CHAPTER II.
PERIOD OF UNCERTAINTY--VOYAGE TO THE ISLE OF FRANCE--ACQUAINTANCE WITH J. J. ROUSSEAU--THE CRISIS.
He felt about for some time longer before finally taking up the pen. In vain his friend Hennin urged him: "Above all, do not keep saying as you have done hitherto, 'I will write, I will publish;' write, publish, and leave it to your friends to make your work a success." Bernardin de Saint-Pierre hesitated: "I am occupying myself," he replied, "in putting in order the journal of my travels; not that I wish to become an author, that is too distasteful a career and leads to nothing, but I imitate those who learn to draw in order to adorn their rooms." (Letter of the 29th of December, 1771). He speaks to him in the same letter of getting the Government to give him a mission to the Indies, so that he may be able to regale the ministers with a few more memorials on politics or strategy.
He hesitated because he did not know how to set to work. He thought he saw a manner of describing nature for which he knew of no models; and instead of trusting to himself, he appealed to his writers, who could do nothing for him. In the _Harmonies de la Nature_, his last great work, into which he put all his fragments, there is a rhetorical lecture upon the rules of landscape painting, which bears witness to the care with which he had analysed the methods of Virgil. In it Saint-Pierre explains to some imaginary pupils the means employed by the poet to obtain the desired effect: "When Virgil tells us, 'The ash-tree is very beautiful _in the woods_, the poplar _on the banks of the rivers_,' he puts the tree in the singular and the site in the plural, _in order to enlarge his horizon_. If he had put the vegetation in the plural, and the sites in the singular, they would not have had the same scope. He would have contracted his different scenes if he had said: 'The ash-trees are very beautiful _in a wood_; the poplars _on the bank of a river_.' The lines of the picture once fixed, Virgil throws the flash of light upon his landscape, and it appears either sad or smiling. He succeeds in enlivening it with bees, swans, birds and flocks; or in saddening it by painting it desolate. A landscape is always melancholy when it includes nothing but the primitive forces of nature."
It is a subtle piece of observation, but the feeling for nature which was awakening in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and for which he was striving to find expression, was more complicated than that of Virgil. Neither the _Eclogues_ nor the _Georgics_ taught him anything about what were to be the great novelties of descriptive literature. The ancients did not feel this need for precise and picturesque detail, which has enabled us to take the portrait of a corner of country as we do that of a person, with the same minutiæ, and the same care about the resemblance. On the other hand, they had little of the intuition for that mysterious correspondence between the scene and the spectator, for that reciprocal action of nature upon our feelings, and of our feelings upon the manner in which we look upon nature that in our day gives so personal an emphasis to literary pictures of scenery, and can lend a tragedy to the description of a bit of meadow. The only one of the Greek or Latin writers, who has described the relations of our souls with the world around us, has done it magnificently; but Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had not read him. He was a Father of the Church of the fourth century, Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, some of whose pages make us think of Chateaubriand.
"Yesterday, tortured by my regrets, I seated myself under the shade of a thick wood, eating my heart in solitude; for in trouble this silent communing with one's soul is a consolation that I love. From the tree-tops where the breeze murmured, and the birds were singing, gladdened by the sunlight, there fell a soft influence of sleep. The grasshoppers hidden in the grass echoed through the wood, a clear stream softly gliding through its cool glades bathed my feet; as for me, I remained pre-occupied with my grief, and had no care for these things; for when the soul is overwhelmed with sorrow it cannot yield itself up to pleasure. In the tumult of my troubled heart, I spoke aloud the thoughts which were contending within me: 'What have I been? What am I? What shall I become? I know not. One wiser than I knows no better. Lost in clouds I wander to and fro; having nothing, not even the dream of what I desire.'"[9]
One might urge that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had not read the poets of the sixteenth century any more than the Fathers of the Church. It was not the fashion of his day, and he was not the sort of man to go and explore the libraries; he was too much occupied in making discoveries in the fields. Like almost all his contemporaries, he jumped from antiquity to the seventeenth century with only Montaigne in the interval. After Homer, Virgil, the Gospel, and Plutarch, his intellectual sustenance had been Racine, La Fontaine, Fénélon, and at last coming to his contemporaries, Jean Jacques Rousseau. In vain he questioned them upon the idea which pursued him; not one of them gave him a satisfactory answer. Racine, who they say was enchanted with the valley of Port Royal, had had no room in his tragedies for word pictures. La Fontaine had more the feeling for the country than for nature. Fénélon saw the woods and the fields from the point of view of the ancients. We have purposely not mentioned Buffon; Bernardin did not understand or appreciate him.
There remained Rousseau, who loved the beauty of the universe with all his passionate heart; but the fine descriptions of Rousseau appear in his posthumous works--in the _Confessions_ and the _Reveries_ which were published, it is well to insist upon this, nine years after the _Voyage to the Isle of France_. The celebrated landscapes in _La Nouvelle Heloïse_, which Saint-Pierre had certainly studied, have about them something conventional, which makes them appear cold. Call to mind Saint-Preux in the mountains of Valais:
"Here immense rocks hung in ruins above my head; there high and thundering cascades drenched me with their thick mist; again, an eternal torrent would open beside me an abyss, of which my eyes did not dare to sound the depths. Sometimes I lost myself in the obscurity of a thick wood. Sometimes on emerging from a ravine my eyes would suddenly be rejoiced by a pleasant plain. An astonishing admixture of wilderness and cultivation showed everywhere the hand of men, where one would have thought that they had never penetrated: beside a cavern you found houses, dried vine branches where one only sought brambles, vines growing upon landslips, excellent fruit upon rocks, and fields in the midst of precipices."
In this bit, almost all the adjectives are abstract. The torrent is _eternal_, the meadow _agreeable_, the fruits _excellent_. It is still in the style of Poussin, and nothing in it foretells the pictures in the manner of Corot and Théodore Rousseau, which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was soon to give to us. Let us say at once, in order to establish the claim of the author of _Paul and Virginia_ to the character of an innovator and pioneer, that the posthumous works of Jean Jacques only give us his own impressions of a picture which he suggests rather than shows to us. The immortal summer night of the _Confessions_, on the road near Lyons, or the walk to Ménilmontant of the _Reveries_, after the vintage and through the leafless country, leave in the memory recollections of sensations rather than pictures. One recalls a breeze of voluptuous warmth, a soft light of autumn; but the physiognomy of the country escapes us. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre will be the first to paint it for us accurately. Just because he is much less great than his glorious predecessor, we must give him his due, and insist upon his originality.
Thus thrown upon his own resources, and finding by great good fortune no one to imitate, he decided to take up the pen, and wrote, as well as he could, and with many erasures, his _Voyage to the Isle of France_. He had succeeded in sufficiently clearing up his ideas to know very well what he wanted to do. He had two objects in view: in the first place he wished to awaken a love of nature amongst the public. "By dint of familiarising ourselves with the arts," he says in _The Voyage_, "Nature becomes alien to us; we are even so artificial that we call natural objects curiosities." He was shocked that the multitude who became enamoured of the works of men could pass by the works of God without seeing them, and he boasted for his part that he "preferred a vine-stock to a column ... the flight of a gnat to the colonnade of the Louvre." Moreover, he could not understand how one could separate man from his surroundings, from the air which he breathed, the soil which he trod upon, the plants and animals which were about him. "A landscape," he says in his preface, "is the background of the picture of human life."
The second object of his work was in his eyes still more important than the first. The awakening of a love of nature amongst men was not to be a simple artistic pleasure. Saint-Pierre designed to make use of it to teach these same multitudes to seek evidences of the Divinity elsewhere than in books. He wished to restore to the France of the philosophers the sense of the presence of God in the universe, and the best way to do it seemed to him to be to draw attention towards the marvels of creation. No argument in his eyes was worth a day passed in the fields in looking at what was about him and at his feet. "Nature," he wrote, "presents such ingenious harmonies, such benevolent designs; mute scenes so expressive and little noticed, that if one could present even a feeble picture of them to the most thoughtless man, he would be forced to exclaim, 'There is some moving spirit in all this.'" In another place he apologises himself for having written about plants and animals without being a naturalist, and he adds: "Natural history not being confined to the libraries it seemed to me that it was a book wherein all the world might read. I have thought I could perceive the tangible evidence of the existence of a Providence, and I have spoken of it, not as a system which amuses my mind but as a feeling of which my heart is full."
We notice in the two last lines the avowal, as yet timid and obscure, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's favourite maxim, the key to all his schemes philosophical, scientific, political, or educational. He always strove, and more and more openly as he gained reputation and authority, to persuade the world that feeling is ever a better guide than reason in all questions, and that it gives us greater certainty. He himself gave an example in applying it to everything, and in particular to the truths of religion. We should say truthfully, that he was sufficiently of his day, sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the encyclopædists to believe himself already conquered if he appealed to reason in favour of God. He thought it safest to address himself to the feelings of the reader rather than to his intelligence, in order to reconcile him with a personage so little in favour.
This fine programme was unhappily very indifferently realised in the _Voyage to the Isle of France_. Bernardin had first and foremost an immense difficulty to contend against in the absence of a picturesque vocabulary. "The art of depicting nature is so new," he said in the course of his narrative, "that its terminology is yet uninvented. Try to describe a mountain so that it shall be recognisable: when you have spoken of the foundation, of the sides, and the summit, you will have said everything. But what variety is there in those forms bulging, rounded, extended, here flattened, there hollowed, &c.! You can find nothing but paraphrases. There is the same difficulty with the plains and valleys.... It is not astonishing, then, that travellers give such poor accounts of natural objects. If they describe a country to you, you will see in it towns, rivers, mountains; but their descriptions are as barren as a geographical map: Hindostan resembles Europe; _there is no character in it_."
There are, in fact, accounts of travels of the eighteenth century in which one might confound a landscape in the East, with one in Touraine. Not only they did not see so much difference as we do: they wanted words to give to each its own idiosyncrasy. To Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is due the honour of having begun the work of enriching the language, which was one of the glories of the Romantic School.
Having to some extent overcome this first difficulty, Bernardin encountered a second before which he succumbed. That was his inexperience, and the timidity of a novice who dares not let himself go. His narrative is dry and often tiresome. There are here and there fine descriptions, written with a certain breadth and musical expression, but the whole only creates an interest because it is an attempt to achieve something new. The picture of the port at Lorient is one of the best things in it. It is at the beginning and it makes one hope for better things.
"A strong wind was blowing. We had crossed through the town without meeting any one. From the walls of the citadel I could see the inky horizon, the island of Grois covered with mist, the open sea tossing restlessly; in the distance great ships close-reefed, and poor sailing luggers in the trough of the sea; upon the shore troops of women benumbed with cold and fear; a sentinel on the top of a bastion surprised at the hardihood of those poor men who fish with the gulls in the midst of the tempest."
There is grandeur and emphasis in this passage. It has character, to use Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's expression; the sea which he paints for us is the real ocean, and the ocean as seen from the coast of France on a stormy day. He is no less happy in describing familiar things; witness his description of the fish market. "We returned well buttoned up, very wet, and holding on our hats with our hands. In passing through Lorient we saw the whole market-place covered with fish; skates white and dark-coloured, others bristling with spines; dog-fish, monstrous conger-eels writhing upon the ground; large baskets full of crabs and lobsters; heaps of oysters, mussels, and scallops; cod, soles, turbot, in fine a miraculous draught like that of the apostles."
