember, but he has been unable to verify his impression) passionately to have exclaimed that she would give all her genius for one evening of Madame Récamier’s beauty. This was not the vanity on her part of wish to be admired. It was the pathos of longing to be loved. “Never, never,” she cried out in anguish, “I shall never be loved as I love.” She was true woman after all; and it would be inexpiable wrong against her not to say this also, and say it with emphasis, however sharply we may be just in pronouncing the masculine strength of her character. The contrast was so obvious between Madame de Stael and Madame Récamier in point of mere personal charm that, in a moment evil for him, a gentleman once seated between them permitted himself the awkwardness of saying, in ill-advised intention of compliment to both, but with most unhappy chief effect to the contrary, alike on this side and on that, “How fortunate! I sit between Wit and Beauty.” “Yes, and without possessing either the one or the other,” retorted Wit, amply avenging herself for being reminded that she was not also Beauty. Madame de Stael had certainly justified one half of the gentleman’s compliment; and Madame Récamier, with her serene ineffable charm, did not need to speak in order to justify the other.

It was, then, by the pure dry light of her intellect and her wit that Madame de Stael dazzled so in conversation—dazzled so, and so attracted. Wherever she was, there was the center. She made a salon anywhere, by simply being there. And Madame de Stael’s salon was felt by the ruler of Europe to be a formidable political power implacably hostile to himself. “Somehow,” said Napoleon, “I observe that, whatever is talked about at Madame de Stael’s, those who go there come away thinking less favorably of me.” It seems to have been in part because she said nothing, and would say nothing, of Napoleon in her “Germany,” that he finally suppressed that book. “You will speak ill of me when you get back to your academy,” said to Plato the tyrant of Syracuse. “In the academy we shall not have time to speak of you at all,” was the philosopher’s reply.

Madame de Stael was singularly fortunate in heredity on both sides of her parentage. Her father was an eminent banker and minister of finance, who enjoyed the noblest and clearest renown as a man both of talent and of character. Her mother was that beautiful and gifted daughter of a Swiss pastor whom the historian Gibbon once thought he loved, but whom he dutifully gave up at the will of his father. “I sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son,” Gibbon says in his “Autobiography.” This was after years had passed with him—“years that bring the philosophic mind!” The obese but famous English historian, still a bachelor, was a frequent guest at the house of M. Necker, where he had the opportunity gallantly to admire the brilliant daughter of the woman who might have been his wife.

We have said enough to show that, with the exception of personal beauty, Madame de Stael enjoyed every external advantage that could help to give her a shining career. Her wealth was something more than a mere accessory advantage; she needed it to sustain her in the waste of money made necessary by her wanderings through Europe to escape the tyrannous hand of Napoleon. Her exile was agony to her, for she loved France, and she loved Paris with inextinguishable affection. It is impossible to deny to the obstinacy that refused to burn even a pinch of incense to the god of her nation’s idolatry, for the sake of permission to return to every thing that she loved—it is impossible, we say, to deny to this obstinacy in Madame de Stael the title of a true and heroic virtue.

How costly-brave was the attitude that Madame de Stael steadfastly kept toward Napoleon, during the fifteen years of his unparalleled sway, may be guessed from the account that she gives of the unnerving, the prostrating effect upon her of the presence, the character, and the genius of that extraordinary man. In her “Reflections on the French Revolution” she has the following passage, almost equally striking whether taken as a description or as a confession:

