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ESSAYS

BY

MATTHEW ARNOLD

ESSAYS

LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS

1906

/'., Mi'.ir), I

4022

E7
1106

CONTENTS

The Function of Criticism at the

Present Time .... 1

The Literary Influence of Academies 71

Maurice de Guerin. . . . 135

Eugenie de Guerin .... 205

824011

THE FUNCTION OF CRITI-
CISM AT THE PRESENT TIME

THE FUNCTION OF CRITI-
CISM AT THE PRESENT TIME

Many objections have been made to a
proposition which, in some remarks of
mine on translating Homer, I ventured
to put forth ; a proposition about criti-
cism, and its importance at the present
day. I said : ' Of the literature of France
and Germany, as of the intellect of
Europe in general, the main effort, for
now many years, has been a critical
effort; the endeavour, in all branches
of knowledge, theology, philosophy, his-
tory, art, science, to see the object as
in itself it really is.' I added, that owing
to the operation in English literature
of certain causes, ' almost the last thing
for which one would come to English
literature is just that very thing which
3

ESSAYS

now Europe most desires, — criticism ; '
and that the power and value of English
literature was thereby impaired. More
than one rejoinder declared that the
importance I here assigned to criticism
was excessive, and asserted the inherent
superiority of the creative effort of the
human spirit over its critical effort.
And the other day, having been led by
a Mr Shairp's excellent notice of Words-
worth to turn again to his biography, I
found, in the words of this great man,
whom I, for one, must always listen to
with the profoundest respect, a sentence
passed on the critic's business, which
seems to justify every possible dispar-
agement of it. Wordsworth says in one
of his letters : —

' The writers in these publications '
(the Reviews), 'while they prosecute
their inglorious employment, can not
be supposed to be in a state of mind
very favourable for being affected by
the finer influences of a thing so pure
as genuine poetry.'
4

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

And a trustworthy reporter of his
conversation quotes a more elaborate
judgment to the same effect: —

' Wordsworth holds the critical power
very low, infinitely lower than the in-
ventive ; and he said to-day that if the
quantity of time consumed in writing
critiques on the works of others were
given to original composition, of what-
ever kind it might be, it would be much
better employed ; it would make a man
find out sooner his own level, and it
would do infinitely less mischief. A
false or malicious criticism may do
much injury to the minds of others ; a
stupid invention, either in prose or
verse, is quite harmless.'

It is almost too much to expect of
poor human nature, that a man capable
of producing some effect in one line of
literature, should, for the greater good
of society, voluntarily doom himself to
impotence and obscurity in another.
Still less is this to be expected from
men addicted to the composition of
a2 5

ESSAYS

the 'false or malicious criticism' of
which Wordsworth speaks. However,
everybody would admit that a false
or malicious criticism had better never
have been written. Everybody, too,
would be willing to admit, as a general
proposition, that the critical faculty is
lower than the inventive. But is it
true that criticism is really, in itself, a
baneful and injurious employment; is
it true that all time given to writing
critiques on the works of others would
be much better employed if it were
given to original composition, of what-
ever kind this may be ? Is it true that
Johnson had better have gone on pro-
ducing more ' Irenes ' instead of writing
his 'Lives of the Poets'; nay, is it
certain that Wordsworth himself was
better employed in making his Ecclesi-
astical Sonnets than when he made his
celebrated Preface, so full of criticism,
and criticism of the works of others?
Wordsworth was himself a great critic,
and it is to be sincerely regretted that

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

he has not left us more criticism ;
Goethe was one of the greatest of
critics, and we may sincerely eongratvi-
late ourselves that he has left us so
much criticism. Without wasting time
over the exaggeration w^hich Words-
worth's judgment on criticism clearly
contains, or over an attempt to trace
the causes, — not difficult, I think, to be
traced, — which may have led Words-
w^orth to this exaggeration, a critic
may with advantage seize an occasion
for trying his own conscience, and for
asking himself of what real service at
any given moment the practice of criti-
cism either is or may be made to his
own mind and spirit, and to the minds
and spirits of others.

JThe critical power is of lower rank
than the creative. True ; but in assent-
ing to this proposition, one or two
things are to be kept in mind. It is
undeniable that the exercise of a crea-
tive power, that a free creative activity,
is the highest function of man ; it is
7

ESSAYS

proved to be so by man's finding in it
his true happiness. But it is undeni-
able, also, that men may have the sense
of exercising this free creative activity
in other ways than in producing great
works of literature or art ; if it were
not so, all but a very few men would
be shut out from the true happiness of
all men. They may have it in well-
doing, they may have it in learning,
they may have it even in criticising.
This is one thing to be kept in mind.
Another is, that the exercise of the
creative power in the production of
great works of literature or art, how-
ever high this exercise of it may rank,
is not at all epochs and under all con-
ditions possible; and that therefore
labour may be vainly spent in attempt-
ing it, which might with more fruit be
used in preparing for it, in rendering
it possible. This creative power works
with elements, with materials ; what if
it has not those materials, those ele-
ments, ready for its use ? In that case
8

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

it must surely wait till they are ready.
Now, in literature, — I will limit myself
to literature, for it is about literature
that the question arises, — the elements
with which the creative power works
are ideas; the best ideas on every
matter which literature touches, cur-
rent at the time. At any rate we may
lay it down as certain that in modern
literature no manifestation of the crea-
tive power not working w^ith these can
be very important or fruitful. And I
say current at the time, not merely
accessible at the time ; for creative
literary genius does not principally
show itself in discovering new ideas,
that is rather the business of the philo-
sopher. The grand work of literary
genius is a work of synthesis and ex-
position, not of analysis and discovery ;
its gift lies in the faculty of being
happily inspired by a certain intel-
lectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a
certain order of ideas, when it finds
itself in them ; of dealing divinely with
9

ESSAYS :n^.

these ideas, presenting them in the
most effective and attractive combina-
tions,— making beautiful works with
them, in short. But it must have the
atmosphere, it must find itself amidst
the order of ideas, in order to work
freely; and these it is not so easy to
command. This is why great creative
epochs in literature are so rare, this is
why there is so much that is unsatis-
factory in the productions of many
men of real genius ; because, for the
creation of a master-work of literature
two powers must concur, the power of
the man and the power of the moment,
and the man is not enough without the
moment ; the creative power has, for
its happy exercise, appointed elements,
and those elements are not in its own
control.

Nay, they are more within the con-
trol of the critical power. It is the
business of the critical power, as I said
in the words already quoted, 'in all
branches of knowledge, theology philo-
10

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

sophy, history, art, science, to see the
object as in itself it really is.' Thus it
tends, at last, to make an intellectual
situation of which the creative power
can profitably avail itself. It tends to
establish an order of ideas, if not ab-
solutely true, yet true by comparison
with that which it displaces ; to make
the best ideas prevail. Presently these
new ideas reach society, the touch of
truth is the touch of life, and there is a
stir and grow^th everywhere ; out of
this stir and growth come the creative
epochs of literature.

Or, to narrow our range, and quit
these considerations of the general
march of genius and of society, — con-
siderations which are apt to become too
abstract and impalpable, — every one
can see that a poet, for instance, ought
to know life and the world before deal-
ing with them in poetry ; and life and the
w^orld being in modern times very com-
plex things, the creation of a modern
poet, to be worth much, implies a great
11

ESSAYS

critical effort behind it ; else it must
be a comparatively poor, barren, and
short-lived affair. This is why Byron's
poetry had so little endurance in it,
and Goethe's so much ; both Byron and
Goethe had a great productive power,
but Goethe's was nourished by a great
critical effort providing the true ma-
terials for it, and Byron's was not ;
Goethe knew life and the world, the
poet's necessary subjects, much more
comprehensively and thoroughly than
Byron. He knew a great deal more of
them, and he knew them much more as
they really aie.

It has long seemed to me that the
burst of creative activity in our litera-
ture, through the first quarter of this
century, had about it in fact something
premature ; and that from this cause
its productions are doomed, most of
them, in spite of the sanguine hopes
which accompanied and do still accom-
pany them, to prove hardly more last-
ing than the productions of far less
12

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

splendid epochs. And this premature-
ness conies from its having proceeded
without having its proper data, without
sufficient materials to work with. In
other words, the English poetry of the
first quarter of this century, with
plenty of energy, plenty of creative
force, did not know enough. This
makes Byron so empty of matter,
Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth
even, profound as he is, yet so wanting
in completeness and variety. Words-
worth cared little for books and dis-
paraged Goethe. I admire Words-
worth, as he is, so much that I can-
not wish him different ; and it is vain,
no doubt, to imagine such a man
different from what he is, to suppose
that he could have been different. But
surely the one thing w^anting to make
Wordsworth an even greater poet than
he is, — his thought richer, and his
influence of wider application, — was
that he should have read more books,
among them, no doubt, those of that
13

ESSAYS

Goethe whom he disparaged without
reading him.

But to speak of books and reading
may easily lead to a misunderstanding
here. It was not really books and
reading that lacked to our poetry at
this epoch ; Shelley had plenty of read-
ing, Coleridge had immense reading.
Pindar and Sophocles — as we all say so
glibly, and often with so little discern-
ment of the real import of what we are
saying — had not many books ; Shaks-
peare was no deep reader. True ; but
in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles,
in the England of Shakspeare, the poet
lived in a current of ideas in the high-
est degree animating and nourishing to
the creative power ; society was, in the
fullest measure, permeated by fresh
thought, intelligent and alive. And
this state of things is the true basis for
the creative power's exercise, in this it
finds its data, its materials, truly ready
for its hand ; all the books and reading
in the world are only valuable as they
14

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

are helps to this. Even when this does
not actually exist, books and reading
may enable a man to construct a kind
of semblance of it in his own mind,
a world of knowledge and intelligence
in which he may live and work. This
is by no means an equivalent to the
artist for the nationally diffused life
and thought of the epochs of Sophocles
or Shakspeare ; but, besides that it may
be a means of preparation for such
epochs, it does really constitute, if
many share in it, a quickening and
sustaining atmosphere of great value.
Such an atmosphere the many-sided
learning and the long and widely-com-
bined critical effort of Germany formed
for Goethe, when he lived and worked.
There was no national glow of life and
thought there as in the Athens of
Pericles or the England of Elizabeth.
That was the poet's weakness. But
there was a sort of equivalent for it in
the complete culture and unfettered
thinking of a large body of Germans.
15

ESSAYS

That was his strength. In the England
of the first quarter of this century
there was neither a national glow of
life and thought, such as we had in
the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture
and a force of learning and criticism
such as were to be found in Germany.
Therefore the creative power of poetry
wanted, for success in the highest sense,
materials and a basis; a thorough in-
terpretation of the world was neces-
sarily denied to it.

At first sight it seems strange that
out of the immense stir of the French
Revolution and its age should not have
come a crop of works of genius equal
to that which came out of the stir
of the great productive time of Greece,
or out of that of the Renascence, with
its powerful episode the Reformation.
But the truth is that the stir of the
French Revolution took a character
which essentially distinguished it from
such movements as these. These were,
in the main, disinterestedly intellectual
16

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

and spiritual movements ; movements
in which the human spirit looked for
its satisfaction in itself and in the
increased play of its own activity. The
French Revolution took a political,
practical character. The movement
which went on in France under the old
regime, from 1700 to 1789, was far more
really akin than that of the Revolution
itself to the movement of the Renas-
cence; the France of Voltaire and
Rousseau told far more powerfully
upon the mind of Europe than the
France of the Revolution. Goethe
reproached this last expressly with
having ' thrown quiet culture back.'
Nay, and the true key to how much in
our Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is
this! — that they had their source in a
great movement of feeling, not in a
great movement of mind. The French
Revolution, however, — that object of so
much blind love and so much blind
hatred, — found undoubtedly its motive-
power in the intelligence of men, and
B 17

ESSAYS

not in their practical sense ; this is what
distinguishes it from the English Re-
volution of Charles the First's time.
This is what makes it a more spiritual
event than our Revolution, an event of
much more powerful and world-wide
interest, though practically less suc-
cessful; it appeals to an order of ideas
which are universal, certain, permanent.
1789 asked of a thing. Is it rational?
1642 asked of a thing. Is it legal? or,
when it went furthest, Is it according
to conscience? This is the English
fashion, a fashion to be treated, within
its own sphere, with the highest re-
spect; for its success, within its own
sphere, has been prodigious. But what
is law in one place is not law in another,
what is law here to-day is not law even
here to-morrow ; and as for conscience,
what is binding on one man's conscience
is not binding on another's. The old
woman who threw her stool at the head
of the surpliced minister in St Giles's
Church at Edinburgh obeyed an im-
18

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

pulse to which millions of the human
race maj'' be permitted to remain stran-
gers. But the prescriptions of reason
are absolute, unchanging of universal
validity ; to count by tens is the easiest
way of counting — that is a proposition
of which everyone, from here to the
Antipodes, feels the force ; at least I
should say so if we did not live in a
country where it is not impossible that
any morning we may find a letter in
the Times declaring that a decimal
coinage is an absurdity. That a whole
nation should have been penetrated
with an enthusiasm for pure reason,
and with an ardent zeal for making its
prescriptions triumph, is a very re-
markable thing, when we consider how
little of mind, or anything so worthy
and quickening as mind, comes into
the motives which alone, in general,
impel great masses of men. In spite of
the extravagant direction given to this
enthusiasm, in spite of the crimes and
follies in which it lost itself, the French
19

ESSAYS

Revolution derives from the force,
truth, and universality of the ideas
which it took for its law, and from the
passion with which it could inspire a
multitude for these ideas, a unique and
still living power ; it is — it will pro-
bably long remain — the greatest, the
most animating event in history. And
as no sincere passion for the things of
the mind, even though it turn out in
many respects an unfortunate passion,
is ever quite thrown away and quite
barren of good, France has reaped from
hers one fruit — the natural and legiti-
mate fruit, though not precisely the
grand fruit she expected: she is the
country in Europe where 'the people' is
most alive.

But the mania for giving an immedi-
ate political and practical application
to all these fine ideas of the reason was
fatal. Here an Englishman is in his
element : on this theme we can all go
on for hours. And all we are in the
habit of saying on it has undoubtedly
20

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

a great deal of truth. Ideas cannot be
too much prized in and for themselves,
cannot be too much lived with ; but to
transport them abruptly into the world
of politics and practice, violently to
revolutionise this world to their bidding,
— that is quite another thing. There
is the world of ideas and there is the
world of practice ; the French are often
for suppressing the one and the English
the other; but neither is to be sup-
pressed. A member of the House of
Commons said to me the other day:
' That a thing is an anomaly, I consider
to be no objection to it whatever.' I
venture to think he was wrong ; that a
thing is an anomaly is an objection to
it, but absolutely and in the sphere of
ideas : it is not necessarily, under such
and such circumstances, or at such and
such a moment, an objection to it in
the sphere of politics and practice.
Joubert has said beautifully: 'C'est la
force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses
dans le monde ; la force en attendant
b2 21

ESSAYS

le droit.' (Force and right are the
governors of this world ; force till right
is ready.) Force till right is ready ; and
till right is ready, force, the existing
order of things, is justified, is the legiti-
mate ruler. But right is something
moral, and implies inward recognition,
free assent of the will ; we are not ready
for right, — right, so far as we are con-
cerned, is not ready, — until we have at-
tained this sense of seeing it and willing
it. The way in which for us it may
change and transform force, the exist-
ing order of things, and become, in its
turn, the legitimate ruler of the world,
should depend on the way in which,
when our time comes, we see it and
will it. Therefore for other people
enamoured of their own newly dis-
cerned right, to attempt to impose it
upon us as ours, and violently to sub-
stitute their right for our force, is an
act of tyranny, and to be resisted. It
sets at nought the second great half of
our maxim, force till right is ready.
22

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

This was the grand error of the French
Revolution ; and its movement of ideas,
by quitting the intellectual sphere and
rushing furiously into the political
sphere, ran, indeed, a prodigious and
memorable course, but produced no
such intellectual fruit as the movement
of ideas of the Renascence, and created,
in opposition to itself, what I may call
an epoch of concentration. The great
force of that epoch of concentration
was England ; and the great voice of
that epoch of concentration was Burke.
It is the fashion to treat Burke's
writings on the French Revolution as
superannuated and conquered by the
event ; as the eloquent but unphilo-
sophical tirades of bigotry and pre-
judice. I will not deny that they are
often disfigured by the violence and
passion of the moment, and that in
some directions Burke's view was
bounded, and his observation therefore
at fault. But on the whole, and for
those who can make the needful cor-
23

ESSAYS

rections, what distinguishes these writ-
ings is their profound, permanent,
fruitful, philosophical truth. They
contain the true philosophy of an epoch
of concentration, dissipate the heavy
atmosphere which its own nature is
apt to engender round it, and make
its resistance rational instead of me-
chanical.

But Burke is so great because, almost
alone in England, he brings thought to
bear upon politics, he saturates politics
with thought. It is his accident that
his ideas were at the service of an epoch
of concentration, not of an epoch of ex-
pansion ; it is his characteristic that he
so lived by ideas, and had such a source
of them welling up within him, that he
could float even an epoch of concentra-
tion and English Tory politics with
them. It does not hurt him that Dr
Price and the Liberals were enraged
with him ; it does not even hurt him
that George the Third and the Tories
were enchanted with him. His great-
24

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

ness is that he lived in a world which
neither English Liberalism nor English
Toryism is apt to enter; — the world of
ideas, not the world of catchwords and
party habits. So far is it from being
really true of him that he 'to party
gave up what was meant for mankind,'
that at the very end of his fierce
struggle with the French Revolution,
after all his invectives against its false
pretensions, hoUowness, and madness,
with his sincere conviction of its mis-
chievousness, he can close a memoran-
dum on the best means of combating
it, some of the last pages he ever wrote,
— the 'Thoughts on French Affairs' in
December 1791, — with these striking
words : —

' The evil is stated, in my opinion, as
it exists. The remedy must be where
power, ^\'isdom, and information, I hope,
are more united with good intentions
than they can be with me. I have done
with this subject, I believe, for ever.
It has given me many anxious moments
25

ESSAYS

for the last two years. If a great
change is to be made in human affairs,
the minds of men will be fitted to it; the
general opinions and feelings w^ill draw
that way. Every fear, every hope will
forward it ; and then they who persist
in opposing this mighty current in
human affairs, will appear rather to
resist the decrees of Providence itself,
than the mere designs of men. They
will not be resolute and firm, but per-
verse and obstinate.'

That return of Burke upon himself
has always seemed to me one of the
finest things in English literature, or
indeed in any literature. That is what
I call living by ideas : Avhen one side of
a question has long had your earnest
support, when all your feelings are en-
gaged, when you hear all round you
no language but one, when your party
talks this language like a steam-engine
and can imagine no other, — still to be
able to think, still to be irresistibly
carried, if so it be, by the current of
26

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

thought to the opposite side of the
question, and, like Balaam, to be un-
able to speak anything but what the
Lord has put in your mouth. I know
nothing more striking, and I must add
that I know nothing more un-English.
For the Englishman in general is
like my friend the Member of Parlia-
ment, and believes, point-blank, that
for a thing to be an anomaly is abso-
lutely no objection to it whatever. He
is like the Lord Auckland of Burke's
day, who, in a memorandum on the
French Revolution, talks of 'certain
miscreants, assuming the name of phil-
osophers, who have presumed them-
selves capable of establishing a new
system of society.' The Englishman
has been called a political animal, and
he values what is political and practi-
cal so much that ideas easily become
objects of dislike in his eyes, and
thinkers 'miscreants,' because ideas
and thinkers have rashly meddled with
politics and practice. This would be
27

ESSAYS

all very well if the dislike and neglect
confined themselves to ideas trans-
ported out of their own sphere, and
meddling rashly with practice ; but
they are inevitably extended to ideas
as such, and to the whole life of intelli-
gence ; practice is everything, a free
play of the mind is nothing. The
notion of the free play of the mind
upon all subjects being a pleasure in
itself, being an object of desire, being
an essential provider of elements with-
out which a nation's spirit, whatever
compensations it may have for them,
must, in the long run, die of inanition,
hardly enters into an Englishman's
thoughts. It is noticeable that the
word curiosity, which in other lan-
guages is used in a good sense, to mean,
as a high and fine quality of man's
nature, just this disinterested love of
a free play of the mind on all subjects,
for its own sake, — it is noticeable, I
say, that this word has in our language
no sense of the kind, no sense but a
28

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

rather bad and disparaging one. But
criticism, real criticism, is essentially
the exercise of this very quality. It
obeys an instinct prompting it to try
to know the best that is known and
thought in the world, irrespectively of
practice, politics, and everything of the
kind ; and to value knowledge and
thought as they approach this best,
without the intrusion of any other
considerations whatever. This is an in-
stinct for which there is, I think, little
original sympathy in the practical
English nature, and what there was
of it has undergone a long benumbing
period of blight and suppression in the
epoch of concentration which followed
the French Revolution.

But epochs of concentration cannot
well endure for ever ; epochs of expan-
sion, in the due course of things, follow
them. Such an epoch of expansion
seems to be opening in this country.
In the first place all danger of a hos-
tile forcible pressure of foreign ideas
29

ESSAYS

upon our practice has long disappeared;
like the traveller in the fable, there-
fore, we begin to wear our cloak a little
more loosely. Then, with a long peace,
the ideas of Europe steal gradually
and amicably in, and mingle, though
in infinitesimally small quantities at
a time, with our own notions. Then,
too, in spite of all that is said about
the absorbing and brutalising influence
of our passionate material progress, it
seems to me indisputable that this pro-
gress is likely, though not certain, to
lead in the end to an apparition of in-
tellectual life ; and that man, after he
has made himself perfectly comfortable
and has now to determine what to do
with himself next, may begin to re-
member that he has a mind, and that
the mind may be made the source of
great pleasure. 1 grant it is mainly
the privilege of faith, at present, to
discern this end to our railways, our
business, and our fortune-making ; but
we shall see if, here as elsewhere, faith
30

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

is not in the end the true prophet.
Our ease, our travelling, and our un-
bounded liberty to hold just as hard
and securely as we please to the prac-
tice to which our notions have given
birth, all tend to beget an inclination
to deal a little more freely with these
notions themselves, to canvass them a
little, to penetrate a little into their
real nature. Flutterings of curiosity,
in the foreign sense of the word, ap-
pear amongst us, and it is in these that
criticism must look to find its account.
Criticism first ; a time of true creative
activity, perhaps, — which, as I have said,
must inevitably be preceded amongst
us by a time of criticism, — hereafter,
when criticism has done its work.

It is of the last importance that
English criticism should clearly discern
what rule for its course, in order to
avail itself of the field now opening to
it, and to produce fruit for the future,
it ought to take. The rule may be
summed up in one word, — disinterested-
31

ESSAYS

ness. And how is criticism to show dis-
interestedness ? By keeping aloof from
what is called 'the practical view of
things;' by resolutely following the
law of its own nature, which is to be
a free play of the mind on all subjects
which it touches. By steadily refusing
to lend itself to any of those ulterior,
political, practical considerations about
ideas, which plenty of people will be
sure to attach to them, which perhaps
ought often to be attached to them,
which in this country at any rate are
certain to be attached to them quite
sufficiently, but which criticism has
really nothing to do with. .Its business
is, as I have said, simply to know the
best that is known and thought in the
world, and by in its turn making this
known, to create a current of true and
fresh ideas. Its business is to do this
with inflexible honesty, with due ability ;
but its business is to do no more, and
to leave alone all questions of practical
consequences and applications, ques-
32

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

tions which will never fail to have due
prominence given to them. Else criti-
cism, besides being really false to its
own nature, merely continues in the
old rut which it has hitherto followed
in this country, and will certainly miss
the chance now given to it. For what
is at present the bane of criticism in
this country? It is that practical con-
siderations cling to it and stifle it. It
subserves interests not its own. Our
organs of criticism are organs of men
and parties having practical ends to
serve, and with them those practical
ends are the first thing and the play of
mind the second ; so much play of mind
as is compatible with the prosecution
of those practical ends is all that is
wanted. An organ like the Revue des
Deux Mondes, having for its main func-
tion to understand and utter the best
that is known and thought in the world,
existing, it may be said, as just an
organ for a free play of the mind, we
have not. But we have the Edinburgh
c 33

ESSAYS

Review, existing as an organ of the old
Whigs, and for as much play of the
mind as may suit its being that; we
have the Quarterly Review, existing as
an organ of the Tories, and for as much
play of mind as may suit its being that ;
we have the Bintish Quarterly Review,
existing as an organ of the political
Dissenters, and for as much play of
mind as may suit its being that; we
have the Times, existing as an organ
of the common, satisfied, well-to-do
Englishman, and for as much play of
mind as may suit its being that. And
so on through all the various fractions,
political and religious, of our society;
every fraction has, as such, its organ
of criticism, but the notion of com-
bining all fractions in the common plea-
sure of a free disinterested play of mind
meets with no favour. Directly this
play of mind wants to have more scope,
and to forget the pressure of practical
considerations a little, it is checked, it
is made to feel the chain. We saw this
34

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

the other day in the extinction, so much
to be regretted, of the Home and Foreign
Review. Perhaps in no organ of criti-
cism in this country was there so much
knowledge, so much play of mind ; but
these could not save it. The Dublin
Review subordinates play of mind to
the practical business of English and
Irish Catholicism, and lives. It must
needs be that men should act in sects
and parties, that each of these sects
and parties should have its organ, and
should make this organ subserve the
interests of its action ; but it would be
well, too, that there should be a criti-
cism, not the minister of these interests,
not their enemy, but absolutely and en-
tirely independent of them. No other
criticism will ever attain any real
authority or make any real way to-
wards its end, — the creating a current
of true and fresh ideas.

