SCHOLARS EN DÉSHABILLÉ.

Scholars before the world and scholars at home are often the greatest contrast to themselves. Daily life is, after all, so levelling that it makes a tabula rasa of crowned heads and peasants, of sages and fools, of good men and bad. There is no visible nimbus round the head of the man who towers above his fellows, as there is round the summit of the mountain that pierces the clouds. Without the conventional distinctions of costumes, attendance, or display, there is no means of telling the man of giant intellect from the man of common attainments. Not that some men lack that physical superiority which at once causes a stranger to turn eagerly round and ask, “Who is that?” but this mark so often accompanies other men whose interior life does not justify its presence, or whose career has been a mistake and a failure, that it is practically valueless. The outward sign or “ticket” requisite to denote a man of acknowledged station is therefore as necessary in this blind world as it is humiliating to the world’s sense of discernment. Take an imaginary procession of magnates, financial, political, artistic, royal, or noble, dress them in plain citizen’s garb, and then send in a child to pick out the prizes among them, to distinguish the bishop from the chancellor, the diplomatist from the banker, the king from the scholar. Guided by purely natural instinct (not unlike that which presided at the election of barbarian chieftains in the Vth century), the child will call the tallest, strongest, manliest personage the king, and will choose the most venerable, gentle, and serious as the bishop. Ten to one it will have taken a soldier for king, and an artist for bishop; and so on ad infinitum. Now place those great people in suitable coaches, dress them in appropriate robes, put on them the crowns, coronets, crosses, and insignia of their order, and the veriest baby will recognize by the conventional instinct of civilization the rank and importance of each; only it will then be seen that the king is that quiet man of banker-like aspect, the bishop yonder retiring individual with a bald head, the financier that dandy with the unobtrusive gold ring and faultless yet severe costume, the ambassador that commonplace-looking person hidden under stars and ribbons. Change the slide once more, set all these good people down at their respective homes, and look through the magic-lantern again. What do we see? A dining-room, a table set with more or less perfection of appointments, a few noiseless servants and romping children, a homely, middle-aged matron, serene and placid, perhaps looking over an account-book or hemming pocket-handkerchiefs. The bishop’s household alone will wear a distinctive mark, but, compared with other ecclesiastical abodes, will keep its master’s secrets as well as any secular one. God alone knows where to point to a saint or a genius among these ordinary surroundings, and the objects of his discernment would often surprise any human observer who should be admitted to share his knowledge.

The craving which men have to know the details of the private life of any one distinguished from the commonalty by talent or position is an inexplicable phenomenon, and one that to the end will defy our solution and persist in remaining in force long after we have decided that it has no business to exist. Is it that we are envious of everything above us, and wish to dim its glory by putting it to the same test as our own dull being? Is it through a morbid desire to analyze that which, against our will, enchants us, in order that, having done so, and reduced it to various elements which separately are powerless to charm, we may depreciate the whole? Or is it through that loftier feeling that urges us to ally ourselves by sympathy with all that is noble and exalted in human nature? Do we long to claim at least a fellowship with intellect through the sacred instincts which intellect and mediocrity share alike? It is unfortunately as often through the baser as through the nobler feeling; and yet, when we have sifted the tendency to its simplest elements, we cannot say that we have personally rid ourselves of the foible or learned the lesson of lofty incuriousness which by implication we have taught.

The daily life and privations, the struggles and successes, the domestic joys, sorrows, and losses of great men have a deeper meaning than shows on the surface; for not only have they influenced the works or writings through which these men have become known to us, but they show how independent of outward circumstances is their greatness. In this sense, they present encouragement to many in whom the same qualities are latent, but who from faintheartedness might otherwise have neglected their gifts and wasted their powers. They teach yet another lesson; for in them we see what compensations the mind gives in the midst of even sordid trials, and how the higher a man’s intellectual training is, so much the stronger is his moral endurance. But draw what moral we will from them, the interest in them remains and will remain to the end of time. Trivial as they are, too, they somehow fix the personality of a man of genius better in the mind of posterity than his greatest virtues or doughtiest deeds; as, for instance, King Alfred is better remembered as the disguised soldier burning the cakes of his peasant-hostess than as the wise lawgiver and heroic chieftain of the Saxons. Prince Charlie’s romantic escapes have endeared him to the Scottish heart and made him the centre of the later traditions of a romantic people, while no such halo gathers round the person of the First or Second Charles of England, even though the “Martyr-King” has won by his tragical death a separate niche in the Valhalla of history.

