Part 2 — INTELLECTUAL CENTRES.

A thought struck us the other day—a thought that was half a memory—of the interest we should feel in Geneva at the present moment were we to be there as long as the Treaty arbitration lasts. This led us to reflect upon Geneva as we knew it—one of the most delightful, intellectual, and interesting places we ever came across. Thought, like art, has its centres, its headquarters, and, like politics, its changes of dynasties and capitals. In these centres, a person might live undisturbedly a whole generation, and, never stirring ten miles beyond the city gates, not miss any one novelty, person, discovery, or theory worth hearing or seeing. All great personages, whether of royal birth or, what is more important, of intellectual fame, will sooner or later pass through this favored place; all new modes of thought, from theology to unbelief, from Spiritism to Darwinism, will find there a ready field of battle.

Of these centres of thought in modern times, Geneva is not the least. We can speak from experience of the quiet, unpretending old town, standing, in the pride of its antiquity and of its superior taste, aloof from the more frivolous Parisian suburb that commercial enterprise has caused to grow up beside it on the opposite side of the Rhone. It has a population of savants and dilettanti; its salons are “blue-stocking,” and its young men not mere butterflies, but men with a work to do or perchance already begun. Music has a home there, too—grave, classical, instrumental music, such as you can fancy the délassement of a nation of sages should be. Conversation is hardly brilliant among the Genevese (though the use of the French language renders it far from heavy), but it is solid, and words are put for ideas, not strung together to hide nonsense. Theatres are feebly patronized, and are left to the summer visitors of foreign countries, whose exclusive society creates another Geneva by the side of the old historical town—a Geneva that has nothing Genevese about it but the name. Lectures are very prominent, almost as much so as in America, and they are generally upon scientific subjects. Men of fortune give a course of them free, for the enlightenment of the humbler classes, and young men of good family and position spend their time in literary trials, hunting up references and studying abstruse systems of forgotten philosophy. To be uneducated in Geneva brands a man with a worse mark than to be poor among mercantile communities. Frivolity in man or woman is equivalent to dishonor. There is little display in Genevese society—a simplicity far more republican than anything America can point to reigns in domestic affairs; and the people do not court nor take any pains to allure the pot-pourri of foreign princes, merchants, gentlemen, and gamblers that fill the gay quays on the modern side of the river. It is told of one of the highest civil dignitaries of Geneva in the last century—a man of good descent and comfortable means—that he received the envoy of the King of France (it was before the French Revolution), on some diplomatic mission, with one maid-servant holding a lantern. The guest having alighted from his state-coach, and groped his way into the modest house, inquired in surprise: “Mais, monsieur, où sont vos gens?” (“But, sir, where is your household?”) “Mes gens!” repeated the Genevese, with undismayed good-nature; “c’est Jeanne!” (“My household consists of Jane!”) The French magnifico, whose only idea of power lay in profuse display, and who counted his lackeys by the score, was dumfounded at these Spartan barbarians, whose chief unblushingly declared that a kitchen-maid was all his retinue! Yet the chief was probably a savant, while the Frenchman at best was most likely nothing more than a wit. The writer of this article, eager to see something of the home-life of the Genevese, succeeded in making a few acquaintances among these most exclusive of literati. On one occasion we were dining at the primitive hour of five with a charming family, the De la Rives, people of the most polished manners, quick perceptions, and inexhaustible fund of interesting conversation. The meal was plain and frugal, well cooked, yet without a trace of art—what one might have expected at a farmer’s or tradesman’s table; but what in the most modest of gentlemen’s houses in France, England, or Germany would have been an impossibility. The governess and the little children dined with us, the former joining heartily and cleverly in the conversation, which never by any chance fell upon trivialities. The knives and forks were not changed throughout dinner, to our great perplexity; and for the purpose of keeping them from soiling the table during the change of plates, there were provided little glass rests, like thick, short bars. These quaint details seemed quite matters of course, and, strange to say, there was nothing vulgar or repulsive about them, the personnel of the hosts being enough to stamp all belonging to them with the hall-mark of true and unostentatious refinement. There was no dressing for this family dinner, as there would have been in England, nor, indeed, is there much dressing at all among the Genevese women. To tell the truth, they are rather what our fastidious taste would call dowdy in their toilette and appearance; but then, what a solid background of true and deep education lies behind their exterior carelessness! It is the same with their parties, which are rather like family gatherings, and where the old-fashioned habit is still kept up of having the tea served on a large table, round which the guests unceremoniously seat themselves. Men of mark in the literary world are there; inventors of machines that have changed the destiny of commerce, and originated or obliterated this or that trade; botanists who have inherited their talent with their fathers’ name and experience; women who have written treatises that men of science read with approval—and all of them so unaffectedly enjoying themselves, all of them so truly refined and so childlike in their simple manners. Looking at this kind of assemblage, is it wonderful that it should have made its native city a capital of the world of thought? Bad men as well as good pass through it; Mazzinist and International fraternize and plot; Legitimist and Catholic meet, and hold congresses; outsiders from another continent, as at this moment, agree to settle their disputes on its neutral soil. All philosophies, from De Maistre and Cousin down to Darwin and Renan, find their exponents there; their upholders lecture there; their theories are more closely looked into if they start from there. The church is more active at Geneva than almost anywhere in Europe; unbelief is more rampant and more unblushing; dissent more earnest, and, if blinded, yet more sincere. Thirty or forty years ago, a body of Genevese ministers of the “National Church” did what no other Protestant body corresponding in numbers and influence has ever done in modern times—they voluntarily gave up their benefices, and threw themselves with their families, utterly destitute, on the generosity of such among their flocks as would follow their conscience. And why? Because the National Church was becoming more and more Socinian, and dechristianizing the population of Geneva. These dissenters, headed by the Malan family, persevered in their sacrifice, and succeeded in founding a “Free Church,” which is now very prosperous, and counts among its members all the best people of the town. Outside the Catholic Church, it would be difficult to find a parallel to this act of renunciation for the sake of principle. Speaking of Geneva from a religious point of view, we do not know but what we might most decidedly call it a centre of active religion, since its bishop, Mgr. Mermillod, is one of its best known and most distinguished native citizens, and the church under his guidance is making rapid conquests in the former stronghold of Calvinism; but this is beside our subject, which is simply to reckon Geneva as first and foremost in the present tournament of restless intellect.