It is because criticism has so little
kept in the pure intellectual sphere,
has so little detached itself from prac-
35

ESSAYS

tice, has been so directly polemical and
controversial, that it has so ill accom-
plished, in this country, its best spiritual
work ; which is to keep man from a
self-satisfaction which is retarding and
vulgarising, to lead him towards perfec-
tion, by making his mind dwell upon
what is excellent in itself, and the
absolute beauty and fitness of things.
A polemical practical criticism makes
men blind even to the ideal imperfec-
tion of their practice, makes them wil-
lingly assert its ideal perfection, in
order the better to secure it against
attack; and clearly this is narrowing
and baneful for them. If they were re-
assured on the practical side, specu-
lative considerations of ideal perfection
they might be brought to entertain,
and their spiritual horizon would thus
gradually widen. Sir Charles Adderley
says to the Warwickshire farmers :—

' Talk of the improvement of breed !
Why, the race we ourselves represent,
the men and women, the old Anglo-
36

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

Saxon race, are the best breed in the
whole world. . . . The absence of a too
enervating climate, too unclouded skies,
and a too luxurious nature, has pro-
duced so vigorous a race of people, and
has rendered us so superior to all the
world.'

Mr Roebuck says to the Sheffield
cutlers : —

' I look around me and ask what is
the state of England ? Is not property
safe? Is not every man able to say
what he likes ? Can you not walk from
one end of England to the other in
perfect security? I ask you whether,
the world over or in past history, there
is anything like it ? Nothing. I pray
that our unrivalled happiness may last.'

Now obviously there is a peril for
poor human nature in words and
thoughts of such exuberant self-satis-
faction, until we find ourselves safe in
the streets of the Celestial City.
'Das wenige verschwindet leicht dem
Blicke

c2 37

ESSAYS

Der vorwarts sieht, wie viel noch iibrig

bleibt-'
says Goethe; 'the little that is done
seems nothing when we look forward
and see how much we have yet to do.'
Clearly this is a better line of reflection
for weak humanity, so long as it re-
mains on this earthly field of labour
and trial.

But neither Sir Charles Adderley nor
Mr Roebuck is by nature inaccessible
to considerations of this sort. They
only lose sight of them owing to the
controversial life we all lead, and the
practical form which all speculation
takes with us. They have in view op-
ponents whose aim is not ideal, but
practical; and in their zeal to uphold
their own practice against these innova-
tors, they go so far as even to attri-
bute to this practice an ideal perfection.
Somebody has been wanting to intro-
duce a six-pound franchise, or to abolish
church-rates, or to collect agricultural
statistics by force, or to diminish local
38

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

self-government. How natural, in re-
ply to such proposals, very likely im-
proper or ill-timed, to go a little beyond
the mark, and to say stoutly, 'Such a
race of people as we stand, so superior
to all the world ! The old Anglo-Saxon
race, the best breed in the whole world!
I pray that our unrivalled happiness
may last ! I ask you whether, the
world over or in past history, there
is anything like it?' And so long as
criticism answers this dithyramb by
insisting that the old Anglo - Saxon
race would be still more superior to
all others if it had no church-rates, or
that our unrivalled happiness would
last yet longer with a six-pound fran-
chise, so long will the strain, ' The best
breed in the whole world ! ' swell louder
and louder, everything ideal and refin-
ing will be lost out of sight, and both
the assailed and their critics will re-
main in a sphere, to say the truth,
perfectly unvital, a sphere in which
spiritual progression is impossible. But
39

ESSAYS

let criticism leave church-rates and the
franchise alone, and in the most candid
spirit, without a single lurking thought
of practical innovation, confront with
our dithyramb this paragraph on which
I stumbled in a newspaper immediately
after reading Mr Roebuck : —

'A shocking child murder has just
been committed at Nottingham. A
girl named Wragg left the workhouse
there on Saturday morning with her
young illegitimate child. The child
was soon afterwards found dead on
Mapperly Hills, having been strangled.
Wragg is in custody.'

Nothing but that ; but, in juxtaposi-
tion with the absolute eulogies of Sir
Charles Adderley and Mr Roebuck, how
eloquent, how suggestive are those few
lines ! 'Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the
best in the whole world ! ' — how much
that is harsh and ill-favoured there is
in this best ! Wragg ! If we are to
talk of ideal perfection, of ' the best in
the whole world,' has anyone reflected
40

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

what a touch of grossness in our race,
what an original shortcoming in the
more delicate spiritual perceptions, is
shown by the natural growth amongst
us of such hideous names, — Higgin-
bottom, Stiggins, Bugg I In Ionia and
Attica they were luckier in this respect
than 'the best race in the world;' by
the Ilissus there Avas no Wragg, poor
thing I And ' our unrivalled happi-
ness ; ' — what an element of grimness,
bareness, and hideousness mixes ^\'ith
it and blurs it ; the workhouse, the
dismal Mapperly Hills, — how dismal
those who have seen them will remem-
ber;— the gloom, the smoke, the cold,
the strangled illegitimate child I 'I
ask you whether, the world over or in
past history, there is anything like it ? '
Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer ;
but at any rate, in that case, the world
is very much to be pitied. And the
final touch, — short, bleak, and in-
human : Wragg is in custody. The sex
lost in the confusion of our unrivalled
41

ESSAYS

happiness ; or (shall I say ?) the super-
fluous Christian name lopped off by
the straightforward vigour of our old
Anglo - Saxon breed ! There is profit
for the spirit in such contrasts as this ;
criticism serves the cause of perfec-
tion by establishing them. By eluding
sterile conflict, by refusing to remain
in the sphere where alone narrow and
relative conceptions have any worth
and validity, criticism may diminish its
momentary importance, but only in
this way has it a chance of gaining ad-
mittance for those wider and more per-
fect conceptions to which all its duty
is really owed. Mr Roebuck will have
a poor opinion of an adversary who
replies to his defiant songs of triumph
only by murmuring under his breath,
Wragg is in custody ; but in no other
way will these songs of triumph be
induced gradually to moderate them-
selves, to get rid of what in them ia
excessive and offensive, and to fall into
a softer and truer key.
42

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

It will be said that it is a very subtle
and indirect action which I am thus
prescribing for criticism, and that, by
embracing in this manner the Indian
virtue of detachment and abandoning
the sphere of practical life, it condemns
itseK to a slow and obscure work. Slow
and obscure it may be, but it is the
only proper work of criticism. The
mass of mankind will never have any
ardent zeal for seeing things as they
are ; very inadequate ideas will always
satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas
reposes, and must repose, the general
practice of the world. That is as much
as saying that whoever sets himself to
see things as they are will find himself
one of a very small circle ; but it is only
by this small circle resolutely doing its
own work that adequate ideas will ever
get current at all. The rush and roar
of practical life ^vill always have a
dizzying and attracting effect upon the
most collected spectator, and tend to
draw him into its vortex; most of all
43

ESSAYS

will this be the case where that life is
so powerful as it is in England. But it
is only by remaining collected, and
refusing to lend himself to the point of
view of the practical man, that the
critic can do the practical man any
service ; and it is only by the greatest
sincerity in pursuing his own course,
and by at last convincing even the
practical man of his sincerity, that he
can escape misunderstandings which
perpetually threaten him.

For the practical man is not apt for
fine distinctions, and yet in these dis-
tinctions truth and the highest culture
greatly find their account. But it is
not easy to lead a practical man, — un-
less you reassure him as to your practi-
cal intentions, you have no chance of
leading him, — to see that a thing which
he has always been used to look at
from one side only, which he greatly
values, and which, looked at from that
side, quite deserves, perhaps, all the
prizing and admiring which he bestows
44

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

upon it, — that this thing, looked at from
another side, may appear much less
beneficent and beautiful, and yet re-
tain all its claims to our practical
allegiance. Where shall we find lan-
guage innocent enough, how shall we
make the spotless purity of our inten-
tions evident enough, to enable us to
say to the political Englishman that
the British Constitution itself, which,
seen from the practical side, looks such
a magnificent organ of progress and
virtue, seen from the speculative side,
— with its compromises, its love of
facts, its horror of theory, its studied
avoidance of clear thoughts, — that, seen
from this side, our august Constitution
sometimes looks, — forgive me, shade of
Lord Somers I — a colossal machine for
the manufacture of Philistines ? How
is Cobbett to say this and not be mis-
understood, blackened as he is with the
smoke of a lifelong conflict in the field
of political practice ? how is Mr Carlyle
to say it and not be misunderstood,
45

ESSAYS

after his furious raid into this field with
his Latter-day Pamphlets'} how is Mr
Ruskin, after his pugnacious political
economy ? I say, the critic must keep
out of the region of immediate practice
in the political, social, humanitarian
sphere, if he wants to make a begin-
ning for that more free speculative
treatment of things, which may per-
haps one day make its benefits felt
even in this sphere, but in a natural
and thence irresistible manner.

Do what he will, however, the critic
will still remain exposed to frequent
misunderstandings, and nowhere so
much as in this country. For here
people are particularly indisposed even
to comprehend that without this free
disinterested treatment of things, truth
and the highest culture are out of the
question. So immersed are they in
practical life, so accustomed to take all
their notions from this life and its pro-
cesses, that they are apt to think that
truth and culture themselves can be
46

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

reached by the processes of this life,
and that it is an impertinent singularity
to think of reaching them in any other.
' We are all terrce filii,' cries their elo-
quent advocate ; ' all Philistines to-
gether. Away with the notion of pro-
ceeding by any other course than the
course dear to the Philistines; let us
have a social movement, let us organise
and combine a party to pursue truth and
new thought, let us call it the Liberal
party, and let us all stick to each other,
and back each other up. Let us have
no nonsense about independent criti-
cism, and intellectual delicacy, and the
few and the many. Don't let us trouble
ourselves about foreign thought; we
shall invent the whole thing for our-
selves as we go along. If one of us
speaks well, applaud him ; if one of us
speaks ill, applaud him too ; we are all
in the same movement, we are all
liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth.'
In this way the pursuit of truth be-
comes really a social, practical, pleasur-
47

ESSAYS

able affair, almost requiring a chairman,
a secretary, and advertisements ; with
the excitement of an occasional scan-
dal, with a little resistance to give the
happy sense of difficulty overcome ;
but, in general, plenty of bustle and
very little thought. To act is so easy,
as Goethe says ; to think is so hard !
It is true that the critic has many
temptations to go with the stream, to
make one of the party movement, one
of these terrce filii ; it seems ungracious
to refuse to be a terrce filius, when so
many excellent people are; but the
critic's duty is to refuse, or, if resistance
is vain, at least to cry with Obermann :
Perissons en resistant.

How serious a matter it is to try
and resist, I had ample opportunity of
experiencing when I ventured some
time ago to criticise the celebrated first
volume of Bishop Colenso. The echoes
of the storm which was then raised I
still, from time to time, hear grumbling
round me. That storm arose out of a
48

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

misunderstanding almost inevitable.
It is a result of no little culture to at-
tain to a clear perception that science
and religion are two wholly different
things. The multitude \vill for ever
confuse them; but happily that is of
no great real importance, for while the
multitude imagines itself to live by its
false science, it does really live by its
true religion. Dr Colenso, however, in
his first volume did all he could to
strengthen the confusion, and to make
it dangerous. He did this Avith the
best intentions, I freely admit, and with
the most candid ignorance that this
was the natural effect of what he was
doing; but, says Joubert, 'Ignorance,
which in matters of morals extenu-
ates the crime, is itself, in intellectual
matters, a crime of the first order.' I
criticised Bishop Colenso's speculative
confusion. Immediately there was a
cry raised : ' What is this ? here is a
liberal attacking a liberal. Do not you
belong to the movement ? are not
D 49

ESSAYS

you a friend of truth? Is not Bishop
Colenso in pursuit of truth? then speak
v'ith proper respect of his book. Dr
Stanley is another friend of truth, and
you speak with proper respect of his
book ; why make these invidious differ-
ences ? both books are excellent, admir-
able, liberal ; Bishop Colenso's perhaps
the most so, because it is the boldest,
and will have the best practical conse-
quences for the liberal cause. Do you
want to encourage to the attack of a
brother liberal his, and your, and our
implacable enemies, the Church and
State Review or the Record, — the High
Church rhinoceros and the Evangelical
hyaena ? Be silent, therefore ; or rather
speak, speak as loud as ever you can !
and go into ecstasies over the eighty
and odd pigeons.'

But criticism cannot follow this coarse
and indiscriminate method. It is un-
fortunately possible for a man in pur-
suit of truth to write a book which
reposes upon a false conception. Even
50

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

the practical consequences of a book
are to genuine criticism no recom-
mendation of it, if the book is, in the
highest sense, blundering. I see that a
lady who herself, too, is in pursuit of
truth, and who writes with great ability,
but a little too much, perhaps, under
the influence of the practical spirit of
the English liberal movement, classes
Bishop Colenso's book and M. Renan's
together, in her survey of the religious
state of Europe, as facts of the same
order, works, both of them, of 'great
importance;' 'great ability, power, and
skill ; ' Bishop Colenso's, perhaps, the
most powerful; at least. Miss Cobbe
gives special expression to her grati-
tude that to Bishop Colenso ' has been
given the strength to grasp, and the
courage to teach, truths of such deep
import.' In the same way, more than
one popular writer has compared him
to Luther. Now it is just this kind of
false estimate which the critical spirit
is, it seems to me, bound to resist. It
51

ESSAYS

is really the strongest possible proof of
the low ebb at which, in England, the
critical spirit is, that while the critical
hit in the religious literature of Ger-
many is Dr Strauss's book, in that of
France M. Kenan's book, the book of
Bishop Colenso is the critical hit in the
religious literature of England. Bishop
Colenso's book reposes on a total mis-
conception of the essential elements of
the religious problem, as that problem
is now presented for solution. To criti-
cism, therefore, which seeks to have the
best that is known and thought on this
problem, it is, however well meant, of
no importance whatever. M. Kenan's
book attempts a new synthesis of the
elements furnished to us by the Four
Gospels. It attempts, in my opinion, a
synthesis, perhaps premature, perhaps
impossible, certainly not successful. Up
to the present time, at any rate, we
must acquiesce in Fleury's sentence on
such recastings of the Gospel - story :
Quiconque simagine la pouvoir mieux
62

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

ecHre, ne Ventend pas. M. Renan had
himself passed by anticipation a like
sentence on his o'vnti work, when he
said : ' If a new presentation of the
character of Jesus were offered to me,
I would not have it ; its very clearness
would be, in my opinion, the best proof
of its insufficiency.' His friends may
with perfect justice rejoin that at the
sight of the Holy Land, and of the
actual scene of the Gospel-story, all
the current of M. Renan's thoughts
may have naturally changed, and a new
casting of that story irresistibly sug-
gested itself to him; and that this is
just a case for applying Cicero's maxim :
Change of mind is not inconsistency —
nemo doctus uiiquam mutafionem con-
silii inconstantiam dixit esse. Never-
theless, for criticism, M. Renan's first
thought must still be the truer one, as
long as his new casting so fails more
fully to commend itself, more fully (to
use Coleridge's happy phrase about the
Bible) to find us. Still M. Renan's at-
d2 53

ESSAYS

tempt is, for criticism, of the most real
interest and importance, since, with all
its difficulty, a fresh synthesis of the
New Testament data, — not a making
war on them, in Voltaire's fashion, not
a leaving them out of mind, in the
world's fashion, but the putting a new
construction upon them, the taking
them from under the old, traditional,
conventional point of view and placing
them under a new one, — is the very
essence of the religious problem, as now
presented; and only by efforts in this
direction can it receive a solution.

Again, in the same spirit in which
she judges Bishop Colenso, Miss Cobbe,
like so many earnest liberals of our
practical race, both here and in America,
herself sets vigorously about a positive
reconstruction of religion, about mak-
ing a religion of the future out of hand,
or at least setting about making it.
We must not rest, she and they are
always thinking and saying, in negative
criticism, we must be creative and con-
54

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

structive; hence we have such works
as her recent Religious Duty, and works
still more considerable, perhaps, by-
others, which will be in every one's
mind. These works often have much
ability ; they often spring out of sincere
convictions, and a sincere wish to do
good ; and they sometimes, perhaps, do
good. Their fault is (if I may be per-
mitted to say so) one which they have
in common with the British College of
Health, in the Ne\N' Road. Everyone
knows the British College of Health ;
it is that building with the lion and
the statue of the Goddess Hygeia be-
fore it; at least I am sure about the
lion, though I am not absolutely cer-
tain about the Goddess Hygeia. This
building does credit, perhaps, to the re-
sources of Dr Morrison and his disciples;
but it falls a good deal short of one's
idea of what a British College of Health
ought to be. In England, where we
hate public interference and love in-
dividual enterprise, we have a whole

ESSAYS

crop of places like the British College
of Health ; the grand name without the
grand thing. Unluckily, creditable to
individual enterprise as they are, they
tend to impair our taste by making us
forget what more grandiose, noble, or
beautiful character properly belongs
to a public institution. The same may
be said of the religions of the future
of Miss Cobbe and others. Creditable,
like the British College of Health, to
the resources of their authors, they
yet tend to make us forget what more
grandiose, noble, or beautiful character
properly belongs to rehgious construc-
tions. The historic religions, with all
their faults, have had this ; it certainly
belongs to the religious sentiment, when
it truly flowers, to have this; and we
impoverish our spirit if we allow a
religion of the future without it. What
then is the duty of criticism here?
To take the practical point of view, to
applaud the liberal movement and all
its works, — its New Road religions of
56

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

the future into the bargain, — for their
general utility's sake? By no means;
but to be perpetually dissatisfied with
these works, while they perpetually
fall short of a high and perfect ideal.

For criticism, these are elementary
laws ; but they never can be popular,
and in this country they have been
very little followed, and one meets
with immense obstacles in following
them. That is a reason for asserting
them again and again. Criticism must
maintain its independence of the prac-
tical spirit and its aims. Even with
well-meant efforts of the practical spirit
it must express dissatisfaction, if in the
sphere of the ideal they seem impover-
ishing and limiting. It must not hurry
on to the goal because of its practical
importance. It must be patient, and
know how to wait ; and flexible, and
know how to attach itself to things
and how to withdraw from them. It
must be apt to study and praise ele-
ments that for the fulness of spiritual
57

ESSAYS

perfection are wanted, even though
they belong to a power which in the
practical sphere may be maleficent. It
must be apt to discern the spiritual
shortcomings or illusions of powers that
in the practical sphere may be bene-
ficent. And this without any notion of
favouring or injuring, in the practical
sphere, one power or the other; without
any notion of playing off, in this sphere,
one power against the other. When
one looks, for instance, at the English
Divorce Court,— an institution which
perhaps has its practical conveniences,
but which in the ideal sphere is so hid-
eous ; an institution which neither makes
divorce impossible nor makes it decent,
which allows a man to get rid of his
wife, or a wife of her husband, but makes
them drag one another first, for the
public edification, through a mire of un-
utterable infamy, — when one looks at
this charming institution, I say, with
its crowded trials, its newspaper reports,
and its money compensations, this insti-
58

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

tution in which the gross unregenerate
British Philistine has indeed stamped
an image of himself, — one may be per-
mitted to find the marriage theory of
Catholicism refreshing and elevating.
Or when Protestantism, in virtue of
its supposed rational and intellectual
origin, gives the law to criticism too
magisterially, criticism may and must
remind it that its pretensions, in this
respect, are illusive and do it harm; that
the Reformation was a moral rather
than an intellectual event ; that Luther's
theory of grace no more exactly reflects
the mind of the spirit than Bossuet's
philosophy of history reflects it; and that
there is no more antecedent probability
of the Bishop of Durham's stock of ideas
being agreeable to perfect reason than
of Pope Pius the Ninth's. But criticism
will not on that account forget the
achievements of Protestantism in the
practical and moral sphere ; nor that,
even in the intellectual sphere, Protes-
tantism, though in a blind and stumbling
59

ESSAYS

manner, carried forward the Renascence,
while Catholicism threw itself violently
across its path.

I lately heard a man of thought and
energy contrasting the want of ardour
and movement which he now found
amongst young men in this country
with what he remembered in his own
youth, twenty years ago. ' What re-
formers we were then ! ' he exclaimed ;
' what a zeal we had ! how we canvassed
every institution in Church and State,
and ^vere prepared to remodel them all
on first principles ! ' He was inclined
to regret, as a spiritual flagging, the
lull which he saw. I am disposed rather
to regard it as a pause in which the turn
to a new mode of spiritual progress is
being accomplished. Everything was
long seen, by the young and ardent
amongst us, in inseparable connection
with politics and practical life. We have
pretty well exhausted the benefits of
seeing things in this connection, we
have got all that can be got by so seeing
60

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

them. Let us try a more disinterested
mode of seeing them ; let us betake our-
selves more to the serener life of the
mind and spirit. This life, too, may
have its excesses and dangers ; but they
are not for us at present. Let us think
of quietly enlarging our stock of true
and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we
get an idea or haK an idea, be running
out with it into the street, and trying
to make it rule there. Our ideas will,
in the end, shape the world all the better
for maturing a little. Perhaps in fifty
years' time it will in the English House
of Commons be an objection to an
institution that it is an anomaly, and
my friend the Member of Parliament
will shudder in his grave. But let us in
the meanwhile rather endeavour that
in twenty years' time it may, in English
literature, be an objection to a proposi-
tion that it is absurd. That will be a
change so vast, that the imagination
almost fails to grasp it. Ab integro
sceclorum nascitur ordo.
61

ESSAYS

If I have insisted so much on the
course which criticism must take where
politics and religion are concerned, it is
because, where these burning matters
are in question, it is most likely to go
astray. I have wished, above all, to insist
on the attitude which criticism should
adopt towards things in general ; on its
right tone and temper of mind. But
then comes another question as to the
subject-matter which literary criticism
should most seek. Here, in general, its
course is determined for it by the idea
which is the law of its being ; the idea
of a disinterested endeavour to learn
and propagate the best that is known
and thought in the world, and thus to
establish a current of fresh and true
ideas. By the very nature of things, as
England is not all the world, much of
the best that is known and thought in
the world cannot be of English growth,
must be foreign ; by thenature of things,
again, it is just this that we are least
likely to know, while English thought
62

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

is streaming in upon us from all sides,
and takes excellent care that we shall
not be ignorant of its existence. The
English critic of literature, therefore,
must dwell much on foreign thought,
and with particular heed on any part of
it, which, while significant and fruitful
in itself, is for any reason specially likely
to escape him. Again, judging is often
spoken of as the critic's one business,
and so in some sense it is ; but the judg-
ment which almost insensibly forms it-
self in a fair and clear mind, along with
fresh knowledge, is the valuable one;
and thus knowledge, and ever fresh
knowledge, must be the critic's great
concern for himself. And it is by com-
municating fresh knowledge, and let-
ting his own judgment pass along with
it, — but insensibly, and in the second
place, not the first, as a sort of com-
panion and clue, not as an abstract law-
giver,— that the critic will generally do
most good to his readers. Sometimes,
no doubt, for the sake of establishing
63

ESSAYS

an author's place in literature, and his
relation to a central standard (and if
this is not done, how are we to get at
our best in the ivorld ?) criticism may
have to deal with a subject-matter so
familiar that fresh knowledge is out of
the question, and then it must be all
judgment ; an enunciation and detailed
application of principles. Here the
great safeguard is never to let oneself
become abstract, always to retain an
intimate and lively consciousness of the
truth of what one is saying, and, the
moment this fails us, to be sure that
something is wrong. Still, under all
circumstances, this mere judgment and
application of principles is, in itself, not
the most satisfactory work to the critic ;
like mathematics, it is tautological, and
cannot well give us, like fresh learning,
the sense of creative activity.

But stop, someone will say ; all this
talk is of no practical use to us what-
ever ; this criticism of yours is not what
we have in our minds when we speak of

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

criticism ; when we speak of critics and
criticism, we mean critics and criticism
of the current English literature of the
day ; when you offer to tell criticism its
function, it is to this criticism that we
expect you to address yourself. I am
sorry for it, for I am afraid I must dis-
appoint these expectations. I am bound
by my own definition of criticism : a,
disinterested endeavour to learn and
propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world. How much of
current English literature comes into
this 'best that is known and thought
in the world ' ? Not very much, I fear ;
certainly less, at this moment, than
of the current literature of France or
Germany. Well, then, am I to alter
my definition of criticism, in order to
meet the requirements of a number
of practising English critics, who, after
all, are free in their choice of a busi-
ness? That would be making criti-
cism lend itself just to one of those
alien practical considerations, which, I
E 65

ESSAYS

have said, are so fatal to it. One may
say, indeed, to those who have to deal
with the mass — so much better disre-
garded— of current English literature,
that they may at all events endeavour,
in dealing with this, to try it, so far as
they can, by the standard of the best
that is known and thought in the world ;
one may say, that to get anywhere near
this standard, every critic should try
and possess one great literature, at
least, besides his own ; and the more
unlike his own, the better. But, after
all, the criticism I am really concerned
with, — the criticism which alone can
much help us for the future, the critic-
ism which, throughout Europe, is at the
present day meant, when so much stress
is laid on the importance of criticism
and the critical spirit, — is a criticism
which regards Europe as being, for in-
tellectual and spiritual purposes, one
great confederation, bound to a joint
action and working to a common result;
and whose members have, for their
66

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek,
Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of
one another. Special, local, and tempor-
ary advantages being put out of account,
that modern nation will in the intel-
lectual and spiritual sphere make most
progress, which most thoroughly carries
out this programme. And what is that
but saying that we too, all of us, as indi-
viduals, the more thoroughly we carry
it out, shall make the more progress ?

There is so much inviting us! — what
are we to take? what will nourish us
in growth towards perfection ? That is
the question which, with the immense
field of life and of literature lying be-
fore him, the critic has to answer; for
himself first, and afterwards for others.
In this idea of the critic's business the
essays brought together in the follow-
ing pages have had their origin ; in this
idea, widely different as are their sub-
jects, they have, perhaps, their unity.