In all ages and all climes, learning and wealth have seldom gone together. Anecdotes of scholars whose daily wants were in sad contrast with their aspirations abound in the records of all centres of learning. Dr. Newman, in his lectures on universities, has given us many touching as well as ludicrous examples of this truth. Among the disciples of Pythagoras, if we recollect accurately, was one Cleanthes, a professional boxer from Corinth, who, smitten with a love of wisdom, came to Athens to become a philosopher. As he had not even the trifling daily sum required by the professor of learning, he spent half of each day in earning it by carrying water and doing such like services to the citizens, while the remaining hours he passed at the academy. One day, the wind blew his upper garment open, and his luckier companions most “unphilosophically” jeered him when they saw that his outer covering was all that he had. He afterwards rose to great proficiency, and taught a school of his own—never, however, discarding his simple ways. The well-known story of the three students who had but one cloak between them and wore it each in his turn in the lecture-hall while the others stayed in bed, is told of Athenians as well as Saxons, Irish, or Italians in the universities of the middle ages. Bp. Vaughan’s Life of S. Thomas abounds with such anecdotes of impecunious and enthusiastic scholars. S. Thomas himself, it is related, wrote his Summa (not the great work, but a previous and less comprehensive book) on such stray pieces of parchment, old letters, torn covers, etc., as he could pick up or beg from his fellow-students. S. Richard of Canterbury, when teaching in his chair at Oxford, was so careless of his honorarium that he generally left it on the window-sill, unless he had need of it to relieve some poor person. The same saint in his youth was sometimes so frozen to the bone that he could not continue his studies and was fain to run round the court of the school for half an hour every night to restore circulation before he went to bed. The Oxford students suffered hunger as well as cold in the service of philosophy, for they often had no other resource than to beg the broken victuals from the tables of the tradesmen, and one of them avers in a private letter that, on a great holiday, he and his friends made merry over an unusual feast—“a penny piece of beef between four.”

In Paris, the case was the same. The lay students suffered most, for each of the great religious orders had its own representative house, and the young religious lived in community. Among the seculars it was different; they were quartered on the citizens, and, when they were honest as well as industrious, led a terribly hard life. They lodged in garrets, and lay on straw; their landlords extorted from them exorbitant rents for their share of the filthy tenement, and they often had to depend on charity for their food. Ingenious as poverty always is, it suggested remedies to these harassed votaries of learning, even as it has in all succeeding ages. The poorer students took to copying books and selling them at starvation prices, working for others when they could find patrons, for themselves when they were forced to do so. Thus originated bookstalls and private shops for the sale of books, parchment, wax, and ink. In the dark days of winter, the want of light was severely felt by those who were too poor to buy oil, and pale, shivering forms might be seen huddled in doorways, grouped on corners, or gathered round a street-shrine, anywhere, in fact, where a lamp could be found, all intent on their notes of yesterday’s lecture, or busily examining the subject of to-morrow’s lesson. Beside them was ever the other world of students—the gay, rich, and careless: those who spent in one night’s revel what would have bought parchment and oil for six months for the thrifty, hard-working copyist of MSS. But what martyrdoms were undergone for knowledge’s sake in those days of earnest search after science no man can tell. Knowing less of the details of mediæval life than we do of the daily needs of later generations, we can perhaps hardly appreciate the degree of privation endured by these sturdy knowledge-seekers.

Turning to the chivalrous land of Germany, we find, in the same century as that of S. Thomas and the students of Paris University, the school of poor minstrels, the famous Minnesingers. Kroeger, in his work on them and their novel art, says: “These singers led a life most strange and romantic. At a time when cities had as yet barely come into existence in Germany, and the castles of the lords were the chief gathering-places of the vast floating population of the Crusading times, these Minnesingers, with little or nothing besides their sword, fiddle, or harp and some bit of love-ribbon or the like from their sweetheart, wandered from village to village, and castle to castle, everywhere welcomed with gladness, and receiving their expected remuneration with the proud unconcern of strolling vagabonds.... For these singing knights felt no more delicacy in chronicling the good things they received from their patrons than in immortalizing the meanness of those who let them depart without gifts of clothing, food, and money.... The young knight was by custom compelled to saunter forth into the world, and generally by poverty to keep on sauntering in this fashion all his lifetime. Then he perfected himself in the art of composing songs and playing some stringed instrument, which became both a source of infinite enjoyment and an unfailing source of revenue if the knight was poor. With his art, he paid his boarding-bills; his art furnished him with clothes, horses, and equipments. More than all, his art won him the love of his lady.”