The tempest at sea in the Mozambique Channel is perhaps the best page in the book. In order to enjoy it thoroughly, we must turn first to the classical tempests before Saint-Pierre's time, which are still more featureless, more destitute of character, than the landscapes. The following example is taken from _Telemachus_: "While they thus forgot the dangers of the sea a sudden tempest agitated the heavens and the sea. The unchained winds roared with fury in the sails; dark waves beat against the sides of the vessel, which groaned under their blows. Now we rose on to the summits of the swollen waves; now the sea seemed to disappear from under the ship and to plunge us into the abyss." When one has read one of these accounts one has read them all. The same terms, few in number, serve to fashion indefinitely the same images of groaning vessels which roaring winds precipitate into the abyss, and it is not even necessary to have seen the sea in order to acquit oneself quite respectably: it is enough if one consults the proper authors. Not a word of the description which we have been reading belonged really to Fénélon. He took it in its entirety from Virgil and Ovid:
... stridens aquilone procella. Velum adversa ferit.
(Virgil. _The Eniad._)
Sæpe? dat ingentem fluctu latus icta fragorem.
(Ovid. _The Metamorphosis._)
Hi summo in fluctu pendent; his unda dehiscens Terram inter fluctus aperit.
(Virgil. _The Eniad._)
Now compare with this literary tempest the realistic description of Saint-Pierre, taken from hour to hour, minute to minute, and put down in a note-book as the rolling of the vessel permitted.
"On the 23rd (June, 1768), at half-past twelve, a tremendously heavy sea stove in four windows out of five in the large saloon, although their shutters were fastened with crossbars. The vessel made a backward movement as if she were going down by the stern. Hearing the noise, I opened the door of my cabin, which in a moment was full of water and floating furniture. The water escaped by the door of the grand saloon as though through the sluices of a mill; upwards of twenty hogsheads had come in. The carpenters were called, a light was brought, and they hastened to nail up other port-holes. We were then flying along under the foresail; the wind and the sea were terrible....
"As the rolling of the ship prevented me from sleeping, I had thrown myself into my berth in my boots and dressing-gown; my dog seemed to be seized with extraordinary fear. While I was amusing myself trying to calm him, I saw a flash of lightning through the dim light of my port-hole, and heard the noise of thunder. It might have been about half-past three. An instant later a second peal of thunder burst overhead, and my dog began to tremble and howl. Then came a third flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a third peal of thunder, and I heard some one in the forecastle cry that the ship was in danger; in fact, the noise was like the roar of a cannon discharged close to us; there was no reverberation. As I smelt a strong odour of sulphur, I went up on deck, where at first I felt it intensely cold. A great silence reigned there, and the night was so dark that I could see nothing. However, I made out dimly some one near me. I asked him what had happened; he replied, 'They have just carried the officer of the watch to his cabin; he has fainted, as has also the pilot. The lightning struck our vessel, and our mainmast is split.' I could in fact distinguish the yard of the topsail, which had fallen upon the cross-trees of the main-top. Above it there was neither mast nor rigging, and the whole of the crew had retired into the chart-room. They made a round of the decks, and found that the lightning had descended the whole length of the mast. A woman who had just been confined had seen a globe of fire at the foot of her berth; nevertheless, they found no trace of fire. Everybody awaited with impatience the end of the night.
"At daybreak I went up on deck again. In the sky were some clouds, white and copper-coloured. The wind blew from the west, where the horizon appeared of a ruddy silver, as though the sun were going to rise there; the east was entirely black. The sea rose in huge waves, resembling jagged mountain ranges, formed of tier upon tier of hills. On their summit were great jets of spray tinted with the colours of the rainbow. They rose to such a height that from the quarter-deck they seemed to us higher than the topmast. The wind made so much noise in the rigging it was impossible for us to hear one another. We were scudding before the wind under the foresail. A stump of the topmast hung from the end of the mainmast, which was split in eight places down to the level of the deck. Five of the iron bands with which it was bound had been melted away...."
Here are now some extracts from one of Pierre Loti's storms. We shall thus be able to estimate the progress which descriptive literature has made in the last two centuries.
"The waves, still small, began to chase one another and melt together; they were at first marbled with white foam, which on their crests broke into spray. Then with a kind of hiss there rose a smoke: you would have said the water was boiling or burning, and the strident clamour of it all increased from moment to moment.... The great bank of clouds which had gathered on the western horizon in the shape of an island, was beginning to break up from the top and the fragments were scudding over the sky. It seemed to be inexhaustible; the wind drew it out, elongated it, and stretched it, bringing out of it dark curtains, which it spread over the clear yellow sky, now become livid, cold, and dark.
"And all the while it grew stronger and stronger, this mighty breath which made all things to tremble.
"The ship, the _Marie_, prepares for bad weather, and begins to fly to leeward.
"Overhead it had become quite dark, a dead vault that seemed as if it would crush you--with a few spots of a yet blacker blackness, which were spread over it in formless patches. It seemed almost like a motionless dome, and you had to look closely to see that it was in the full whirl of movement. Great sheets of grey cloud hurrying by and unceasingly replaced by others, rose from the bottom of the horizon, like gloomy curtains unrolling from an endless coil.
"The _Marie_ fled faster and faster before the storm, and the storm fled after her as if from some mysterious terror. Everything--the wind, the sea, the ship, the clouds--was seized with the same panic of flight and speed towards the same point. And all this passion of movement grew greater, under an ever-darkening sky, in the midst of ever-increasing din.
"From everything arose a Titanic clamour, like the prelude of an apocalypse foreboding the horror of a world's catastrophe. Amidst it you could distinguish thousands of voices; those above were shrill or deep, and seemed far off because they were so mighty; that was the wind, the great soul of this confusion, the invisible power that dominated it all. It filled one with fear, but there were other sound nearer, more material, more ominous of destruction, which came from the writhen water, that hissed as it were upon embers."[10]
After the pages which we have just read there is nothing more in the way of progress possible. The only thing to be done would be to return to the great simplicity of Homer, Lucretius, and Virgil, to obtain the same emotions in two or three lines.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's style is bald beside that of Pierre Loti; it requires an effort to return to it. The arrival at Port Louis of the ship, disabled, and filled with scurvy-smitten people, is, however, striking in its simplicity. "Just imagine this riven mainmast, this ship with her flag of distress, firing guns every minute; a few sailors, looking like spectres, seated on the deck; the open hatches, whence rose a poisonous vapour; the 'tween-decks full of dying people, the deck covered with invalids exposed to the heat of the sun, and who died whilst speaking to one. I shall never forget a young man of eighteen, to whom the evening before I had promised a little lemonade. I sought him on the deck amongst the others; they pointed him out to me lying on a plank; he had died during the night."
The passages in which the thought and the expression are thus wedded are unfortunately rare in the _Voyage to the Isle of France_. In general, the writer does not yet understand how to make the best use of his sketches and notes; and he did not hesitate later on to go over his first sketches and develop them. This makes it very convenient for following his progress in the difficult art which he was creating. One can judge of it in his account of a sunset at sea in the tropics, which he re-wrote for the _Études de la Nature_. Here is the sketch as it appeared in the _Voyage to the Isle of France_:
"One evening the clouds gathered towards the west in the form of a vast net, resembling in texture white silk. As the sun passed behind it each strand appeared in relief surrounded with a circle of gold. The gold gradually dissolved into flame-colour and crimson tints, and low on the horizon appeared pale tones of purple, green, and azure.
"Often in the sky there are formed landscapes of singular variety, where you can find the most fantastic shapes, promontories, steep declivities, towers, and hamlets, over which the light throws in succession all sorts of prismatic colours."
This is but a summary account of the scene, a sort of table of contents of the state of the sky on a certain evening. The second description is almost too excessive, and contains too much imagery and too many colours.
"Sometimes the winds roll up the clouds as though they were strands of silk; then they drive them to the west, crossing them over one another like the withies of a basket. They throw to one side of this network the clouds which they have not made use of, and which are not few in number. They roll them up into immense white masses like snow, and pile them up one upon another, like the Cordilleras of Peru, giving to them the forms of mountains, caverns, and rocks. Then towards the evening they calm down a bit, as if they feared to disarrange their work. When the sun goes down behind this magnificent tracery, one sees through all the interstices a multitude of luminous rays, which, lighting up two sides of each mesh, seem to illuminate it with a golden aureole, while the other two sides, which are in shadow, are tipped with superb tones of pale red. Four or five rays of light rise from the setting sun right to the zenith, and edge with a golden fringe the vaguely-defined outline of this celestial barrier, throwing their glowing reflections upon the pyramids of the airy mountains beside them, which appear gold and vermilion. It is then that you see in the midst of their numerous ridges a multitude of valleys which extend into space, and are marked at their entrance by some shade of flesh-colour or pink. The celestial valleys present in their diverse contours inimitable tones of white, which melt away into space as far as the eye can reach, or shadows which lengthen out towards the other clouds without losing themselves in them. You see here and there, emerging from the cavernous sides of these cloud mountains, streams of light which are thrown in bars of gold and silver upon rocks of coral. Here are gloomy rocks pierced through so that you can see the pure blue of heaven through their apertures; there appear long stretches of golden sands, which extend into the wondrous depths of the crimson, scarlet, and emerald-green sky. By degrees the luminous clouds become faint-coloured, and the faint-coloured fade into shadow. Their forms are as varied as their tints, and in turn they appear as islands, hamlets, hills planted with palms, great bridges across rivers, countries of gold, of amethysts, of rubies, or rather there is nothing of all this but just colours and heavenly forms, which no brush can paint, and no tongue express."
The landscapes of the _Voyage to the Isle of France_ are for the most part very sad. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre found the Isle of France ugly and gloomy, perhaps because he had had nothing but trouble there. Throughout his narrative he tries to convey the impression of a barren, cheerless country, in some places covered with scorched grass, which makes it look "black as a coal-pit," in others paved with stones of an iron-grey colour, which form an unpleasant surface to a rugged country. Plants, which he generally loves so much, do not appeal to him there. Many are thorny, others mal-odorous, and the flowers are not pretty. He does not like the trees, they have not the superb bearing of French oaks and chestnuts, and their stiff leaves of dark green give an effect of sadness to the verdure. Here and there, however, one comes across delightful spots where the great woods are enlivened by babbling brooks, but these solitudes, the refuge for runaway slaves, are the theatre of hideous man-hunts. You see this unhappy quarry killed or wounded with gun-shots, and hear the crack of the whip in the air like pistol-shots, and cries which rend one's heart, "Spare me, master, have pity!" To the heart thus oppressed the beauties of the landscape disappear, and one only sees in it "an abominable country." Abominable country, abominable abode, abominable inhabitants, for the most part--that is, the Isle of France of the _Voyage_--little in all conscience to impress our minds with the idea of a beneficent Providence, careful of our needs. The author saw this, for he abandoned this part of his programme and kept to picturesque effects, producing in the end a meagre book, only a rough sketch of what he had in his head.