Far from gaining re-assurance in meeting Buonaparte oftener, he intimidated me daily more and more. I confusedly felt that no emotion of the heart could possibly take effect upon him. He looks upon a human being as a fact or as a thing, but not as a fellow-creature. He does not hate any more than he loves; there is nothing for him but himself; all other beings are so many ciphers. The force of his will lies in the imperturbable calculation of his selfishness.... His successes are as much to be credited to the qualities which he lacks as to the talents which he possesses. Neither pity, nor attraction, nor religion, nor attachment to any idea whatsoever, could make him swerve from the main path he had chosen. Every time I heard him talk I was struck with his superiority; this, however, had no resemblance to the superiority of men trained and cultivated by study or by society, a class of which England and France can offer examples. But his courses of remark indicated a tact for seizing upon circumstances like that which the hunter has for seizing upon his prey. Sometimes he recounted the political and military incidents of his life in a manner to interest greatly; he had even, in narrations that admitted gayety, a trace of Italian imagination. Still, nothing could get the better of my revulsion for what I perceived in him. I felt, in his soul, a sword, cold and cutting, that froze while it wounded; I felt, in his mind, a fundamental irony from which nothing great, nothing beautiful, not his own glory even, could escape; for he despised the nation whose suffrages he sought; and no single spark of enthusiasm mixed with his wish to astonish mankind.

It was during the interval between the return of Buonaparte (from Italy), and his setting out for Egypt toward the end of 1787, that I several times saw him in Paris; and never could I overcome the difficulty which I experienced in breathing in his presence. I was one day seated at table between him and the Abbé Sieyès; singular situation, could I have foreseen the future! [Sieyès, two years later, became one in a triumvirate of “consuls,” of whom Napoleon was another.] I scrutinized carefully the face of Napoleon; but every time he detected my observing glances he had the art to rob his eyes of all expression, as if they were changed to marble. His countenance was then immobile, save a vague smile that he brought upon his lips at a venture, in order to throw out any one who might wish to mark the external signs of his thought.

It was not a light thing, and Madame de Stael did not feel it a light thing, to hold out as she did, never once dipping her colors, against the will and the power of the man whom she thus describes.

This passionate woman of genius, twice linked by marriage in a union marked by violent and opposite disparities of age—for the second husband was as much younger as the first was older than she—sought satisfaction for her hungry desire of love in “relations,” if not ambiguous, at least apparently ambiguous, with men other than her husbands. One of these men was Benjamin Constant, whose conversational powers, exercised in partnership, never in rivalship, with Madame de Stael, helped make the society in which they shone as twin stars together, the admiration, the envy, the despair, of cultivated Europe. Benjamin Constant, as Madame de Stael’s companion of travel in Germany, was no doubt part, though August Wilhelm Schlegel was part still greater, of the vitalizing intellectual influence that helped her produce her work on that country. Schlegel, by the way, had previously accompanied Madame de Stael in that Italian tour and sojourn of hers, the fruit of which was the novel, or the book of travels, or both in one, entitled “Corinne.” This book was the first of her books to give its author a European fame. Besides being studied as a text-book in the schools, “Corinne” is still read as a production important in literary history.

The “De l’Allemagne” (literally “Concerning Germany”) is generally esteemed the masterpiece of its author. From this we draw our illustrations by specimen of the literary quality of Madame de Stael. The “Germany” may be said to have first introduced that country to France, almost to Europe in general. Its scope is comprehensive. It describes Germany in a great variety of aspects; but it is on the literature of Germany that it expends its strength.

Madame de Stael’s “Preface” to her “Germany,” written in England, where, after its arbitrary suppression in France, the volume was finally published, is an interesting bit of reading. Witness one or two extracts:

My bookseller took upon himself the responsibility of the publication of my book, after submitting it to the censors....

At the moment when the work was about to appear, and when the 10,000 copies of the first edition had been actually printed off, the minister of the police, known under the name of General Savary, sent his officers to the bookseller’s, with orders to tear the whole edition in pieces, and to place sentinels at the different entrances to the warehouse, for fear a single copy of this dangerous writing should escape.

What a glimpse is there incidentally afforded of the intolerable despotism of Napoleon!

Madame de Stael thinks silently of her lovely and beloved friend Madame Récamier, who had suffered from Napoleon by her relation with the exiled woman of letters, when still in her preface she writes:

Some of my friends were banished, because they had had the generosity to come and see me; this was too much: to carry with us the contagion of misfortune, not to dare to associate with those we love, to be afraid to write to them, or pronounce their names, to be the object by turns, either of affectionate attentions which make us tremble for those who show them, or of those refinements of baseness which terror inspires, is a situation from which every one, who still values life, would withdraw!