Walther von der Vogelweide—“bird’s pasture or meadow”—was one of the foremost of these wandering troubadours, and, as he himself tells us, was very poor. He went to Austria to better his fortunes by the knightly art alone fit for one of gentle birth, and among his patrons found one, the Duke of Kärnten, whose meanness has come down to posterity, through the then obscure minstrel’s verse, in having “withheld a promised suit of new clothes” from the poet.

Walther’s best luck seems to have been his appointment as tutor to the son of the Emperor Frederic II. This led to his being given a small estate with fixed income; but he had struggled long enough in gay though hopeless poverty before fortune singled him out for her favors. As usual, his mind was far beyond the standard of his circumstances; a thinker, philosopher, observer of human nature, an active member of the state when he participated in political duties, a conscientious patriot and a true Catholic. In politics he never refused to recognize whatever merits the opposite party held, nor to denounce any injustice on the part of his own; in religion, he was always alive to the abuses of the time, despite his devout faith and earnest worship. Kroeger says of him that, though but “little tainted by the prejudices of nationality, he is, in his thorough earnestness and rare purity of spirit, even more truly a representative German than either Goethe or Schiller.” Of later authors, poets, artists, there are ampler memoirs left to teach us the inner and darker life of the spirit we know in this bright public envelope. The Greeks, who held that all free-born men, Hellenes by descent, had a right to become learned and elegant scholars, and who upon this theory based their practice of having slaves to do that work which did not comport with the calm attitude of mind necessary to philosophical study, made use of very cogent arguments, humanly speaking. It remained for Christianity to do something more sublime yet than to devote an entire class of men to lofty aims and studies; it was reserved for Christ’s law to change even menial pursuits and vulgar necessities into employments fit for the highest intellect. The soul’s sanctification became a loftier aim than the cultivation of the mind alone, and every office, however lowly, was made capable of ministering to this new aim. Thus was the stigma which the pagan world had set upon poverty and dependence removed, but the fact of poverty was to remain for ever. Just as by his death our Lord had taken away, not the fact of death, but “its sting, its victory,” and its ignominy, so by his life he took all bitterness from that inevitable condition of the majority of mankind—physical need and suffering.

How far this century, and indeed the spirit of the world in all centuries, has succeeded in counteracting this beneficent change, and in fastening again upon poverty the disgrace entailed, on it by the pagan system, each one can judge for himself. Nay, many have a personal standard by which they can judge of it. One cannot read the life of any person of merit in any branch of learning without this pathetic element constantly cropping out. Here we have Kepler, the astronomer, struggling with constant anxieties, telling fortunes for a livelihood, and saying that astrology, as the daughter of astronomy, ought to keep her mother. “I supplicate you,” he writes to a friend of his, “if there is a situation vacant at Tübingen, do what you can to obtain it for me, and let me know the prices of bread and wine, and other necessaries of life; for my wife is not accustomed to live on beans.” He had to accept all sorts of jobs; he made almanacs, and served any one who would pay him. The gentle, melancholy Schiller wasted by necessity much of his time in literary hack-work at a period when the pay of authors was so miserable that they could hardly exist by the pen: he translated French books at “a shilling a page.” Even Goethe, whose fortune was quite independent, could not add to his income by his talent; and when Merck, the publisher, offered three pounds sterling for a drama of his, the old poet might well ask: “If Europe praised me, what has Europe done for me? Nothing. Even my works have been an expense to me.”