Rome naturally suggests itself as another of these centres. We put it second in the intellectual scale and in the wide sense in which we are speaking, although in religion it stands more than first, that is, perfectly unequalled. Still, when Byron called it “city of the soul,” he made that delicate shade of a distinction that marked it as a spiritual capital more than an intellectual centre. For the spirit of Rome is too calm for agitation, too conservative for creation. Yet in a secondary sense to volcanic Geneva, and in a contrasting sense too, Rome is a wonderful rendezvous of the talent and thought of Europe. A life spent in Rome would include a sight of almost all the distinguished men and women of both hemispheres. Unbelievers go to Rome to scoff, and often remain to pray; curious idlers go to see the old man of the Vatican, and often stay to ask his blessing; antiquarians find enough work for a lifetime in digging up a few square feet of ground; artists have a range of subjects before them so vast that, if they had a thousand lives to live, they could not exhaust it; men of science go to meet their kin and discuss things in quiet congresses, which it is impossible to end otherwise than peaceably, for the curious and unique charm of Rome is its subtle power of harmonizing the minds of its guests with the traditions of its own mysterious existence. It has a faculty of spiritual alchemy, and changes the visitor for the time being into a different creature. All its lessons seem to be taught in silence, and for argument it has but little sympathy. Intrinsically, it is a centre of love; accidentally, a centre of thought. Men with wearied hearts are its “chosen few,” for its power is rather recuperative than creative. It is most difficult to say what we mean, and yet not to seem to speak in disparagement of this wonderful “city of the soul”; and perhaps a description of its society, though that would be the easiest way to make our meaning clear, would be tedious, because so familiar. We all of us seem to know Rome as if each one had been there; and so perhaps after all we may trust to be better understood than we had hoped to be at first. A short walk on the “Pincio” will show us the utmost cosmopolitanism possible; the Polish exile secure while within a few paces of the Russian official; the Anglican minister, with his trained Oxford refinement, calmly discussing with the energetic, passionate, and voluble Italian ecclesiastic; the Mazzinist bowing involuntarily to the cardinal whose generosity raised him from the poor-house; the French philosopher and the German artist; the American sculptor, with his prejudiced yet not unkindly view of Rome; the English convert, enthusiastic and interested; and the languid Italian, taking everything as a matter of course—such are a few of the common types one jostles against every minute. These things, however, are too well known; and from this strange, perplexing city, so dearly loved and so well hated, so prominent in the world’s annals that no dark future can obscure her ever-real and ever the same present—this city whose Christian fame overrides even her glorious heathen past of unlimited power and unchecked Cæsarism—we will go forward to the land of those “barbarians” who regenerated Europe and materially helped to build the church. But how changed is the brightest city of that land, Munich, the undoubted centre of the highest intellect, but now also the unhappy cradle of a new perversion of that very intellect!