The volume appeared in the first months of the year 1773, and in the article of the _Correspondence littéraire_, by Grunin, in the end of February. The letter which accompanied the copy destined for Hennin is dated March 17: "Here at last, sir and dear friend, is some of the fruit of my garden.... Send me your opinion of my _Voyage_." Saint-Pierre added in another letter of the 1st of June: "My book has had a great literary success; but that is almost the only profit which I have obtained from it."
Did he really have a great success? It is doubtful as regards the masculine public. Hennin kept an obstinate silence on the subject in his letters, to the great disgust of the author, who had the bad taste to persist, and who wrote to him two years later: "Why do you not talk to me of my _Voyage_?" Duval, his friend at St. Petersburg, insinuated among his compliments a few words on the passages which suggested "an imitation of Rousseau, of Voltaire, or of Montesquieu." Grunin did not understand it at all. Here is the essential part of his notice: "M. de Saint-Pierre is not wanting in wit, still less in feeling; this last quality appears to be his especial and distinctive characteristic. The greater part of the work consists of observations made at sea, and details of natural history. That struck me as very superficial." Nothing about the style, nor the descriptive scenes, of which the number ought, one would think, to have arrested his observation. Grunin took the _Voyage_ for a scientific work and found it bad; its originality entirely escaped him. It was the same thing with Leharpe, who does not even mention Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in his _Cours de Litterature_, that is to say that he took little notice of secondary works. Then Sainte-Beuve, who collected his information with so much care, has contradicted himself about the effect produced by the _Voyage to the Isle of France_. One reads in his first article upon Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: "This narrative had a well-deserved success,"[11] and in his second article, written thirteen years later: "The work received very little notice."[12]
It is curious to compare the indifference of the men towards Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's attempt, with the enthusiasm of the women for the young unknown author who had spoken to them of the colour of the clouds and the melancholy of the great forests. Women arrive at a conclusion much more quickly than men when it is a question of feeling. The women who read the _Voyage to the Isle of France_ understood at once that there was something in it beyond mere observations made at sea and natural history details, more even than sentimental tirades upon the negroes. They divined that they were being introduced to new joys, and they hastened to seek them under the guidance of the sympathetic master who interpreted Nature to them, her beauties, her gentleness, and her passion. The interest which they took in this first work, not very attractive as a whole, was a sort of miraculous instinct on their part.
The _Voyage to the Isle of France_ had hardly appeared before Bernardin de Saint-Pierre set to work again, in spite of all his protestations against ever becoming an author. His diffidence had disappeared. He felt himself to be full of courage and spirit, and it was not to his success that he owed this, but simply to a visit which he chanced to pay, and which was in its consequences the great event of his career. "In the month of May, 1772, a friend having proposed to take me to see J. J. Rousseau, he conducted me to a house in the rue Plâtrière, nearly opposite to the Post Office. We ascended to the fourth story and knocked at the door, which was opened by Mme. Rousseau, who said to us, 'Enter, gentlemen, you will find "my husband" in.' We passed through a tiny ante-room, in which were neatly arranged all the household chattels, to a room where J. J. Rousseau was sitting, in a frock-coat, with a white cap on his head, occupied in copying music. He rose with a smile, offered us seats, and returned to his work, giving his attention all the while to the conversation."[13]
Rousseau was sixty in 1772; his infirmities, his morbid ideas on the subject of persecution, and his disputes with Hume, had put the finishing touch to his reputation as a dangerous lunatic. His visitor was struck with the sad expression underlying his "smiling air." But he was irresistible when he was not roused. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre joyfully yielded to this all-powerful fascination. He felt that he had found the master in literature who had been wanting to him, he who was to give him the right impulse and direction, and that by oral teaching, so much more fruitful than written instruction.
"Near him," he continues, "was a spinet, on which from time to time he tried over some airs. Two little beds, covered with coarse print, striped blue and white like the hangings of his room, a chest of drawers, a table, and a few chairs completed his furniture. On the walls hung a map of the forest and park of Montmorency, where he had lived, and a print of his old benefactor the king of England. His wife was seated sewing; a canary sang in its cage suspended from the ceiling; some sparrows came to pick up bread-crumbs from the window-sills on the side of the street, and on those of the ante-room one saw boxes and pots full of plants such as Nature chose to sow there. The whole effect of this little household was one of cleanliness, peace, and simplicity, which gave one pleasure."
It suggests one of those interiors of Chardin, where the neat little mistress of the house in white cap and apron is busy about the children's dinner. It is the most charming picture we possess of Rousseau at home.
The conversation turned upon travels, the news of the day, and the works of the master of the house. Rousseau was most gracious all the time, and reconducted his visitors to the head of the stairs; but who could tell with so capricious a being whether this first visit would lead to anything? It did, in fact, to Bernardin's intense satisfaction. "Some days after that he came to return my visit. He had on a round wig, well powdered and curled, a nankeen suit, and carried his hat under his arm. In his hand he held a small cane. His whole appearance was modest but very neat, as was that of Socrates, we are told."
This second interview also passed off most agreeably, in looking at tropical plants and seeds, but it was followed by the first tiff. Deceived by the good-natured air of his new friend, Saint-Pierre included him in a distribution he was making of coffee, which he had received from the Colonies. Rousseau wrote to him: "Sir, we have only met once, and you already begin to make me presents; that is being a little too hasty it seems to me. As I am not in a position to make presents myself, it is my custom, in order to avoid the annoyance of unequal friendships, not to receive the persons who make me presents; you can do as you like about leaving this coffee with me, or sending to fetch it; but in the first case please accept my thanks, and there will be an end of our acquaintanceship."
They made it up on condition that Saint-Pierre received "a root of ginseng[14] and a work on Ichthyology," in exchange for his coffee. Rousseau, appeased, invited him to dinner for the next day. After the repast he read his MSS. to him. They talked, the hours flew by, and there resulted from these difficult beginnings an intimacy, stormy, as it was bound to be with Jean Jacques, but wonderfully fruitful for the disciple, who drank in deep draughts of the nectar of poetry, if not of wisdom, which fell from the master's lips. All this took place during their long walks together in the environs of Paris. They would start on foot, early in the morning, each choosing in turn the direction of their walk. Rousseau loved the banks of the Seine and the heights above them, as deserted then as they are peopled to-day. They would go through the bois de Boulogne, botanizing as they went along, and they sometimes saw in "these solitudes" young girls occupied in making their toilet in the open air. A ferry boat would land the two friends at the foot of Mount Valérien, and they would climb up to visit the hermit at the top, who would give them food; or perhaps Rousseau would lead his companion towards the height of Sèvres, promising him "beautiful pine-woods and purple moors." The "deserted commons" of Saint Cloud had also their attractions; nevertheless all that side of Paris rather erred in the way of extreme wildness. Such a powerful effect did Nature have upon these her first lovers, intoxicated with their discoveries, and whose sensations had not been discounted by descriptions taken from books.
When Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was the guide they chose by preference the direction of Prés-Saint-Gervais and Romainville. The familiar and peaceful nooks and corners around these attracted him more than the extreme wildness of Sèvres and Ville-d'Avray. "You have shown me the places which please you," he said; "I am now going to show you one which is to my taste." They passed by the park of Saint-Fargean, absorbed to-day into Belleville, and, by almost imperceptible degrees, gained the gentle heights of those charming solitudes--for they were also solitudes, but less severe than those chosen by Rousseau; green grass there took the place of the brambles of Saint Cloud, and cherry-trees and gooseberry-bushes the dark pines of Sèvres. One had not to seek hospitality from hermits; there were inns, where Rousseau liked himself to make an omelet of bacon, while Saint-Pierre made the coffee, a luxury brought in a box from Paris. They would return by another road, gathering plants and digging up roots as they went; and nothing can express the charm with which the cantankerous and suspicious Jean Jacques knew how to surround these excursions. He showed himself a simple-minded, good fellow, an easy-going and cheery comrade, interesting himself in everything, talking of everything, and lavishing his ideas with the magnificent prodigality of the rich.
Whether Bernardin de Saint-Pierre turned the conversation upon philosophy or questions of economy, upon the Greeks and Romans, or hygiene, upon his father the watchmaker, or upon Voltaire, the stream flowed on in great waves, pouring out pell-mell anecdotes, aphorisms, theories, descriptions of scenery, and literary opinions. One might have said that he was taking his revenge for those conversations in society in which he was known to fall short. "My wit is always half an hour after that of others," he said of himself. It was not so in a _tête-a-tête_, and every one of his words entered like the stroke of a plummet into his young companion's mind, whose ideas had need of a little help before they could burst forth. The effect of all this was not long in showing itself. Saint-Pierre has fixed the dates in a letter to Hennin of July 2, 1778, six years after his intimacy with Rousseau. "At last I hope to find water in my wells; for six years I have jotted down a great many ideas, which require putting in order. Amongst much sand there are, I hope, some grains of gold."
The enchantment of the walks lasted until their return to Paris. Then Rousseau's brow would grow dark at the sight of the first houses of the suburb. His mania resumed possession of him. He frowned, hastened his steps, became taciturn and morose. One day, when his friend tried to distract him, he stopped short, to say to him all at once, in the middle of the street: "I would rather be exposed to the arrows of the Parthians than to the gaze of men." This mood would sometimes be prolonged as long as they were in the town, and no one was then safe from the strokes of his sarcasm.
"One day, when I went to return a book ... he received me without saying a word, and with an austere and gloomy air. I spoke to him; he only replied in monosyllables, continuing all the time to copy music; he struck out or erased his work every minute. To distract myself, I opened a book which was on the table. 'You like reading, sir?' he said, in a discontented tone. I got up to go; he rose at the same time, and reconducted me to the head of the stairs, saying, when I begged him not to trouble himself: 'One must be ceremonious with persons with whom one is not on a familiar footing.'" Saint-Pierre, hurt, swore that he would never return; but they met, arranged another walk, and Rousseau once more became amiable at sight of the first bushes. "At last," he said, "here we are beyond the carriages, pavements, and men."[15]
Their intimacy lasted until after Rousseau's departure for Ermenonville in 1778, a short time before his death. His friend mourned his loss bitterly, and always spoke of him with tenderness and admiration. He did not forget how much he owed to him. He acknowledged, at least in part--which is, after all, fine and praiseworthy--that if he had shown a spark of the sacred fire, it was Rousseau who had lighted it in their intercourse. He has never sought to hide the fact that his works are strewn with ideas which occurred to them during their walks, and which they had discussed as they sauntered together under the shadow of some tree, or in the green woodland paths. The results of these walks with Jean Jacques will be found in the _Études de la Nature_. In comparing this work with the _Voyage to the Isle of France_, one can see exactly what Bernardin owed to his illustrious friend. The _Voyage_ proves to us that he knew what he wished to do long before he met the author of the _Reveries_, but that, at the same time, he would never have reached the goal without the impulse given to him by a genius more robust than his own.