Perhaps no life has ever been so continual a struggle as that of Oliver Goldsmith. From his very childhood he was used to starvation; for family difficulties caused him to go to Dublin University, not as a pensioner (as he had hoped), but as a sizar. He had to sweep the courts, wait at table, and perform other menial tasks of the same sort. It was a bitter price to pay for learning, but his after-life was no sweeter in its manifold experiences. Before he left college, his father died, and he was thrown on his own resources, when he often had to pawn his books, and at last took to writing street-ballads, which he disposed of at five shillings per copy. Twice the shiftless scholar tried to make his way to America, and failed; his pretensions to Anglican orders were crushed by his failure to pass his examination, and his venture as a tutor was equally unsuccessful. His good genius, his uncle, Mr. Contarine, sent him to Edinburgh to become a physician, and this was the last of the regular professions which he tried. We find him wandering through Flanders, singing and playing his flute at the houses of the peasantry, in order to obtain a supper and a night’s lodging; then attending chemical lectures at the Universities of Leyden and Louvain; taking part in the open discussions on philosophical subjects held on certain days in the convents and colleges of Italy, and returning to England without a farthing in his pocket; then taking a fortnight to reach London from Dover, begging, performing, or playing on the road. He went among the London apothecaries, “and asked them to let him spread plasters for them, pound in their mortars, or run with their medicines.” It was through a poor journeyman printer, a patient of his, that he first gained the notice of a great publisher; but his troubles were only increased by his literary ventures. Now he is in a garret, with the milk-woman knocking at the door, pressing him for a trifling milk-score, which he is too poor to pay; now he repeatedly loses the chance of good situations, because he has not a decent suit of clothes to his back. Once a publisher provided him with clothes, in advance, for four reviews for his magazine; but before Goldsmith has finished his work, his landlord is dragged away by bailiffs to pass his Christmas in prison for debt. The impulsive author has no money, but immediately runs and pawns his clothes, liberating his miserable host, and rejoicing the poor family. Left starving himself, he gets a trifling loan from a friend on the four books to be reviewed, when the publisher makes a sudden and peremptory demand for the clothes and books, or payment for the same. Goldsmith begs him, as a favor, “for fear of worse happening to him,” to put him in gaol. The pay he received for his ceaseless work was ridiculously slender; for his Plutarch’s Lives he got eight pounds a volume. The novel which has immortalized his name, the Vicar of Wakefield, was sold for sixty pounds, and in the most unceremonious fashion possible. Johnson, the author’s fast friend, gives the story of the transaction thus: “I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion.... I desired he would be calm; ... he then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merits, told the landlady I should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent.” The famous novel, so hastily disposed of to stave off actual starvation and imprisonment, was thought so little of by its new owner that it was eighteen months before he published it. Although his fame grew with years, Goldsmith remained in distress; for he never could keep what he earned. Indiscriminate generosity, often lavished on unworthy companions, swallowed up his growing but always transitory income; and the week after a gorgeous supper or a tailor’s bill of extravagant items duly receipted, we yet find him writing a short English grammar for five pounds, and, later on, borrowing one pound from his publisher.

The young poet Chatterton, impulsive, gifted, and unfortunate, the contemporary and friend of Goldsmith, was another victim to the fickleness of the muse. Starving and desperate, he at last committed suicide in a miserable London garret, in a dirty street leading out of Holborn, a neighborhood not much more desirable than Baxter Street, New York. There was no one to claim his body, and it was finally taken to the “bonehouse” of St. Andrew’s, and buried in the pauper burial-ground in Shoe Lane.