I conclude with what I said at the be-
ginning : to have the sense of creative
67

ESSAYS

activity is the great happiness and the
great proof of being alive, and it is not
denied to criticism to have it ; but then
criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible,
ardent, ever widening its knowledge.
Then it may have, in no contemptible
measure, a joyful sense of creative activ-
ity ; a sense which a man of insight and
conscience will prefer to what he might
derive from a poor, starved, fragment-
ary, inadequate creation. And at some
epochs no other creation is possible.

Still, in full measure, the sense of crea-
tive activity belongs only to genuine
creation ; in literature we must never
forget that. But what true man of let-
ters ever can forget it? It is no such
common matter for a gifted nature to
come into possession of a current of
true and living ideas, and to produce
amidst the inspiration of them, that we
are likely to underrate it. The epochs
of -iEschylus and Shakspeare make us
feel their pre-eminence. In an epoch
like those is, no doubt, the true life of

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

literature ; there is the promised land,
towards which criticism can only beckon.
That promised land it will not be ours
to enter, and we shall die in the wilder-
ness; but to have desired to enter it,
to have saluted it from afar, is already,
perhaps, the best distinction among con-
temporaries ; it will certainly be the best
title to esteem with posterity.

e2

THE LITERARY INFLUENCE
OF ACADEMIES

THE LITERARY INFLUENCE
OF ACADEMIES

It is impossible to put down a book like
the history of the French Academy, by
Pellisson and D'Olivet, which M. Charles
Livet has lately re-edited, without being
led to reflect upon the absence, in our
own country, of any institution like
the French Academy, upon the probable
causes of this absence, and upon its re-
sults. A thousand voices will be ready
to tell us that this absence is a signal
mark of our national superiority ; that
it is in great part owing to this absence
that the exhilarating words of Lord
Macaulay, lately given to the world by
his very clever nephew, Mr Trevelyan,
are so profoundly true : * It may safely
be said that the literature now extant
in the English language is of far greater
73

ESSAYS

value than all the literature which three
hundred years ago was extant in all the
languages of the world together.' I
daresay this is so ; only, remembering
Spinoza's maxim that the tAvo great
banes of humanity are self-conceit and
the laziness coming from self-conceit, I
think it may do us good, instead of
resting in our pre-eminence with per-
fect security, to look a little more
closely why this is so, and whether it
is so without any limitations.

But first of all I must give a very few
words to the outward history of the
French Academy. About the year 1629,
seven or eight persons in Paris, fond
of literature, formed themselves into
a sort of little club to meet at one
another's houses and discuss literary
matters. Their meetings got talked of,
and Cardinal Richelievi, then minister
and all-powerful, heard of them. He
himself had a noble passion for letters,
and for all fine culture ; he was inter-
ested by what he heard of the nascent
74

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

society. Himself a man in the grand
style, if ever man was, he had the in-
sight to perceive what a potent instru-
ment of the grand style was here to his
hand. It was the beginning of a great
century for France, the seventeenth ;
men's minds were working, the French
language was forming. Richelieu sent
to ask the members of the new society
whether they would be willing to be-
come a body with a public character,
holding regular meetings. Not without
a little hesitation, — for apparently they
found themselves very well as they
were, and these seven or eight gentle-
men of a social and literary turn were
not perfectly at their ease as to what
the great and terrible minister could
want with them, — they consented. The
favours of a man like Richelieu are not
easily refused, whether they are hon-
estly meant or no ; but this favour of
Richelieu's was meant quite honestly.
The Parliament, however, had its doubts
of this. The Parliament had none of
76

ESSAYS

Richelieu's enthusiasm about letters and
culture ; it was jealous of the appari-
tion of a new public body in the State ;
above all, of a body called into existence
by Richelieu. The King's letters-patent,
establishing and authorising the new
society, were granted early in 1635 ; but,
by the old constitution of France, these
letters-patent required the verification
of the Parliament. It was two years
and a half — towards the autumn of 1637
— before the Parliament would give it ;
and it then gave it only after pressing
solicitations, and earnest assurances of
the innocent intentions of the young
Academy. Jocose people said that this
society, with its mission to purify and
embellish the language, filled with terror
a body of lawyers like the French Par-
liament, the stronghold of barbarous
jargon and of chicane.

This improvement of the language

was in truth the declared grand aim

for the operations of the Academy. Its

statutes of foundation, approved by

76

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

Richelieu before the royal edict estab-
lishing it was issued, say expressly :
' The Academy's principal function shall
be to work with all the care and all the
diligence possible at giving sure rules
to our language, and rendering it pure,
eloquent, and capable of treating the
arts and sciences.' This zeal for making
a nation's great instrument of thought,
— its language, — correct and worthy, is
undoubtedly a sign full of promise, — a
weighty earnest of future power. It is
said that Richelieu had it in his mind
that French should succeed Latin in its
general ascendency, as Latin had suc-
ceeded Greek ; if it was so, even this
wish has to some extent been fulfilled.
But, at any rate, the ethical influences
of style in language, — its close relations,
so often pointed out, with character, —
are most important. Richelieu, a man
of high culture, and, at the same time,
of great character, felt them profoundly ;
and that he should have sought to regu-
larise, strengthen, and perpetuate them
77

ESSAYS

by an institution for perfecting lan-
guage, is alone a striking proof of his
governing spirit and of his genius.

This was not all he had in his mind,
however. The new Academy, now en-
larged to a body of forty members, and
meant to contain all the chief literary
men of France, was to be a literary tri-
bunal. The works of its members were
to be brought before it previous to pub-
lication, were to be criticised by it, and
finally, if it saw fit, to be published with
its declared approbation. The works
of other writers, not members of the
Academy, might also, at the request
of these writers themselves, be passed
under the Academy's review. Besides
this, in essays and discussions the Aca-
demy examined and judged works al-
ready published, whether by living or
dead authors, and literary matters in
general. The celebrated opinion on Cor-
neille's 'Cid,' delivered in 1637 by the
Academy at Richelieu's urgent request,
when this poem, which strongly occu-
78

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

pied public attention, had been attacked
by M. de Scudery, shows how fully
Richelieu designed his new creation to
do duty as a supreme court of litera-
ture, and how early it in fact began to
exercise this function. One who had
known Richelieu declared, after the
Cardinal's death, that he had projected
a yet greater institution than the Aca-
demy, a sort of grand European college
of art, science, and literature, a Pry-
taneum, where the chief authors of all
Europe should be gathered together in
one central home, there to live in se-
curity, leisure, and honour ; — that w^as a
dream which will not bear to be pulled
about too roughly. But the project of
forming a high court of letters for
France was no dream; Richelieu in
great measure fulfilled it. This is what
the Academy, by its idea, really is ; this
is what it has always tended to become ;
this is what it has, from time to time,
really been ; by being, or tending to be
this, far more than even by what it has

ESSAYS

done for the language, it is of such im-
portance in France. To give the law,
the tone to literature, and that tone a
high one, is its business. 'Richelieu
meant it,' says M. Sainte-Beuve, ' to be
a haut jury,' — a jury the most choice
and authoritative that could be found on
all important literary matters in ques-
tion before the public ; to be, as it in
fact became in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, ' a sovereign organ
of opinion.' ' The duty of the Academy
is,' says M. Renan, ' maintenir la deli-
catesse de V esprit fiangais' — to keep the
fine quality of the French spirit unim-
paired ; it represents a kind of ' maitrise
en fait de bon ton ' — the authority of a
recognised master in matters of tone
and taste. ' All ages,' says M. Renan
again, 'have had their inferior litera-
ture ; but the great danger of our time
is that this inferior literature tends
more and more to get the upper place.
No one has the same advantage as the
Academy for fighting against this mis-
80

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

chief ' ; the Academy, which, as he says
elsewhere, has even special facilities for
' creating a form of intellectual culture
which shall impose itself on all around.'
M. Sainte-Beuve and M. Renan are, both
of them, very keen-sighted critics ; and
they show it signally by seizing and
putting so prominently forward this
character of the French Academy.

Such an effort to set up a recognised
authority, imposing on us a high stan-
dard in matters of intellect and taste,
has many enemies in human nature.
We all of us like to go our own way,
and not to be forced out of the atmo-
sphere of commonplace habitual to
most of us ; — ' was uns alle biindigt,' says
Goethe, ' das Gemeine.' We like to be
suffered to lie comfortably in the old
straw of our habits, especially of our
intellectual habits, even though this
straw may not be very clean and fine.
But if the effort to limit this freedom
of our lower nature finds, as it does and
must find, enemies in human nature, it
F 81

ESSAYS

finds also auxiliaries in it. Out of the
four great parts, says Cicero, of the hon-
estum, or good, which forms the matter
on which officiwin, or human duty, finds
employment, one is the fixing of a
modus and an ordo, a measure and an
order, to fashion and wholesomely con-
strain our action, in order to lift it
above the level it keeps if left to itself,
and to bring it nearer to perfection.
Man alone of living creatures, he says,
goes feeling after 'quid sit ordo, quid
sit quod deceat, in factis dictisque qui
modus — the discovery of an order, a law
of good taste, a measure for his words
and actions.' Other creatures submis-
sively follow the law of their nature ;
man alone has an impulse leading him
to set up some other law to control the
bent of his nature.

This holds good, of course, as to moral
matters, as well as intellectual matters :
and it is of moral matters that we are
generally thinking when we affirm it.
But it holds good as to intellectual
82

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

matters too. Now, probably, M. Sainte-
Beuve had not these words of Cicero
in his mind when he made, about the
French nation, the assertion I am going
to quote ; but, for all that, the assertion
leans for support, one may say, upon
the truth conveyed in those words of
Cicero, and wonderfully illustrates and
confirms them. 'In France,' says M.
Sainte - Beuve, ' the first consideration
for us is not whether we are amused
and pleased by a work of art or mind,
nor is it whether we are touched by it.
What we seek above all to learn is,
whether we were right in being amused
with it, and in applauding it, and in
being moved by it.' Those are very re-
markable words, and they are, I believe,
in the main quite true. A Frenchman
has, to a considerable degree, -what one
may call a conscience in intellectual
matters ; he has an active belief that
there is a right and a wrong in them,
that he is bound to honour and obey
the right, that he is disgraced by cleav-
83

ESSAYS

ing to the wrong. All the world has,
or professes to have, this conscience in
moral matters. The word conscience
has become almost confined, in popular
use, to the moral sphere, because this
lively susceptibility of feeling is, in the
moral sphere, so far more common than
in the intellectual sphere ; the livelier,
in the moral sphere, this susceptibility
is, the greater becomes a man's readi-
ness to admit a high standard of action,
an ideal authoritatively correcting his
everyday moral habits ; here, such will-
ing admission of authority is due to
sensitiveness of conscience. And a like
deference to a standard higher than
one's own habitual standard in intel-
lectual matters, a like respectful recog-
nition of a superior ideal, is caused, in
the intellectual sphere, by sensitiveness
of intelligence. Those whose intelli-
gence is quickest, openest, most sensi-
tive, are readiest with this deference ;
those whose intelligence is less delicate
and sensitive are less disposed to it.
84

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

Well, now we are on the road to see
why the French have their Academy
and we have nothing of the kind.

What are the essential characteristics
of the spirit of our nation? Not, cer-
tainly, an open and clear mind, not a
quick and flexible intelligence. Our
greatest admirers would not claim for
us that we have these in a pre-eminent
degree; they might say that we had
more of them than our detractors gave
us credit for ; but they would not assert
them to be our essential characteristics.
They would rather allege, as our chief
spiritual characteristics, energy and
honesty; and, if we are judged favour-
ably and positively, not invidiously and
negatively, our chief characteristics are,
no doubt, these : — energy and honesty,
not an open and clear mind, not a
quick and flexible intelligence. Open-
ness of mind and flexibility of intelli-
gence were very signal characteristics
of the Athenian people in ancient times;
everybody will feel that. Openness of
f2 85

• ■ ESSAYS

mind and flexibility of intelligence are
remarkable characteristics of the French
people in modern times ; at any rate, they
strikingly characterise them as com-
pared with us ; I think everybody, or al-
most everybody, will feel that. I will not
now ask what more the Athenian or the
French spirit has than this, nor what
shortcomings either of them may have
as a set-off against this ; all I want now
to point out is that they have this, and
that we have it in a much lesser degree.
Let me remark, however, that not
only in the moral sphere, but also in the
intellectual and spiritual sphere, energy
and honesty are most important and
fruitful qualities ; that, for instance, of
what we call genius energy is the most
essential part. So, by assigning to a na-
tion energy and honesty as its chief spiri-
tual characteristics, — by refusing to it, as
at all eminent characteristics, openness
of mind and flexibility of intelligence, —
we do not by any means, as some people
might at first suppose, relegate its im-
86

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

portance and its power of manifesting
itself with effect from the intellectual
to the moral sphere. We only indicate
its probable special line of successful
activity in the intellectual sphere, and,
it is true, certain imperfections and
failings to which in this sphere, it will
always be subject. Genius is mainly an
affair of energy, and poetry is mainly
an affair of genius ; therefore, a nation
whose spirit is characterised by energy
may well be eminent in poetry ; — and we
have Shakspeare. Again, the highest
reach of science is, one may say, an in-
ventive power, a faculty of divination,
akin to the highest power exercised in
poetry ; therefore, a nation whose spirit
is characterised by energy may well be
eminent in science ; — and we have New-
ton. Shakspeare and Newton : in the in-
tellectual sphere there can be no higher
names. And what that energy, which
is the life of genius, above everything
demands and insists upon, is freedom ;
entire independence of all authority,
87

ESSAYS

prescription, and routine, — the fullest
room to expand as it will. Therefore,
a nation whose chief spiritual charac-
teristic is energy, will not be very apt
to set up, in intellectual matters, a fixed
standard, an authority, like an academy.
By this it certainly escapes certain real
inconveniences and dangers, and it can,
at the same time, as we have seen, reach
undeniably splendid heights in poetry
and science. On the other hand, some
of the requisites of intellectual work
are specially the affair of quickness
of mind and flexibility of intelligence.
The form, the method of evolution, the
precision, the proportions, the relations
of the parts to the whole, in an in-
tellectual work, depend mainly upon
them. And these are the elements of
an intellectual work which are really
most communicable from it, which can
most be learned and adopted from it,
which have, therefore, the greatest
effect upon the intellectual perform-
ance of others. Even in poetry, these
88

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

requisites are very important ; and the
poetry of a nation, not eminent for the
gifts on which they depend, will, more
or less, suffer by this shortcoming. In
poetry, however, they are, after all,
secondary, and energy is the first thing;
but in prose they are of first-rate im.-
portance. In its prose literature, there-
fore, and in the routine of intellectual
work generally, a nation with no partic-
ular gifts for these will not be so suc-
cessful. These are what, as I have said,
can to a certain degree be learned and
appropriated, while the free activity of
genius cannot. Academies consecrate
and maintain them, and, therefore, a
nation with an eminent turn for them
naturally establishes academies. So far
as routine and authority tend to embar-
rass energy and inventive genius, aca-
demies may be said to be obstructive
to energy and inventive genius, and, to
this extent, to the human spirit's general
advance. But then this evil is so much
compensated by the propagation, on a
89

ESSAYS

large scale, of the mental aptitudes and
demands which an open mind and a
flexible intelligence naturally engender,
genius itself, in the long run, so greatly
finds its account in this propagation, and
bodies like the French Academy have
such power for promoting it, that the
general advance of the human spirit is
perhaps, on the whole, rather furthered
than impeded by their existence.

How much greater is our nation in
poetry than prose ! how much better,
in general, do the productions of its
spirit show in the qualities of genius
than in the qualities of intelligence !
One may constantly remark this in the
work of individuals ; how much more
striking, in general, does any English-
man,— of some vigour of mind, but by
no means a poet, — seem in his verse
than in his prose ! His verse partly
suffers from his not being really a poet,
partly, no doubt, from the very same
defects which impair his prose, and he
cannot express himself with thorough
90

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

success in it. But how much more
powerful a personage does he appear
in it, by dint of feeling, and of origin-
ality and movement of ideas, than when
he is writing prose ! With a French-
man of like stamp, it is just the re-
verse : set him to write poetry, he is
limited, artificial, and impotent ; set
him to write prose, he is free, natural,
and effective. The power of French
literature is in its prose -writers, the
power of English literature is in its
poets. Nay, many of the celebrated
French poets depend wholly for their
fame upon the qualities of intelligence
which they exhibit, — qualities which
are the distinctive support of prose ;
many of the celebrated English prose-
writers depend wholly for their fame
upon the qualities of genius and ima-
gination which they exhibit, — qualities
which are the distinctive support of
poetry. But, as I have said, the quali-
ties of genius are less transferable than
the qualities of intelligence ; less can
91

ESSAYS

be immediately learned and appropri-
ated from their product ; they are
less direct and stringent intellectual
agencies, though they may be more
beautiful and divine. Shakspeare and
our great Elizabethan group were cer-
tainly more gifted writers than Cor-
neille and his group ; but what was
the sequel to this great literature, this
literature of genius, as we may call it,
stretching from Marlowe to Milton?
What did it lead up to in English litera-
ture ? To our provincial and second-
rate literature of the eighteenth cen-
tury. What on the other hand, was the
sequel to the literature of the French
'great century,' to this literature of
intelligence, as, by comparison with our
Elizabethan literature, we may call it ;
what did it lead up to ? To the French
literature of the eighteenth century,
one of the most powerful and pervasive
intellectual agencies that have ever ex-
isted,— the greatest European force of
the eighteenth century. In science,
92

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

again, we had Newton, a genius of the
very highest order, a type of genius in
science, if ever there was one. On the
continent, as a sort of counterpart to
Newton, there was Leibnitz ; a man, it
seems to me (though on these matters
I speak under correction), of much less
creative energy of genius, much less
power of divination than Newton, but
rather a man of admirable intelligence,
a type of intelligence in science, if ever
there was one. Well, and what did
they each directly lead up to in science?
What was the intellectual generation
that sprang from each of them ? I only
repeat what the men of science have
themselves pointed out. The man of
genius was continued by the English
analysts of the eighteenth century,
comparatively powerless and obscure
followers of the renowned master. The
man of intelligence was continued by
successors like Bernouilli, Euler, Lag-
range, and Laplace, the greatest names
in modern mathematics.
93

ESSAYS

What I want the reader to see is, that
the question as to the iitiHty of aca-
demies to the intellectual life of a nation
is not settled when we say, for instance:
' Oh, we have never had an academy,
and yet we have, confessedly, a very
great literature.' It still remains to
be asked : ' What sort of a great litera-
ture ? a literature great in the special
qualities of genius, or great in the
special qualities of intelligence ? ' If
in the former, it is by no means sure
that either our literature, or the general
intellectual life of our nation, has got
already, without academies, all that
academies can give. Both the one and
the other may very well be somewhat
wanting in those qualities of intelli-
gence out of a lively sense for which
a body like the French Academy, as I
have said, springs, and which such a
body does a great deal to spread and
confirm. Our literature, in spite of the
genius manifested in it, may fall short
in form, method, precision, proportions,
&4

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

arrangement, — all of them, I have said,
things where intelligence proper comes
in. It may be comparatively weak in
prose, that branch of literature where
intelligence proper is, so to speak, all
in all. In this branch it may show
many grave faults to which the want
of a quick, flexible intelligence, and of
the strict standard which such an in-
telligence tends to impose, makes it
liable; it may be full of hap-hazard,
crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity,
violence, blundering. It may be a less
stringent and effective intellectual
agency, both upon our own nation and
upon the world at large, than other
literatures which show less genius,
perhaps, but more intelligence.

The right conclusion certainly is that
we should try, so far as we can, to
make up our shortcomings; and that
to this end, instead of always fixing
our thoughts upon the points in which
our literature, and our intellectual life
generally, are strong, we should, from
95

ESSAYS

time to time, fix them upon those in
which they are weak, and so learn to per-
ceive clearly what we have to amend.
What is our second great spiritual char-
acter,— our honesty, — good for, if it is
not good for this ? But it will, — I am
sure it will, — more and more, as time
goes on, be found good for this.

Well, then, an institution like the
French Academy, — an institution ow-
ing its existence to a national bent to-
wards the things of the mind, towards
culture, towards clearness, correctness,
and propriety in thinking and speak-
ing, and, in its turn, promoting this
bent, — sets standards in a number of
directions, and creates, in all these di-
rections, a force of educated opinion,
checking and rebuking those who fall
below these standards, or who set them
at nought. Educated opinion exists
here as in France; but in France the
Academy serves as a sort of centre
and rallying-point to it, and gives it a
force which it has not got here. Why
96

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

is all the journeyman-work of literature,
as I may call it, so much worse done
here than it is in France? I do not
wish to hurt anyone's feelings ; but
surely this is so. Think of the differ-
ence between our books of reference
and those of the French, between our
biographical dictionaries (to take a
striking instance) and theirs ; think of
the difference between the translations
of the classics turned out for Mr Bohn's
library and those turned out for M.
Nisard's collection ! As a general rule,
hardly any one amongst us, who knows
French and German well, would use
an English book of reference when he
could get a French or German one ; or
would look at an English prose trans-
lation of an ancient author when he
could get a French or German one. It
is not that there do not exist in Eng-
land, as in France, a number of people
perfectly well able to discern what is
good, in these things, from what is bad,
and preferring what is good ; but they
G 97

ESSAYS

are isolated, they form no powerful
body of opinion, they are not strong
enough to set a standard, up to which
even the journey man- work of litera-
ture must be brought, if it is to be
vendible. Ignorance and charlatanism
in work of this kind are always trying
to pass off their wares as excellent,
and to cry down criticism as the voice
of an insignificant, over-fastidious min-
ority; they easily persuade the multi-
tude that this is so when the minority
is scattered about as it is here ; not so
easily when it is banded together as in
the French Academy. So, again, with
freaks in dealing with language; cer-
tainly all such freaks tend to impair
the power and beauty of language;
and how far more common they are
with us than with the French ! To
take a very familiar instance. Every
one has noticed the way in which the
Times chooses to spell the word 'dio-
cese ' ; it always spells it diocess, de-
riving it, I suppose, from Zeus and
98

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

census. The Journal des Debats might
just as well write ' diocess ' instead of
'diocese,' but imagine the Journal des
Debats doing so ! Imagine an edi>cated
Frenchman indulging himself in an
orthographical antic of this sort, in
face of the grave respect with which
the Academy and its dictionary invest
the French language ! Some people
will say these are little things; they
are not ; they are of bad example.
They tend to spread the baneful notion
that there is no such thing as a high,
correct standard in intellectual mat-
ters ; that every one may as well take
his own way; they are at variance
with the severe discipline necessary
for all real culture ; they confirm us in
habits of wilfulness and eccentricity,
which hurt our minds, and damage our
credit with serious people. The late
Mr Donaldson was certainly a man of
great ability, and I, who am not an
Orientalist, do not pretend to judge
his ' Jashar ' : but let the reader observe

ESSAYS

the form which a foreign Orientalist's
judgment of it naturally takes. M.
Renan calls it a tentative malheureuse,
a failure, in short ; this it may be, or
it may not be ; I am no judge. But he
goes on: 'It is astonishing that a re-
cent article ' (in a French periodical, he
means) ' should have brought forward
as the last word of German exegesis a
work like this, composed by a doctor of
the University of Cambridge, and uni-
versally condemned by German critics.'
You see what he means to imply: an
extravagance of this sort could never
have come from Germany, where there
is a great force of critical opinion con-
trolling a learned man's vagaries, and
keeping him straight; it comes from
the native home of intellectual eccen-
tricity of all kinds, — from England,
from a doctor of the University of Cam-
bridge:— and I daresay he would not ex-
pect much better things from a doctor
of the University of Oxford. Again,
after speaking of what Germany and
100

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

France have done for the history of
Mahomet: 'America and England,' M.
Renan goes on, ' have also occupied
themselves with Mahomet.' He men-
tions Washington Irving's ' Life of Ma-
homet,' which does not, he says, evince
much of an historical sense, a senti7nent
historique fort eleve ; ' but,' he proceeds,
' this book shows a real progress, when
one thinks that in 1829 Mr Charles
Forster published two thick volumes,
which enchanted the English reverends,
to make out that Mahomet was the
little horn of the he-goat that figures in
the eighth chapter of Daniel, and that
the Pope was the great horn. Mr For-
ster founded on this ingenious parallel
a whole philosophy of history, accord-
ing to which the Pope represented
the Western corruption of Christianity,
and Mahomet the Eastern ; thence the
striking resemblances between Maho-
metanism and Popery.' And in a note
M. Renan adds : ' This is the same Mr
Charles Forster who is the author of a
g2 101

ESSAYS

mystification about the Sinaitic inscrip-
tions, in which he declares he finds the
primitive language.' As much as to
say : ' It is an Englishman, be surprised
at no extravagance.' If these innuen-
does had no ground, and were made in
hatred and malice, they would not be
worth a moment's attention ; but they
come from a grave Orientalist, on his
own subject, and they point to a real
fact; — the absence, in this country, of
any force of educated literary and
scientific opinion, making aberrations
like those of the author of 'The One
Primeval Language' out of the ques-
tion. Not only the author of such aber-
rations, often a very clever man, suffers
by the want of check, by the not being
kept straight, and spends force in vain
on a false road, which, under better dis-
cipline, he might have used with profit
on a true one; but all his adherents,
both ' reverends ' and others, suffer too,
and the general rate of information
and judgment is in this way kept low.
102

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

In a production which we have all
been reading lately, a production
stamped throughout with a literary
quality very rare in this country, and
of which I shall have a word to say
presently — urbanity; in this produc-
tion, the work of a man never to be
named by any son of Oxford without
sympathy, a man who alone in Oxford
of his generation, alone of many genera-
tions, conveyed to us in his genius that
same charm, that same ineffable senti-
ment which this exquisite place itself
conveys, — I mean Dr Newman, — an ex-
pression is frequently used which is
more common in theological than in lit-
erary language, but ^vhich seems to me
fitted to be of general service ; the note
of so and so, the note of catholicity, the
note of antiquity, the note of sanctity,
and so on. Adopting this expressive
word, I say that in the bulk of the in-
tellectual work of a nation which has
no centre, no intellectual metropolis
like an academy, like M. Sainte-Beuve's
103

ESSAYS

'sovereign organ of opinion,' like M.
Renan's 'recognised authority in mat-
ters of tone and taste ' — there is observ-
able a note of provinciality. Now to get
rid of provinciality is a certain stage of
culture; a stage the positive result of
which we must not make of too much
importance, but which is, nevertheless,
indispensable, for it brings us on to
the platform where alone the best and
highest intellectual work can be said
fairly to begin. Work done after men
have reached this platform is classical ;
and that is the only work which, in the
long run, can stand. All the scoria? in
the work of men of great genius who
have not lived on this platform are due
to their not having lived on it. Genius
raises them to it by moments, and the
portions of their work which are im-
mortal are done at these moments; but
more of it would have been immortal
if they had not reached this platform
at moments only, if they had had the
culture which makes men live there.