It hung on quite a small chance that his career was not blighted at the very moment when his fancy was preparing to take flight. The success which the _Voyage to the Isle of France_ had with the fair sex nearly proved fatal to its author. Their approval had to be paid for, as is always the case. M. de Saint-Pierre was invited into the fashionable world, and charming women flung themselves at his head, with their habitual indiscretion, and caused him acute suffering. He had scruples, and he was vain. The world laughed at his scruples, his vanity could not console him for its scoffs, and the women did not thank him for his respect; so that his soul was filled with bitterness and disgust. He could not get over the depravity of society, and was seized with a morbid irritation against it. Some months after he had mixed in it, his imagination made it appear to him to be wholly and solely occupied in making fun of him, of his goodness, of his gentleness, of his pride, of all the virtues that he liked to attribute to himself, and which he chose, as is the habit of all of us, amongst those he least possessed. Soon he could not hear any one laugh without thinking they were laughing at him, and every gesture made him suspicious. He said later: "I could not even walk along a path in a public garden where a few people were assembled without thinking, if they looked at me, that they were disparaging me, even if they were quite unknown to me." Thirty years later he was still persuaded that Mlle. de Lespinasse had intended to insult him one day when she offered him a sweetmeat, at the same time praising him for his kindness on a recent occasion.
He fought duels in order to put a stop to the whispered raillery which he thought he heard around him. Two fortunate affairs were powerless to soothe his nerves, and strange disorders began to make him fear for his reason. He consulted physicians, who recommended diverse remedies; but he required money for them, and his bookseller had not paid him. Meanwhile the evil grew from bad to worse, and at last came the crisis. "Flashes of light, resembling lightning, disturbed my sight; every object appeared to me to be double, and as though in motion.... My heart was not less troubled than my head. On the finest summer day I could not cross the Seine in a boat without feeling intolerable qualms.... If in a public garden I but passed near the basin of a fountain full of water, I felt a sensation of spasm and horror. There were times when I believed that I must have been bitten by a mad dog without knowing it."
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was mad, not incurably so, or enough to be shut up; but, for all that, mad. He knows it, acknowledges it, and adds to his heartrending confession a note, which explains how he was able to hide his condition from the world around him. "God granted me this signal favour, that however much my reason was disturbed, I never lost the consciousness of my condition myself, or forgot myself before others. Directly I felt the approach of the paroxysms of my malady, I would retire into solitude." Here follows a slight metaphysical discussion upon "this extraordinary reason," which warned him "that his ordinary reason was disturbed."
Just about the same time his brother Dutailly began the series of extravagances which obliged them to shut him up.
Meantime, the world from which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had succeeded in hiding himself, was without indulgence for him, and pronounced him to be wicked, while he was in reality only unhappy. We have now arrived at the years of pain, of physical and moral distress, of equivocal ills, absurd suspicions, quarrels, ill-will, and, alas! of begging. Some of his friends became estranged by his incomprehensible humour, others gave him up, and of this number were "the philosophers," d'Alembert, Condorcet, all the intimates of Mlle. de Lespinasse. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has, in an _Apologie_ addressed to Mme. Necker to beg her protection, naïvely explained that he quarrelled with "the philosophers" because they failed to induce Turgot to help him. "If they had been my friends," he adds, with indignation, "could they have acted so? Pensions, easy posts, rings for their fingers, are distributed to their clients, while to me they only come to advise me to leave the country, although I showed them that I had the greatest repugnance to such a course."[16] (January 26, 1780.)
He retired from the world, living an unsociable life in a miserable lodging-house, not willingly seeing any one but Rousseau, so well able to understand a misanthrope, and a few faithful friends who put up with all his moods, at the head of whom was Hennin, whose patience was admirable. The position which the latter held in the Foreign Office led to his being charged with the presentation of the petitions that his gloomy and needy friend addressed to the ministers; and the task was not an easy or pleasant one, as their correspondence testifies. Saint-Pierre begged shamelessly. "I have neither linen nor clothes; my excursions on foot have worn them out. If you wish to see me again, induce them to give me the means of appearing. You know that your department decidedly owes me something.... Do remember to think of me in the distribution of the king's favours; I need them greatly.... I am reduced to borrowing, and I have nothing to expect till February of next year." And so on from month to month, if not from week to week. If there was delay in sending the money, M. Hennin would receive a bitter letter, in which M. de Saint-Pierre would excuse himself for not having visited him on account of the bad weather, adding: "If I had received the favour which you led me to hope for, I should have taken a carriage." If the money was forthcoming, it was still worse for Hennin, because of the ceremonies with which it had to be conveyed to its recipient. There is amongst their correspondence a series of letters which are quite comic, about a sum of £300 that Saint-Pierre had begged hard for, and which he wished M. de Vergennes personally to press him to accept. He demands a "letter of satisfaction and kindness" from the minister, written with his own hand, without which he refuses the £300. Silence on the part of Hennin, who is evidently overcome by this extraordinary pretentiousness; uneasiness on the part of Bernardin, who trembles lest he should be taken at his word. The £300 are sent to him; he pockets them, spends them, and continues to claim his letter. A year later he is still claiming it, without having ceased to beg in the meantime.
It is true that this took place at a time when the bounties of the king conferred honour upon the recipient, and when the nobility of France set the example of holding out the hat to catch the royal manna. It is true that it took place very near the time when the man of letters lived upon his servile dedications, upon inferior employments among the rich and great, and considered himself only too happy, in the absence of copyright, to repay in flatteries the rent of a room at the Louvre or the Condé mansion. It is true that one must not ask for a strict account from a brain disturbed by hallucinations, and that nothing could relieve the mind of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre of the idea that the French Government owed him compensation for his journey to Poland, where he assured them he had run the risk of being taken by the Russians and sent to Siberia. It was the same with the memorials, with which for fifteen years he harassed people in office, and the others which he promised to send them. The same with the situations which he had lost through his own fault, and those which had been refused to him. The same with his literary works, to which he gave up his time, and which had for their aim the happiness of mankind; and the same with the services which he had rendered to his country, a long list of which appears in the _Apologie_. "I remember that in the park at Versailles I pacified an infuriated Breton peasant woman, who intended, she informed me, to go and get up a riot under the very windows of the king. This was during the bread riots. Another time I had a discussion with an atheistical reaper." How was it possible to refuse a pension to a man who had done that!
In common justice they owed him also compensation for the great and glorious things they had prevented him from accomplishing. He had ripened his plan of an ideal colony, and sent project after project to Versailles. Sometimes he offered himself to civilise Corsica, sometimes to conquer Jersey, or North America, or to found a small state in France itself, within the king's dominions. Nobody had deigned to take any notice of his plans, unless perhaps "some intriguing, avaricious protegé" should have stolen his ideas and was preparing to carry them out in his stead; such things did happen sometimes. He laid the blame of the culpable negligence of the Government upon the head clerk of the Foreign Office, and he did not spare his reproaches. The excellent Hennin groaned, grieved over it, but did not get angry. He himself counted upon recompense also, and he did not count in vain. As soon as this mind diseased recovered itself a little, there were most delightful outpourings to the good and true friend who was never harsh or unfeeling. Then there are periods in their correspondence like oases of peace and poetry. In the beginning of 1781 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, at Hennin's suggestion, quitted his wretched furnished room, and took a lodging in the rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, which he called his donjon, and where cheerfulness streamed in at every window. The staircase was in the courtyard to the right, and on ascending to the fourth story under the roof, one found four small bright rooms, from which one looked out upon a little bit of country. It was nothing but gardens, orchards, convents, peaceful little cottages, the wide sky overhead, and the low horizon. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre felt that he was saved. He wrote a letter to Hennin which is a song of joy. He says:--
"I shall come to see you with the first violet; I shall have to walk five miles, but shall do it joyfully, and I intend to give you such a description of my abode as will make you long to come and see me and take a meal with me. Horace invited Mecænas to come to his cottage at Tivoli, to eat a quarter of lamb and drink Falernian wine. As my purse is getting very low, I shall only offer you strawberries and mugs of milk, but you will have the pleasure of hearing the nightingales sing in the groves of the convent of the English nuns, and of seeing the young novices play in their garden." (February 7, 1781.)
Another year April perfumes the air, and Hennin has promised to come and dine in the donjon. His friend describes the menu to him: "Simple viands, amongst which will be found a big pie that Mme. Mesnard is going to give me; a pure wine, good of its kind; excellent coffee, and punch, which I make well, let me say without vanity." It is a question of fixing a day. "Nature must undertake the chief cost of this little feast, therefore I expect she will have carpeted the paths with verdure and decorated the groves of trees in my landscape with leaves and flowers. If you were an observer of nature, I should say to you start the very first day that you see the chestnut tree set out its chandeliers; but you are one of those who only have eyes for the evolution of human forces. Let me know the day you choose," &c.
The dinner was as charming as the invitation. It was talked of at Versailles, and some fair dames lamented aloud that they had not been invited.
To most of them the donjon would have appeared a hateful abode: one froze in it in winter and was roasted in summer, and every gust of wind threatened to blow it away. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, obstinate dreamer that he was, preserved all his life the most tender and faithful remembrance of his aërial lodging: "It was there," he wrote in his mature age, "in the midst of a profound solitude, and under a bewitching horizon, that I experienced the sweetest joys of my life. I should perhaps still be there if for a whim they had not forced me to turn out in order to pull it down. It was there that I put the finishing touches to my _Études de la Nature_, and from there I published it."[17] And it is there that one must look upon him in order to do him justice after our earlier sad pictures of him.
Before he had become a morose beggar, suffering with weak nerves, he was, we must remember, possessed with the idea that to a man carrying in his head a book which he believes to be good and useful, all means are fair for accomplishing his destiny of creative artist and intellectual guide. He recognises no choice of means, he is the slave, and at need the victim of a superior power, which commands him to sacrifice his repose and his pride on condition that he acquits himself of his debt towards mankind by giving to it a work which will bring a little happiness to our poor world. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was quite certain that he possessed the magic word which lifts up the heart, and rather than throw it to the four winds of heaven, he would have begged alms on the highway. Was he right? was he wrong? We owe it to his great faith to leave our verdict undecided.
Think of him in his garret, and you will understand that he begged not for himself, but for his book, which is a very different matter. He is avaricious because he hopes still to write another chapter before going on the tramp again. He has only one coat for the whole year, winter and summer. He does his own housekeeping, sweeps, cleans, cooks. He allows himself so little firing that in winter the water remains frozen for eight days in his rooms, and his pitchers burst. He goes on foot to Versailles to see Hennin, and returns in the same way at night; all the better if it is moonlight, all the worse if it rains. His health suffers, but his head recovers, and he is happy; he has a "whole trunk" full of rough draughts, which he copies, corrects, and arranges. "You cannot imagine," he writes to Hennin, "the tenderness of an author for his production; that of a mother for her son is not to be compared to it. I am always adding to or cutting out something of mine. A bear does not lick her cub with more care than I; I fear in the end I shall rub away the muzzle of mine with my licking. I do not wish to touch it any more.... There have been moments when I have caught a glimpse of heaven." (December 18, 1783.)
When the moment arrives to have his work printed, he redoubles his economy. He is sordid and at the same time a greater borrower, more in debt than ever; for after all it is in order to commit some extravagance for his "child"--to have fine paper, to add a print here, a pretty frontispiece there. The extravagance accomplished, he writes to Hennin, one of his principal lenders, to demonstrate to him that this is an excellent speculation:--
"It is not a superfluous expense, even if the print in 12º itself comes to fourteen or fifteen pounds, because it is possible that many people will buy my work for the print alone, as has happened to others. Moreover, I shall raise the price of my edition with it, so as to reap more than I sowed. So...." (June 29, 1784.)