We advance into the body of the work.

The German Lessing had himself found in his literary countrymen the same fault that Madame de Stael, near the beginning of her book, points out as follows:

In literature, as in politics, the Germans have too much respect for foreigners, and not enough of national prejudices. In individuals it is a virtue, this denial of self, and this esteem of others; but the patriotism of nations ought to be selfish.

Bismarck and Moltke in politics and in war, Herman Grimm, for example, in literature, with his appalling claim for Goethe’s “Faust,” as the “greatest work of the greatest poet of all nations and times,” have lately “changed all that.” The fault of Germany now is not over-modesty.

The boundless freedom, nay, audacity, of speculative thought indulged by the Germans is stimulantly contrasted with their strangely contented subserviency (which then was) in more material matters. The sentence we italicize below was canceled by Napoleon’s censors, before their master took the shorter method of canceling the book:

The enlightened men of Germany dispute vehemently among themselves the dominion of speculations, and will suffer no shackles in this department; but they give up, without difficulty, all that is real in life to the powerful of the earth. This real in life, so disdained by them, finds, however, those who make themselves possessors of it, and these, in the end, carry trouble and constraint even into the empire of the imagination.

The following passage concerning Voltaire and a particular production of his pen is one of the most trenchantly critical expressions that the reader would find in the whole course of the “Germany.” The German name of Leibnitz occurring in it will suggest the association of contrast by which such a criticism of a Frenchman found its way into a book treating of things German. Leibnitz had propounded a metaphysical theory of universal optimism, which—like all philosophic hypotheses, even those apparently least practical, let them once become widely entertained—was having its influence on national thought and national character. With Voltaire’s “Candide” the readers of this volume will already have acquired sufficient acquaintance to make Madame de Stael’s remarks upon it here presented additionally interesting:

Voltaire so well perceived the influence that metaphysics exercise over the general bias of men’s minds that to combat Leibnitz he wrote Candide. He took up a curious whim against final causes, optimism, free will, in short, against all the philosophical opinions that exalt the dignity of man; and he composed Candide, that work of a diabolical gayety, for it appears to be written by a being of a different nature from ourselves, insensible to our condition, well pleased with our sufferings, and laughing like a demon or an ape at the miseries of that human species with which he has nothing in common....

Candide brings into action that scoffing philosophy, so indulgent in appearance, in reality so ferocious; it presents human nature under the most lamentable point of view, and offers us, in the room of every consolation, the sardonic grin which frees us from all compassion for others by making us renounce it for ourselves.

When Madame de Stael comes in due course to speak of the masterpiece of Goethe, his “Faust,” she prepares her French readers to be shocked with a first disappointment. She says:

Certainly we must not expect to find in it either taste, or measure, or the art that selects and terminates, but if the imagination could figure to itself an intellectual chaos, such as the material chaos has often been described, the Faust of Goethe should in propriety have been composed at that epoch.... The drama of Faust certainly is not a good model. Whether it be considered as an offspring of the delirium of the mind, or of the satiety of reason, it is to be wished that such productions may not be multiplied; but when such a genius as that of Goethe sets itself free from all restrictions the crowd of thoughts is so great that on every side they break through and trample down the barriers of art.

We close our series of extracts by giving what this most brilliant among the French women that have been at the same time great talkers and great writers found to say of that high art of conversation in which her countrymen surpass the world and in which she surpassed her countrymen:

The bon-mots of the French have been quoted from one end of Europe to the other. Always they have displayed the brilliancy of their merit and solaced their griefs in a lively and agreeable manner; always they have stood in need of one another, as listeners taking turns in mutual encouragement; always they have excelled in the art of knowing under what circumstances to speak, and even under what circumstances to keep still, when any commanding interest triumphs over their natural liveliness; always they have possessed the talent of living a quick life, of cutting short long discourses, of giving way to their successors who are desirous of speaking in their turn; always, in short, they have known how to take from thought and feeling no more than is necessary to animate conversation without overstaking the feeble interest which men generally feel for one another.