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

The less a literature has felt the in-
fluence of a supposed centre of correct
information, correct judgment, correct
taste, the more we shall find in it this
note of provinciality. I have shown
the note of provinciality as caused by
remoteness from a centre of correct
information. Of course the note of
provinciality from the want of a centre
of correct taste is still more visible, and
it is also still more common. For here
great — even the greatest — powers of
mind most fail a man. Great powers
of mind will make him inform himself
thoroughly, great powers of mind will
make him think profoundly, even with
ignorance and platitude all round him ;
but not even great powers of mind will
keep his taste and style perfectly sound
and sure, if he is left too much to him-
self, with no 'sovereign organ of opinion'
in these matters near him. Even men
like Jeremy Taylor and Burke suffer
here. Take this passage from Taylor's
funeral sermon on Lady Carbery : —
105

ESSAYS

*So have I seen a river, deep and
smooth, passing with a still foot and
a sober face, and paying to the fiscus,
the great exchequer of the sea, a tribute
large and full; and hard by it a little
brook, skipping and making a noise
upon its unequal and neighbour bottom;
and after all its talking and bragged
motion, it paid to its common audit no
more than the revenues of a little cloud
or a contemptible vessel: so have I
sometimes compared the issues of her
religion to the solemnities and famed
outsides of another's piety.'

That passage has been much admired,
and, indeed, the genius in it is undeni-
able. I should say, for my part, that
genius, the ruling divinity of poetry,
had been too busy in it, and intelli-
gence, the ruling divinity of prose, not
busy enough. But can anyone, with
the best models of style in his head, help
feeling the note of provinciality there,
the want of simplicity, the want of
measure, the want of just the qualities
106

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

that make prose classical ? If he does
not feel what I mean, let him place
beside the passage of Taylor this pas-
sage from the Panegyric of St Paul, by
Taylor's contemporary, Bossuet : —

' II ira, cet ignorant dans I'art de bien
dire, avec cette locution rude, avec cette
phrase qui sent I'etranger il ira en cette
Grece polie, la mere des philosophes et
des orateurs ; et malgre la resistance du
monde, il y etablira plus d'Eglises que
Platon n'y a gagne de disciples par cette
eloquence qu'on a crue divine.'

There we have prose without the note
of provinciality — classical prose, prose
of the centre.

Or take Burke, our greatest English
prose-writer, as I think ; take expres-
sions like this : —

' Blindfold themselves, like bulls that
shut their eyes when they push, they
drive, by the point of their bayonets,
their slaves, blindfolded, indeed, no
worse than their lords, to take their
fictions for currencies, and to swallow
107

ESSAYS

down paper pills by thirty-four millions
sterling at a dose.'

Or this :—

' They used it ' (the royal name) ' as a
sort of navel-string, to nourish their
unnatural offspring from the bowels
of royalty itself . Now that the monster
can purvey for its own subsistence, it
w^ill only carry the mark about it, as a
token of its having torn the womb it
came from.'

Or this :—

' Without one natural pang, he (Rous-
seau) ' casts away, as a sort of offal and
excrement, the spawn of his disgustful
amours, and sends his children to the
hospital of foundlings.'

Or this :—

' I confess I never liked this continual
talk of resistance and revolution, or the
practice of making the extreme medi-
cine of the constitution its daily bread.
It renders the habit of society danger-
ously valetudinary ; it is taking periodi-
cal doses of mercury sublimate, and
108

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

swallowing down repeated provocatives
of cantharides to our love of liberty.'

I say that is extravagant prose ;
prose too much suffered to indulge its
caprices ; prose at too great a distance
from the centre of good taste ; prose, in
short, with the note of provinciality.
People may reply, it is rich and imagina-
tive; yes, that is just it, it is Asiatic
prose, as the ancient critics would have
said ; prose somewhat barbarously rich
and overloaded. But the true prose is
Attic prose.

Well, but Addison's prose is Attic
prose. Where, then, it may be asked,
is the note of provinciality in Addison ?
I answer, in the commonplace of his
ideas. This is a matter worth remark-
ing. Addison claims to take leading
rank as a moralist. To do that, you
must have ideas of the first order on
your subject — the best ideas, at any
rate, attainable in your time — as well
as be able to express them in a perfectly
sound and sure style. Else you show
109

ESSAYS

your distance from the centre of ideas
by your matter ; you are provincial by
your matter, though you may not be
provincial by your style. It is com-
paratively a small matter to express
oneself well, if one will be content with
not expressing much, with expressing
only trite ideas ; the problem is to ex-
press new and profound ideas in a per-
fectly sound and classical style. He is
the true classic, in every age, who does
that. Now Addison has not, on his sub-
ject of morals, the force of ideas of the
moralists of the first class — the class-
ical moralists ; he has not the best
ideas attainable in or about his time,
and which were, so to speak, in the air
then, to be seized by the finest spirits ;
he is not to be compared for power,
searchingness, or delicacy of thought
to Pascal or La Bruyere or Vauven-
argues ; he is rather on a level, in this
respect, with a man like Marmontel.
Therefore, I say, he has the note of
provinciality as a moralist; he is pro-
110

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

vincial by his matter, though not by
his style.

To illustrate what I mean by an ex-
ample. Addison, writing as a moralist
on fixedness in religious faith, says : —

' Those who delight in reading books
of controversy do very seldom arrive at
a fixed and settled habit of faith. The
doubt which was laid revives again, and
shows itself in new difficulties ; and that
generally for this reason, — because the
mind, which is perpetually tossed in con-
troversies and disputes, is apt to forget
the reasons which had once set it at rest,
and to be disquieted with any former
perplexity when it appears in a new
shape, or is started by a different hand.'

It may be said, that is classical Eng-
lish, perfect in lucidity, measure, and
propriety. I make no objection ; but,
in my turn, I say that the idea expressed
is perfectly trite and barren, and that
it is a note of provinciality in Addison,
in a man whom a nation puts forward
as one of its great moralists, to have no
111

ESSAYS

profounder and more striking idea to
produce on this great subject. Compare,
on the same subject, these words of a
moralist really of the first order, really
at the centre by his ideas,— Joubert : —

' L'exp^rience de beaucoup d'opinions
donne a I'esprit beaucoup de flexibilite et
I'affermit dans celles qu'il croit les meil-
leures.'

With what a flash of light that touches
the subject ! how it sets us thinking !
what a genuine contribution to moral
science it is !

In short, where there is no centre like
an academy, if you have genius and
powerful ideas, you are apt not to have
the best style going ; if you have pre-
cision of style and not genius, you are
apt not to have the best ideas going.

The provincial spirit, again, exag-
gerates the value of its ideas for Avant
of a high standard at hand by which to
try them. Or rather, for w^ant of such
a standard, it gives one idea too much
prominence at the expense of others ;
112

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

it orders its ideas amiss ; it is hurried
away by fancies ; it likes and dislikes
too passionately, too exclusively. Its
admiration weeps hysterical tears, and
its disapprobation foams at the mouth.
So we get the eruptive and the aggres-
sive manner in literature ; the former
prevails most in our criticism, the latter
in our newspapers. For, not having
the lucidity of a large and centrally
placed intelligence, the provincial spirit
has not its graciousness ; it does not
persuade, it makes war ; it has not ur-
banity, the tone of the city, of the
centre, the tone which always aims at
a spiritual and intellectual effect, and
not excluding the use of banter, never
disjoins banter itself from politeness,
from felicity. But the provincial tone
is more violent, and seems to aim rather
at an effect upon the blood and senses
than upon the spirit and intellect; it
loves hard-hitting rather than persuad-
ing. The newspaper, with its party
spirit, its thorough-goingness, its re-
H 113

ESSAYS

solute avoidance of shades and distinc-
tions, its short, highly-charged, heavy-
shotted articles, its style so unlike
that style leiiis minimeque pertinax —
easy and not too violently insisting, —
which the ancients so much admired,
is its true literature ; the provincial
spirit likes in the newspaper just what
makes the newspaper such bad food for
it, — just what made Goethe say, when
he was pressed hard about the immor-
ality of Byron's poems, that, after all,
they were not so immoral as the news-
papers. The French talk of the hrutalit4
des journaux anglais. What strikes
them comes from the necessary in-
herent tendencies of newspaper- writing
not being checked in England by any
centre of intelligent and urbane spirit,
but rather stimulated by coming in
contact with a provincial spirit. Even
a newspaper like the Saturday Review,
that old friend of all of us, a newspaper
expressly aiming at an immunity from
the common newspaper-spirit, aiming
114

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

at being a sort of organ of reason, —
and, by thus aiming, it merits great
gratitude and has done great good, —
even the Saturday Review, replying to
some foreign criticism on our precau-
tions against invasion, falls into a strain
of this kind : —

'To do this' (to take these precau-
tions) 'seems to us eminently worthy
of a great nation, and to talk of it as
unworthy of a great nation, seems to
us eminently worthy of a great fool.'

There is what the French mean when
they talk of the hrutalite des joumaux
anglais; there is a style certainly as
far removed from urbanity as possible,
— a style with what I call the note of
provinciality. And the same note may
not unfrequently be observed even in
the ideas of this newspaper, full as it
is of thought and cleverness : certain
ideas allowed to become fixed ideas, to
prevail too absolutely. I will not speak
of the immediate present, but, to go a
little while back, it had the critic who
115

ESSAYS

so disliked the Emperor of the French ;
it had the critic who so disliked the
subject of my present remarks — aca-
demies ; it had the critic who was so
fond of the German element in our
nation, and, indeed, everywhere ; who
ground his teeth if one said Charle-
magne instead of Charles the Great, and,
in short, saw all things in Teutonism,
as Malebranche saw all things in God.
Certainly anyone may fairly find faults
in the Emperor Napoleon or in aca-
demies, and merit in the German ele-
ment ; but it is a note of the provincial
spirit not to hold ideas of this kind a
little more easily, to be so devoured
by them, to suffer them to become
crotchets.

In England there needs a miracle
of genius like Shakspeare's to produce
balance of mind, and a miracle of intel-
lectual delicacy like Dr Newman's to
produce urbanity of style. How preva-
lent all round us is the want of balance
of mind and urbanity of style! How
116

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

much, doubtless, it is to be found in
ourselves, — in each of us! but, as human
nature is constituted, every one can
see it clearest in his contemporaries.
There, above all, we should consider it,
because they and we are exposed to the
same influences; and it is in the best
of one's contemporaries that it is most
worth considering, because one then
most feels the harm it does, when one
sees what they would be without it.
Think of the difference between Mr
Ruskin exercising his genius, and Mr
Ruskin exercising his intelligence ; con-
sider the truth and beauty of this : —

' Go out, in the spring-time, among
the meadows that slope from the shores
of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their
low^er mountains. There, mingled with
the taller gentians and the white nar-
cissus, the grass grows deep and free ;
and as you follow the winding moun-
tain paths, beneath arching boughs all
veiled and dim with blossom, — paths
that for ever droop and rise over the
h2 117

ESSAYS

green banks and mounds sweeping
down in scented undulation, steep to
the blue water studded here and there
with new-mown heaps, filling all the
air with fainter sweetness, — look up to-
wards the higher hills, where the waves
of everlasting green roll silently into
their long inlets among the shadows of
the pines. . . .'

There is what the genius, the feeling,
the temperament in Mr Ruskin, the
original and incommunicable part, has
to do with ; and how exquisite it is !
All the critic could possibly suggest, in
the way of objection, would be, per-
haps, that Mr Ruskin is there trying
to make prose do more than it can
perfectly do ; that what he is there
attempting he will never, except in
poetry, be able to accomplish to his
own entire satisfaction : but he accom-
plishes so much that the critic may
well hesitate to suggest even this. Place
beside this charming passage another,
—a passage about Shakspeare's names,
118

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

where the intelligence and judgment
of Mr Ruskin, the acquired, trained,
communicable part in him, are brought
into play, — and see the difference : —

' Of Shakspeare's names I will af ter-
w^ards speak at more length ; they are
curiously — often barbarously — mixed
out of various traditions and languages.
Three of the clearest in meaning have
been already noticed. Desdemona —
" Bva-Sainovia" miserahle fortune — is also
plain enough. Othello is, I believe,
"the careful"; all the calamity of the
tragedy arising from the single flaw
and error in his magnificently collected
strength. Ophelia, " serviceableness,"
the true, lost ^vif e of Hamlet, is marked
as having a Greek name by that of her
brother, Laertes ; and its signification
is once exquisitely alluded to in that
brother's last word of her, where her
gentle preciousness is opposed to the
uselessness of the churlish clergy : — " A
ministering angel shall my sister be,
when thou liest howling." Hamlet is,
119

ESSAYS

I believe, connected in some way with
" homely," the entire event of the
tragedy turning on betrayal of home
duty. Hermione (ep/^ia), " pillar-like " (rj

e?8o<; e'xe XP^crT]'^ 'A(^poSiT7;s) ; Titania (riTr/vr;),

"the queen"; Benedick and Beatrice,
" blessed and blessing " ; Valentine and
Proteus, " enduring or strong " (valens),
and "changeful." lago and lachimo
have evidently the same root — prob-
ably the Spanish lago, Jacob, "the
supplanter." '

Now, really, what a piece of extra-
vagance all that is ! I will not say
that the meaning of Shakspeare's names
(I put aside the question as to the
correctness of Mr Ruskin's etymologies)
has no effect at all, may be entirely lost
sight of; but to give it that degree
of prominence is to throw the reins
to one's whim, to forget all moderation
and proportion, to lose the balance of
one's mind altogether. It is to show
in one's criticism, to the highest excess,
the note of provinciality.
120

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

Again, there is Mr Palgrave, certainly
endowed with a very fine critical tact :
his ' Golden Treasury ' abundantly proves
it. The plan of arrangement which he
devised for that work, the mode in
which he followed his plan out, nay,
one might even say, merely the juxta-
position, in pursuance of it, of two such
pieces as those of Wordsworth and
Shelley which form the 285th and 286th
in his collection, show a delicacy of feel-
ing in these matters which is quite
indisputable and very rare. And his
notes are full of remarks which show
it too. All the more striking, conjoined
with so much justness of perception,
are certain freaks and violences in Mr
Palgrave's criticism, mainly imputable,
I think, to the critic's isolated position
in this country, to his feeling himself
too much left to take his own way, too
much without any central authority
representing high culture and sound
judgment, by which he may be, on the
one hand, confirmed as against the
121

ESSAYS

ignorant, on the other, held in respect
when he himself is inclined to take
liberties. I mean such things as this
note on Milton's line, —
'The great Emathian conqueror bade

spare.' . . .
'When Thebes was destroyed, Alex-
ander ordered the house of Pindar to
be spared. He was as incapable of
appreciating the poet as Louis XIV. of
appreciating Racine ; but even the nar-
row and barbarian mind of Alexander
could understand the advantage of a
showy act of homage to poetry.' A note
like that I call a freak or a violence ;
if this disparaging view of Alexander
and Louis XIV., so unlike the current
view, is wrong, — if the current view is,
after all, the truer one of them, — the
note is a freak. But, even if its dispar-
aging view is right, the note is a vio-
lence ; for, abandoning the true mode
of intellectual action — persuasion, the
instilment of conviction, — it simply
astounds and irritates the hearer by
122

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

contradicting without a word of proof
or preparation, his fixed and familiar
notions ; and this is mere violence. In
either case, the fitness, the measure,
the centrality, which is the soul of all
good criticism, is lost, and the note of
provinciality shows itself.

ThuSjinthe famous 'Handbook' marks
of a fine power of perception are every-
where discernible, but so, too, are
marks of the want of sure balance, of
the check and support afforded by
knowing one speaks before good and
severe judges. When Mr Palgrave dis-
likes a thing, he feels no pressure con-
straining him either to try his dislike
closely or to express it moderately ; he
does not mince matters, he gives his
dislike all its own way ; both his judg-
ment and his style would gain if he
were under more restraint. ' The style
which has filled London with the dead
monotony of Gower or Harley Streets,
or the pale commonplace of Belgravia,
Tyburnia, and Kensington ; which has
123

ESSAYS

pierced Paris and Madrid with the
feeble frivolities of the Rue Rivoli and
the Strada de Toledo.' He dislikes the
architecture of the Rue Rivoli, and he
puts it on a level vt^ith the architecture
of Belgravia and Gower Street ; he
lumps them all together in one con-
demnation, he loses sight of the shade,
the distinction, which is everything
here ; the distinction, namely, that the
architecture of the Rue Rivoli ex-
presses show, splendour, pleasure, — un-
worthy things, perhaps, to express alone
and for their own sakes, but it expresses
them; whereas the architecture of
Gower Street and Belgravia merely
expresses the impotence of the archi-
tect to express anything. Then, as to
style : ' sculpture which stands in a
contrast ^\'ith Woolner hardly more
shameful than diverting.' . . . ' passing
from Davy or Faraday to the art of
the mountebank or the science of the
spirit-rapper.' ... 'it is the old, old
story with Marochetti, the frog trying
124

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

to blow himself out to bull dimensions.
He may puff and be puffed, but he will
never do it.' We all remember that
shower of amenities on poor M. Maro-
chetti. Now, here Mr Palgrave himself
enables us to form a contrast which
lets us see just what the presence of an
academy does for style; for he quotes
a criticism by M. Gustave Planche on
this very M. Marochetti. M. Gustave
Planche was a critic of the very first
order, a man of strong opinions, which
he expressed with severity; he, too,
condemns M. Marochetti's work, and
Mr Palgrave calls him as a witness
to back w^hat he has himself said ;
certainly Mr Palgrave's translation will
not exaggerate M. Planche's urbanity
in dealing with M. Marochetti, but, even
in this translation, see the difference in
sobriety, in measure, between the critic
writing in Paris and the critic writing
in London : —

' These conditions are so elementary,
that I am at a perfect loss to compre-
125

ESSAYS

hend how M. Marochetti has neglected
them. There are soldiers here like the
leaden playthings of the nursery : it
is almost impossible to guess whether
there is a body beneath the dress. We
have here no question of style, not even
of grammar ; it is nothing beyond mere
matter of the alphabet of art. To break
these conditions is the same as to be
ignorant of spelling.'

That is really more formidable criti-
cism than Mr Palgrave's, and yet in
how perfectly temperate a style ! M.
Planche's advantage is, that he feels
himself to be speaking before compe-
tent judges, that there is a force of cul-
tivated opinion for him to appeal to.
Therefore, he must not be extravagant,
and he need not storm ; he must satisfy
the reason and taste, — that is his busi-
ness. Mr Palgrave, on the other hand,
feels himself to be speaking before a
promiscuous multitude, with the few
good judges so scattered through it as
to be powerless ; therefore, he has no
126

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

calm confidence and no self-control ; he
relies on the strength of his lungs ;
he knows that big words impose on the
mob, and that, even if he is outrageous,
most of his audience are apt to be a
great deal more so.

Again, the first two volumes of Mr King-
lake's ' Invasion of the Crimea ' were
certainly among the most successful
and renowned English books of our
time. Their style was one of the most
renowned things about them, and yet
how conspicuous a fault in Mr King-
lake's style is this over-charge of which
I have been speaking ! Mr James Gor-
don Bennett, of the New York Herald,
says, I believe, that the highest achieve-
ment of the human intellect is what
he calls ' a good editorial.' This is not
quite so ; but, if it were so, on what a
height would these two volumes by Mr
Kinglake stand ! I have already spoken
of the Attic and the Asiatic styles ; be-
sides these, there is the Corinthian style.
That is the style for ' a good editorial,'
127

ESSAYS

and Mr Kinglake has really reached
perfection in it. It has not the warm
glow, blithe movement, and soft pli-
ancy of life, as the Attic style has : it
has not the over-heavy- richness and
encumbered gait of the Asiatic style ;
it has glitter without warmth, rapidity
without ease, effectiveness without
charm. Its characteristic is, that it has
no soul; all it exists for, is to get its
ends, to make its points, to damage its
adversaries, to be admired, to triumph.
A style so bent on effect at the expense
of soul, simplicity, and delicacy ; a style
so little studious of the charm of the
great models ; so far from classic truth
and grace, must surely be said to have
the note of provinciality. Yet Mr King-
lake's talent is a really eminent one,
and so in harmony with our intellectual
habits and tendencies, that, to the great
bulk of English people, the faults of
his style seem its merits ; all the more
needful that criticism should not be
dazzled by them.

128

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

We must not conipare a man of Mr
Kinglake's literary talent with French
writers like M. de Bazancourt. We
must compare him with M. Thiers.
And what a superiority in style has M.
Thiers from being formed in a good
school, with severe traditions, whole-
some restraining influences ! Even in
this age of Mr James Gordon Bennett,
his style has nothing Corinthian about
it, its lightness and brightness make it
almost Attic. It is not quite Attic, how-
ever ; it has not the infallible sureness
of Attic taste. Sometimes his head gets
a little hot with the fumes of patriotism,
and then he crosses the line, he loses
perfect measure, he declaims, he raises
a momentary smile. France condemned
' a etre I'effroi du monde dont elle pour-
7^ait etre Vainour,' — Caesar, whose exquis-
ite simplicity M. Thiers so much ad-
mires, would not have written like that.
There is, if I may be allowed to say so,
the slightest possible touch of fatuity
in such language, — of that failure in
I 129

ESSAYS

good sense which comes from too warm
a self-satisfaction. But compare this
language with Mr Kinglake's Marshal
St Arnaud — 'dismissed from the pres-
sence' of Lord Raglan or Lord Strat-
ford, 'cowed and pressed down' under
their ' stern reproofs,' or under ' the
majesty of the great Elchi's Canning
brow and tight, merciless lips!' The
failure in good sense and good taste
there reaches far beyond what the
French mean by fatuity; they would
call it by another word, a word express-
ing blank defect of intelligence, a word
for which we have no exact equivalent
in English, — hete. It is the difference
between a venial, momentary, good-
tempered excess, in a man of the world,
of an amiable and social weakness, —
vanity; and a serious, settled, fierce,
narrow, provincial misconception of the
whole relative value of one's own things
and the things of others. So baneful to
the style of even the cleverest man may
be the total want of checks.
130

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

In all I have said, I do not pretend
that the examples given prove my rule
as to the influence of academies ; they
only illustrate it. Examples in plenty
might very likely be found to set against
them ; the truth of the rule depends, no
doubt, on ^vhether the balance of all
the examples is in its favour or not ;
but actually to strike this balance is
always out of the question. Here, as
everywhere else, the rule, the idea, if
true, commends itself to the judicious,
and then the examples make it clearer
still to them. This is the real use of
examples, and this alone is the purpose
which I have meant mine to serve.
There is also another side to the whole
question, — as to the limiting and pre-
judicial operation which academies may
have ; but this side of the question it
rather behoves the French, not us, to
study.

The reader will ask for some practi-
cal conclusion about the establishment
of an Academy in this country, and
131

ESSAYS

perhaps I shall hardly give him the
one he expects. But nations have their
own modes of acting, and these modes
are not easily changed ; they are even
consecrated, when great things have
been done in them. When a literature
has produced Shakspeare and Milton,
w^hen it has even produced Barrow and
Burke, it cannot well abandon its tra-
ditions ; it can hardly begin, at this late
time of day, with an institution like the
French Academy. I think academies
w^ith a limited, special, scientific scope,
in the various lines of intellectual work,
— academies like that of Berlin, for in-
stance,— we w^ith time may, and prob-
ably shall, establish. And no doubt they
will do good ; no doubt the presence of
such influential centres of correct in-
formation will tend to raise the stand-
ard amongst us for w^hat I have called
the journeyman- work of literature, and
to free us from the scandal of such
biographical dictionaries as Chalmers's,
or such translations as a recent one of
132

INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES

Spinoza, or perhaps, such philological
freaks as Mr Forster's about the one
primeval language. But an academy
quite like the French Academy, a sover-
eign organ of the highest literary opin-
ion, a recognised authority in matters
of intellectual tone and taste, we shall
hardly have, and perhaps we ought not
to wish to have it. But then every one
amongst us with any turn for literature
will do well to remember to what short-
comings and excesses, which such an
academy tends to correct, we are liable ;
and the more liable, of course, for not
having it. He will do well constantly to
try himself in respect of these, steadily
to widen his culture, severely to check
in himself the provincial spirit ; and
he will do this the better the more he
keeps in mind that all mere glorifica-
tion by ourselves of ourselves or our
literature, in the strain of what, at the
beginning of these remarks, I quoted
from Lord Macaulay, is both vulgar,
and, besides being vulgar, retarding.
1 2 133

MAURICE DE GUERIN

MAURICE DE GUERIN

I WILL not presume to say that I now
know the French language well ; but at
a time when I knew it even less well
than at present,— some fifteen years ago,
— I remember pestering those about me
with this sentence, the rhythm of which
had lodged itself in my head, and which,
with the strangest pronunciation pos-
sible, I kept perpetually declaiming : ' Les
dieux jaloux ont enfoui quelque part les
temoignages de la descendance des choses ;
mais au hord de quel Ocean ont-ils roulS
la pierre qui les couvre, 6 Macaree ! '

These words come from a short com-
position called the ' Centaur,' of which
the author, Georges-Maurice de Guerin,
died in the year 1839, at the age of
twenty-eight, without having published
anything. In 1840, Madame Sand
137

ESSAYS

brought out the ' Centaur ' in the ' Re-
vue des Deux Mondes, with a short no-
tice of its author, and a few extracts
from his letters. A year or two after-
wards she reprinted these at the end of
a volume of her novels ; and there it
was that I fell in with them. I was so
much struck with the ' Centaur ' that I
waited anxiously to hear something
more of its author, and of what he had
left ; but it was not till the other day —
twenty years after the first publication
of the * Centaur ' in the Revue des Deux
Mondes, that my anxiety was satisfied.
At the end of 1860 appeared two vol-
umes with the title ' Maurice de Guerin,
Reliquiae,' containing the ' Centaur,' sev-
eral poems of Guerin, his journals, and
a number of his letters, collected and
edited by a devoted friend, M. Trebutien,
and preceded by a notice of Guerin by
the first of living critics, M. Sainte-
Beuve.