Though we are less conversant with Munich than with the two foregoing places, we shall yet attempt to say a few words on its influence in modern times.

It is perhaps a more recent focus of thought than any other of the present day, yet it is none the less powerful for that. The Bavarian royal family has preserved for two or three generations the traditions of a modern Medici dynasty; they are the declared champions of talent, the protectors of innovations of any kind. As long as there is genius, originality, vitality, in a thing or idea, no matter what its tendency, good or bad, it is sure of patronage and help. Intensely national in its leanings, Munich aspires to make Germany paramount, to impose her ways of thought upon the world, to mould Europe according to a German standard, and set up in a new Rome of the north a new ideal that might be expressed in these words, Le génie c’est moi. If Christianity had not yet appeared, the plan would have been magnificent, and this Roman Empire of absolute intellect a far grander conception than Plato’s Republic, but now God has reserved universality as a mark of his church alone; and the power that would tear this badge from her to crown itself therewith, in opposition to her, cannot hope to succeed any better than the great angel of light succeeded in his gigantic rebellion. Still, notwithstanding this blot upon the otherwise fair system of intellectual supremacy of which Munich is the headquarters, the fact of this practical supremacy remains, and is the more felt and the better tested now since Prussia has attempted to establish herself in opposition to it. The story of ancient Greece and Rome is being enacted anew—matter and mind are face to face; and the military machine which is called the North German Empire, and which has proved itself so politically resistless, stands baffled before the more Attic and refined organization of the capital of thought and art. Impossible to transplant to the alien atmosphere of iron-bound Berlin the delicate grace and play of intellect that distinguishes Munich; impossible to make philosophy accept the trammels of officialism, or persuade artists to wait the nod of bureaucrats. The intangible charm of cosmopolitan life belongs to the Bavarian city, the freemasonry of intellectual activity vivifies it. Napoleon carried half the marbles of Rome to his palace of the Louvre, and yet he could not make the Louvre a Vatican, and Belshazzar, though he robbed the temple of its golden cups and drank from them at his banquets, could not make himself high-priest of the Hebrew faith.

The world goes to Munich for art, instruction, and artistic models; Germany goes there for philosophical and scientific theories. Foreigners would rather leave Berlin and Vienna unvisited than miss a week at Munich; and a stay among its galleries, libraries, and museums, is part of the education of every travelled man. It has its literary, its fashionable, and its diplomatic circles, and, strangely enough, each of these pronounces it an equally agreeable resort. The cultivated world filters through it all the year round, and, like Geneva and Rome, though perhaps in a lesser degree than either, one might stay there a lifetime and yet see the whole panorama of intellectual Europe unrolled at intervals before one’s eyes. Although Munich possesses a learned and important university, it is not to that alone she owes her supremacy, for it is a fact worthy of notice that in our days the sovereignty of thought is more the attribute of an aggregate of independent thinkers, than the exclusive privilege of certain bodies trained in the same traditions, and cast in much the same mould. Whether or no this is an advantage, is a question we need not enter into here; it is beside our subject. We hope subsequently to be able to draw a companion picture of that ancient state of things which made the intellectual centres of the past, both in their growth and in their influence, so widely different from our own. Certain it is, however, that that influence was less ephemeral formerly than now.