In thriving America, the El Dorado of the untaught European imagination, the scholar is hardly destined to a happier lot than in the old realms where intellect is supposed to have a traditionary value. Of Nathaniel Hawthorne we have various records of want and manful struggle. Always brave under adverse circumstances, this is how he words his own misfortunes in 1820, when, still a boy, he already edited a small and obscure periodical called the Spectator. Among the obituary notices one day, the following was conspicuous: “We are sorry to be under the necessity of informing our readers that no death of any importance has taken place, except that of the publisher of this paper, who died of starvation, owing to the slenderness of his patronage.” In 1839, he had been so lucky, in a worldly sense, as to have secured the post of head-collector of the port of Salem, Mass.; and, in this uncongenial yet lucrative situation, he felt beyond the reach of necessity. He curiously laments his ludicrous dilemma, and comments on his name, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” which he had fondly hoped from his childhood to have sent forth to the world on the title-page of some important work, now taking wing for the remotest ends of the earth, scrawled in red chalk on the covers of packing-cases, tea-chests, and cotton-bales. Political changes twice ousted him from his position, and the second ejection was definitive—a starting-point in his life. He went home one evening, and announced his dispossession to his wife. There were no provisions in the house, save a barrel of flour and some insignificant adjuncts. The family had hardly any money in hand, but no one complained. Hawthorne told his wife he was going to write in earnest, and they must trust to Providence in the meanwhile. Partly by economy of the most rigid kind, partly by the helping hand of friendly neighbors, the Hawthornes managed to keep the “wolf from the door” till the novel was completed. The evening it was finished, the author, feverish, excited, and emaciated, closeted himself with his wife, and read her the MS. She listened intently, the interest becoming painful, her breath came and went, her color faded gradually, and, at the climax of the wonderful story, fell at his feet almost in convulsions, exclaiming, “For God’s sake, do not read further; I cannot bear it.” Next morning, he sent the novel to a friend of his, a sound judge and unsparing critic in the literary world. The friend raced through the MS., enthralled by its powerful word-imagery, and came himself with his answer. Meeting the author’s little boy, Julian, in the garden in front of the house, he caught him up in his arms, exclaiming: “Child! child! do you know what a father you have?” and rushed into the house, fairly storming the newly revealed genius with congratulations.[214] Thus was the Scarlet Letter produced and Hawthorne’s name made. After that, his success was rapid, and literature proved a sufficient support for her gifted votary.

Another American genius was less fortunate. In Baltimore, a periodical entitled the Saturday Visitor offered a prize for the best poem and story (the amount we cannot precisely recollect). When the candidates’ MSS. were examined, one of them proved to be a collection of clever poems and a story written almost in “copper-plate” hand. The editors looked no further, but said, in joke, “Let us give the prize to the first of geniuses who has written legibly.” The name of the young author was Edgar Allan Poe.

“He came just as he was,” says his biographer, “the prize-money not having yet been sent him, with a seedy coat buttoned up to conceal the total absence of linen, but with shoes whose gaping crevices could not be made to hide the absence of socks.” Mr. Kennedy (the editor) took him to the tailor, and fitted him out as comfortably and completely as possible, after which he was installed as an inmate of his house, and for a little time employed on the staff of the Saturday Visitor. This was in 1833. The vicissitudes of fortune were perpetual, though to his terrible propensity to intemperance much of his constant distress was due. A gentleman despite the squalor of his appearance, a genius despite his uncontrolled vices, he was one of the most unfortunate of men. A few years later, he writes to a friend: “Can you not send me five dollars? I am sick, and Virginia (his wife) is almost gone.” In 1839, his prospects were for the moment not so hopeless, and one who often visited him testified to his home in Philadelphia, “though slightly and cheaply furnished,” being yet “so tasteful and refined, so fitly disposed, that it seemed altogether suitable for a man of genius.” Again, his biographer speaks of him as “always in pecuniary difficulties, and his sick wife frequently in want of the merest necessities of life.” For his poem “The Raven,” first published in the Whig Review, and since become the pedestal of his worldwide fame, he received the sum of ten dollars; and in 1848, while writing for the Southern Literary Messenger, he was content to work for two dollars a page. And yet, so far as fame was concerned, Poe’s name and talent were known beyond the seas, admired by two continents; and when, upon entering an office in New York, he would mention who he was, men turned round to stare at the gifted poet who, all starving as he was, was already enrolled among the great men of America.

The philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, had equal occasion to put his philosophy to the same universal test of patience. Finding a mercantile clerkship ill-adapted to his poetic and vagrant humor, he left Geneva and went to Lausanne, where he tried music as a profession. His experiences were curious. He tried to teach music, but, as he says himself, “The scholars did not crowd, and two or three German boys, luckily as stupid as I was ignorant of my business, were my only pupils. Under my tuition they did not become great croquenotes. One day, I was sent for to a house to teach a little ‘serpent of a girl,’ to whom it gave infinite pleasure to show me a quantity of music I did not know, and then to play one piece for me, ‘just to show the master how it should go.’ I knew absolutely so little of reading that I could not follow a note of my own composition in such a manner as to be able to regulate its execution.” It may be supposed the poor man did not thrive on these means of livelihood; his fare was meagre enough, and he paid only thirty francs a month for his board and lodging in the little inn where he made his home. For his dinner, he had but one dish of soup, with something a little more substantial for his supper at night. Notwithstanding his desire for independence and freedom from the personal thraldom (assujettissement) of a fixed and sedentary occupation, he found out that “one must live.” So he took to copying music at a small remuneration, and so fond did he become of his self-chosen trade (for with him it was not art) that in later life, when in comfortable circumstances, he took to it again. But his musical mania went yet further. He composed an operetta entitled Le Devin du Village—“The Village Astrologer, or Fortune-teller”—and had it executed at Lausanne. He says of its first performance “that it was such a charivari as could not be surpassed; that every one shut their ears and opened wide their eyes; that it was a witch’s sabbath, a devilish hubbub, insupportable and monstrous.” The tide turned one day, and the same play was performed in the court theatre at Versailles, the family and courtiers of Louis XVI. calling the music dream-like, divine, entrancing! This sounds like an anticipation of the diversity of opinion now observable concerning Wagner and Liszt.

Real artists, like Mozart, were hardly more fortunate in their domain of legitimate art than was Rousseau in his queer attempts at music. Although his name was known, his music extolled to the skies, and his person retained as a priceless court treasure at Vienna, Wolfgang Mozart hardly made a competency by his unrivalled and acknowledged genius. His early death was mainly the result of continual anxiety on the score of personal necessities. When the mysterious stranger came and gave the order for the requiem, Mozart was already ill, worn, and exhausted. The stranger’s opportune gift, or fragment in advance, came too late, though it was sorely needed at the time; and, before the order was completed, the great musician was on his death-bed, his wife Constance by his side, his friends rehearsing the finished part of the requiem at the foot of his bed, while his haggard features were lit up to the last by the feverish enthusiasm so soon to be quenched in death.

It would seem as though the greater the genius, the greater the destitution. Hardly one has escaped the furnace of poverty. Curran, the great Irish lawyer and orator, was stranded early in life, without friends, connections, or fortune, conscious of talent above the crowd that elbowed him, and sensitive to a painful degree. He himself thus tells the story of the first fee of any consequence which he received in his profession: “I then lived upon Hog Hill, Dublin; my wife and children were the chief furniture of my apartments; as to my rent, it stood much the same chance of its liquidation with the national debt. Mrs. Curran, however, was a barrister’s lady, and what was wanting in wealth she was well determined should be supplied by dignity. The landlady, on the other hand, had no idea of any other gradation except that of pounds, shillings, and pence. I walked out one morning, in order to avoid the perpetual altercations on this subject, with my mind, you may imagine, in no very enviable temperament. I fell into gloom, to which from my infancy I had been occasionally subject. I had a family, for whom I had no dinner, and a landlady, for whom I had no rent. I had gone abroad in despondence; I returned home almost in desperation. When I opened the door of my study the first object that presented itself was an immense folio of a brief, twenty golden guineas wrapped up beside it, and the name of old Bob Lyons marked on the back of it. I paid my landlady, bought a good dinner, gave Bob Lyons a share of it, and that dinner was the date of my prosperity!”

One of the most Christian and sympathetic authors of France (in a department in which it must be confessed she does not excel—poetry), Alphonse de Lamartine, was both in his youth and in his old age the victim of poverty. Though in his childhood his poverty was not absolutely sordid, like that of many a scholar as talented and even as well born, still it was such that his mother had to exercise the strictest economy on her small property, to help her peasant-servants in many a lowly household task, and was in such straits that the failure or success of her slender vintage was to her the chief event of the year. A noble woman, a Christian Cornelia, she knew how to turn these troubles into lessons for her son; and a more genial, lovable “great man” than Lamartine has seldom claimed our homage, notwithstanding the foibles which necessarily qualify our admiration. Political and diplomatic success gave him far different prospects in middle life. His poems were the first heralds, the joy-bells, of a new school; his name was a talisman. But the shadow of genius—relentless poverty—fell upon him again, and his last days were little better than a pauper’s.

The literary world of Paris presents the acme of this combination—squalor and talent. Dramatists, poets, painters, musicians, the smaller fry of the daily press, the heavier authors of yellow-covered romans, all mingled in one inextricable bohemia of distress, of recklessness, of generosity, of self-sacrifice. Good and bad are strangely interwoven; the starving writer stints himself to help the dying artist, or the swaggering playwright repudiates his debts to gamble away in one night the rare remuneration of months of toil; and amid the confusion, the din of this assemblage, amid this fellowship of misery, remains the seemingly eternal truth that the path of scholarship, or even its counterfeit, is not the legitimate path of success.