The grand power of poetry is its in-
terpretative power ; by which I mean,
138

MAURICE DE GUERIN

not a power of drawing out in black
and white an explanation of the mys-
tery of the universe, but the power of
so dealing with things as to awaken in
us a wonderfully full, new, and inti-
mate sense of them, and of our relations
with them. When this sense is awak-
ened in us, as to objects without us, we
feel ourselves to be in contact with the
essential nature of those objects, to be
no longer bewildered and oppressed by
them, but to have their secret, and to
be in harmony with them ; and this
feeling calms and satisfies us as no other
can. Poetry, indeed, interprets in an-
other way besides this ; but one of its
two ways of interpreting, of exercising
its highest power, is by awakening this
sense in us. I will not now inquire
whether this sense is illusive, whether
it can be proved not to be elusive,
whether it does absolutely make us pos-
sess the real nature of things ; all I say
is, that poetry can awaken it in us, and
that to awaken it is one of the highest
139

ESSAYS

powers of poetry. The interpretations
of science do not give us this intimate
sense of objects as the interpretations
of poetry give it; they appeal to a
limited faculty, and not to the whole
man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish
or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of
animals, or water, or plants, who seizes
their secret for us, who makes us parti-
cipate in their life; it is Shakspeare,
with his

' daffodils
That come before the swallow dares,

and take
The winds of March with beauty ' ;
it is Wordsworth, with his

'voice . . . heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides ' ;
it is Keats, with his

'moving waters at their priest-
like task
Of cold ablution round Earth's human
shores ' ;

140

MAURICE DE GUERIN

it is Chateaubriand, with his, ' cime in-
determinee des forets ' ; it is Senancour,
with his mountain birch-tree : ' Cette
ecorce blanche, lisse et crevassee : cette tige
agreste ; ces branches qui sinclhient vers
la terre ; la mobility des feuilles, et tout
cet abandon, simplicity de la nature, atti-
tude des deserts'

Eminent manifestations of this magi-
cal power of poetry are very rare and
very precious: the compositions of
Guerin manifest it, I think, in singular
eminence. Not his poems, strictly so
called, — his verse, — so much as his prose ;
his poems in general take for their
vehicle that favourite metre of French
poetry, the Alexandrine ; and, in my
judgment, I confess they have thus, as
compared with his prose, a great dis-
advantage to start with. In prose, the
character of the vehicle for the com-
poser's thoughts is not determined
beforehand ; every composer has to
make his own vehicle ; and who has
ever done this more admirably than the
141

ESSAYS

great prose-writers of France, — Pascal,
Bossuet, Fenelon, Voltaire? But in
verse the composer has (with compara-
tively narrow liberty of modification)
to accept his vehicle ready-made ; it is
therefore of vital importance tohimthat
he should find at his disposal a vehicle
adequate to convey the highest matters
of poetry. We may even get a decisive
test of the poetical power of a language
and nation by ascertaining how far the
principal poetical vehicle which they
have employed, how far (in plainer
words) the established national metre
for high poetry, is adequate or inade-
quate. It seems to me that the estab-
lished metre of this kind in France, —
the Alexandrine, — is inadequate ; that
as a vehicle for high poetry it is greatly
inferior to the hexameter or to the
iambics of Greece (for example), or to
the blank verse of England. Therefore
the man of genius who uses it is at a dis-
advantage as compared with the man
of genius who has for conveying his
142

MAURICE DE GUERIN

thoughts a more adequate vehicle,
metrical or not. Racine is at a disad-
vantage as compared with Sophocles
or Shakspeare, and he is likewise at a
disadvantage as compared with Bos-
suet.

The same may be said of our own
poets of the eighteenth century, a cen-
tury which gave them as the main
vehicle for their high poetry a metre
inadequate (as much as the French
Alexandrine, and nearly in the same
way) for this poetry, — the ten-syllable
couplet. It is worth remarking, that
the English poet of the eighteenth cen-
tury whose compositions wear best and
give one the most entire satisfaction, —
Gray, — hardly uses that couplet at all :
this abstinence, however, limits Gray's
productions to a few short compositions,
and (exquisite as these are) he is a poeti-
cal nature repressed and without free
issue. For English poetical production
on a great scale, for an English poet de-
ploying all the forces of his genius, the
143

ESSAYS

ten-syllable couplet was, in the eigh-
teenth century, the established, one
may almost say the inevitable, channel.
Now this couplet, admirable (as Chau-
cer uses it) for story-telling not of the
epic pitch, and often admirable for a
few lines even in poetry of a very high
pitch, is for continuous use in poetry of
this latter kind inadequate. Pope, in
his ' Essay on Man,' is thus at a disad-
vantage compared with Lucretius in
his poem on Nature : Lucretius has an
adequate vehicle, Pope has not. Nay,
though Pope's genius for didactic poetry
was not less than that of Horace,
while his satirical power was certainly
greater, still one's taste receives, I can-
not but think, a certain satisfaction
when one reads the Epistles and Satires
of Horace, which it fails to receive
when one reads the Satires and Epistles
of Pope. Of such avail is the superior
adequacy of the vehicle used to com-
pensate even an inferiority of genius
in the user ! In the same way Pope is
144

MAURICE DE GUERIN

at a disadvantage as compared with
Addison. The best of Addison's com-
position (the ' Coverley Papers ' in the
Spectator, for instance) wears better
than the best of Pope's, because Addi-
son has in his prose an intrinsically
better vehicle for his genius than Pope
in his couplet. But Bacon has no such
advantage over Shakspeare; nor has
Milton, writing prose (for no contem-
porary English prose-writer must be
matched with Milton except Milton
himself), any such advantage over Mil-
ton writing verse : indeed, the advan-
tage here is all the other way.

It is in the prose remains of Guerin, —
his journals, his letters, and the striking
composition which I have already men-
tioned, the ' Centaur,' — that his extra-
ordinary gift manifests itself. He has
a truly interpretative faculty ; the most
profound and delicate sense of the life of
Nature, and the most exquisite felicity
in finding expressions to render that
sense. To all who love poetry, Guerin
K 145

ESSAYS

deserves to be something more than a
name; and I shall try, in spite of the
impossibility of doing justice to such a
master of expression by translations, to
make English readers see for them-
selves how gifted an organisation his
was, and how few artists have received
from Nature a more magical faculty of
interpreting her.

In the winter of the year 1832 there
was collected in Brittany, around the
well-known Abbe Lamennais, a singu-
lar gathering. At a lonely place. La
Chenaie, he had founded a religious re-
treat, to which disciples, attracted by his
powers or by his reputation, repaired.
Some came with the intention of pre-
paring themselves for the ecclesiastical
profession; others merely to profit by
the society and discourse of so dis-
tinguished a master. Among the in-
mates were men whose names have
since become known to all Europe, —
Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert ;
there were others, who have acquired
146

MAURICE DE GUERIN

a reputation, not European, indeed, but
considerable, — the Abbe Gerbet, the
Abbe Rohrbacher; others, who have
never quitted the shade of private life.
The winter of 1832 was a period of crisis
in the religious world of France : Lamen-
nais's rupture with Rome, the con-
demnation of his opinions by the Pope,
and his revolt against that condem-
nation, were imminent. Some of his
followers, like Lacordaire, had already
resolved not to cross the Rubicon with
their leader, not to go into rebellion
against Rome ; they were preparing to
separate from him. The society of La
Chenaie was soon to dissolve ; but, such
as it is shown to us for a moment, with
its voluntary character, its simple and
severe life in common, its mixture of
lay and clerical members, the genius of
its chiefs, the sincerity of its disciples, —
above all, its paramount fervent interest
in matters of spiritual and religious con-
cernment,— it offers a most instructive
spectacle. It is not the spectacle we
147

ESSAYS

most of us think to find in France, the
France we have imagined from common
English notions, from the streets of
Paris, from novels; it shows us how,
wherever there is greatness like that
of France, there are, as its foundation,
treasures of fervour, pure-mindedness,
and spirituality somewhere, whether we
know of them or not ; — a store of that
which Goethe calls Halt ; — since great-
ness can never be founded upon frivolity
and corruption.

On the evening of the 18th of Decem-
ber in this year 1832, M. de Lamennais
was talking to those assembled in the
sitting-room of La Chenaie of his recent
journey to Italy. He talked with all
his usual animation ; ' but,' writes one
of his hearers, a Breton gentleman, M.
de Marzan, ' I soon became inattentive
and absent, being struck with the re-
served attitude of a young stranger some
twenty-two years old, pale in face, his
black hair already thin over his temples,
with a southern eye, in which bright-
148

MAURICE DE GUERIN

ness and melancholy were mingled. He
kept himself somewhat aloof, seeming
to avoid notice rather than to court
it. All the old faces of friends which I
found about me at this my re-entry into
the circle of La Chenaie failed to occupy
me so much as the sight of this stranger,
looking on, listening, observing, and say-
ing nothing.'

The unknown was Maurice de Guerin.
Of a noble but poor family, having lost
his mother at six years old, he had been
brought up by his father, a man sad-
dened by his wife's death, and austerely
religious, at the chateau of Le Cayla, in
Languedoc. His childhood was not gay ;
he had not the society of other boys;
and solitude, the sight of his father's
gloom, and the habit of accompanying
the cure of the parish on his rounds
among the sick and dying, made him
prematurely grave and familiar with
sorrow. He went to school first at
Toulouse, then at the College Stanislas
at Paris, with a temperament almost as
k2 149

ESSAYS

unfit as Shelley's for common school
life. His youth was ardent, sensitive,
agitated, and unhappy. In 1832 he pro-
cured admission to La Chenaie to brace
his spirit by the teaching of Lamennais,
and to decide whether his religious feel-
ings would determine themselves into
a distinct religious vocation. Strong
and deep religious feelings he had, im-
planted in him by nature, developed in
him by the circumstances of his child-
hood ; but he had also (and here is the
key to his character) that temperament
which opposes itself to the fixedness of
a religious vocation, or to any vocation
of which fixedness is an essential at-
tribute ; a temperament mobile, incon-
stant, eager, thirsting for new impres-
sions, abhorring rules, aspiring to a
' renovation without end ' ; a tempera-
ment common enough among artists,
but with which few artists, who have
it to the same degree as Gu^rin, unite
a seriousness and a sad intensity like
his. After leaving school, and before go-
150

MAURICE DE GUERIN

ing to La Chenaie, he had been at home
at Le Cayla with his sister Eugenie (a
wonderfully gifted person, whose genius
so competent a judge as M. Sainte-
Beuve is inclined to pronounce even
superior to her brother's) and his sister
Eugenie's friends. With one of these
friends he had fallen in love, — a slight
and transient fancy, but which had
already called his poetical powers into
exercise ; and his poems and fragments,
in a certain green note-book ('le Ca-
hier Vert') which he long continued to
make the depository of his thoughts,
and which became famous among his
friends, he brought with him to La
Chenaie. There he found among the
younger members of the Society several
who, like himself, had a secret passion
for poetry and literature; with these
he became intimate, and in his letters
and journal we find him occupied, now
with a literary commerce established
with these friends, now with the for-
tunes, fast coming to a crisis, of the
151

ESSAYS

Society, and now with that for the sake
of which he came to La Chenaie, — his
religious progress and the state of his
soul.

On Christmas-day, 1832, having been
then three weeks at La Chenaie, he
writes thus of it to a friend of his
family, M. de Bayne: —

' La Chenaie is a sort of oasis in the
midst of the steppes of Brittany. In
front of the chateau stretches a very
large garden cut in two by a terrace
with a lime avenue, at the end of which
is a tiny chapel. I am extremely fond
of this little oratory, where one breathes
a twofold peace, — the peace of solitude
and the peace of the Lord. When spring
comes we shall walk to prayers between
two borders of flowers. On the east
side, and only a few yards from the
chateau, sleeps a small mere between
two woods, where the birds in warm
weather sing all day long ; and then, —
right, left, on all sides, — woods, woods,
everywhere woods. It looks desolate
152

MAURICE DE GUERIN

just now that all is bare and the woods
are rust-colour, and under this Brittany
sky, which is always clouded and so
low that it seems as if it were going to
fall on your head ; but as soon as spring
comes the sky raises itself up, the woods
come to life again, and everything will
be full of charm.

Of what La Chenaie will be when
spring comes he has a foretaste on the
3rd of March.

'To-day' (he writes in his journal)
' has enchanted me. For the first time
for a long while the sun has shown him-
self in all his beauty. He has made
the buds of the leaves and flowers swell,
and he has waked up in me a thousand
happy thoughts. The clouds assume
more and more their light and grace-
ful shapes, and are sketching, over the
blue sky, the most charming fancies.
The woods have not yet got their leaves,
but they are taking an indescribable air
of life and gaiety, which gives them
quite a new physiognomy. Everything
153

ESSAYS

is getting ready for the great festival
of Nature.'

Storm and snow adjourn this festival
a little longer. On the 11th of March
he writes : —

' It has snowed all night. I have been
to look at our primroses ; each of them
has its small load of snow, and w^as bow-
ing its head under its burden. These
pretty flowers, with their rich yellow
colour, had a charming effect under
their white hoods. I saw whole tufts
of them roofed over by a single block
of snow ; all these laughing flowers
thus shrouded and leaning one upon
another, made one think of a group of
young girls surprised by a shower, and
sheltering under a white apron.'

The burst of spring comes at last,
though late. On the 5th of April we
find Guerin ' sitting in the sun to pene-
trate himself to the very marrow with
the divine spring.' On the 3rd of May,
*one can actually see the progress of
the green ; it has made a start from the
154

MAURICE DE GUERIN

garden to the shrubberies, it is getting
the upper hand all along the mere ; it
leaps, one may say, from tree to tree,
from thicket to thicket, in the fields
and on the hill-sides ; and I can see it
already arrived at the forest edge and
beginning to spread itself over the
bioad back of the forest. Soon it will
have overrun everything as far as the
eye can reach, and all those wide spaces
between here and the horizon will be
moving and sounding like one vast sea,
a sea of emerald.'

Finally, on the 16th of May, he writes
to M. de Bayne that ' the gloomy and
bad days, — bad because they bring
temptation by their gloom, — are, thanks
to God and the spring, over ; and I see
approaching a long file of shining and
happy days, to do me all the good in
the world. This Brittany of ours,' he
continues, 'gives one the idea of the
grayest and most wrinkled old woman
possible suddenly changed back by the
touch of a fairy's wand into a girl of
155

ESSAYS

twenty, and one of the loveliest in the
world ; the fine weather has so decked
and beautified the dear old country.'
He felt, however, the cloudiness and
cold of the ' dear old country ' with all
the sensitiveness of a child of the South.
' What a difference,' he cries, ' between
the sky of Brittany, even on the finest
day, and the sky of our South ! Here
the summer has, even on its highdays
and holidays, something mournful, over-
cast, and stinted about it. It is like a
miser who is making a show ; there is a
niggardliness in his magnificence. Give
me our Languedoc sky, so bountiful of
light, so blue, so largely vaulted ! ' And
somewhat later, complaining of the
short and dim sunlight of a February
day in Paris, ' What a sunshine,' he ex-
claims, ' to gladden eyes accustomed to
all the wealth of light of the South ! —
aux larges et lihSrales effusions de lumihre
du del du Midi'

In the long winter of La Chenaie his
great resource was literature. One has
156

MAURICE DE GUERIN

often heard that an educated French-
man's reading seldom goes much beyond
French and Latin, and that he makes
the authors in these two languages
his sole literary standard. This may
or may not be true of Frenchmen in
general, but there can be no question
as to the width of the reading of Guerin
and his friends, and as to the range of
their literary sympathies. One of the
circle, Hippolyte la Morvonnais, — a poet
who published a volume of verse, and
died in the prime of life, — had a pas-
sionate admiration for Wordsworth,
and had even, it is said, made a pilgrim-
age to Rydal Mount to visit him ; and
in Guerin's own reading I find, besides
the French names of Bernardin de St
Pierre, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and
Victor Hugo, the names of Homer,
Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and Goethe ;
and he quotes both from Greek and
from English authors in the original.
His literary tact is beautifully fine and
true. ' Every poet,' he writes to his
157

ESSAYS

sister, 'has his own art of poetry
written on the ground of his own soul ;
there is no other. Be constantly ob-
serving Nature in her smallest details,
and then write as the current of your
thoughts guides you ; — that is all.' But
with all this freedom from the bondage
of forms and rules, Guerin marks with
perfect precision the faults of the free
French literature of his time, — the lit-
teratu7-e facile, — and judges the romantic
school and its prospects like a master:
'that youthful literature which has put
forth all its blossom prematurely, and
has left itself a helpless prey to the re-
turning frost, stimulated as it has been
by the burning sun of our century, by
this atmosphere charged with a perilous
heat, which has over-hastened every
sort of development, and will most
likely reduce to a handful of grains the
harvest of our age.' And the popular
authors, — those 'whose name appears
once and disappears for ever, whose
books, unwelcome to all serious people,
158

MAURICE DE GUERIN

welcome to the rest of the world, to
novelty-hunters and novel-readers, fill
with vanity these vain souls, and then,
falling from hands heavy with the
languor of satiety, drop for ever into
the gulf of oblivion ' ; and those, more
noteworthy, ' the writers of books cele-
brated, and, as works of art, deserving
celebrity, but which have in them not
one grain of that hidden manna, not
one of those sweet and wholesome
thoughts which nourish the human
soul and refresh it when it is weary,'
— these he treats with such severity
that he may in some sense be described,
as he describes himself, as 'invoking
with his whole heart a classical restor-
ation.' He is best described, however,
not as a partisan of any school, but
as an ardent seeker for that mode of
expression which is the most natural,
happy, and true. He writes to his
sister Eugenie: —

' I want you to reform your system
of composition ; it is too loose, too
159

ESSAYS

vague, too Lamartinian. Your verse is
too sing-song ; it does not talk enough.
Form for yourself a style of your own,
which shall be your real expression.
Study the French language by atten-
tive reading, making it your care to
remark constructions, turns of expres-
sion, delicacies of style, but without ever
adopting the manner of any master.
In the works of these masters we must
learn our language, but we must use it
each in our own fashion.'

It was not, however, to perfect his
literary judgment that Guerin came
to La Chenaie. The religious feeling,
which was as much a part of his essence
as the passion for Nature and the liter-
ary instinct, shows itself at moments
jealous of these its rivals, and alarmed
at their predominance. Like all power-
ful feelings, it wants to exclude every
other feeling and to be absolute. One
Friday in April, after he has been de-
lighting himself with the shapes of the
clouds and the progress of the spring,
160

MAURICE DE GUERIN

he suddenly bethinks himself that the
day is Good Friday, and exclaims in his
diary : —

' My God, what is my soul about that
it can thus go running after such fugi-
tive delights on Good Friday, on this
day all filled with thy death and our
redemption? There is in me I know
not what damnable spirit, that awakens
in me strong discontents, and is for ever
prompting me to rebel against the holy
exercises and the devout collectedness
of soul which are the meet preparation
for these great solemnities of our faith.
Oh how well can I trace here the old
leaven, from which I have not yet per-
fectly cleared my soul ! '

And again, in a letter to M. de
Marzan : ' Of what, my God, are we
made,' he cries, 'that a little verdure
and a few trees should be enough to
rob us of our tranquillity and to distract
us from thy love ? ' And writing, three
days after Easter Sunday, in his journal,
he records the reception at La Chenaie
L 161

ESSAYS

of a fervent neophyte, in words which
seem to convey a covert blame of his
own want of fervency : —

'Three days have passed over our
heads since the great festival. One
anniversary the less for us yet to spend
of the death and resurrection of our
Saviour ! Every year thus bears away
with it its solemn festivals ; when will
the everlasting festival be here? I
have been witness of a most touching
sight; Fran<jois has brought us one of
his friends whom he has gained to the
faith. This neophyte joined us in our
exercises during the Holy week, and on
Easter day he received the communion
with us. Francois was in raptures. It
is a truly good work which he has thus
done. Francois is quite young, hardly
twenty years old ; M. de la M. is thirty
and is married. There is something
most touching and beautifully simple
in M. de la M. letting himself thus
be brought to God by quite a young
man; and to see friendship, on Fran-
162

MAURICE DE GUERIN

^ois's side, thus doing the w^ork of an
Apostle, is not less beautiful and touch-
ing.'

Admiration for Lamennais worked
in the same direction with this feeling.
Lamennais never appreciated Guerin ;
his combative, rigid, despotic nature,
of which the characteristic was energy,
had no affinity with Guerin's elusive, un-
dulating, impalpable nature, of which
the characteristic T\^as delicacy. He set
little store by his new disciple, and
could hardly bring himself to under-
stand what others found so remarkable
in him, his OAvn genuine feeling tow^ards
him being one of indulgent compassion.
But the intuition of Guerin, more dis-
cerning than the logic of his master,
instinctively felt what there was com-
manding and tragic in Lamennais's
character, different as this was from
his own ; and some of his notes are
among the most interesting records of
Lamennais which remain.

'"Do you know what it is," M. Feli
163

ESSAYS

said to us on the evening of the day
before yesterday, "which makes man
the most suffering of all creatures ? It
is that he has one foot in the finite and
the other in the infinite, and that he is
torn asunder, not by four horses, as in
the horrible old times, but between two
worlds." Again he said to us as we
heard the clock strike: "If that clock
knew that it was to be destroyed the
next instant, it would still keep strik-
ing its hour until that instant arrived.
My children, be as the clock ; whatever
may be going to happen to you, strike
always your hour." '

Another time Guerin writes :
' To-day M. Feli startled us. He was
sitting behind the chapel, under the
two Scotch firs; he took his stick and
marked out a grave on the turf, and
said to Elie, "It is there I wish to be
buried, but no tombstone ! only a simple
hillock of grass. Oh, how well I shall
be there ! " Elie thought he had a pre-
sentiment that his end was near. This
164

MAURICE DE GUERIN

is not the first time he has been visited
by such a presentiment ; when he was
setting out for Rome, he said to those
here : " I do not expect ever to come
back to you; you must do the good
which I have failed to do." He is im-
patient for death.'

Overpowered by the ascendency of
Lamennais, Guerin, in spite of his hesi-
tations, in spite of his confession to
himself that, ' after a three weeks' close
scrutiny of his soul, in the hope of find-
ing the pearl of a religious vocation
hidden in some corner of it,' he had
failed to find what he sought, took, at
the end of August 1833, a decisive step.
He joined the religious order which
Lamennais had founded. But at this
very moment the deepening displeasure
of Rome with Lamennais determined
the Bishop of Rennes to break up, in
so far as it was a religious congrega-
tion, the Society of La Chenaie, to
transfer the novices to Ploermel, and
to place them under other superintend-
l2 165

ESSAYS

ence. In September, Laniennais, ' who
had not yet ceased,' writes M. de Marzan,
a fervent Catholic, 'to be a Christian
and a priest, took leave of his beloved
colony of La Chenaie, with the anguish
of a general who disbands his army
down to the last recruit, and withdraws
annihilated from the field of battle.'
Guerin went to Ploermel. But here, in
the seclusion of a real religious house,
he instantly perceived how alien to a
spirit like his, — a spirit which, as he
himself says somewhere, 'had need of
the open air, wanted to see the sun and
the flowers,' — was the constraint and
monotony of a monastic life, when
Lamennais's genius was no longer pre-
sent to enliven this life for him. On
the 7th of October he renounced the
novitiate, believing himself a partisan
of Lamennais in his quarrel with Rome,
reproaching the life he had left with
demanding passive obedience instead
of trying ' to put in practice the admir-
able alliance of order with liberty, and
166

MAURICE DE GUERIN

of variety with unity,' and declaring
that, for his part, he preferred taking
the chances of a life of adventure to
submitting himself to be ' garotte par
un reglement, — tied hand and foot by a
set of rules.' In real truth, a life of
adventure, or rather a life free to wan-
der at its own will, was that to which
his nature irresistibly impelled him.