From Munich we have not far to go to another of the world’s volcanoes, Paris, the modern enigma. Like a witch’s cauldron, always seething, never safe, Paris is playing an uninterrupted game of political conjuring. Unlike other cities whose intellect is distinct from their politics, Paris cannot help giving a political tinge to its literary and philosophical creations. Social questions are violently joined to intellectual problems; and savants or beaux-esprits will eschew a brother philosopher or wit who wears alien colors and belongs to another camp. The talent that rides uppermost in Paris is identified with socialism, and from literary Bohemianism soon lapses into political outlawry. Victor Hugo is its apostle, Alfred de Musset its poet. On the one hand, a frantic, destructive vigor urges it to assert its self-assumed and imperious sovereignty; on the other, a maudlin, opium-like languor soothes its sensuality and bids it revel in momentary luxury. Sybarites are always tyrants; Nero crowned with roses and singing to his lute while Rome was helplessly burning by his orders, is a fit image of modern Paris displaying her world-alluring softness while Europe is in flames through her baneful principles. We speak of Paris in her zenith; but it is to be feared that the spirit which made her the rose-entwined firebrand of the world, will not long be quelled even by her own unparalleled misfortunes. In her deepest humiliation, when the sympathy of the universe was hers, did she not find strength enough to turn on her true friends, and, by her fiendish attempts on law and order, to alienate the shocked and insulted instincts of a world that had been ready to take up arms in her defence? It may be said that that Paris was not the real one; yet it is the one that rules—rules sourdement, as the French so expressively say, when she is herself ruled by an iron hand, rules through her infidel press, her immoral literature, her unwholesome poetry, her rotten philosophy, her frivolous and heedless society. True it is that in Paris, which proudly calls itself “the capital of the world and the heart of humanity,” there are circles of quiet literary men—coteries of harmless exiles from other lands; men whose lives are bounded by the Bibliothèque Impériale and the Théâtre Français; and men, too, whose one aim is charity and one ambition, heaven. True, France can boast as many missionaries as communists, as many martyrs as soldiers, almost as many religious as unhung miscreants. But how many Montalemberts, how many Dupanloups, how many Lacordaires, beside the innumerable spawn of Dumases, George Sands, Balzacs, Michelets, Taines, and Renans? No doubt in the records of the Almighty there are to be found in this modern Sodom the ten just men that will save it from spiritual destruction, but we are speaking of it principally in the intellectual sense, and surely, from this point of view, where are its saviors? A centre of intellect it is most undoubtedly and most unfortunately, but a centre such as a powder magazine might be. The streams it pours over Europe’s world of thought are lava-streams, scorching the purer air of principle to make way for the poisonous gases of self-indulgence. If Paris were sovereign, peace would be no more, and truth would leave the earth, dismayed. The very opposite, of Rome, its spirit is one of fever, catching even to the calmest pulse of a law-abiding and metaphysical northerner—a spirit that broods over one like the blast of a furnace, and bewilders like the breath of a coming simoom. We have experienced it ourselves in days long before the last great judgment that has crushed the unhappy city; we have marvelled at its obtrusive activity, so fatiguing to the eye, because, unlike that of London or New York, it denotes only the frivolous search after empty pleasure, not the calm plodding after necessary business; we have wondered at its frothy show, where the greatest display is a sure sign of the worst depravity; we have longed to be out of its unwholesome, oppresive spell, that seemed to paralyze the mind and darken the understanding. To think that this possessed city should be the pioneer of the nineteenth century, and have more influence over the moral destinies of the world than Napoleon ever had over the kingdoms of Europe, or than Bismarck can ever have over the future of Paris itself! What have we done to deserve it? What has brought this Egyptian plague upon us, the Nile of the intellect turned into blood, the fertilizer become poison?

There is a wider difference than the mere width of the Channel between Paris and Oxford. What calm, scholarly, refined associations come to our mind when we name the Alma Mater of so many of England’s greatest men! It is like a refreshing ocean breeze after the scorching blast of a volcano. We feel at home here. Gladstone, Pusey, Keble, Newman, were sons of this English centre of thought—Stanley for a long time was identified with it, all the intellectual movements of this century sprang from it, and to represent it in Parliament is accounted the highest political honor. All schools of thought have started from it; “High Church,” “Low Church,” and “Broad Church” have all found their headquarters there, and recruits from these several camps have left it to bring their various gifts to that other and wider university over which the Holy Ghost presides everlastingly. If one might use words that must seem a paradox, Oxford, once made and fashioned by the church, has in our days herself influenced the church. We mean that the university has given to the Catholics of England that unrivalled body of priests who stand alone in Europe for their indomitable energy, their self-sacrificing earnestness, and their gentle and truly Christian refinement. Among Protestants, it is only the strict truth to say that Oxford has created the Church of England, and vivifies her now even more than state protection, or the universal adoption extended to her by usage and courtesy among the educated classes. Most truly has Oxford been called the Rome of English Protestantism. It is sad for us to think of the perverted influence of a system essentially Catholic, of traditions and customs that have lost their meaning while they have kept their form, and yet it is also a proud thought to dwell upon, that such as this matchless seat of intellect is, and such as its absolute identification with English national thought and national character makes it certain ever to be, it owes it to the church of Alfred, of Langton, of Scotus—the church of Peter—alone.