Thus it was as clear as noonday that this lovely engraving would make his fortune, a very important matter to his creditors. We do not possess Hennin's reply, but there is no doubt, after what we know of his kindness, that he made pretence of being convinced.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] _Poems._ Translated by Villemain.
[10] Pecheur d'Islande.
[11] Portraits littéraires, 1836.
[12] Causeries du lundi, 1852.
[13] Essay upon J. J. Rousseau.
[14] Chinese name for a bitter-sweet root used in medicine.--TRANSLATOR.
[15] He has expressed the same sentiment, only more energetically, in a passage of the _Huitième Promenade_, where he represents himself as escaping at last from the "procession of the wicked."
[16] This curious note does not appear in the complete works. It formed part of the collection of autographs belonging to M. Feuillet de Conches. I owe the information to the kindness of Mme. Feuillet de Conches.
[17] Sequel to the _Vows of a Hermit_.
III.
THE "ÉTUDES DE LA NATURE."
The _Études de la Nature_ appeared in three volumes towards the end of 1784. It did not then comprise the fragments of _l'Arcadie_, which have been since added to it, nor _Paul and Virginia_, which the author had cut out in consequence of an adventure that has been recounted a thousand times, and that we must recount yet again in order to give consolation to any disappointed young man who may be breaking his heart because he is not understood.
Mme. Necker had invited him to come and read some of his MSS. aloud, promising that he should have for his audience some distinguished judges. Amongst them were in fact Buffon, the Abbé Galiani, Thomas, Necker, and some others. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre chose _Paul and Virginia_. At first they listened in silence, then they began to whisper, to pay less attention, to yawn, and finally not to listen at all. Thomas fell asleep, those nearest the door slipped out, Buffon looked at his watch and called for his carriage. Necker smiled at seeing some of the women, who dared not appear otherwise touched, in tears. The reading ended, not one of these persons, though trained in the world's deceits, could find a word of praise for the author. Mme. Necker was the only person to speak, and it was to remark that the conversations between Paul and the old man suspended the action of the story, and chilled the reader; that it was "a glass of iced water": a very just definition, but ungracious, and it reduced Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to despair.
He thought he was condemned without appeal, and returned to his house so prostrated in spirit that he thought of burning _Paul and Virginia_, the _Études_, and _l'Arcadie_--all his papers in fact--so as not to be tempted to touch them again. One of the Vernets turned up at this crisis, took pity upon his suffering, had the despised work read over to him, and recognised the charm of it. He applauded, wept, proclaimed it a masterpiece, the MSS. are saved, and the author consoled, without, however, gaining sufficient courage to print a work which had sent Thomas to sleep, and put Buffon to flight. _Paul and Virginia_ remained in a drawer.
It was the same with the fragments of the _Arcadie_, and with much more reason. _L'Arcadie_, begun after the publication of the _Voyage to the Isle of France_, was to be an epic poem in prose in twelve books, and was inspired by _Telémaque_ and _Robinson Crusoe_. Saint-Pierre proposed "to represent the three successive states through which most nations pass: that of barbarism, of nature, and of corruption."[18] Notice in passing this progression. The state of nature is not the first state, it is between the two, after the state of barbarism and before the state of over-civilisation, which proves that before admiring or despising natural man, according to the eighteenth century, it is as well to understand the sense which each writer gives to the words.
The picture of these three states furnished our author with the means of expressing his ideas upon the ideal republic which he proposed to form. Thus _l'Arcadie_ became the instrument of propagandism, just the thing to lead M. de Saint-Pierre to fortune, and he never forgave himself for having given up this work, a little through Rousseau's fault, who proclaimed the plan of the book admirable, but, nevertheless, advised him to re-write it from beginning to end. Jean Jacques acknowledged at the same time, with a smile, that he had ceased to believe in poetical and virtuous shepherds since a certain journey which he had taken beside the Lignon: "I once made an excursion to Forez," he continued, with the geniality of his good days, "solely to see the country of Celadon and Astrea, of which Urfé gives us such charming pictures. Instead of loving shepherds, I only saw on the banks of the Lignon farriers, blacksmiths, and edge-tool makers." "What!" cried Saint-Pierre, overwhelmed with astonishment, "that all, in so delightful a country?" "It is only a country of smithies," replied Rousseau. "It was that journey to Forez which cured me of my illusion; up to that time never a year passed without my reading Astrea from end to end. I was acquainted with all its characters. Thus does science rob us of our pleasures.[19]"
It was in the bois de Boulogne, seated under a tree, that Jean Jacques Rousseau taught his astonished disciple not to take the Astrea for history. He also told him with great modesty that he felt himself incapable of governing the Republic of their dreams; that all he could do would be to live in it. This declaration piqued Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; he thought he perceived an underlying criticism, and enlarged with enthusiasm upon the sublime virtues of his future subjects which would make them easy to govern. But even while disputing about it he grew disgusted with _l'Arcadie_, put it on one side, and used up the materials for his _Études_. Posterity has no reason to regret it. The fragments which have reached us suggest a work in which the ideas are false and the characters conventional. One reads in it for example: "One could see by her timidity that she was a shepherdess." The contrary is the case in point of fact, and Saint-Pierre knew it better than any one; he who had trotted on foot through the whole of Normandy in quest of models for his heroes, before tracing the portraits of the beautiful Cyanée of Tirteé, her father, and their guest Amasis. His rustics seem to be drawn by a wit who is a clumsy imitator of Fénélon. He was quite wise to give it up.
According to his correspondence, the _Études de la Nature_ was begun in 1773. The plan of it was at that time gigantic. He informs us on the first page that he wished "to write a general history of nature, in imitation of Aristotle, of Pliny, of Bacon, and other modern celebrities." He set to work, but he soon acknowledged, in making his observations of a strawberry-plant, that he would never have the time to observe all that there is on the earth. Although the page upon the strawberry-plant has become classical, it is as well to re-read it in order to be able to realise its effect upon readers, who up to that time had dwelt upon our beautiful Mother Earth deaf and blind, without hearing the pulsation of her life, without seeing her prodigious eternal productiveness.
"One summer day ... I perceived upon a strawberry-plant, which had by chance been placed upon my window-sill, a lot of little flies, so pretty, that I became possessed of the wish to describe them. The next day I saw another kind, and of them also I wrote a description. During three weeks I observed thirty-seven different species of them; but they came in such numbers at last, and in so many varieties, that I gave up the study of them, although it was most interesting, because I had not sufficient leisure, or, to tell the truth, sufficient command of language for the task.
"The flies which I did observe were distinguished from each other by their colours, their forms, and their habits. There were some of a golden hue, some silver, some bronze, speckled, striped, blue, green, some dusky, some irridescent. In some the head was round like a turban; in others, flat like the head of a nail. In some they appeared dark like a spot of black velvet; in others, they shone out like a ruby. There was no less variety in their wings; some had them long and brilliant like a sheet of mother-o'-pearl; in others, they were short and broad, resembling the meshes of the finest gauze. Each one had its own way of carrying its wings and of using them. Some carried them erect, and others horizontally, and they seemed to take pleasure in spreading them out. Some would fly, fluttering about like butterflies; others would rise in the air, flying against the wind by aid of a mechanism somewhat resembling toy beetles. Some would alight upon a plant to deposit their eggs; others simply to seek shelter from the sun. But most of them came for reasons which were quite unknown to me; for some flew to and fro in perpetual movement, while others only moved their backs. There were some who remained quite immoveable, and were, perhaps, like me, engaged in making observations. I disdained, as I already knew them so well, all the tribes of other insects which were attracted to my strawberry-plant: such as the snails which nestled under its leaves; the butterflies which fluttered around it; the beetles which dug at its roots; the little worms which found the means of living in the cellular tissue, that is to say, simply in the thickness of a leaf; the wasps and the bees which hummed about its flowers; the aphis which sucked the stems, the ants which ate up the aphis; and last of all, the spiders which wove their webs near at hand in order to catch all these different victims."
He then had recourse to the microscope to examine into the world of the infinitely little, and saw that the only limit to his observation was the imperfections of our instruments; each leaf of the strawberry-plant was a little universe in which creatures invisible to the naked eye were born, lived, and died. This led to the reflection that his plant would be more densely peopled if it had not been in a pot, in the midst of the smoke of Paris; that, moreover, he had only made his observations of it at one hour of the day, and at one season of the year; and he perceived that the complete history of one species of plant, comprising its relations with the animal world, would be sufficient to occupy several naturalists. His thoughts turned to the immense number of plants and animals known to us, and to the small amount of attention which up to that time had been given to their instincts, their appearances, their friendships and enmities, so that almost everything remained still to be found out. He thought over the weakness of his intention, and acknowledged himself vanquished at the outset. Far from being able to embrace in his work this formidable mass of information which we call creation, he felt himself incapable of explaining fully even its details. "All my ideas," he wrote to Hennin, "are but the shadows of nature, collected by another shadow." He also compared himself to a child who has dug a hole in the sand with a shell, to contain the sea. So he gave up his project of writing a general history, and lowered his ambition till it was more in accordance with his powers, declaring himself satisfied that he had given his readers some new delights, and extended their views in the infinite and mysterious world of nature.
Nevertheless, if his work was given to the public only in a curtailed and mutilated form, his object remained. The _Études de la Nature_ was destined to paraphrase the first part of Fénélon's _Traité de l'existence de Dieu_, especially of the second chapter, entitled "Proofs of the Existence of God, taken from the Consideration of the Chief Marvels of Nature." Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was born religious at heart in an age which had "lost the taste for God," to use Bossuet's expression, when believers themselves were wanting in spirit and tenderness. He was brought up upon the celebrated phrase of Voltaire--"The people must have a religion"--and never could reconcile himself to hear repeated around him that in truth, "Religion is the portion of the people, just a kind of political engine invented to keep them in check" (_Études_). Atheism seemed to him a diminution of our being, a lessening of its most noble sensations and its most elevated emotions. "It is only religion," he said, "which gives to our passions a lofty character"; and he related, apropos of this, that the day on which he himself had perceived most vividly the power of the "divine majesty" of suffering was in contemplating a peasant woman from Caux prostrated at the foot of the cross one stormy day, praying, with clasped hands, her eyes cast up to heaven, for a boat which was in danger. The seventeenth century would not have admitted for poetical reasons that they believed thus in God. Men's minds were then too serious; and the great spiritual directors of the time of Bossuet and Bourdaloue, without mentioning the Jansenists, would have been shocked at the sentimental religion of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. But the eighteenth century had taught men to be less nice, and such things appeared to it to be sublime.
It must be said that they were very tired of arguments and philosophy, and the idea that they might seek for truth by some less tiresome paths was very pleasing. They had for so long lived like the Carthusian friars of the _Harmonies_. "One day one of my friends went to visit a Carthusian friar. It was the month of May; the garden of the recluse was covered with flowers, in the borders and on the fruit-trees. As for him, he had shut himself up in his room, from which he could see absolutely nothing. 'Why,' asked my friend, 'have you closed your shutters?' 'In order,' replied the friar, 'to be able to meditate without distraction on the attributes of God.' 'Ah!' said my friend, 'don't you think that perhaps you may find greater distraction in your own heart than nature would give to you in the month of May? Take my advice, open your shutters and shut the door upon your imagination.'"