For a career of adventure, the inevit-
able field was Paris. But before this
career began, there came a stage, the
smoothest, perhaps, and the most happy
in the short life of Guerin. M. la Mor-
vonnais, one of his La Chenaie friends,
— some years older than Guerin, and
married to a wife of singular sweetness
and charm,— had a house by the sea-
side at the mouth of one of the beauti-
ful rivers of Brittany, the Arguenon.
He asked Guerin, when he left Ploermel,
to come and stay with him at this
place, called Le Val de I'Arguenon, and
Guerin spent the winter of 1833-4 there.
I grudge every word about Le Val and
167

ESSAYS

its inmates which is not Guerin's own,
so charming is the picture he draws of
them, so truly does his talent find itself
in its best vein as he draws it.

' How full of goodness ' (he writes in
his journal of the 7th of December) 'is
Providence to me ! For fear the sud-
den passage from the mild and tem-
perate air of a religious life to the torrid
clime of the world should be too trying
for my soul, it has conducted me, after
I have left my sacred shelter, to a house
planted on the frontier between the
two regions, where, without being in
solitude, one is not yet in the world ; a
house whose windows look on the one
side towards the plain where the tumult
of men is rocking, on the other towards
the wilderness where the servants of
God are chanting. I intend to write
down the record of my sojourn here,
for the days here spent are full of
happiness, and I know that in the time
to come I shall often turn back to the
story of these past felicities. A man,
168

MAURICE DE GUERIN

pious, and a poet; a woman, whose
spirit is in such perfect sympathy with
his that you would say they had but
one being between them; a child, called
Marie like her mother, and who sends,
like a star, the first rays of her love
and thought through the white cloud
of infancy; a simple life in an old-
fashioned house ; the ocean, which
comes morning and evening to bring
us its harmonies ; and lastly, a wan-
derer who descends from Carmel and
is going on to Babylon, and who has
laid down at this threshold his staff
and his sandals, to take his seat at the
hospitable table ; — here is matter to
make a biblical poem of, if I could only
describe things as I can feel them ! '

Every line written by Guerin during
this stay at Le Val is worth quoting,
but I have only room for one extract
more : —

' Never ' (he writes, a fortnight later,
on the 20th of December), ' never have
I tasted so inwardly and deeply the
169

ESSAYS

happiness of home-life. All the little
details of this life, which in their suc-
cession make up the day, are to me so
many stages of a continuous charm
carried from one end of the day to the
other. The morning greeting, which in
some sort renews the pleasure of the
first arrival, for the words with which
one meets are almost the same, and the
separation at night, through the hours
of darkness and uncertainty, does not
ill represent longer separations ; then
breakfast, during which you have the
fresh enjoyment of having met together
again ; the stroll afterwards, when we
go out and bid Nature good-morning;
the return and setting to work in an
old panelled chamber looking out on
the sea, inaccessible to all the stir of
the house, a perfect sanctuary of labour ;
dinner, to which we are called, not by
a bell, which reminds one too much of
school or a great house, but by a pleas-
ant voice; the gaiety, the merriment,
the talk flitting from one subject to
170

MAURICE DE GUERIN

another and never dropping so long as
the meal lasts ; the crackling fire of dry
branches to which we draw our chairs
directly afterwards, the kind words
that are spoken round the warm flame
which sings while we talk ; and then, if
it is fine, the walk by the seaside, when
the sea has for its visitors a mother
with her child in her arms, this child's
father and a stranger, each of these
two last with a stick in his hand; the
rosy lips of the little girl, which keep
talking at the same time with the waves,
— now and then tears shed by her and
cries of childish fright at the edge
of the sea; our thoughts, the father's
and mine, as we stand and look at the
mother and child smiling at one an-
other, or at the child in tears and the
mother trying to comfort it by her
caresses and exhortations ; the Ocean,
going on all the while rolling up his
waves and noises; the dead boughs
which we go and cut, here and there,
out of the copse-wood, to make a quick
171

ESSAYS

and bright fire when we get home, —
this little taste of the woodman's calling
which brings us closer to Nature and
makes us think of M. Feli's eager fond-
ness for the same work ; the hours of
study and poetical flow which carry us
to supper-time ; this meal, which sum-
mons us by the same gentle voice as its
predecessor, and which is passed amid
the same joys, only less loud, because
evening sobers everything, tones every-
thing down ; then our evening, ushered
in by the blaze of a cheerful fire, and
w^hich with its alternations of reading
and talking brings us at last to bed-
time : — to all the charms of a day so
spent add the dreams which follow it,
and your imagination will still fall far
short of these home- joys in their de-
lightful reality,'

I said the foregoing should be my
last extract, but who could resist this
picture of a January evening on the
coast of Brittany? —

' All the sky is covered over with
172

MAURICE DE GUERIN

gray clouds just silvered at the edges.
The sun, who departed a few minutes
ago, has left behind him enough light
to temper for awhile the black shadows,
and to soften down, as it were, the ap-
proach of night. The winds are hushed,
and the tranquil ocean sends up to me,
when I go out on the doorstep to lis-
ten, only a melodious murmur, which
dies away in the soul like a beautiful
wave on the beach. The birds, the first
to obey the nocturnal influence, make
their way towards the woods, and you
hear the rustle of their wings in the
clouds. The copses which cover the
whole hill-side of Le Val, which all
the daytime are alive with the chirp
of the wren, the laughing whistle of
the woodpecker, and the different notes
of a multitude of birds, have no longer
any sound in their paths and thickets,
unless it be the prolonged high call of
the blackbirds at play with one another
and chasing one another, after all the
other birds have their heads safe under
173

ESSAYS

their wings. The noise of man, always
the last to be silent, dies gradually out
over the face of the fields. The general
murmur fades away, and one hears
hardly a sound except what comes from
the villages and hamlets, in which, up
till far into the night, there are cries of
children and barking of dogs. Silence
wraps me round ; everything seeks
repose except this pen of mine, which
perhaps disturbs the rest of some living
atom asleep in a crease of my notebook,
for it makes its light scratching as it
puts down these idle thoughts. Let it
stop, then ! for all I write, have written,
or shall write, will never be worth set-
ting against the sleep of an atom.'

On the 1st of February we find him
in a lodging at Paris. ' I enter the
world ' (such are the last words written
in his journal at Le Val) ' with a secret
horror.' His outward history for the
next five years is soon told. He found
himself in Paris, poor, fastidious, and
with health which already, no doubt,
174

MAURICE DE GUERIN

felt the obscure presence of the malady
of which he died — consumption. One of
his Brittany acquaintances introduced
him to editors, tried to engage him
in the periodical literature of Paris;
and so unmistakable was Guerin's talent
that even his first essays were immedi-
ately accei3ted. But Guerin's genius
was of a kind which unfitted him to
get his bread in this manner. At first
he was pleased with the notion of living
by his pen ; 'je nai qua ecrire,' he says
to his sister, — ' I have only got to write.'
But to a nature like his, endued with
the passion for perfection, the neces-
sity to produce, to produce constantly,
to produce whether in the vein or out
of the vein, to produce something good
or bad or middling, as it may happen,
but at all events something, — is the most
intolerable of tortures. To escape from
it he betook himself to that common
but most perfidious refuge of men of
letters, that refuge to which Goldsmith
and poor Hartley Coleridge had be-
175

ESSAYS

taken themselves before him, — the
profession of teaching. In September
1834 he procured an engagement at the
College Stanislas, where he had himself
been educated. It was vacation-time,
and all he had to do was to teach a
small class composed of boys who did
not go home for the holidays, — in his
own words, ' scholars left like sick
sheep in the fold, while the rest of the
flock are frisking in the fields.' After
the vacation he was kept on at the
college as a supernumerary. ' The mas-
ter of the fifth class has asked for a
month's leave of absence ; I am taking
his place, and by this work I get one
hundred francs (£4). I have been look-
ing about for pupils to give private
lessons to, and I have found three or
four. Schoolwork and private lessons
together fill my day from half -past
seven in the morning till half -past nine
at night. The college dinner serves me
for breakfast, and I go and dine in the
evening at twenty-four sous, as a young
176

MAURICE DE GUERIN

man beginning life should.' To better
his position in the hierarchy of public
teachers it was necessary that he should
take the degree of agrege ks-lettres, cor-
responding to our degree of Master of
Arts ; and to his heavy work in teach-
ing, there was thus added that of pre-
paring for a severe examination. The
drudgery of this life was very irksome
to him, although less insupportable
than the drudgery of the profession of
letters ; inasmuch as to a sensitive man
like Guerin, to silence his genius is
more tolerable than to hackney it.
Still the yoke wore him deeply, and he
had moments of bitter revolt ; he con-
tinued, however, to bear it with resolu-
tion, and on the whole with patience,
for four years. On the 15th of Novem-
ber 1838 he married a young Creole
lady of some fortune. Mademoiselle
Caroline de Gervain, ' whom,' to use his
own words, 'Destiny, who loves these
surprises, has wafted from the farthest
Indies into my arms.' The marriage
M 177

ESSAYS

was happy, and it ensured to Guerin
liberty and leisure ; but now ' the blind
Fury with the abhorred shears' was
hard at hand. Consumption declared
itself in him : ' I pass my life,' he writes,
with his old playfulness and calm, to his
sister on the 8th of April 1839, ' within
my bed-curtains, and wait patiently
enough, thanks to Caro's goodness,
books, and dreams, for the recovery
which the sunshine is to bring with it.'
In search of this sunshine he was taken
to his native country, Languedoc, but
in vain. He died at Le Cayla on the
19th of July 1839.

The vicissitudes of his inward life dur-
ing these five years were more consider-
able. His opinions and tastes underw^ent
great, or what seem to be great, changes.
He came to Paris the ardent partisan of
Lamennais: even in April 1834, after
Rome had finally condemned Lamen-
nais,— ' To-night there will go forth from
Paris,' he writes, 'with his face set to
the west, a man whose every step I
178

MAURICE DE GUERIN

would fain follow, and who returns to
the desert for which I sigh. M. Feli de-
parts this evening for La Chenaie.' But
in October 1835, — ' I assure you,' he
writes to his sister, ' I am at last weaned
from M. de Lamennais ; one does not
remain a babe and suckling for ever ; I
am perfectly freed from his influence.'
There was a greater change than this.
In 1834 the main cause of Guerin's aver-
sion to the literature of the French ro-
mantic school, was that this literature,
having had a religious origin, had ceased
to be religious : ' it has forgotten,' he
says, ' the house and the admonitions of
its Father.' But his friend M. de Marzan
tells us of a 'deplorable revolution'
which, by 1836, had taken place in him.
Guerin had become intimate with the
chiefs of this very literature; he no
longer went to church ; ' the bond of a
common faith, in w^hich our friendship
had its birth, existed between us no
longer.' Then, again, ' this interregnum
was not destined to last.' Reconverted
179

ESSAYS

to his old faith by suffering and by
the pious efforts of his sister Eugenie,
Guerin died a Catholic. His feelings
about society underwent a like change.
After ' entering the world with a secret
horror,' after congratulating himself
when he had been some months at Paris
on being 'disengaged from the social
tumult, out of the reach of those blows
which, when I live in the thick of the
world, bruise me, irritate me, or utterly
crush me,' M. Sainte-Beuve tells us of
him, two years afterwards, appearing
in society ' a man of the world, elegant,
even fashionable; a talker who could
hold his own against the most brilliant
talkers of Paris.'

In few natures, however, is there
really such essential consistency as in
Guerin's. He says of himself, in the
very beginning of his journal : ' I owe
everything to poetry, for there is no
other name to give to the sum total of
my thoughts ; I owe to it whatever I
now have pure, lofty, and solid in my
180

MAURICE DE GUERIN

soul ; I owe to it all my consolations in
the past ; I shall probably owe to it my
future.' Poetry, the poetical instinct,
was indeed the basis of his nature ; but
to say so thus absolutely is not quite
enough. One aspect of poetry fascin-
ated Guerin's imagination and held it
prisoner. Poetry is the interpretress of
the natural world, and she is the inter-
pretress of the moral world ; it was as
the interpretress of the natural world
that she had Guerin for her mouthpiece.
To make magically near and real the
life of Nature, and man's life only so
far as it is a part of that Nature, was
his faculty ; a faculty of naturalistic,
not of moral interpretation. This fa-
culty always has for its basis a peculiar
temperament, an extraordinary delicacy
of organisation and susceptibility to im-
pressions ; in exercising it the poet is in
a great degree passive (Wordsworth
thus speaks of a wise passiveness) ; he
aspires to be a sort of human ^olian
harp, catching and rendering every
m2 181

ESSAYS

rustle of Nature. To assist at the evolu-
tion of the whole life of the world is
his craving, and intimately to feel it
all:

* ... the glow, the thrill of life,
Where, where do these abound ? '
is what he asks : he resists being riveted
and held stationary by any single im-
pression, but would be borne on for ever
down an enchanted stream. He goes
into religion and out of ^ religion, into
society and out of society, not from the
motives which impel men in general,
but to feel what it is all like ; he is thus
hardly a moral agent, and, like the pas-
sive and ineffectual Uranus of Keats's
poem, he may say :

' I am but a voice ;

My life is but the life of winds and tides ;
No more than winds and tides can I

avail.'
He hovers over the tumult of life, but
does not really put his hand to it.

No one has expressed the aspirations
of this temperament better than Guerin
182

MAURICE DE GUERIN

himself. In the last year of his life he
writes : —

' I return, as you see, to my old brood-
ing over the world of Nature, that line
which my thoughts irresistibly take ; a
sort of passion which gives me enthusi-
asm, tears, bursts of joy, and an eternal
food for musing ; and yet I am neither
philosopher nor naturalist, nor anything
learned whatsoever. There is one word
which is the God of my imagination, the
tyrant, I ought rather to say, that fas-
cinates it, lures it onward, gives it work
to do without ceasing, and will finally
carry it I know not where ; the word
life.'

And in one place in his journal he
says : —

' My imagination welcomes every
dream, every impression, without at-
taching itself to any, and goes on for
ever seeking something new.'

And again in another : —

' The longer I live, and the clearer I
discern between true andfalseinsociety,
183

ESSAYS

the more does the inclination to live,
not as a savage or a misanthrope, but
as a solitary man on the frontiers of
society, on the outskirts of the world,
gain strength and grow in me. The
birds come and go and make nests
around our habitations, they are fellow-
citizens of our farms and hamlets with
us ; but they take their flight in a hea-
ven which is boundless, but the hand of
God alone gives and measures to them
their daily food, but they build their
nests in the heart of the thick bushes,
or hang them in the height of the trees.
So would I, too, live, hovering round
society, and having always at my back
a field of liberty vast as the sky.'

In the same spirit he longed for
travel. 'When one is a wanderer,' he
writes to his sister, ' one feels that one
fulfils the true condition of humanity.'
And the last entry in his journal is, —
' The stream of travel is full of delight.
Oh, who will set me adrift on this
NUe!'

1&4

MAURICE DE GUERIN

Assuredly it is not in this tempera-
ment that the active virtues have their
rise. On the contrary, this temperament,
considered in itself alone, indisposes
for the discharge of them. Something
morbid and excessive, as manifested
in Guerin, it undoubtedly has. In him,
as in Keats, and as in another youth
of genius, whose name, but the other
day unheard of, Lord Houghton has
so gracefully written in the history
of English poetry, — David Gray, —
the temperament, the talent itself, is
deeply influenced by their mysterious
malady ; the temperament is devouring ;
it uses vital power too hard and too
fast, paying the penalty in long hours
of unutterable exhaustion and in pre-
mature death. The intensity of Guerin's
depression is described to us by Guerin
himself with the same incomparable
touch w^ith which he describes happier
feelings ; far of tener than any pleasur-
able sense of his gift he has ' the sense
profound, near, immense, of my misery,
185

ESSAYS

of my inward poverty.' And again :
' My inward misery gains upon me ;
I no longer dare look within.' And on
another day of gloom he does look
within, and here is the terrible
analysis : —

' Craving, unquiet, seeing only by
glimpses, my spirit is stricken by all
those ills which are the sure fruit of a
youth doomed never to ripen into man-
hood. I grow old and wear myself out
in the most futile mental strainings,
and make no progress. My head seems
dying, and when the wind blows I fancy
I feel it, as if I were a tree, blowing
through a number of withered branches
in my top. Study is intolerable to me,
or rather it is quite out of my power.
Mental w^ork brings on, not drowsiness,
but an irritable and nervous disgust
w^hich drives me out, I know^ not where,
into the streets and public places. The
Spring, whose delights used to come
every year stealthily and mysteriously
to charm me in my retreat, crushes me
186

MAURICE DE GUERIN

this year under a weight of sudden
hotness. I should be glad of any event
which delivered me from the situation
in which I am. If I were free I would
embark for some distant country where
I could begin life anew.'

Such is this temperament in the
frequent hours when the sense of its
own weakness and isolation crushes it
to the ground. Certainly it was not
for Guerins happiness, or for Keats's,
as men count happiness, to be as they
were. Still the very excess and pre-
dominance of their temperament has
given to the fruits of their genius a
unique brilliancy and flavour. I have
said that poetry inter j)rets in two ways ;
it interprets by expressing with magical
felicity the physiognomy and move-
ment of the outward world, and it
interprets by expressing, with inspired
conviction, the ideas and laws of the
inward world of man's moral and
spiritual nature. In other words,
poetry is interpretative both by hav-
187

ESSAYS

ing natural magic in it, and by having
moral profundity. In both ways it
illuminates man ; it gives him a satis-
fying sense of reality; it reconciles
him with himself and the universe.
Thus ^schylus's ' Spda-avn TradiLv ' and his
^dvi]piOfiov yiXaa-fxa' are alike interpreta-
tive. Shakspeare interprets both when
he says,

' Full many a glorious morning have
I seen,
Flatter the mountain-tops with sov-
ran eye';
and when he says,

'There's a divinity that shapes our

ends,
Rough-hew them as we will.'
These great poets unite in themselves
the faculty of both kinds of interpre-
tation, the naturalistic and the moral.
But it is observable that in the poets
who unite both kinds, the latter (the
moral) usually ends by making itself
the master. In Shakspeare the two
kinds seem w^onderf ully to balance one
188

MAURICE DE GUERIN

another; but even in him the balance
leans ; his expression tends to become
too little sensuous and simple, too
much intellectualised. The same thing
may be yet more strongly affirmed of
Lucretius and of Wordsworth. In
Shelley there is not a balance of the
two gifts, nor even a co-existence of
them, but there is a passionate strain-
ing after them both, and this is what
makes Shelley, as a man, so interest-
ing : I will not now inquire how much
Shelley achieves as a poet, but what-
ever he achieves, he in general fails
to achieve natural magic in his ex-
pression ; in Mr Palgrave's charming
' Treasury ' may be seen a gallery of
his failures. But in Keats and Guerin,
in whom the faculty of naturalistic
interpretation is overpoweringly pre-
dominant, the natural magic is per-
fect; when they speak of the world
they speak like Adam naming by
divine inspiration the creatures; their
expression corresponds with the thing's
189

ESSAYS

essential reality. Even between Keats
and Guerin, however, there is a dis-
tinction to be drawn. Keats has,
above all, a sense of what is pleasur-
able and open in the life of nature ;
for him she is the A hna Parens : his
expression has, therefore, more than
Guerin's, something genial, outward,
and sensuous. Guerin has, above all,
a sense of what there is adorable and
secret in the life of Nature ; for him
she is the Magna Parens ; his expres-
sion has, therefore, more than Keats's,
something mystic, inward, and pro-
found.

So he lived like a man possessed ;
with his eye not on his own career,
not on the public, not on fame, but
on the Isis whose veil he had uplifted.
He published nothing : ' There is more
power and beauty,' he writes, 'in the
well-kept secret of one's self and one's
thoughts, than in the display of a
whole heaven that one may have in-
side one.' 'My spirit,' he answers
190

MAURICE DE GUERIN

the friends who urge him to write,
'is of the home-keeping order, and
has no fancy for adventure; literary
adventure is above all distasteful to
it ; for this, indeed (let me say so with-
out the least self-sufficiency), it has a
contempt. The literary career seems
to me unreal, both in its own essence
and in the rewards which one seeks
from it, and therefore fatally marred
by a secret absurdity.' His acquaint-
ances, and among them distinguished
men of letters, full of admiration for
the originality and delicacy of his
talent, laughed at his self-depreciation,
warmly assured him of his powers.
He received their assurances with a
mournful incredulity, which contrasts
curiously with the self-assertion of
poor David Gray, whom I just now
mentioned. 'It seems to me intoler-
able,' he writes, 'to appear to men
other than one appears to God. My
worst torture at this moment is the
over-estimate which generous friends
191

ESSAYS

form of me. We are told that at the
last judgment the secret of all con-
sciences will be laid bare to the uni-
verse ; would that mine were so this
day, and that every passer-by could
see me as I am ! ' ' High above my
head,' he says at another time, 'far,
far away, I seem to hear the murmur
of that world of thought and feeling
to which I aspire so often, but where
I can never attain. I think of those
of my own age who have wings strong
enough to reach it, but I think of them
without jealousy, and as men on earth
contemplate the elect and their feli-
city.' And, criticising his own com-
position, ' When I begin a subject, my
self-conceit' (says this exquisite artist)
' imagines I am doing wonders ; and
when I have finished, I see nothing
but a wretched made-up imitation,
composed of odds and ends of colour
stolen from other people's palettes, and
tastelessly mixed together on mine.'
Such was his passion for perfection, his
192

MAURICE DE GUERIN

disdain for all poetical work not per-
fectly adequate and felicitous. The
magic of expression, to which by the
force of this passion he won his way,
will make the name of Maurice de
Guerin remembered in literature.

I have already mentioned the ' Cen-
taur,' a sort of prose poem by Guerin,
which Madame Sand published after
his death. The idea of this composi-
tion came to him, M. Sainte-Beuve
says, in the course of some visits which
he made with his friend, M. Trebutien,
a learned antiquarian, to the Museum
of Antiquities in the Louvre. The free
and wild life which the Greeks ex-
pressed by such creations as the Cen-
taur had, as we might well expect, a
strong charm for him ; under the same
inspiration he composed a ' Bacchante,'
which was meant by him to form part
of a prose poem on the adventures of
Bacchus in India. Real as was the
affinity which Guerin's nature had for
these subjects, I doubt whether, in

ESSAYS

treating them, he would have found
the full and final employment of his
talent. But the beauty of his ' Cen-
taur ' is extraordinary ; in its whole
conception and expression this piece
has in a wonderful degree that natural
magic of which I have said so much,
and the rhythm has a charm which
bewitches even a foreigner. An old
Centaur on his mountain is supposed
to relate to Melampus, a human ques-
tioner, the life of his youth. Untrans-
latable as the piece is, I shall conclude
with some extracts from it : —

'The Centaur

' I had my birth in the caves of these
mountains. Like the stream of this
valley, whose first drops trickle from
some weeping rock in a deep cavern,
the first moment of my life fell in the
darkness of a remote abode, and with-
out breaking the silence. When our
mothers draw near to the time of their
delivery, they withdraw to the caverns,
194

MAURICE DE GUERIN

and in the depth of the loneliest of
them, in the thickest of its gloom,
bring forth, without uttering a plaint,
a fruit silent as themselves. Their
puissant milk makes us surmount,
without weakness or dubious struggle,
the first difficulties of life ; and yet we
leave our caverns later than you your
cradles. The reason is that we have
a doctrine that the early days of ex-
istence should be kept apart and en-
shrouded, as days filled with the pres-
ence of the gods. Nearly the whole
term of my growth was passed in the
darkness where I was born. The re-
cesses of my dwelling ran so far under
the mountain that I should not have
known on which side was the exit, had
not the winds, when they sometimes
made their way through the opening,
sent fresh airs in, and a sudden trouble.
Sometimes, too, my mother came back
to me, having about her the odours
of the valleys, or streaming from the
waters which were her haunt. Her
195^

ESSAYS

returning thus, without a word said
of the valleys or the rivers, but with
the emanations from them hanging
about her, troubled my spirit, and I
moved up and down restlessly in my
darkness. " What is it," I cried, " this
outside world whither my mother is
borne, and what reigns there in it so
potent as to attract her so often?"
At these moments my own force began
to make me unquiet. I felt in it a
power which could not remain idle ;
and betaking myself either to toss my
arms or to gallop backwards and for-
wards in the spacious darkness of the
cavern, I tried to make out from the
blows which I dealt in the empty space,
or from the transport of my course
through it, in what direction my arms
were meant to reach, or my feet to
bear me. Since that day, I have wound
my arms round the bust of Centaurs,
and round the body of heroes, and
round the trunk of oaks; my hands
have assayed the rocks, the waters,
196

MAURICE DE GUERIN

plants without number, and the subtlest
impressions of the air, — for I uplift
them in the dark and still nights to
catch the breaths of wind, and to draw
signs whereby I may augur my road ;
my feet, — look, O Melampus, how worn
they are ! And yet, all benumbed as
I am in this extremity of age, there are
days when, in broad sunlight, on the
mountain-tops, I renew these gallop-
ings of my youth in the cavern, and
with the same object, brandishing my
arms and employing all the fleetness
which yet is left to me.

'O Melampus, thou who wouldst
know the life of the Centaurs, where-
fore have the gods willed that thy
steps should lead thee to me, the oldest
and most forlorn of them all? It is
long since I have ceased to practise
any part of their life. I quit no more
this mountain summit, to which age
has confined me. The point of my
arrows now serves me only to uproot
n2 197

ESSAYS

some tough-fibred plant; the tranquil
lakes know me still, but the rivers
have forgotten me. I will tell thee a
little of my youth ; but these recollec-
tions, issuing from a worn memory,
come like the drops of a niggardly
libation poured from a damaged urn.

' The course of my youth w^as rapid
and full of agitation. Movement was
my life, and my steps knew no bound.
One day when I was following the
course of a valley seldom entered by
the Centaurs, I discovered a man mak-
ing his way up the stream-side on the
opposite bank. He was the first whom
my eyes had lighted on : I despised him.
"Behold," I cried, "at the utmost but
the half of what I am ! How short are
his steps ! and his movement how full
of labour! Doubtless he is a Centaur
overthrown by the gods, and reduced
by them to drag himself along thus."