The French are in the habit of treating their own misfortunes lightly from the fear of fatiguing their friends; they guess the weariness which they would occasion by that which they would experience.... The desire of appearing amiable induces men to assume an expression of gayety, whatever may be the inward disposition of the soul; the physiognomy by degrees influences the feelings, and that which we do for the purpose of pleasing others soon takes off the edge of our own individual sufferings.

A sensible woman has said that Paris is, of all the world, the place where men can most easily dispense with being happy. [The foregoing italicized passage was, Madame de Stael says, “suppressed by the literary censorship under the pretext that there was so much happiness in Paris now that there was no need of doing without it.”] ... But nothing can metamorphose a city of Germany into Paris.

... To succeed in conversation one must be able clearly to observe the impression produced at each moment on people, that which they wish to conceal, that which they seek to exaggerate, the inward satisfaction of some, the forced smile of others; one may see passing over the countenances of those who listen half formed censures which may be evaded by hastening to dissipate them before self-love is engaged on their side. One may also behold there the first birth of approbation, which may be strengthened without, however, exacting from it more than it is willing to bestow. There is no arena in which vanity displays itself in such a variety of forms as in conversation.

I once knew a man who was agitated by praise to such a degree that whenever it was bestowed upon him he exaggerated what he had just said and took such pains to add to his success that he always ended in losing it. I never dared to applaud him from the fear of leading him to affectation and of his making himself ridiculous by the heartiness of his self-love. Another was so afraid of the appearance of wishing to display himself that he let fall words negligently and contemptuously; his assumed indolence only betrayed one more affectation, that of pretending to have none. When vanity displays herself, she is good-natured; when she hides herself, the fear of being discovered renders her sour, and she affects indifference, satiety, in short, whatever may persuade other men that she has no need of them. These different combinations are amusing for the observers, and one is always astonished that self-love does not take the course, which is so simple, of naturally avowing its desire to please, and making the utmost possible use of grace and truth to attain the object.

There is something in the foregoing strain of ascription from Madame de Stael to the social virtues of the French which recalls that remarkable character given by Pericles, in his noble funeral oration reported by Thucydides, to the national spirit and habit of the Athenians in contrast with those of their Spartan neighbors and enemies.

If of Madame de Stael the woman we shall in any respect have failed to give a just idea, it will be by not having adequately represented the generosity of her character. Her desire and her ability to shine should not be permitted, in any one’s conception of her, to obscure her fondness and her fitness for loving and for being loved. Those who knew her intimately bear touching testimony to this quality of womanliness in the personal character of Madame de Stael. She was fundamentally an amiable, as she was conspicuously a strenuous, spirit, and no mutations in fashion or in taste will ever reduce her to less than a great tradition in literature.

XX.

CHATEAUBRIAND.

1768-1848.

Chateaubriand—his is a faded fame. He was a false brilliant from the first, but he glittered during his time like a veritable Mountain of Light. Men hardly found out till he died that instead of being precious stone he was nothing but paste.

Our figure misrepresents the fact. Chateaubriand was not thus spurious through and through. He had streaks of genuine in him. His true symbol perhaps would be a common rubble-stone flawed splendidly with diamond.

The reaction of disparagement, which is now the critical vogue as to Chateaubriand’s personal and literary value, meets occasional stout challenge from redoubtable voices. Mr. Matthew Arnold, for instance, protests against it, triumphantly citing out of the author for whom he stands up what certainly would read like the utterance of a mind both large and noble, could one rid one’s self of the feeling that Chateaubriand in writing it had his own case chiefly in view, as follows:

It is a dangerous mistake, sanctioned, like so many other dangerous mistakes, by Voltaire, to suppose that the best works of imagination are those which draw the most tears.... The true tears are those which are called forth by the beauty of poetry; there must be as much admiration in them as sorrow.