Open your shutters and shut your books, cried this new-comer in the world of letters. Nature is the source of everything which is ingenious, useful, pleasant and beautiful, but she must be contemplated in all simplicity of heart. It is for our happiness that she hides from us the laws which govern her mighty forces, and there is a kind of thoughtless impiety in wishing to penetrate too deeply into her mysteries. Besides, we always fail, and our imprudent efforts only succeed in adding the mist of our errors to the cloud which veils her divinity. Let us make up our minds to not being taken into the Divine confidence; content to examine Nature at work, observing her work without studying it on a system, forgetting what the scholars and the academies have decided and decreed as a matter of doctrine. The forces of Nature, ever young and active, form one of the most wonderful and admirable spectacles which the universe affords us. The same spirit of life which formed our world out of chaos, continues to develop the germs under our eyes, to repair the wounded plants and renew their injured tissues with fresh growths. They tell you that Nature brings forth at hazard, producing pell-mell and indifferently the good and the bad, annulling the good by this disorder. But I tell you that not a blade of grass has been made at hazard, and that the least mite testifies to the existence of a sovereign intelligence and goodness. I assure you also that this goodness has only had one pre-occupation--yourself; but one aim--your happiness. God made nature for man, and man for Himself. Man is the end and aim of everything upon the earth, and the proofs of this are infinite in number.
A great part of the _Études_ is taken up with the gathering together of these proofs. I do not believe that there exists another so intrepid a partisan of final causes. Nothing turns him from his demonstration, not facts, nor absurdities, nor ridicule. Things are so because it is necessary to the happiness of man that they should be so: nothing turns Bernardin de Saint-Pierre from that opinion. I do not say that he scoffed at science; he looked upon himself as a scientific spirit who was to set his predecessors right, including Descartes and Newton; I only say that he speaks about it rather as though he were laughing at it.
Our earth, then, has been solidified, modelled and carved out by God for our needs and our comfort. There is not a mountain whose height, breadth, and site have not been calculated by Divine wisdom for our advantage. One is intended to refresh us with its ice, another to protect us from the north wind, a third to produce a healthful current of air; this last we call eolian. Those islands of rock strewn along the seashore, and vulgarly called sand-banks, are fortifications placed there by Providence, without which our coasts would be demolished by the ocean. Those which one remarks at the mouths of water-courses "form channels for the rivers, each channel taking a different direction, so that if one becomes stopped up by the winds or the currents from the sea, the water can escape by another." It speaks for itself that God does not have to try a thing over and over again before it is perfect. Creation was perfect from the first day, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre suppresses the slow evolutions, due to the action of the forces of nature, which according to some incessantly alter the surface of the earth. That surface is unchangeable. There is no example that the sea ever "hollowed out a bay, or detached anything from the continent;" that the "rivers formed at their entrance into the sea sand-banks and promontories;" that ancient ports had been effaced, islands destroyed, or mountains denuded and levelled to the ground. In truth, the works of God, like those of man, are subject to wear, and need reparation; but the Divine Architect is never idle, and works without ceasing to maintain them, which amounts to the same thing.
The means which He employs for reparation often escape our notice from their very simplicity. What pedestrian has not execrated the clouds of sand or dust which the wind raises on the strand or on barren plains. He would have been rather astonished if he had known that he was witnessing the dispersal of materials designed by Providence to replace the soil in the mountains, which had been worn away by water. Sand and dust are transported to the tops of the peaks upon the wings of storms, thanks to the "fossil attractions" of the mountains.
It was six years after Buffon's _Époques de la Nature_ had appeared, that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre offered to the public this astonishing system of the Universe. It needed a certain amount of courage to be so deliberately behindhand.
The theory of final causes thus carried to extremes occasioned a good deal of embarrassment to the Deist. It is no slight matter to undertake to explain, to the advantage of Providence, everything that there is upon the earth without any exception; so many things appear useless, so many hurtful. Saint-Pierre never despaired of finding justification for every one of them, with human happiness as its basis. He went on bravely without disturbing himself that the laugh was at his expense, and with an ardour of conviction which convinced many of the men and almost all the women who read him. The spirit of that day was not very scientific.
Of what use are volcanoes? Hardly any one has failed to perceive that rivers are, so to speak, the drains of the continent. The oils, the resin, and the nitre of vegetables and animals are carried by the water-courses to the sea, where all their component parts become dissolved, covering the surface with fatty matter, which does not evaporate because it resists the action of the air. Without the intervention of Providence the entire ocean since the existence of the world would be defiled with these tainted oils; but Providence made volcanoes, and the waters were purified. In fact, volcanoes "do not proceed from heat inside the earth, but they owe their origin to the waters, and the matter contained in them. One can convince one's self of this fact by remarking that there is not a single volcano in the interior of a continent, unless it is in the neighbourhood of some great lake like that of Mexico." Nature, obeying a Divine impulse, has "lighted these vast furnaces on the shores of the ocean," so that the oils of which we have spoken, being attracted towards them by a phenomenon which the author does not explain, are burnt up as the weeds in a garden are burnt in the autumn by a careful gardener. One does in truth find lava in the interior of a country, but a proof that it owes its origin to water is that the volcanoes which have produced it have become extinct, when the waters have failed. Those volcanoes were lighted there like those of our day, by the animal and vegetable fermentations with which the earth was covered after the Deluge, when the remains of so many forests and so many animals, whose trunks and bones are still found in our quarries, floated on the surface of the ocean, forming huge deposits, which the currents accumulated in the cavities of the mountains, so that the ancient craters of the Auvergne mountains prove that all volcanoes are found beside the sea. Inundations afford us the pleasures of boating and fishing. That is the reason that the nations which inhabit the shores of the Amazon and the Orinico, and many other rivers which overflow their banks, looked upon these inundations as blessings from heaven before the arrival of Europeans, who upset their ideas: "Was it, then, so displeasing a spectacle for them to see their immense forests intersected by long water-roads, which they could navigate without trouble of any sort in their canoes, and of which they could gather in the produce with the greatest ease? Some colonies like those on the Orinico, convinced of these advantages, had adopted the strange habit of living in the tops of trees, like the birds, seeking board, lodging and shelter under their foliage. In spite of the epithet _strange_, one feels that he regretted these picturesque manners, and that it would not have displeased him at all to see the dwellers on the banks of the Loire, nesting with the magpies and jays in their own poplars."
Beasts of prey rid the earth of dead bodies, which without them would not fail to infect the air. Every year there dies a natural death at least the twentieth part of the quadrupeds, the tenth part of the birds, and an infinite number of insects, of which most of the species only live a year. There are some insects even who only live a few hours, such as the ephemera. This enormous destruction would soon poison the air and the water without the aid of the innumerable army of grave-diggers created and maintained by Nature to keep the surface of the globe clean. Saint-Pierre draws a description of it which is wonderful for its colour and spirit: "It is above all in hot countries, where the effects of decomposition are most rapid and most dangerous, that Nature has multiplied carnivorous animals. Tribes of lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, civet-cats, lynxes, jackals, hyenas, condors, &c., there come to reinforce the wolves, foxes, martens, otters, vultures, ravens, &c. Legions of voracious crabs make their homes in the sand there; alligators and crocodiles lie in ambush amongst their reeds, an innumerable species of shell-fish, armed with implements to enable them to suck, to bore, to file, to crush, bristle on the rocks and pave their sea-shores. Clouds of sea-birds fly screaming along the rocks, or sail round them on the tops of the waves seeking their prey; eels, garfish, shad, and every species of cartiaginous fish which only lives upon flesh, such as long sharks, big skate, hammer-fish, octopuses armed with suckers, and every variety of dog-fish, swim about in shoals, occupied all the time in devouring the remains of the dead bodies which collect there. Nature also musters insects to hasten on the destruction. Wasps armed with shears cut the flesh, flies pump out the fluids, marine worms separate the bones.... What remains of all these bodies, after having served as food to numberless shoals of other kinds of fish, some with snouts formed like a spoon, others like a pipe, so that they can pick up every crumb from the vast table, at last converted by so many digestions into oils and fats and added to the vegetable pulps which descends from all parts into the ocean, would reproduce a new chaos of putrefaction in its waters, if the currents did not carry it to the volcanoes, the fires of which succeed in decomposing it and giving it back to the elements. It is for this reason, as we have already indicated, that volcanoes ... are all in the neighbourhood of the sea or big lakes."
How happy are the poets! for they can talk nonsense with impunity. With all his extravagant ideas, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has brought home to us like no one else, the sensation of the activity of Nature, and of the swarming life which covers the earth, moves inside it, and fills the air and the sea.
He had quite foreseen that people would oppose to all this the sufferings inflicted by beasts of prey, large and small, upon living animals, men even, but this objection did not embarrass him in the least. As far as animals are concerned, it would disappear of itself only by taking a broader view of things. "It is true," he said, "several species of carnivorous beasts devour living animals.... Let us return to the great principle of Nature: she has made nothing in vain. She destines few animals to die of old age, and I believe even that it is only man whom she permits to run through the entire course of life, because it is only man whose old age can be useful to his fellows. Among animals what would be the use of unreflecting old age to their posterity, which is born with the instinct which takes the place of experience? On the other hand, how would the decrepid parents find sustenance among their children who leave them the moment they know how to swim, fly, or walk? Old age would be for them a weight from which the wild beasts deliver them." Let us add that to them death means little suffering. They are generally destroyed in the night during their sleep. "They do not attach to this fatal moment any of the feelings which render it so bitter to the greater part of humanity--the regrets for the past and anxieties for the future. _In the midst of a life of innocence, often with their dreams of love still fresh, their untroubled spirits wing their flight into the shades of night._ It is very prettily phrased, but unhappily no one has ever succeeded, often as it has been tried, in convincing those who are eaten that it is for their good."
The objection relative to man is dismissed with the same ease. "Man has nothing to fear from beasts of prey. Firstly, most of them only go abroad in the night, and they possess striking characteristics which announce their approach even before they become visible. Some of them have strong odours of musk like the marten, the civet cat, and the crocodile; others shrill voices which can be heard for long distances in the night like the wolves and jackals; again, others have strongly-marked colours which can be distinguished a long way off upon the neutral tint of their skins: such are the dark stripes of the tiger and the distinct spots of the leopard. They all have eyes which shine in the darkness.... Even those which attack the human body have distinguishing signs; either they have a strong odour like the bug, or contrasts in colour to the parts to which they attach themselves, like white insects on the hair, or the blackness of fleas against the whiteness of the skin." How about fleas upon the negro?
The flea's usefulness does not stop with its blackness. It is also useful from the point of view of political economy, by obliging "the rich to employ those who are destitute, in the capacity of domestics, to keep things clean about them." Furthermore hail, with the help of its ally, the hurricane, destroys a great many insects; earthquakes are no less necessary and useful, their function being to purify the atmosphere. Hail, tempests, earthquakes, are in reality so many benefactors, unrecognised because we are not penetrated to the marrow of our bones with these fundamental truths: the happiness of man is the first law of the world; "nothing superfluous exists, only such things as are useful relatively to man."