' Wandering along at my own will
like the rivers, feeling wherever I went

198

MAURICE DE GUERIN

the presence of Cybele, whether in the
bed of the valleys, or on the height
of the mountains, I bounded whither
I would, like a blind and chainless life.
But when Night, filled with the charm
of the gods, overtook me on the slopes
of the mountain, she guided me to the
mouth of the caverns, and there tran-
quillised me as she tranquillises the
billows of the sea. Stretched across
the threshold of my retreat, my flanks
hidden within the cave, and my head
under the open sky, I watched the
spectacle of the dark. The sea-gods,
it is said, quit during the hours of
darkness their palaces under the deep ;
they seat themselves on the promon-
tories, and their eyes wander over the
expanse of the waves. Even so I kept
watch, having at my feet an expanse
of life like the hushed sea. My regards
had free range, and travelled to the
most distant points. Like sea-beaches
which never lose their wetness, the
line of mountains to the west retained
199

ESSAYS

the imprint of gleams not perfectly
wiped out by the shadows. In that
quarter still survived, in pale clearness,
mountain summits naked and pure.
There I beheld at one time the god
Pan descend, ever solitary ; at another,
the choir of the mystic divinities ; or I
saw pass some mountain nymph charm-
struck by the night. Sometimes the
eagles of Mount Olympus traversed the
upper sky, and were lost to view among
the far-off constellations, or in the shade
of the dreaming forests.

' Thou pursuest after wisdom, O Mel-
ampus, which is the science of the will
of the gods ; and thou roamest from
people to people like a mortal driven
by the destinies. In the times when
I kept my night-watches before the
caverns, I have sometimes believed
that I was about to surprise the
thought of the sleeping Cybele, and
that the mother of the gods, betrayed
by her dreams, would let fall some of
her secrets ; but I have never made out
200

MAURICE DE GUERIN

more than sounds which faded away
in the murmur of night, or words in-
articulate as the bubbling of the rivers.
' " O Macareus," one day said the
great Chiron to me, whose old age I
tended ; " we are, both of us, Centaurs
of the mountain ; but how different
are our lives ! Of my days all the
study is (thou seest it) the search for
plants ; thou, thou art like those
mortals who have picked up on the
waters or in the woods, and carried
to their lips, some pieces of the reed-
pipe thrown away by the god Pan.
From that hour these mortals, having
caught from their relics of the god a
passion for wild life, or perhaps smit-
ten with some secret madness, enter
into the wilderness, plunge among
the forests, follow the course of the
streams, bury themselves in the heart
of the mountains, restless, and haunted
by an unknown purpose. The mares
beloved of the winds in the farthest
Scythia are not wilder than thou, nor
201

'''"''■'' ESSAYS

more cast down at nightfall, when the
North Wind has departed. Seekest
thou to know the gods, O Macareus,
and from what source men, animals,
and the elements of the universal fire
have their origin ? But the aged Ocean,
the father of all things, keeps locked
within his own breast these secrets ;
and the nymphs, who stand around,
sing as they weave their eternal dance
before him, to cover any sound which
might escape from his lips half-opened
by slumber. The mortals, dear to the
gods for their virtue, have received
from their hands lyres to give delight
to man, or the seeds of new plants to
make him rich ; but from their inexor-
able lips, nothing ! "

' Such were the lessons which the old
Chiron gave me. Waned to the very
extremity of life, the Centaur yet
nourished in his spirit the most lofty
discourse.

202

MAURICE DE GUERIN

' For me, O Melampus, I decline into
my last days, calm as the setting of
the constellations, I still retain enter-
prise enough to climb to the top of the
rocks, and there I linger late, either
gazing on the wild and restless clouds,
or to see come up from the horizon
the rainy Hyades, the Pleiades, or the
great Orion ; but I feel myself perish-
ing and passing quickly away, like a
snow-wreath floating on the stream ;
and soon shall I be mingled with the
waters which flow in the vast bosom
of Earth.'

203

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

Who that had spoken of Maurice de
Guerin could refrain from speaking of
his sister Eugenie, the most devoted
of sisters, one of the rarest and most
beautiful of souls? 'There is nothing
fixed, no duration, no vitality in the
sentiments of women towards one an-
other; their attachments are mere
pretty knots of ribbon, and no more.
In all the friendships of women I ob-
serve this slightness of the tie. I know
no instance to the contrary, even in
history. Orestes and Pylades have no
sisters.' So she herself speaks of the
friendships of her own sex. But Electra
can attach herself to Orestes, if not to
Chrysothemis. And to her brother
Maurice, Eugenie de Guerin was Py-
lades and Electra in one.
207

ESSAYS

The name of Maurice de Guerin, —
that young man so gifted, so attrac-
tive, so careless of fame, and so early
snatched away; who died at twenty-
nine ; who, says his sister, ' let what
he did be lost with a carelessness so
unjust to himself, set no value on any
of his own productions, and departed
hence without reaping the rich harvest
which seemed his due ' ; who, in spite
of his immaturity, in spite of his fra-
gility, exercised such a charm, 'fur-
nished to others so much of that which
all live by,' that some years after his
death his sister found in a country-
house where he used to stay, in the
journal of a young girl who had not
known him, but who heard her family
speak of him, his name, the date of his
death, and these words, '^7 etait leur
vie ' (he was their life); whose talent, ex-
quisite as that of Keats, with much less
of sunlight, abundance, inventiveness,
and facility in it than that of Keats,
but with more of distinction and power,
208

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

had 'that winning, delicate, and beauti-
fully happy turn of expression' which is
the stamp of the master, — is beginning
to be w^ell known to all lovers of litera-
ture. This establishment of Maurice's
name was an object for which his sister
Eugenie passionately laboured. While
he was alive, she placed her whole joy
in the flowering of this gifted nature ;
when he was dead, she had no other
thought than to make the world know
him as she knew him. She outlived
him nine years, and her cherished task
for those years was to rescue the frag-
ments of her brother's composition, to
collect them, to get them published.
In pursuing this task she had at first
cheering hopes of success ; she had at
last baffling and bitter disapppoint-
ment. Her earthly business was at an
end; she died. Ten years afterwards,
it was permitted to the love of a friend,
M. Trebutien, to effect for Maurice's
memory what the love of a sister had
failed to accomplish. But those who
o 209

ESSAYS

read, with delight and admiration,
the journal and letters of Maurice de
Guerin, could not but be attracted and
touched by this sister Eugenie, who met
them at every page. She seemed hardly
less gifted, hardly less interesting, than
Maurice himself. And presently M. Tre-
butien did for the sister what he had
done for the brother. He published the
journal of Mdlle. Eugenie de Guerin,
and a few (too few, alas !) of her letters.
The book has made a profound impres-
sion in France ; and the fame which she
sought only for her brother now crowns
the sister also.

Parts of Mdlle. de Guerin's journal
were several years ago printed for pri-
vate circulation, and a writer in the
National Review had the good fortune
to fall in with them. The bees of our
English criticism do not often roam so
far afield for their honey, and this critic
deserves thanks for having flitted in
his quest of blossom to foreign parts,
and for having settled upon a beautiful
210

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

flower found there. He had the dis-
cernment to see that Mdlle. de Guerin
was well worth speaking of, and he
spoke of her with feeling and appre-
ciation. But that, as I have said, was
several years ago ; even a true and feel-
ing homage needs to be from time to
time renewed, if the memory of its
object is to endure ; and criticism must
not lose the occasion offered by Mdlle.
de Guerin's journal being for the first
time published to the world, of direct-
ing notice once more to this religious
and beautiful character.

Eugenie de Guerin was born in 1805,
at the chateau of Le Cayla, in Lan-
guedoc. Her family, though reduced
in circumstances, was noble ; and even
w^hen one is a saint one cannot quite
forget that one comes of the stock
of the Guarini of Italy, or that one
counts among one's ancestors a Bishop
of Senlis, who had the marshalling of
the French order of battle on the day
of Bouvines. Le Cayla was a solitary
211

ESSAYS

place, with its terrace looking down
upon a stream-bed and valley; 'one
may pass days there without seeing
any living thing but the sheep, without
hearing any living thing but the birds.'
M. de Guerin, Eugenie's father, lost his
wife when Eugenie was thirteen years
old, and Maurice seven ; he was left with
four children, — Eugenie, Marie, Erem-
bert, and Maurice, — of whom Eugenie
was the eldest, and Maurice was the
youngest. This youngest child, whose
beauty and delicacy had made him the
object of his mother's most anxious
fondness, was commended by her in
dying to the care of his sister Eugenie.
Maurice at elev^en years old went to
school at Toulouse ; then he went to the
College Stanislas at Paris ; then he be-
came a member of the religious society
which M. de Lamennais had formed at
La Chenaie in Brittany ; afterwards he
lived chiefly at Paris, returning to Le
Cayla, at the age of twenty-nine, to die.
Distance, in those days, was a great
212

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

obstacle to frequent meetings of the
separated members of a French family
of narrow means. Maurice de Guerin
was seldom at Le Cayla after he had
once quitted it, though his few visits to
his home were long ones ; but he passed
five years, — the period of his sojourn
in Brittany, and of his first settlement
in Paris, — without coming home at all.
In spite of the check from these ab-
sences, in spite of the more serious
check from a temporary alteration in
Maurice's religious feelings, the union
between the brother and sister was
wonderfully close and firm. For they
were knit together, not only by the tie
of blood and early attachment, but also
by the tie of a common genius, ' We
were,' says Eugenie, ' two eyes looking
out of one head.' She, on her part,
brought to her love for her brother the
devotedness of a woman, the intensity
of a recluse, almost the solicitude of a
mother. Her home duties prevented
her from following the wish, which
o2 213

ESSAYS

often arose in her, to join a religious
sisterhood. There is a trace, — just a
trace, — of an early attachment to a
cousin ; but he died when she was
twenty-four. After that, she lived for
Maurice. It was for Maurice that, in
addition to her constant correspond-
ence with him by letter, she began in
1834 her journal, which was sent to him
by portions as it was finished. After
his death she tried to continue it, ad-
dressing it to 'Maurice in heaven.' But
the effort was beyond her strength ;
gradually the entries become rarer and
rarer ; and on the last day of December
1840 the pen dropped from her hand:
the journal ends.

Other sisters have loved their
brothers, and it is not her affection
for Maurice, admirable as this was,
which alone could have made Eugenie
de Guerin celebrated. I have said that
both brother and sister had genius :
M. Sainte-Beuve goes so far as to say
that the sister's genius was equal, if
214

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

not superior, to her brother's. No one
has a more profound respect for M.
Sainte-Beuve's critical judgments than
I have, but it seems to me that this
particular judgment needs to be a little
explained and guarded. In Maurice's
special talent, which was a talent for
interpreting nature, for finding words
which incomparably render the subtlest
impressions which nature makes upon
us, which bring the intimate life of
nature wonderfully near to us, it seems
to me that his sister was by no means
his equal. She never, indeed, expresses
herself without grace and intelligence ;
but her words, when she speaks of the
life and appearances of nature, are
in general but intellectual signs; they
are not like her brother's — symbols
equivalent with the thing symbolised.
They bring the notion of the thing de-
scribed to the mind, they do not bring
the feeling of it to the imagination.
Writing from the Nivernais, that region
of vast woodlands in the centre of
215

ESSAYS

France : 'It does one good,' says Eugenie,
' to be going about in the midst of this
enchanting nature, with flowers, birds,
and verdure all round one, under this
large and blue sky of the Nivernais.
How I love the gracious form of it,
and those little white clouds here and
there, like cushions of cotton, hung
aloft to rest the eye in this immensity ! '
It is pretty and graceful, but how
different from the grave and pregnant
strokes of Maurice's pencil ! ' I have
been along the Loire, and seen on its
banks the plains w^here nature is
puissant and gay ; I have seen royal
and antique dwellings, all marked by
memories which have their place in the
mournful legend of humanity, — Cham-
bord, Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux ;
then the towns on the two banks of the
river, — Orleans, Tours, Saumur, Nantes;
and at the end of it all, the Ocean
rumbling. From these I passed back
into the interior of the country, as
far as Bourges and Nevers, a region of
216

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

vast ^voodlands, in which murmurs of
an immense range and fulness ' (ce beau
torrent de rumeurs, as, with an expres-
sion worthy of Wordsworth, he else-
where calls them) 'prevail and never
cease.' Words whose charm is like
that of the sounds of the murmuring
forest itself, and "whose reverberations,
like theirs, die away in the infinite dis-
tance of the soul.

Maurice's life was in the life of nature,
and the passion for it consumed him ;
it would have been strange if his accent
had not caught more of the soul of
nature than Eugenie's accent, whose
life was elsewhere. 'You will find in
him,' Maurice says to his sister of a
friend whom he was recommending to
her, 'you will find in him that which
you love, and w^hich suits you better
than anything else, — Vonction, Veffusion,
la mysticite.' Unction, the pouring out
of the soul, the rapture of the mystic,
were dear to Maurice also ; but in him
the bent of his genius gave even to
217

ESSAYS

those a special direction of its own.
In Eugenie they took the direction
most native and familiar to them ; their
object was the religious life.

And yet, if one analyses this beauti-
ful and most interesting character quite
to the bottom, it is not exactly as a
saint that Eugenie de Guerin is remark-
able. The ideal saint is a nature like
Saint Francois de Sales or Fenelon ;
a nature of ineffable sweetness and
serenity, a nature in which struggle
and revolt is over, and the whole man
(so far as is possible to human infirmity)
swallowed up in love. Saint Theresa
(it is Mdlle. de Guerin herself who re-
minds us of it) endured twenty years of
unacceptance and of repulse in her
prayers; yes, but the Saint Theresa
whom Christendom knows is Saint
Theresa repulsed no longer ! it is Saint
Theresa accepted, rejoicing in love,
radiant with ecstasy. Mdlle. de Guerin
is not one of these saints arrived at
perfect sweetness and calm, steeped in
218

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

ecstasy; there is something primitive,
indomitable in her, which she governs,
indeed, but which chafes, which re-
volts. Somewhere in the depths of that
strong nature there is a struggle, an
impatience, an inquietude, an ennui,
which endures to the end, and which
leaves one, when one finally closes her
journal, with an impression of pro-
found melancholy. ' There are days,'
she writes to her brother, ' when one's
nature rolls itself up, and becomes a
hedgehog. If I had you here at this
moment, here close by me, how I should
prick you ! how sharp and hard ! '
' Poor soul, poor soul,' she cries out
to herself another day, ' what is the
matter, what would you have ? Where
is that which will do you good ? Every-
thing is green, everything is in bloom,
all the air has a breath of flowers. How
beautiful it is ! well, I will go out. No,
I should be alone, and all this beauty,
when one is alone, is worth nothing.
What shall I do then ? Read, write,
219

ESSAYS

pray, take a basket of sand on my head
like that hermit-saint, and walk with
it? Yes, work, work! keep busy the
body which does mischief to the soul !
I have been too little occupied to-day,
and that is bad for one, and it gives a
certain ennui which I have in me time
to ferment.'

' A certain ennui which I have in me ' :
her wound is there. In vain she follows
the counsel of Fenelon : ' If God tires
you, tell him that he tires you.' No
doubt she obtained great and frequent
solace and restoration from prayer :
'This morning I was suffering; well,
at present I am calm, and this I owe to
faith, simply to faith, to an act of faith.
I can think of death and eternity with-
out trouble, without alarm. Over a
deep of sorrow there floats a divine
calm, a suavity which is the work
of God only. In vain have I tried
other things at a time like this : noth-
ing human comforts the soul, nothing
human upholds it : —
220

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

" A I'enfant il faut sa mere,
A mon ame il faut mon Dieu." '
Still the ennui reappears, bringing with
it hours of unutterable forlornness,
and making her cling to her one great
earthly happiness, — her affection for
her brother, — with an intenseness, an
anxiety, a desperation in which there
is something morbid, and by which she
is occasionally carried into an irrita-
bility, a jealousy which she herself is
the first, indeed, to censure, which she
severely represses, but which neverthe-
less leaves a sense of pain.

Mdlle. de Guerin's admirers have
compared her to Pascal, and in some
respects the comparison is just. But she
cannot exactly be classed with Pascal,
any more than with Saint Francois de
Sales. Pascal is a man, and the inex-
haustible power and activity of his
mind leave him no leisure for ennui.
He has not the sweetness and serenity
of the perfect saint; he is, perhaps, ' der
strenge, kranke Pascal — the severe mor-
221

ESSAYS

bid Pascal," — as Goethe (and, strange
to say, Goethe at twenty-three, an age
which usually feels Pascal's charm most
profoundly) calls him. But the stress
and movement of the lifelong conflict
waged in him between his soul and his
reason keep him full of fire, full of
agitation, and keep his reader, who
witnesses this conflict, animated and
excited; the sense of forlornness and
dejected weariness which clings to
Eugenie de Guerin does not belong to
Pascal. Eugenie de Guerin is a woman,
and longs for a state of firm happiness,
for an affection in which she may re-
pose. The inward bliss of Saint Theresa
or Fenelon would have satisfied her ;
denied this, she cannot rest satisfied
w^ith the triumphs of self-abasement,
with the sombre joy of trampling the
pride of life and of reason underfoot,
of reducing all human hope and joy to
insignificance; she repeats the magni-
ficent words of Bossuet, words which
both Catholicism and Protestantism

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

have uttered with indefatigable itera-
tion : ' On trouve au fond de tout le vide
et le neant — At the bottom of every-
thing one finds emptiness and nothing-
ness,' but she feels, as every one but the
true mystic must ever feel, their incur-
able sterility.

She resembles Pascal, however, by the
clearness and firmness of her intelli-
gence, going straight and instinctively
to the bottom of any matter she is deal-
ing with, and expressing herself about
it with incomparable precision ; never
fumbling with what she has to say,
never imperfectly seizing or imperfectly
presenting her thought. And to this
admirable precision she joins a light-
ness of touch, a feminine ease and
grace, a flowing facility which are her
own. ' I do not say,' writes her brother
Maurice, an excellent judge, ' that I find
in myself a dearth of expression ; but I
have not this abundance of yours, this
productiveness of soul which streams
forth, which courses along without ever
223

ESSAYS

failing, and always with an infinite
charm.' And writing to her of some
composition of hers, produced after her
religious scruples had for a long time
kept her from the exercise of her talent:
' You see, my dear Tortoise,' he writes,
'that your talent is no illusion, since
after a period, I know not how long, of
poetical inaction, — a trial to which any
half-talent would have succumbed, — it
rears its head again more vigorous than
ever. It is really heart-breaking to
see you repress and bind down, with I
know not what scruples, your spirit,
which tends with all the force of its
nature to develop itself in this direc-
tion. Others have made it a case of
conscience for you to resist this im-
pulse, and I make it one for you to
follow it.' And she says of herself, on
one of her freer days: 'It is the instinct
of my life to write, as it is the instinct
of the fountain to flow.' The charm
of her expression is not a sensuous and
imaginative charm like that of Maurice,
224

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

but rather an intellectual charm ; it
conies from the texture of the style
rather than from its elements ; it is not
so much in the words as in the turn of
the phrase, in the happy cast and flow
of the sentence. Recluse as she was,
she had a great correspondence : every
one wished to have letters from her ;
and no wonder.

To this strength of intelligence and
talent of expression she joined a great
force of character. Religion had early
possessed itself of this force of charac-
ter, and reinforced it : in the shadow of
the Cevennes, in the sharp and tonic na-
ture of this region of Southern France,
which has seen the Albigensians, which
has seen the Camisards, Catholicism
too is fervent and intense. Eugenie de
Guerin was brought up amidst strong
religious influences, and they found in
her a nature on which they could lay
firm hold. I have said that she was not
a saint of the order of Saint Francois de
Sales or Fenelon ; perhaps she had too
p 225

ESSAYS

keen an intelligence to suffer her to be
this, too forcible and impetuous a char-
acter. But I did not mean to imply the
least doubt of the reality, the profound-
ness, of her religious life. She was
penetrated by the power of religion;
religion was the master-influence of her
life ; she derived immense consolations
from religion, she earnestly strove to
conform her whole nature to it; if
there was an element in her which re-
ligion could not perfectly reach, per-
fectly transmute, she groaned over this
element in her, she chid it, she made it
bow. Almost every thought in her was
brought into harmony with religion ;
and what few thoughts were not thus
brought into harmony were brought
into subjection.

Then she had her affection for her
brother ; and this, too, though perhaps
there might be in it something a little
over-eager, a little too absolute, a little
too susceptible, was a pure, a devoted
affection. It was not only passionate,
226

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

it was tender. It was tender, pliant,
and self-sacrificing to a degree that not
in one nature out of a thousand, — of
natures with a mind and will like hers,
— is found attainable. She thus united
extraordinary power of intelligence,
extraordinary force of character, and
extraordinary strength of affection;
and all these under the control of a
deep religious feeling.

This is what makes her so remark-
able, so interesting. I shall try and
make her speak for herself, that she
may show us the characteristic sides of
her rare nature with her own inimit-
able touch.

It must be remembered that her jour-
nal is written for Maurice only ; in her
lifetime no eye but his ever saw it. ' Ceci
nest pas pour le public,' she writes ; ' e'est
de Vinthne, cest de Vdme, cest pour un.'
' This is not for the public ; it contains
my inmost thoughts, my very soul ; it
is for one.' And Maurice, this one, was
a kind of second self to her. ' We see
227

ESSAYS

things with the same eyes ; what you
find beautiful, I find beautiful ; God has
made our souls of one piece.' And this
genuine confidence in her brother's sym-
pathy gives to the entries in her journal
a naturalness and simple freedom rare
in such compositions. She felt that he
would understand her, and be interested
in all that she wrote.

One of the first pages of her journal
relates an incident of the home-life of
Le Cayla, the smallest detail of which
Maurice liked to hear ; and in relating
it she brings this simple life before us.
She is writing in November, 1834 : —

' I am furious with the gray cat. The
mischievous beast has made away with
a little half -frozen pigeon, which I was
trying to thaw by the side of the fire.
The poor little thing was just beginning
to come round ; I meant to tame him ;
he would have grown fond of me ; and
there is my whole scheme eaten up by
a cat ! This event, and all the rest of
to-day's history, has passed in the kit-
228

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

chen. Here I take up my abode all the
morning and a part of the evening, ever
since I am without Mimi. I have to
superintend the cook ; sometimes papa
comes down, and I read to him by the
oven, or by the fireside, some bits out
of the " Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon
Church." This book struck Pierril with
astonishment. " Que de mout aqui de-
dins ! What a lot of words there are
inside it ! " This boy is a real original.
One evening he asked me if the soul
was immortal ; then afterwards, what
a philosopher was ? We had got upon
great questions, as you see. When I
told him that a philosopher was a per-
son who was wise and learned : " Then,
mademoiselle, you are a philosopher."
This was said with an air of simplicity
and sincerity which might have made
even Socrates take it as a compliment ;
but it made me laugh so much that my
gravity as catechist was gone for that
evening. A day or two ago Pierril left
us, to his great sorrow : his time with
p2 229

ESSAYS

us was up on Saint Brice's day. Now
he goes about with his little dog, truffle-
hunting. If he comes this way I shall
go and ask him if he still thinks I look
like a philosopher.'

Her good sense and spirit made her
discharge with alacrity her household
tasks in this patriarchal life of Le Cayla,
and treat them as the most natural
thing in the world. She sometimes
complains, to be sure, of burning her
fingers at the kitchen-fire. But when
a literary friend of her brother ex-
presses enthusiasm about her and her
poetical nature : ' The poetess,' she says,
'whom this gentleman believes me to
be, is an ideal being, infinitely removed
from the life which is actually mine — a
life of occupations, a life of household-
business, which takes up all my time.
How could I make it otherwise ? I am
sure I do not know; and, besides, my
duty is in this sort of life, and I have
no wish to escape from it.'

Among these occupations of the patri-
230

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

archal life of the chatelaine of Le Cayla
intercourse with the poor fills a promi-
nent place : —

' To-day,' she writes on the 9th of De-
cember 1834, ' I have been warming my-
self at every fireside in the village. It
is a round which Mimi and I often
make, and in which I take pleasure.
To-day we have been seeing sick people,
and holding forth on doses and sick-
room drinks. " Take this, do that " ; and
they attend to us just as if we were the
doctor. We prescribed shoes for a little
thing who was amiss from having gone
barefoot; to the brother, who, with a
bad headache, was lying quite flat, we
prescribed a pillow ; the pillow did him
good, but I am afraid it will hardly cure
him. He is at the beginning of a bad
feverish cold : and these poor people
live in the filth of their hovels like ani-
mals in their stable ; the bad air poisons
them. When I come home to Le Cayla
I seem to be in a palace.'

She had books, too ; not in abund-
231

ESSAYS

ance, not for the fancying them; the
list of her library is small, and it is en-
larged slowly and with difficulty. The
' Letters of Saint Theresa,' which she
had long wished to get, she sees in the
hands of a poor servant girl, before she
can procure them for herself. 'What
then?' is her comment : ' very likely she
makes a better use of them than I
could.' But she has the ' Imitation,' the
' Spiritual Works ' of Bossuet and Fene-
lon, the * Lives of the Saints,' Corneille,
Racine, Andre Chenier, and Lamartine;
Madame de Stael's book on Germany,
and French translations of Shakspeare's
plays, Ossian, the ' Vicar of Wakefield,'
Scott's ' Old Mortality ' and ' Redgaunt-
let,' and the ' Promessi Sposi ' of Man-
zoni. Above all, she has her own mind;
her meditations in the lonely fields, on
the oak-grown hill-side of 'The Seven
Springs ' ; her meditations and writing
in her own room, her chambrette, her
delicieux chez moi, where every night,
before she goes to bed, she opens the
232

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

window to look out upon the sky, — the
balmy moonlit sky of Languedoc. This
life of reading, thinking, and writing
was the life she liked best, the life that
most truly suited her. ' I find w^riting
has become almost a necessity to me.
Whence does it arise, this impulse to
give utterance to the voice of one's
spirit, to pour out my thoughts before
God and one human being? I say one
human being, because I alw ays imagine
that you are present, that you see what
I write. In the stillness of a life like
this my spirit is happy, and, as it were,
dead to all that goes on upstairs or
downstairs, in the house or out of the
house. But this does not last long.
" Come, my poor spirit," I then say to
myself, " we must go back to the things
of this world." And I take my spinning,
or a book, or a saucepan, or I play w^ith
Wolf or Trilby. Such a life as this I
call heaven upon earth.'