The author of the foregoing, assuredly, excites with his pathos quite as much admiration as sorrow.

Chateaubriand forms an essential link in the chain of literary history for France. He constitutes almost the sole representative of French literature for the period of the First Empire, so-called—that is, the time of the supreme ascendency of Napoleon Bonaparte. Madame de Stael alone needs to be named as his rival and peer. Chateaubriand, in his day—and his day was a long one, for he outlived the empire, the restoration, and the reign of Louis Philippe—was well-nigh an equal power with Napoleon himself. In his own opinion, he was fully such; for his self-complacency was unbounded.

Never in the history of letters did it twice happen to an author to be better served by opportunity than in two cases was Chateaubriand. The Encyclopædists, with Voltaire and Rousseau, had had their hour, and a reaction had set in, when Chateaubriand’s “Genius of Christianity” appeared. It was the exact moment for such a book. It seemed to create the reactionary movement with which it coincided, and it rendered its author not merely famous, but powerful. Napoleon saw his account in making use of a writer who had the secret of such popularity. Besides, the Napoleonic sagacity was equal to perceiving that return to religious belief was needful for France. Napoleon made overtures to Chateaubriand, which Chateaubriand accepted. The author took office at the gift of the dictator.

But Chateaubriand was himself too supremely an egotist to be securely attached to another egotist’s interest by any flattery that could be bestowed upon him. When, at the word of Napoleon, the Duke d’Enghien was murdered, Chateaubriand—let him have the credit of his high spirit—resigned his office and separated himself from the tyrant who had conferred it. Chateaubriand’s first happy synchronism with the course of events was his publishing the “Genius of Christianity” when he did. His second was his publishing the pamphlet “Bonaparte and the Bourbons” at the very moment when that restoration impended which raised Louis XVIII. to the throne of France. The new monarch acknowledged that Chateaubriand’s book had been worth an army to his cause.

Chateaubriand prolonged his literary career to a great age, enjoying almost to the end an undisputed supremacy among the authors of France. There has seldom been a more uncloudedly, more dazzlingly, brilliant contemporary success achieved by any writer of any age or any nation. The renown continues, but the splendor of the renown has passed away. Why? Our answer is, Chateaubriand’s writing is vitiated by a vein of unreality, of falseness, running through it. This character in his writing but reflected, we fear, a character in the writer. There is ground for suspecting that Chateaubriand was at heart lacking in genuineness. It was inseparable defect in the man that gave that hollow ring to the words. It is but a just reprisal upon Chateaubriand that his literary fame should suffer by the fault detected in his personal character. A man’s words are seldom in the long run more weighty than the man.

Chateaubriand was a kind of continuer and modifier of a celebrated French writer that preceded him. He was a better-bred, a much purified, an aristocratic Rousseau. He may be pronounced second greatest in the succession of the literary sentimentalists of France.

René François Augustus, Viscount de Chateaubriand, to give him now his full name and title, lived a life replete with adventure and vicissitude. At twenty-three years of age he fled from the horrors of the French Revolution to travel in America and to find a north-west passage to the Polar Sea. He called, with a letter of introduction, on President Washington, to whose prudent dissuasion of the young man from his project of arctic exploration, founded on the difficulty of the task, Chateaubriand had the French readiness, together with the necessary egotism, to make the complimentary reply: “But, sir, my task is not so difficult as yours was, that of creating a state.” In his posthumous biography, the “Memoirs d’Outre Tombe” [Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb], Chateaubriand, alluding to this interview of his with Washington, said, sententiously and loftily, “There is a virtue in the look of a great man.”