Here are some more proofs which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre considers striking. Nature invented the hideous scorpion to be a salutary terror to us, to keep us away from damp, unhealthy places, its ordinary abode. She has given four teats to the cow, which only brings forth one calf at a time, and a dozen to the sow, which has to bring up as many as fifteen young ones, and this because mankind liking milk and pork, the cow had to be made to give us of "the superabundance of her milk, and the sow of that of her young."
What shall be said of the "royal foresight" of the Divinity when it wishes to act upon our hearts and prepare them to learn patience, or open them to gentle feelings? Every one of us has mourned a dog, and has asked himself why these faithful animals have so short a life. Listen to the answer. "If the death of the dog of the house reduces our children, whose companion and contemporary he has been, to despair, doubtless Nature wished to give them, through the loss of an animal so worthy of human affection, their first experience of the privations of which human life is full." The example of the melon and the pumpkin is still more characteristic. While most fruits are cultivated for the mouth of man, like cherries and plums, or for his hand like pears and apples, the melon much larger and divided into quarters, "seems intended to be eaten by the family." As for the enormous pumpkin, Nature intends that one should share it with one's neighbours; it is pre-eminently a sociable fruit.
In spite of all these benefits, we hear our impious race accusing Nature, and blaspheming Providence. We are angry against Heaven when we suffer, when this or that fails us, as though Providence could be at fault, and as though we were not ourselves the real authors of our woes. A little faith, a little confidence, and we should be comforted, but we do not possess it, and we rush to our ruin through ignorance and unbelief, just as it happened one day to some men who had landed upon a desert island where there were no cocoa-nut trees. Soon the sea "threw upon the strand several sprouting cocoa-nuts, as if Providence were eager to persuade them by this useful and agreeable present to remain upon the island and cultivate it." Notice that this was not brought about by any chance currents, because sea-currents are regular, and those which surrounded this island had had time since the creation of the world to sow it with all sorts of seeds. "However that may be, the emigrants planted the cocoa-nuts, and in the course of a year and a half they sent up shoots four feet in height. So marked a favour from Heaven was, nevertheless, not sufficient to keep them in this happy spot: a thoughtless desire to procure for themselves wives, induced them to leave it, and plunged them in a long series of misfortunes, which most of them could not survive. _For my part, I do not doubt that if they had had that confidence in Providence which they owed to her, she would have sent wives to them in their desert island, as she had sent them cocoa-nuts._"
Providence also takes touching care of the animals. The thorns of the brambles and bushes protect the little birds in their nests, and collect the sheep's wool to line the nests with. Ermines have the tips of their tails black, "so that these small animals, entirely white, when going after one another in the snow, where they leave hardly any footmarks, may recognise one another in the luminous reflections of the long nights of the North." Hairy animals are generally white underneath because white keeps them warmer than any other colour, and because "the stomach needs most heat on account of the digestive and other functions; on the other hand, the head is always the deepest in colour, above all in hot countries, because that part has most need of coolness in the animal economy." It is also for the last reason that several of the birds in hot regions have tufts and crests on their heads, to shade them. Lastly, all animals without exception find their table set for them ever since the world began, even those who only feed upon carrion. "Ancient trees grow in the depths of new forests to afford sustenance to the insects and birds who find it in their aged trunks. _Corpses were created for the carnivorous animals._ In every age there must come forth creatures young, old, living and dying." There is always an essential difference in the methods of Providence towards animals and towards man. God takes care of us for our own sakes, He only takes care of animals or plants as they affect us, and in such measure as they are useful or agreeable to us. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was never tired of making remarks in support of these diverse opinions, and we could multiply quotations indefinitely, but what has already been said gives an adequate idea of his theory of the universe.
At first sight we are inclined to shrug our shoulders and pity the final causes for having found an advocate capable of such sad nonsense; but on reflection we are obliged to admit that once the principle is conceded, there is no means of stopping one's self in the downward course. Why admit this final cause and reject that one? If the world is arranged for the happiness of man, ought we not to explain the utility of moths and weevils after that of wool and corn? And if we see in it, as Saint-Pierre did, a means of compelling the monopolists to sell their merchandise for fear that the poor would have to go naked or die of hunger, have we not the right to maintain that one argument is worth another, and that it would be difficult for you to find a better? On the whole, Bernardin only developed Fénélon's idea, who also subordinated the creation to man, and was led by that, in spite of all his cleverness, to affirm that the stars were made to give us light; that the dog is born "to give us a pleasant picture of society, friendship, fidelity, and tender affection;" that wild beasts are intended "to exercise the courage, strength, and skill of mankind." Between Fénélon and Saint-Pierre, as between all determined partisans of final causes, it is only a question of more or less ingenuity, and Saint-Pierre was very ingenious. Grimm wrote, "I do not believe that any man had as yet ventured to recognise Providence, or to attribute to it more skilful attention, more refined research, more delicacy of feeling; but his idea is carried beyond all bounds, and leads him occasionally into all kinds of nonsense and absurd puerilities. His book is one long collection of eclogues, hymns, and madrigals in honour of Providence."[20] The _Études de la Nature_ makes us still better able to understand the warmth with which Buffon repudiated the theory of final causes.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre would have been immensely astonished if he had been told that he was labouring to prepare generations of pessimists by attributing to Providence the cares and solicitude of a nurse in its relations with men. Nothing was further from his thoughts, and yet nothing is more certain from the moment that his works became a success with the public, and exerted an influence over men's minds. Man once convinced that his happiness is the concern of God, considers it the duty of the Divinity to secure it. In misfortune he has no patience to bear his troubles, because he looks upon himself as injured by Providence. The horror of the injustice done to him redoubles his suffering, and he curses the Heaven which does not respect his rights. It would be doing too much honour to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre if we were to make him answerable for the gloomy and bitter turn of mind of our contemporaries, but he certainly helped it on, since for a thoughtful mind his philosophy has a fatal tendency to demonstrate the fallibility of Providence.
He perceived the difficulty quite well, and felt that it is not sufficient to keep repeating over and over again the axiom: "All is for the best in the best of worlds." When one has finished repeating it, the evil is not ended nor explained. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was only too glad to fall back upon his own century, on which he had turned his back during his religious exaltation, and to explain by reasons taken from Diderot and Jean-Jacques the sufferings of humanity in a world created perfect. So he wrote: "Man is born good; it is society that makes bad people, and your education which prepares them." Man is born good; take the savages, who alone upon the earth still possess "real virtue." A good man continues happy so long as he does not turn aside from "the law of nature." Take the savages again--their happiness is perfect, according to the missionaries, so long as they have no intercourse with civilised nations. Society "makes bad people" by its stupid and brutal laws, which ignore and defy those of nature and precipitate us into abysses of evil. Our education prepares our young people to be in their turn wicked, because it is founded upon the false idea with which our whole civilisation is impregnated: it develops the intelligence instead of developing the heart. Nature "does not wish man to be skilful and vainglorious; she wishes him to be happy and good." We are going against her intentions when we undertake to invent scientific systems which "deprave the heart," instead of cultivating sweet and tender sentiments amongst our children. In doing so we commit a criminal error every day of our lives, the fatal consequences of which are quite apparent. Consider what man has become under the influence of this civilisation of which we are so proud.
"Nature, which intended him to be loving, did not furnish him with arms, and so he forged them himself to fight his fellows with. She provides food and shelter for all her children; and the roads leading to our towns are only distinguishable from afar by their gibbets! The history of nature presents only benefits, that of man nothing but wrath and rapine." And further on: "There are many lands which have never been cultivated; but there are none known to Europeans which have not been stained with human blood. Even the lonely wastes of the sea swallow up in their depths shiploads of men sent to the bottom by their fellows. In the towns, flourishing as they seem with their arts and monuments, pride and cunning, superstition and impiety, violence and treachery wage their eternal strife and fill with trouble the lot of the unfortunate inhabitants. _The more civilised the society there, the more cruel are its evils and the more they increase in number._"
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had his Rousseau beside him, when he thus launched his anathemas against civilisation and the sciences. He occasionally makes use of expressions which closely recall the _Discours sur les lettres, les sciences et les arts_, and the _Discours sur l'inegalité parmi les hommes_. Unhappily for his thesis, his eloquent rage against our social state rings false. We feel that it is a rhetorical artifice to help him out of the difficulty of his theory of final causes, and to open out a way for him to bring at last his character of legislator before the public. The occasion was unique for showing to France what she had lost through the incapacity of her ministers, who allowed the memorials of M. de Saint-Pierre to moulder in their portfolios. We thus return to _Robinson Crusoe_, the ideal colony, and those famous laws of nature which it is our mission to contrast with the laws made by man.
The laws of nature are "moral" and "sentimental" laws; they comprise in the first place all the good and noble sentiments which God has placed in our hearts. Just as reason is a miserable and inferior faculty, so sentiment is the glory and strength of mankind; man owes to it everything great and splendid which he has ever accomplished. "Reason has produced many men of mind in the so-called civilised ages, and sentiment men of genius in the so-called barbarous ages. Reason varies from age to age, sentiment is always the same. Errors of reason are local and transitory, the truths of sentiment are unchanging and universal. By reason the ego is made Greek, English, Turkish; by sentiment it becomes human, divine.... In truth, reason gives us some pleasures; but if it reveals some portion of the order of the universe, it shows us at the same time our own destruction, which is involved in the laws of its preservation. It shows us at once past ills and those that are to come.... The wider it explores it brings back to us the evidence of our nothingness; and far from calming our anxieties by its researches, it often only increases them by its knowledge. On the contrary sentiment, blind in its desires, surveys the relics of all countries and all times; it trusts in the midst of ruins, of battles, even of death, in some vague, eternal existence; in all its yearnings it strives after the attributes of the Divinity--infinity, scope, duration, power, greatness, and glory; it adds ardent desire to all our passions, gives to them a sublime impulse, and in subjugating our reason, becomes itself the noblest and best instinct of human life." We must correct Descartes and say: "I feel, therefore I exist."
The apotheosis of sentiment, "blind in its desires" and indomitable in their pursuit, which "subjugates our reason" and makes us act on impulse, strongly resembles an apotheosis of passion, and in fact has led to it. So George Sand strikes some roots in the insipid sensibility of the last century, but we know already that it was not within the scope of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to calculate the not very remote consequences of his principles. He dreamt, without the very least anxiety, of a world entirely governed by sentiment, and emancipated from that abominable reason. No danger could threaten this regenerated community, because its leader had sorted out the sentiments common to humanity, and only allowed such of them to prevail as pity, innocence, admiration, melancholy, and love. This choice promised to the world a succession of Idylls. As for the bad sentiments, hate, avarice, jealousy, ambition, there was no need to take them into consideration or to fear their usurpation; they would disappear from the face of France so soon as the plan of education placed at the end of the _Études de la Nature_ had been adopted.
There is nothing like coming at the right time. At the beginning of the Revolution these sorts of things were listened to with a contrite spirit, and no one thought of laughing at them. Such sentiments appeared as wise as they were beautiful; no one doubted his own virtue and goodness, and all rejoiced in this picture of the delightful emotions which awaited the new society. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre laboured to draw seductive pictures of it, and his efforts have procured us some analyses of public feeling which their date render most interesting.