Tastes like these, joined with a talent
like Mdlle. de Guerin's, naturally in-
233

ESSAYS

spire thoughts of literary composition.
Such thoughts she had, and perhaps
she would have been happier if she had
followed them ; but she never could
satisfy herself that to follow them was
quite consistent with the religious life,
and her projects of composition were
gradually relinquished : —

' Would to God that my thoughts, my
spirit, had never taken their flight be-
yond the narrow round in which it is
my lot to live ! In spite of all that
people say to the contrary, I feel that
I cannot go beyond my needlework
and my spinning without going too
far : I feel it, I believe it : well, then,
I will keep in my proper sphere ; how-
ever much I am tempted, my spirit
shall not be allowed to occupy itself
with great matters until it occupies
itself with them in Heaven.'

And again : —

' My journal has been untouched for
a long while. Do you want to know
why ? It is because the time seems to
284

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

me misspent which I spend in writing
it. We owe God an account of every
minute; and is it not a wrong use of
our minutes to employ them in writing
a history of our transitory days ? '

She overcomes her scruples, and goes
on writing the journal ; but again and
again they return to her. Her brother
tells her of the pleasure and comfort
something she has written gives to
a friend of his in affliction. She
answers : —

'It is from the Cross that those
thoughts come, which your friend finds
so soothing, so unspeakably tender.
None of them come from me. I feel
my own aridity; but I feel, too, that
God, when he will, can make an ocean
flow upon this bed of sand. It is the
same with so many simple souls, from
which proceed the most admirable
things; because they are in direct re-
lation with God, without false science
and without pride. And thus I am
gradually losing my taste for books;
235

ESSAYS

I say to myself : " What can they teach
me which I shall not one day know in
Heaven ? let God be my master and my
study here ! " I try to make him so,
and I find myself the better for it. I
read little ; I go out little ; I plunge
myself in the inward life. How infinite
are the sayings, doings, feelings, events
of that life ! Oh, if you could but see
them! But what avails it to make
them known? God alone should be
admitted to the sanctuary of the soul.'

Beautifully as she says all this, one
cannot, I think, read it without a sense
of disquietude, without a presentiment
that this ardent spirit is forcing itself
from its natural bent, that the beati-
tude of the true mystic will never be
its earthly portion. And yet how simple
and charming is her picture of the life
of religion which she chose as her ark
of refuge, and in which she desired to
place all her happiness : —

'Cloaks, clogs, umbrellas, all the ap-
paratus of winter, went with us this
236

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

morning to Andillac, where we have
passed the whole day ; some of it at the
cure's house, the rest in church. How
I like this life of a country Sunday,
with its activity, its journeys to church,
its liveliness ! You find all your neigh-
bours on the road ; you have a curtsey
from every woman you meet, and then,
as you go along, such a talk about the
poultry, the sheep and cows, the good
man and the children ! My great de-
light is to give a kiss to these children,
and see them run away and hide their
blushing faces in their mother's gown.
They are alarmed at las douniaiselos, as
at a being of another world. One of
these little things said the other day
to its grandmother, who was talking
of coming to see us: " Minino, you
mustn't go to that castle ; there is a
black hole there. " What is the reason
that in all ages the noble's chateau has
been an object of terror ? Is it because
of the horrors that were committed
there in old times ? I suppose so.'
237

ESSAYS

This vague horror of the chateau,
still lingering in the mind of the French
peasant fifty years after he has stormed
it, is indeed curious, and is one of the
thousand indications how unlike aris-
tocracy on the Continent has been to
aristocracy in England. But this is
one of the great matters with which
Mdlle. de Guerin would not have us
occupied; let us pass to the subject of
Christmas in Languedoc : —

' Christinas is come ; the beautiful
festival, the one I love most, and which
gives me the same joy as it gave the
shepherds of Bethlehem. In real truth,
one's whole soul sings with joy at this
beautiful coming of God upon earth, —
a coming which here is announced on
all sides of us by music and by our
charming nadalet. Nothing at Paris
can give you a notion of what Christ-
mas is with us. You have not even the
midnight-mass. We all of us went to
it, papa at our head, on the most per-
fect night possible. Never was there
238

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

a finer sky than ours was that mid-
night : — so fine that papa kept perpetu-
ally throwing back the hood of his
cloak, that he might look up at the
sky. The ground was white with hoar-
frost, but we were not cold ; besides,
the air, as we met it, was warmed by
the bundles of blazing torchwood which
our servants carried in front of us to
light us on our way. It was delightful,
I do assure you ; and I should like you
to have seen us there on our road to
church, in those lanes with the bushes
along their banks as white as if they
were in flower. The hoar-frost makes
the most lovely flowers. We saw a
long spray so beautiful that we wanted
to take it with us as a garland for the
communion-table, but it melted in our
hands : all flowers fade so soon I I was
very sorry about my garland ; it ^vas
mournful to see it drip away, and get
smaller and smaller every minute.'

The religious life is at bottom every-
where alike ; but it is curious to note
239

ESSAYS

the variousness of its setting and out-
ward circumstance. Catholicism has
these so different from Protestantism !
and in Catholicism these accessories
have, it cannot be denied, a nobleness
and amplitude which in Protestantism
is often wanting to them. In Cathol-
icism they have, from the antiquity of
this form of religion, from its preten-
sions to universality, from its really
widespread prevalence, from its sensu-
ousness, something European, august,
and imaginative: in Protestantism
they often have, from its inferiority
in all these respects, something pro-
vincial, mean, and prosaic. In revenge.
Protestantism has a future before it,
a prospect of growth in alliance with
the vital movement of modern society ;
while Catholicism appears to be bent
on widening the breach between itself
and the modern spirit, to be fatally
losing itself in the multiplication of
dogmas, Mariolatry, and miracle-mon-
gering. But the style and circumstance
^0

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

of actual Catholicism is grander than
its present tendency, and the style
and circumstance of Protestantism is
meaner than its tendency. While I
was reading the journal of Mdlle. de
Guerin there came into my hands the
memoir and poems of a young English-
woman, Miss Emma Tatham ; and one
could not but be struck with the singu-
lar contrast which the two lives, — in
their setting rather than in their in-
herent quality, — present. Miss Tatham
had not, certainly, Mdlle. de Guerin's
talent, but she had a sincere vein of
poetic feeling, a genuine aptitude for
composition. Both were fervent Chris-
tians, and, so far, the two lives have
a real resemblance ; but, in the set-
ting of them, what a difference ! The
Frenchwoman is a Catholic in Langue-
doc ; the Englishwoman is a Protest-
ant at Margate ; Margate, that brick-
and-mortar image of English Protes-
tantism, representing it in all its prose,
all its uncomeliness, — let me add, all its
Q 241

ESSAYS

salubrity. Between the external form
and fashion of these two lives, between
the Catholic Mdlle. de Guerin's nadalet
at the Languedoc Christmas, her chapel
of moss at Easter-time, her daily read-
ing of the life of a saint, carrying her
to the most diverse times, places, and
peoples, — her quoting, when she wants
to fix her mind upon the staunchness
which the religious aspirant needs, the
words of Saint Macedonius to a hunter
whom he met in the mountains, 'I
pursue after God, as you pursue after
game,' — her quoting, when she wants
to break a village girl of disobedience
to her mother, the story of the ten dis-
obedient children whom at Hippo Saint
Augustine saw palsied; — between all
this and the bare, blank, narrowly
English setting of Miss Tatham's Pro-
testantism, her 'union in church-fellow-
ship with the worshippers at Hawley
Square Chapel, Margate ' ; her ' singing
with soft, sweet voice, the animating
lines —

242

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

" My Jesus to know, and feel his blood
flow,
'Tis life everlasting, 'tis heaven be-
low " ' ;
her 'young female teachers belonging
to the Sunday-school,' and her 'Mr
Thomas Rowe, a venerable class-leader,'
— what a dissimilarity ! In the ground
of the two lives, a likeness ; in all their
circumstance, what unlikeness ! An un-
likeness, it will be said, in that which
is non-essential and indifferent. Non-
essential,— yes ; indifferent, — no. The
signal want of grace and charm in
English Protestantism's setting of its
religious life is not an indifferent
matter; it is a real weakness. 'This
ought ye to have done, and not to have
left the other undone.'

I have said that the present tendency
of Catholicism, — the Catholicism of
the main body of the Catholic clergy
and laity, — seems likely to exaggerate
rather than to remove all that in this
form of religion is most repugnant to
243

ESSAYS

reason; but this Catholicism was not
that of Mdlle. de Guerin. The insuffi-
ciency of her CathoHcism conies from a
doctrine which Protestantism, too, has
adopted, although Protestantism, from
its inherent element of freedom, may
find it easier to escape from it ; a doc-
trine with a certain attraction for all
noble natures, but, in the modern world
at any rate, incurably sterile, — the doc-
trine of the emptiness and nothingness
of human life, of the superiority of
renouncement to activity, of quietism
to energy; the doctrine which makes
effort for things on this side of the
grave a folly, and joy in things on this
side of the grave a sin. But her Cath-
olicism is remarkably free from the
faults which Protestants commonly
think inseparable from Catholicism;
the relation to the priest, the practice
of confession, assume, when she speaks
of them, an aspect which is not that
under which Exeter Hall knows them,
but which, — unless one is of the number
244

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

of those who prefer regarding that by
which men and nations die to regard-
ing that by which they live, — one is
glad to study. ' La confession,' she says
twice in her journal, ^nest quune ex-
pansion du repentir dans T amour ' ; and
her weekly journey to the confessional
in the little church of Cahuzac is her
' cher peleHnage ' ; the little church is
the place where she has ' laisse tant de
mishres.'

'This morning,' she writes one 28th
of November, 'I was up before day-
light, dressed quickly, said my prayers,
and started with Marie for Cahuzac.
When we got there, the chapel was
occupied, which I was not sorry for.
I like not to be hurried, and to have
time, before I go in, to lay bare my
soul before God. This often takes me
a long time, because my thoughts are
apt to be flying about like these autumn
leaves. At ten o'clock I was on my
knees, listening to words the most
salutary that were ever spoken; and
q2 2A5

ESSAYS

I went away, feeling myself a better
being. Every burden thrown off leaves
us with a sense of brightness ; and
when the soul has laid down the load
of its sins at God's feet, it feels as if it
had wings. What an admirable thing
is confession! What comfort, what
light, what strength is given me every
time after I have said, I have sinned.'

This blessing of confession is the
greater, she says, 'the more the heart
of the priest to whom we confide our
repentance is like that divine heart
which " has so loved us." This is what
attaches me to M. Bories.' M. Bories
was the cure of her parish, a man no
longer young, and of whose loss, when
he was about to leave them, she thus
speaks : —

' What a grief for me ! how much I
lose in losing this faithful guide of my
conscience, heart, and mind, of my whole
self, which God has appointed to be
in his charge, and which let itself be in
his charge so gladly I He knew the re-
246

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

solves which God had put in my heart,
and I had need of his help to follow
them. Our ne\v cure cannot supply his
place ; he is so young I and then he
seems so inexperienced, so undecided !
It needs firmness to pluck a soul out of
the midst of the world, and to uphold
it against the assaults of flesh and blood.
It is Saturday, my day for going to Ca-
huzac ; I am just going there, perhaps
I shall come back more tranquil. God
has always given me some good thing
there, in that chapel where I have left
behind me so many miseries.'

Such is confession for her when the
priest is worthy; and, when he is not
worthy, she knows how to separate the
man from the office : —

' To-day I am going to do something
which I dislike ; but I will do it, with
God's help. Do not think I am on my
way to the stake ; it is only that I am
going to confess to a priest in whom I
have not confidence, but who is the only
one here. In this act of religion the
247

ESSAYS

man must always be separated from the
priest, and sometimes the man must be
annihilated.'

The same clear sense, the same free-
dom from superstition, shows itself in
all her religious life. She tells us, to
be sure, how once, when she was a little
girl, she stained a new frock, and on
praying, in her alarm, to an image of
the Virgin which hung in her room, saw
the stains vanish : even the austerest
Protestant will not judge such Mari-
olatry as this very harshly. But, in
general, the Virgin Mary fills in the reli-
gious parts of her journal no prominent
place ; it is Jesus, not Mary. ' Oh, how
well has Jesus said : " Come unto me,
all ye that labour and are heavy laden."
It is only there, only in the bosom of
God, that we can rightly weep, rightly
rid ourselves of our burden.' And again :
'The mystery of suffering makes one
grasp the belief of something to be
expiated, something to be won. I see
it in Jesus Christ, the Man of Sorrow.
248

EUGJ^NIE DE GUERIN

It was necessary that the Son of Man
should suffer. That is all we know in
the troubles and calamities of life.'

And who has ever spoken of justi-
fication more impressively and piously
than Mdlle. de Guerin speaks of it, when,
after reckoning the number of minutes
she has lived, she exclaims : —

'My God, what have we done with
all these minutes of ours, which thou,
too, wilt one day reckon? Will there
be any of them to count for eternal
life ? will there be many of them ? will
there be one of them? "If thou, O
Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is
done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it I "
This close scrutiny of our time may
well make us tremble, all of us who
have advanced more than a fe^v steps
in life ; for God will judge us otherwise
than as he judges the lilies of the field.
I have never been able to understand
the security of those who placed their
whole reliance, in presenting them-
selves before God, upon a good conduct
249

ESSAYS

in the ordinary relations of human life.
As if all our duties were confined within
the narrow^ sphere of this world ! To
be a good parent, a good child, a good
citizen, a good brother or sister, is not
enough to procure entrance into the
kingdom of heaven. God demands other
things besides these kindly social vir-
tues of him w^hom he means to crown
with an eternity of glory.'

And, with this zeal for the spirit
and power of religion, what prudence
in her counsels of religious practice;
what discernment, what measure ! She
has been speaking of the charm of
the ' Lives of the Saints,' and she goes
on: —

' Notwithstanding this, the ' Lives of
the Saints' seem to me, for a great
many people, dangerous reading. I
would not recommend them to a young
girl, or even to some women who are
no longer young. What one reads has
such power over one's feelings ; and
these, even in seeking God, sometimes
250

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

go astray. Alas, we have seen it in
poor C.'s case. What care one ought
to take with a young person ; with what
she reads, what she writes, her society,
her prayers, — all of them matters which
demand a mother's tender watchful-
ness! I remember many things I did
at fourteen, which my mother, had
she lived, would not have let me do.
I would have done anything for God's
sake ; I would have cast myself into an
oven, and assuredly things like that are
not God's will ; He is not pleased by the
hurt one does to one's health through
that ardent but ill-regulated piety
which, while it impairs the body, often
leaves many a fault flourishing. And,
therefore, Saint Francois de Sales used
to say to the nuns who asked his leave
to go bare-foot : " Change your brains
and keep your shoes." '

Meanwhile Maurice, in a five years'

absence, and amid the distractions of

Paris, lost, or seemed to his sister to

lose, something of his fondness for his

251

ESSAYS

home and its inmates : he certainly lost
his early religious habits and feelings.
It is on this latter loss that Mdlle. de
Guerin's journal oftenest touches, — with
infinite delicacy, but with infinite an-
guish : —

' Oh, the agony of being in fear for a
soul's salvation, who can describe it!
That which caused our Saviour the
keenest suffering, in the agony of his
Passion, was not so much the thought
of the torments he was to endure, as
the thought that these torments would
be of no avail for a multitude of sinners ;
for all those who set themselves against
their redemption, or who do not care
for it. The mere anticipation of this
obstinacy and this heedlessness had
power to make sorrowful, even unto
death, the divine Son of Man. And this
feeling all Christian souls, according to
the measure of faith and love granted
them, more or less share.'
, Maurice returned to Le Cayla in the
summer of 1837, and passed six months
252

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

there. This meeting entirely restored
the union between him and his family.
'These six months with vis,' writes his
sister, 'he ill, and finding himself so
loved by us all, had entirely reattached
him to us. Five years without seeing
us, had perhaps made him a little lose
sight of our affection for him ; having
found it again, he met it with all the
strength of his own. He had so firmly
renewed, before he left us, all family
ties, that nothing but death could have
broken them.' The separation in re-
ligious matters between the brother
and sister gradually diminished, and
before Maurice died it had ceased. I
have elsewhere spoken of Maurice's
religious feeling and his character. It
is probable that his divergence from
his sister in this sphere of religion was
never so wide as she feared, and that
his reunion with her w^as never so com-
plete as she hoped. ' His errors were
passed,' she says, ' his illusions were
cleared away ; by the call of his nature,
253

ESSAYS

by original disposition, he had come
back to sentiments of order. I knew
all, I followed each of his steps ; out of
the fiery sphere of the passions (which
held him but a little moment) I saw
him pass into the sphere of the Chris-
tian life. It was a beautiful soul, the
soul of Maurice.' But the illness which
had caused his return to Le Cayla re-
appeared after he got back to Paris in
the winter of 1837-8. Again he seemed
to recover ; and his marriage with a
young Creole lady, Mdlle. Caroline de
Gervain, took place in the autumn of
1838. At the end of September in that
year Mdlle. de Guerin had joined her
brother in Paris; she was present at
his marriage, and stayed with him and
his wife for some months afterwards.
Her journal recommences in April 1839.
Zealously as she had promoted her
brother's marriage, cordial as were her
relations with her sister-in-law, it is
evident that a sense of loss, of loneli-
ness, invades her, and sometimes weighs
254

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

her down. She writes in her journal
on the 4th of May : —

'God knows when we shall see one
another again ! My own Maurice, must
it be our lot to live apart, to find that
this marriage which I had so much
share in bringing about, which I hoped
would keep us so much together, leaves
us more asunder than ever? For the
present and for the future, this troubles
me more than I can say. My sym-
pathies, my inclinations, carry me more
towards you than towards any other
member of our family. I have the mis-
fortune to be fonder of you than of
anything else in the world, and my
heart had from of old built in you its
happiness. Youth gone and life de-
clining, I looked forward to quitting the
scene w^ith Maurice. At any time of life
a great affection is a great happiness ;
the spirit comes to take refuge in it
entirely. O delight and joy which will
never be your sister's portion ! Only
in the direction of God shall I find an
255

ESSAYS

issue for my heart to love as it has the
notion of loving, as it has the power of
loving.'

From such complainings, in which
there is undoubtedly something mor-
bid,— complainings which she herself
blamed, to which she seldom gave way,
but which, in presenting her character,
it is not just to put wholly out of sight,
— she was called by the news of an
alarming return of her brother's ill-
ness. For some days the entries in
the journal show her agony of appre-
hension. ' He coughs, he coughs still !
Those words keep echoing for ever in
my ears, and pursue me w^herever I go ;
I cannot look at the leaves on the trees
without thinking that the winter will
come, and then the consumptive die.'
She went to him, and brought him back
by slow stages to Le Cayla, dying. He
died on the 19th of July 1839.

Thenceforward the energy of life
ebbed in her; but the main chords of
her being, the chord of affection, the
256

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

chord of religious longing, the chord of
intelligence, the chord of sorrow, gave,
so long as they answered to the touch
at all, a deeper and finer sound than
ever. Always she saw before her, ' that
beloved pale face'; 'that beautiful head,
with all its different expressions, smil-
ing, speaking, suffering, dying,' regarded
her always : —

' I have seen his coffin in the same
room, in the same spot where I remem-
ber seeing, when I was a very little girl,
his cradle, when I was brought home
from Gaillac, where I was then staying,
for his christening. This christening
was a grand one, full of rejoicing, more
than that of any of the rest of us ;
specially marked. I enjoyed myself
greatly, and went back to Gaillac
next day, charmed with my new little
brother. Two years afterwards I came
home, and brought with me a frock for
him of my own making. I dressed him
in the frock, and took him out with me
along by the warren at the north of
R 257

ESSAYS

the house, and there he walked a few
steps alone, — his first walking alone,
— and I ran with delight to tell my
mother the news : " Maurice, Maurice
has begun to walk by himself! " — Recol-
lections which, coming back to-day,
break one's heart.'

The shortness and suffering of her
brother's life filled her with an agony
of pity. ' Poor beloved soul, you have
had hardly any happiness here below ;
your life has been so short, your repose
so rare. O God, uphold me, establish
my heart in thy faith ! Alas, I have
too little of this supporting me ! How
we have gazed at him and loved him,
and kissed him, — his wife, and we, his
sisters ; he lying lifeless in his bed, his
head on the pillow as if he were asleep !
Then we followed him to the church-
yard, to the grave, to his last resting-
place, and prayed over him, and wept
over him; and we are here again, and
I am writing to him again, as if he were
staying away from home, as if he were
258

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

in Paris. My beloved one, can it be,
shall we never see one another again
on earth ? '

But in heaven ?— and here, though love
and hope finally prevailed, the very pas-
sion of the sister's longing sometimes
inspired torturing inquietudes : —

'I am broken down with misery. I
want to see him. Every moment I
pray to God to grant me this grace.
Heaven, the world of spirits, is it so far
from us? O depth, O mystery of the
other life which separates us ! I, who
was so eagerly anxious about him, who
wanted so to know all that happened
to him, — wherever he may be now, it
is over! I follow him into the three
abodes; I stop wistfully before the place
of bliss, I pass on to the place of suffer-
ing,—to the gulf of fire. My God, my
God, no ! Not there let my brother be !
not there ! And he is not : his soul, the
soul of Maurice, among the lost . . .
horrible fear, no! But in purgatory,
where the soul is cleansed by suffering,
259

ESSAYS

where the failings of the heart are
expiated, the doubtings of the spirit,
the half-yieldings to evil ? Perhaps my
brother is there and suffers, and calls
to us amidst his anguish of repentance,
as he used to call to us amidst his bodily
suffering : " Help me, you who love me."
Yes, beloved one, by prayer. I will go
and pray; prayer has been such a power
to me, and I will pray to the end.
Prayer ! Oh ! and prayer for the dead ;
it is the dew of purgatory.'

Often, alas, the gracious dew would
not fall ; the air of her soul was
parched; the arid wind, which was
somewhere in the depths of her being,
blew. She marks in her journal the
1st of May, ' this return of the loveliest
month in the year,' only to keep up the
old habit ; even the month of May can
no longer give her any pleasure : ' Tout
est change — all is changed.' She is
crushed by ' the misery which has no-
thing good in it, the tearless, dry misery,
which bruises the heart like a hammer.'
260

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

'I am dying to everything. I am
dying of a slow moral agony, a con-
dition of unutterable suffering. Lie
there, my poor journal! be forgotten
with all this world which is fading
away from me. I will write here no
more until I come to life again, until
God re-awakens me out of this tomb
in which my soul lies buried. Maurice,
my beloved! it was not thus with me
when I had you ! Tlie thought of Maurice
could revive me from the most profound
depression : to have him in the world
was enough for me. With Maurice, to
be buried alive would not have seemed
dull to me.'

And, as a burden to this funereal
strain, the old vide et n4ant of Bossuet,
profound, solemn, sterile : —

' So beautiful in the morning, and in
the evening, tliat ! how the thought dis-
enchants one, and turns one from the
world ! I can understand that Spanish
grandee who, after lifting up the wind-
ing-sheet of a beautiful queen, threw
261

ESSAYS

himself into the cloister and became a
great saint. I would have all my friends
at La Trappe, in the interest of their
eternal welfare. Not that in the world
one cannot be saved, not that there are
not in the world duties to be discharged
as sacred and as beautiful as there are
in the cloister, but . . . '

And there she stops, and a day or
two afterwards her journal comes to
an end. A few fragments, a few letters
carry us on a little later, but after the
22nd of August 1845 there is nothing.
To make known her brother's genius
to the world was the one task she set
herself after his death ; in 1840 came
Madame Sand's noble tribute to him in
the Revue des Deux Mondes ; then followed
projects of raising a yet more enduring
monument to his fame, by collecting
and publishing his scattered composi-
tions; these projects I have already
said, were baffled; — Mdlle. de Guerin's
letter of the 22nd of August 1845 relates
to this disappointment. In silence, dur-
262

EUGENIE DE GUERIN

ing nearly three years more, she faded
away at Le Cayla. She died on the
31st of May 1848.

M. Trebutien has accompHshed the
pious task in which Mdlle. de Guerin was
baffled, and has established Maurice's
fame ; by publishing this journal he has
established Eugenie's also. She was
very different from her brother; but
she too, like him, had that in her which
preserves a reputation. Her soul had
the same characteristic quality as his
talent, — distinction. Of this quality the
world is impatient ; it chafes against
it, rails at it, insults it, hates it; — it
ends by receiving its influence, and
by undergoing its law. This quality
at last inexorably corrects the world's
blunders, and fixes the world's ideals.
It procures that the popular poet shall
not finally pass for a Pindar, nor the
popular historian for a Tacitus, nor the
popular preacher for a Bossuet. To
the circle of spirits marked by this
rare quality, Maurice and Eugenie de
263

ESSAYS

Guerin belong; they will take their
place in the sky which these inhabit,
and shine close to one another, lucida
sidei^a.

264

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