Our adventurer never found that north-west passage which he came to seek, but he took impressions of a strange new world, impressions that he afterward turned to various literary account. His “René” was one fruit of these experiences of his. The “René” is a romantic and sentimental tale, the main interest of which, where it possessed interest, lay in the seductive style of the composition, the idealizing descriptions occurring in it of American landscape, and the tone of melancholy reflection that pervaded it. The “noble red man” is made in it to talk like a Socrates come again, or like a French Christian philosopher born “the heir of all the ages.” Such absurd inconsistency with the truth of things well illustrates that taint of lurking falseness which to such a degree vitiates all Chateaubriand’s work.

The French Revolution had made great strides while Chateaubriand was discovering the north-west passage by musing and dreaming in the woods and by the streams of the New World. Learning that many members of his social class, the aristocracy of France, had fled from their homes and were rallying in other lands to make a stand against their enemies, Chateaubriand resolved to join them. He was nigh to shipwreck on his way. In a siege, after his arrival, he was saved from death by the chance of his having the manuscript of his “Atala” in the right spot on his person to intercept a ball from the enemy. But he was severely wounded nevertheless, and, worse still, was attacked with the small-pox. Thus disabled, he started on foot to make a journey of hundreds of miles. He, of course, suffered many hardships, and one night gave up to die in a ditch in which he lay down to rest. He was picked up and carried to Namur. Here, as he crawled on hands and knees through the streets, he was befriended by some women who saw his condition. After many adventures, he found himself in London, where he lived squalidly on what he could earn by hack-work with his pen.

His family meantime were suffering in France. Some of them had actually been guillotined, and some were imprisoned, among them his wife, his sister, and his mother. The mother died praying for her son’s conversion from infidel error. The sister wrote to her brother the pathetic story, but she too had died before her letter reached that brother’s hand. “These two voices,” Chateaubriand says, “coming up from the grave, ... struck me with peculiar force.... I wept and believed.” The “Genius of Christianity” was written in the spirit of this sentimental conversion of the author.

We pass over, with mere mention of some principal titles, his other books, not previously named, as his “Itinerary,” a volume of travels; his “Moses,” his “Martyrs,” his “Essay on English Literature,” his “Translation of the Paradise Lost,” to make the brief extracts for which we have room from the “Genius of Christianity.”

This work is designed as a manual of Christian evidence, an argument for the truth of the Christian religion. It is written, of course, from a Roman Catholic point of view, but it may be described as liberal and literary, rather than strict and ecclesiastical. It is far from being closely reasoned. There is, in fact, a great deal of digression and discussion in it. The aim of the author was evidently more to make a readable book suited to the times than to produce an apologetic work that would stand four-square against all hostile attack. The author’s question with himself as he wrote seemed to have been, not, Is this valid, and necessary to the demonstration? but, Will this be interesting? The consequence is that the “Genius of Christianity” is now worthy of note rather as a book that has had a history than as a book that possesses permanent value. It contains, however, writing that will satisfactorily exhibit the style of Chateaubriand—a clear, pure, brilliant, harmonious poetic prose.

Chateaubriand raises and answers the question why the ancients failed in feeling for the beauties and sublimities of nature, thus:

It can scarcely be supposed that men endued with such sensibility as the ancients could have wanted eyes to perceive the charms of nature and talents for depicting them, had they not been blinded by some powerful cause. Now, this cause was their established mythology, which, peopling the universe with elegant phantoms, banished from the creation its solemnity, its grandeur, and its solitude. It was necessary that Christianity should expel the whole hosts of fauns, of satyrs, and of nymphs, to restore to the grottoes their silence, and to the woods their scope for uninterrupted contemplation. Under our religion the deserts have assumed a character more pensive, more vague, and more sublime; the forests have attained a loftier pitch; the rivers have broken their petty urns, that in future they may only pour the waters of the abyss from the summit of the mountains; and the true God, in returning to his work, has imparted his immensity to nature.

The foregoing, paradoxical perhaps, is certainly a sharp turning of the tables upon modern paganizers who mourn the dead Greek and Roman divinities of grove and stream.