In France, where the intellect is so fertile that it is almost the only land where literature is a profession, not a pastime, we may turn to one figure more, a sweet and angelic one, very different from the stormy and erratic geniuses among whom we have been wandering—Eugénie de Guérin, the Catholic poetess, the devoted type of sisterly love. She was poor, though not to destitution. The family, once famous among the Languedoc Crusaders, and owning a great feudal estate, had dwindled down to the possession of a patrimony hardly so large and not half so rich as a modern farm. The woman now known throughout Europe and America by her exquisite Journal and Letters—the starting-point of a new class of domestic literature—tells us simply and playfully enough in those writings—which during life she never dreamed of giving to the public—of her humble avocations in her father’s household. Now we see her, having cooked the supper with her sister’s aid while the servants were all gone to an instruction for confirmation, sitting by the huge fire in the kitchen, because it was warm there, and making a hearty meal of coarse soup, boiled potatoes, and a cake baked by herself, “with the dogs and cats to wait upon us,” as she says. She did not like these household cares, however; they were a cross to her, and her good sister “Mimi” took much of this cross off her hands. Another day she has been washing, but she consoles herself with the thought of Homer’s Nausicaa washing her brother’s tunics. Once, when she was lifting a heavy cauldron from the kitchen fire, her father tenderly said he did not like to see her doing such work; but she answered with a smile that S. Bonaventure was found washing the dishes after the refectory meal when the Papal deputation came to offer him the cardinal’s hat! So she taught herself to do “disgusting things without feeling disgust; as, for instance, blackening her hands in the kitchen.” Another time she makes a hasty note of her affection for her brother and her unconquerable longing after solitude, but adds that she has no time for it now, “as there are ducks to be plucked, a pie to be prepared, a little carnival-dinner got up; in a word, because the parish priest was coming, and her help was anxiously waited for in the kitchen”; while another day she is mending old house-linen. On the other hand, she was reading S. Augustine, S. Jerome, S. Teresa, Bossuet, Fénélon, Plutarch, books of theology and philosophy, mysticism and morals, the works of great thinkers; she was writing poems of more exquisite purity and wealth of imagery than the famous young brother whom Sainte-Beuve and George Sand declared one of the foremost poets of the day: she was a child in her simplicity, a saint in her abnegation—a woman in a thousand. We have dwelt with the greater emphasis and satisfaction on this last reference for the reason that the modern world, in its haste to find countenance for its license in thought and morals, has brought into prominence only the less worthy specimens of French genius, to the neglect of the many admirable writers who are now for the first time, becoming familiar to English readers.

This strangely mingled thread of life which we have illustrated in these pages has its pathetic as well as its ludicrous aspect. Men are constantly complaining of the “injustice” of God in making inequalities among them; if they looked a little deeper, they would see that what they call inequalities are compensations. The world has to be ballasted like a ship; the heaviest merchandise is not always the most precious, but it is none the less necessary. It would be preposterous to expect all men to be rich, good, and clever; gifts balance each other in God’s plan, and, since men sigh so for riches, the wise Distributor of earthly prizes has answered many men literally, and given them riches alone, leaving their brains a blank. To discuss this vexed question is not, however, our intention; a few examples, such as we have drawn from real life, speak for themselves, and facts are ever more tolerated than disquisitions. We may learn from those facts a new interest in books; we may remember, when we read a new work, that a human being’s life is sewed in with those pages; that what we carelessly toss aside after a moment’s perusal has cost hours of trouble, of research, probably of privation; that the pathos that draws tears from our eyes is often transcribed and softened down from the actual experience of the writer; while the humor we approve of and the piquancy we admire are rather born of bitter defiance against an adverse fate than grown from the natural soil of a healthy sense of fun. A book is often the hot-pressed fruit of an unhappy life rather than the product of elegant leisure, and one cannot help feeling a tender but far from disparaging pity for the thousands of educated men and women whose very talent, in a sense, compels them, through circumstances of privation, to write in haste and anxiety books that are inadequate representatives of that talent.