We have said that, in modern times, universities as such have less influence than the aggregate of independent thinkers. This, however, hardly applies to England, for the mass of enlightened men in that country forms, practically, the true university. Cambridge, as a seat of equal learning, yet scarcely of equal brilliancy or influence, is of course included. The social and intellectual training of both is the same, the traditions practically so. The whole body of able men in England belongs to either one or the other of these universities, and, never unlearning their modes of thought and unconsciously stamping their impress deeper on each succeeding work undertaken or effort accomplished, therefore never cease to belong to them. England is thus one university, and Oxford is the epitome of educated England. Very national and jealous of foreign irruption is this vast and compact body; its members will taste and examine very closely before an alien theory be admitted among them, but, once admitted, it is adopted with eagerness, nationalized, and so embodied in a thoroughly English shape that its origin becomes undistinguishable. The spirit of Oxford, unlike that of Paris, is the very reverse of cosmopolitan; there is no versatility in its essence, no straining after effect, novelty, nor even domination; it does not care to impose itself on others, and thus it differs ever from the national-minded spirit of Munich, but it vigorously resents anything being imposed upon it. Ideas grow slowly, and systems ripen there before they are tried; a school of thought goes out whole and calm, not upon tentative excursions, but to certain conquest. Foreigners are more curious to see Oxford than they are to examine any other English institution; foreign savants look with pride or longing on the rare gift of its honorary degrees. Its buildings are the only palaces known in England, and excel in nobility of architecture every modern public erection and almost every private residence. It keeps up customs of hospitality, of generosity, of courtesy, that seem lost amid the dwarfishness of modern politeness; its grand solemnity of demeanor and stateliness of etiquette shame our puny and impudent code of manners; the freedom of later behavior seems by its side a stunted pollard when compared to the magnificent oak of bygone centuries. Oxford keeps up the ideal among Englishmen, or rather it is the ideal personified. It is a standing protest against the levity of modern and fast life—a city of sanctuary for learning, art, ecclesiasticism, æsthetics, philosophy, and taste. Those who have lived all their lives in it as fellow-tutors or professors, love it to idolatry; those who have gone forth to their several professions and been knocked about by the vicissitudes of the world, love it as the Garden of Eden of their lost peace; those who have left it for the Catholic Church, love it with the most mournful and deepest of loves, even as Gregory loved the fair-haired heathen boys that were Angles, but whom he longed to see angels. The greatest mind in England—John Henry Newman—loves it with this sorrowful love, which has prevented him from ever seeing it again since he severed himself from it, and suffered more in this severing than the loss of friends or the wilful misconception of enemies; and in his room at Edgbaston, where his retired life is now entirely spent, there hangs a view of the beautiful English university town, with this significant motto in illuminated characters beneath: “Son of man, dost thou think these dry bones shall live?” (Ez. xxxvii. 3).

From Oxford we must cross the Atlantic to find our last intellectual centre in this age. It is the youngest, though not the least vigorous, and it stands alone on the Western continent, where it has not inaptly been called—as Edinburgh once was—the Modern Athens. Boston is also more or less the product of a university, but here, as elsewhere, the taint is on the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Infidelity and cynicism make their home there in the midst of the luxuriant growth of intellect. Pride of mind has ended in riot of soul, and amid the intoxicating creations of its own strong vitality, the genius of New England has spiritually lost its way. But humanly speaking, what a fair field of intellect is here displayed! It is through Boston that America is best known to Europe. Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Holmes, are household words wherever the English language is spoken; and the dignified history of New England, no less than her weird and fascinating literature, is as interestingly familiar to English as to American minds. Boston is New England crystallized, the representative city of America, the channel of communication between the Old and the New World, the crucible of every new theory and the test the successful passing of which is, as it were, a “degree” in itself. Boston stands forth as the champion of science against commerce, and the breakwater which strives to save America from the imputation—thrown on England by the French—of being “a nation of shopkeepers.” The West, with its gigantic future roughly mapped out, and its raw material inconveniently spread over the whole land, looks with uneasy and half-dismayed contempt at the scholarly capital of New England; the North, with its sleek prosperity and organized system of elegant life, steals a look askance, in which envy is but thinly concealed behind an affectation of patronage. Of the South we cannot speak, since its naturally true instincts of appreciation and intellectual discernment have been cruelly and rudely shaken by the great convulsion whose effects will long remain but too prominent; but if ever there rises a rival, friendly yet altogether dissimilar, to the New England Athens, it will be in the gifted South, among the descendants of the cavaliers, that we shall turn to look for it. Such a one there should be, for this vast continent, in whose bosom the whole of Europe would lie like an island, must have more than one species of intellectual life, and ought to have more than one acknowledged exponent of it. In the South we should find the ardor of Paris, the ambition of Munich, and the refinement of Oxford, mingled and harmonized; and let us trust that in the lands discovered by Catholic missionaries, and colonized by Catholic gentlemen, we might at least escape the ban that clings to the older centres of intellectual life in Europe, the revolutionary and antichristian tendencies of France, and the unhappy heresies of England and Germany.