Here is a passage in description of nature that every reader must acknowledge to be charming. It is throughout thoroughly characteristic of the author. The closing sentence is certainly French rather than Hebrew in spirit—Chateaubriand rather than David:

Penetrate into those forests of America coeval with the world. What profound silence pervades these retreats when the winds are hushed! What unknown voices when they begin to rise! Stand still, and everything is mute; take but a step, and all nature sighs. Night approaches; the shades thicken; you hear herds of wild beasts passing in the dark; the ground murmurs under your feet; the pealing thunder roars in the deserts; the forest bows; the trees fall; an unknown river rolls before you. The moon at length bursts forth in the east; as you proceed at the foot of the trees she seems to move before you at their tops and solemnly to accompany your steps. The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oak to await the return of day; he looks alternately at the nocturnal luminary, the darkness, and the river: he feels restless, agitated, and in expectation of something extraordinary. A pleasure never felt before, an unusual fear, cause his heart to throb as if he were about to be admitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depths of the forest, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all the solitudes of the earth are less vast than one single thought of his heart. Even did he reject the idea of a deity, the intellectual being, alone and unbeheld, would be more august in the midst of a solitary world than if surrounded by the ridiculous divinities of fabulous times. The barren desert itself would have some congeniality with his discursive thoughts, his melancholy feelings, and even his disgust for a life equally devoid of illusion and of hope.

There is in man an instinctive melancholy which makes him harmonize with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hours seated on the bank of a river contemplating its passing waves? Who has not found pleasure on the sea-shore in viewing the distant rock whitened by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus! It was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste the fullness of joy in the presence of its author.

How Roman Catholic, rather than catholic, in tone, is the “Genius of Christianity,” the following deliciously written sentiment about the Virgin Mary will sufficiently show:

They who see nothing in the chaste queen of angels but an obscure mystery are much to be pitied. What touching thoughts are suggested by that mortal woman, become the immortal mother of a Saviour-God! What might not be said of Mary, who is at once a virgin and a mother, the two most glorious characters of woman!—of that youthful daughter of ancient Israel, who presents herself for the relief of human suffering, and sacrifices a son for the salvation of her paternal race! This tender mediatrix between us and the Eternal, with a heart full of compassion for our miseries, forces us to confide in her maternal aid, and disarms the vengeance of Heaven. What an enchanting dogma, that allays the terror of a God by causing beauty to intervene between our nothingness and his Infinite Majesty.

The anthems of the Church represent the Blessed Mary seated upon a pure-white throne more dazzling than the snow. We there behold her arrayed in splendor, as a mystical rose, or as the morning star, harbinger of the Sun of grace; the brightest angels wait upon her, while celestial harps and voices form a ravishing concert around her. In that daughter of humanity we behold the refuge of sinners, the comforter of the afflicted, who, all good, all compassionate, all indulgent, averts from us the anger of the Lord.

Mary is the refuge of innocence, of weakness, and of misfortune. The faithful clients that crowd our churches to lay their homage at her feet are poor mariners who have escaped shipwreck under her protection, aged soldiers whom she has saved from death in the fierce hour of battle, young women whose bitter griefs she has assuaged. The mother carries her babe before her image, and this little one, though it knows not as yet the God of heaven, already knows that divine mother who holds an infant in her arms.

Finally, to illustrate the amusing real lack of logic, masking in logical form, of which Chateaubriand was capable, we give the syllogistic-looking conclusion that sums up the book:

Christianity is perfect; men are imperfect.

Now, a perfect consequence cannot spring from an imperfect principle.

Christianity, therefore, is not the work of men.

If Christianity is not the work of men, it can have come from none but God.

If it came from God, men cannot have acquired a knowledge of it but by revelation.

Therefore, Christianity is a revealed religion.

Chateaubriand was long a venerated figure, central in the pure and brilliant salon of Madame Récamier, that later Marchioness Rambouillet at Paris. His easy airs of patriarchal condescension toward the younger generation of authors who drew around him there naturally engaged them to prolong the long days of his triumphs. But his triumphs may be said to have come to an end when Sainte-Beuve was ready to pronounce, as he did, that this defender of Christianity was a skeptic at heart, this preacher and praiser of purity was a libertine in life. We will not say that we accept this destructive view of Chateaubriand’s character. But we are bound to confess that we wish there were more internal evidence contained in his writings to throw doubt on the justice of a sentence so severe.

De Maistre (Joseph Marie, 1753-1821), is another author who, like Chateaubriand, a little earlier than he, took up a polemic for Christianity as represented in Roman Catholicism. A truly high and nobly earnest spirit was De Maistre, as such contrasting with Chateaubriand, a far deeper and far more philosophical thinker than his brilliant compeer, but wanting in that grace and seductiveness of style which gave to Chateaubriand his life-long wide supremacy in the empire of French letters. It would be not incongruous, if there were room for it in our volume, to prolong this chapter with some brief notice and exemplification of De Maistre’s literary work. We must content ourselves with this respectful bare mention of his name.

The proportionately small space in these pages that, in here ending our notice of him, we allot to Chateaubriand, fails indeed to represent by symbol to the eye the proportionate space that he occupies in the literature of his country. But it has afforded us fairly adequate opportunity to exhibit in description and specimen the characteristic quality of his literary production.

XXI.

BÉRANGER.

1780-1857.

Béranger was a song-writer, the whole of him. He was a song-writer and nothing else. It is his own word, “My songs, they are myself.”

Béranger was not the rose-crowned lyrist of love and wine; he was not Anacreon. Béranger was not the hymner of heroes and kings, a maker of odes; he was not Pindar. Béranger was not the poet of the world, the gay world and the wise; he was not Horace. Béranger was not by chance the lowly melodist, who might by chance as well have been a lofty bard; he was not Robert Burns. Béranger was the song-singer of the people; he himself elected to be such, and he was by the people elected to be such; he said himself, “My muse is the people.” In one word, Béranger was—Béranger. There was none like him before, there has been none like him since; Béranger is alone. We do not thus praise him, we simply describe him.

But it is possible to describe him better. We do so by borrowing from Victor Hugo through Sainte-Beuve.

Sainte-Beuve, not in his essay on Béranger (which, in appreciating, somewhat depreciates the poet), but among the interesting things that, under the title “Chateaubriana,” he prints at the close of his monograph in two volumes on Chateaubriand, has the following personal recollection of his own, which, given here, will serve a threefold purpose; that of hinting incidentally the relation of four celebrated French authors to one another, that of illustrating the ready fecundity and plasticity of Victor Hugo’s genius, and that of setting forth in concrete example Béranger’s master method in his songs, which master method is essentially Béranger, the song-writer, himself. Sainte-Beuve says—of course we translate:

Victor Hugo, returning one morning from the garden of the Luxembourg (1828 or 1829) said to me: “If I should see Béranger, I would give him the subject of a pretty song. I just now met M. de Chateaubriand in the Luxembourg; he did not see me; he was wrapt in thought, intently observing some children who, seated on the ground, were playing and tracing figures in the sand. If I were Béranger I would make a song on the subject: ‘I have been minister, I have been ambassador, etc., I wear the decoration of the Order of the Holy Ghost, that of the Order of the Golden Fleece, that of the order of St. Andrew, etc.; and one sole thing at last amuses me: it is to watch children playing in the sand. I wrote “René,” I wrote the “Genius of Christianity,” I stood up against Napoleon, I opened the poetic era of the century, etc.; and I know only one thing that amuses me: to watch children at play upon the sand. I have seen America, I have seen Greece and Rome, I have seen Jerusalem, etc.’ And after each enumeration of various experiences, forms of greatness or of honor, all kept returning still to this: to watch children playing and tracing circles in the sand.” The plan sketched by Victor Hugo was perfect, far better than I have given it here; but the motive is plain, the idea of the refrain. Never have I had better defined to me the difference that separates the song, even the most elevated in character, from the ode properly so-called.