His chapter on _Melancholy_ is one of the most interesting. Melancholy had only lately come into fashion, and he exerted himself to inquire into the source of this seductive sentiment, the sweetest and most cherished poison of the soul. He to some extent recognised the danger of it, for the word _voluptuous_ occurs several times under his pen: "I do not know," he wrote, "to what physical law the philosopher may attribute the sensations of melancholy. For my part I think that they are the most voluptuous impressions of the soul." That is very finely expressed and very true. Further on, apropos of people who try by artificial means to give themselves sensations of melancholy, he writes: "Our voluptuaries have artificial ruins erected in their gardens.... The tomb has supplied to the poetry of Young and Gessner pictures full of charm; therefore our voluptuaries have imitation tombs put up in their gardens." He is himself "a voluptuary" when he solaces his woes, by abandoning himself to the melancholy which bad weather creates in him. "It seems to me at such times that nature conforms to my situation like a tender friend. She is, besides, always so interesting under whatever aspect she reveals herself, that when it rains I seem to see a beautiful woman in tears, all the more beautiful the more she is distressed. In order to experience these sentiments, which I dare to call voluptuous, we must have no plans for going out, or paying visits, or hunting, or travelling, which always put us into a bad temper, because we are thwarted; ... to enjoy bad weather it is necessary that our soul should travel, our body stay quiet."
We have in these lines a great science of melancholy, given to us by a refined "voluptuary" who understands how to give to agreeable sensations their maximum of enjoyment. One is quite taken in to find directly after a series of pretentious articles in the manner of the day, in which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre explains the _pleasure of the grave_ by the sentiment of the immortality of the soul, and _the pleasure of decay_ by that of the infinity of time. I notice in it, however, an effort to interest the reader in the real and native gothic ruins, which might be called daring, at that time of mania for filling one's garden with Greek and Roman erections, imitation temples, imitation tombs, imitation columns, and imitation ruins, ornamented with allegorical emblems and sentimental inscriptions. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre did not oppose this classical bric-à-brac which pleased him only too well, but he possessed to a greater extent than his contemporaries the sense of the picturesque, which bore fruit in some romantic scenes like the description of the Château of Lillebonne.
The château is perched on a height commanding a valley. "The high walls which surround it are rounded off at the corners, and so covered with ivy that there are but few points from which one can mark their course. About the middle of their length, where I should think it would not be easy to penetrate, rise high battlemented towers, upon the tops of which grow big trees, having the appearance of a thick head of hair. Here and there through the carpet of ivy which covers their sides, are gothic windows, embrasures and gaps resembling mouths of caverns, through which one can see the stairs. The only birds to be seen flying round this desolate habitation are buzzards, which hover about in silence; and if occasionally the cry of a bird is heard, it is sure to be an owl whose nest is there.... When I remember at sight of this stronghold, that it was formerly inhabited by petty tyrants who from there used to plunder their unlucky vassals and even travellers, I seem to see the carcass of some great beast of prey." This conclusion is from a man who, in default of an historical sense, has at least an historical imagination.
_Love_ inspires him with a charming page on the expansion of every living thing during the love-season. The plant opens its flowers, the bird puts on his most beautiful plumage, the wild beasts fill the forests with their roaring, and the soul of the young man "receives its full expansion." His soul also opens its flowers and exhales its perfume of generosity, candour, heroism, and holy faith, and love adorns it with wondrous graces which take the form of "all the characteristics of virtue." It is a dazzling metamorphosis, and it is in some sort a disguise, for the virtues, which are only a transformation of love, run great danger of evaporating with the age of love, like the parade dress of certain birds in the Indies, which are only lent by nature during the pairing season. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre remarks that certainly young men have some modesty, and that "most of our old men have none at all, because they have lost the feeling of love." Honour to the sentiment which thus raises us above ourselves! It is a great thing to have felt certain things once in our lives.
Admiration is another of the moral laws by which nature, left to herself, governs the earth. The author adds to it the _pleasures of ignorance_, which he declares to be incomparable. Ignorance is the supreme blessing from Heaven, the masterpiece of nature, "the never-failing source of our pleasures." We owe to it the exquisite enjoyments of mystery. It takes away all our ills, and embellishes the good things of this life with illusion, upholds the poetry of the world against science. "It is science which has hurled the chaste Diana from her nocturnal chariot; has banished the wood-nymphs from our ancient forests and the sweet naiads from our fountains. Ignorance invited the gods to share in its joys, its sorrows, its hymeneal festivities, and its funeral rites: science sees nothing there but the elements. It has abandoned man to man, and thrown him upon the earth as into a desert." Every epoch which repudiates the supernatural will recognize itself in this _man abandoned to man_, and feeling that he is in a desert.
It would have been best to stop there, glorifying ignorance on poetical grounds only. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre spoilt everything by insisting on the misdeeds of science. He wished to profit by the occasion to crush his enemies the Academicians, men with systems, who never appeared to take his theories seriously, and he gravely affirms that ignorance is the only preservative against the errors into which the "so-called human sciences" plunge us. When one knows nothing, one is sure to know no nonsense. Let it be said in passing that the scientific works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre confirm this maxim; for if he had not learnt geometry, he would not have said such absurd things as we shall see presently, and which covered him with ridicule in the eyes of the scholars of his day. But he did not think of himself in celebrating the advantages of perfect ignorance; in such a case one never does think of oneself.
After the preceding, one does not expect study to hold a great place in the plan of education which crowns the _Études de la Nature_, the object of which is to expel all evil sentiments from the hearts of the French people. To begin with, Saint-Pierre abolishes learning from the education of women, of whom he only purposes to make housekeepers and mistresses. Love is their only end upon earth, the sole reason of their existence, and experience has proved that learning does not help them in this: "Those who have been learned, have almost all been unhappy in love, from Sappho to Christina, Queen of Sweden." It is not with theology and philosophy that they gain a man's affection, it is by all their feminine seductions, and it is with cookery that they keep it. "A man does not like to find a rival or an instructor in his wife." A husband likes good pastry when he is well, and good herb-tea when he is ill. He likes his coffee to be good, preserves in which "the juice is as clear as the flash of a ruby," flowers preserved in sugar which "display more brilliant colours than the amethyst in the rocks of Golconda." He likes his dining-room to be well lighted, the fishing expedition well organized. Look at Cleopatra: it was with her talents as mistress of the house that she subjugated Antony, and made him forget "the virtuous Octavia, who was as beautiful as the Queen of Egypt, but who as a Roman dame had neglected all the homely womanly arts, to occupy herself with affairs of state." Let us beware of turning our daughters into Octavias. They are to have no books; the best are of no use to them. No theatres. Give them a dancing master, a singing master, let them learn needlework and the science of housekeeping; nothing more is necessary to a young girl in the interest of her own happiness. It is thus that united families are prepared, where contentment engenders goodness and makes virtue easy.[21]
Boys are to leave classical studies alone, as they only delay at a dead loss their entry into life. Seven years of humanities, two of philosophy, three of theology; twelve years of weariness, ambition, and self-conceit.... "I ask if, after going through that, a schoolboy, following the denominations of these same studies, is more human, more philosophical, and believes more in God than a good peasant who does not know how to read? Of what use is it all to most men?" A boy ought to have finished his studies and begun a trade at sixteen. Up to then he is to study according to a programme which has made good its way in the world since, and for which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre merits a second time the title of pioneer. These boys were to learn nothing but useful things--arithmetic, geometry, physics, mechanics, agriculture, the art of making bread and weaving cloth, how to build a house and decorate it. A very careful civil education. It is generally forgotten that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre is the inventor of school-drill. It was one of his favourite ideas; he even wished the little school-boys to undertake the grand manoeuvres.
"During the summer, when the harvest is gathered in, towards the beginning of September, I should take them into the country in battalions, divided under several flags. I should give them a picture of war. I should let them sleep on the grass in the shadow of the woods, where they should prepare their food themselves, and learn to defend and attack a post, swim a river, exercise themselves in the use of firearms, and at the same time in manoeuvres taken from the tactics of the Greeks, who are our superiors in almost everything."
A little Greek and Latin they might learn during their last years at school, but taught "by use," without grammar; lessons learnt by heart, or written exercises; a little law, something of politics, some ideas upon the history of religion; but no abstract speculations or researches, even in science.
One did not expect to meet so utilitarian a Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. In a hundred years we have not got beyond him, and yet we know whether our generation prides itself upon its contempt of the schools or not. The wonder is that he found means to retain his Louis XVI. sentimentalism in spite of this overflow of practical ideas. He corrected with one stroke of his pen the dryness of his programme. Everything which was to be taught in his _Écoles de la Patrie_--orthography, ethics, arithmetic, baking--all, without exception, were to be "put into verse and set to music." Out of school-hours the pupils were to be commanded by "the sound of flutes, hautbois, and bagpipes." Here we find ourselves again in the land of Utopia, and we recognise our Bernardin.
The schemes of political and social reforms which fill the last two volumes of the _Études de la Nature_ are full of this curious mixture of a practical mind with a romantic imagination. Saint-Pierre is a democrat, and rather an advanced one for the day for which he was writing. He works with all his might to disturb the existing state of things, and the end is always simply a dream. You have the impression that in his regenerated state the most serious questions would be "put into verse and set to music," like the course of geometry in his model school. He asks for the suppression of large estates and great capitalists, monopolies, privileged companies, the rights of taxation. He proposes several means of putting down the nobility, whose existence would not fail in the long run to bring about the downfall and ruin of the State. He demands energetically the confiscation of the property of the clergy for the good of the poor. He wishes to replace hospitals with home nursing, by which the families of the sick persons would benefit; to ameliorate prison regime and madhouses, to secure pensions to aged workmen, and to construct in Paris edifices large enough to admit of fêtes for the people being held there. All at once he interrupts himself in these grave subjects to describe an _Elysium_ of his invention, which will be like the visible epitome of the happy metamorphosis of France.
His Elysium is situated at Neuilly, in the island of the Grande-yatte, enlarged by the small arm of the Seine and a bit of the shore. It is encumbered with all that the eighteenth century could invent in the way of symbols, allegories, emblems, touching combinations, and instructive conjunctions. There are nothing but obelisques, peristyles, tombs, pyramids, temples, urns, altars, trophies, busts, bas-reliefs, medallions, statues, domes, columns and colonnades, epitaphs, mottoes, maxims, complicated bowers, and "enchanted groves." There is not an object of art in it which has not a moral signification; not a pebble or blade of grass which does not give the passer-by a lesson in virtue or gratitude. Thus, for example, upon a rock placed in the midst of a tuft of strawberry-plants from Chili, one reads these words:--
"_I was unknown in Europe; but in such a year, such a one, born in such a place, transplanted me from the high mountains of Chili; and now I bear flowers and fruit in the pleasant climate of France._"
Under a bas-relief of coloured marble, representing small children eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves, one would read this inscription:--
"_We were exposed in the streets, to the dogs, to hunger and cold; such a one, from such a place, lodged us, clothed us, and gave us the milk refused to us by our mothers._"
At the foot of a statue, in white marble, of a young and beautiful woman, seated, and wiping her eyes with symptoms of sadness and joy:--
"_I was hateful in the sight of Heaven and before men; but, touched with repentance, I appeased Heaven with my tears; and I have repaired the evil which I did to men, by serving the sorrowful._"
Not far from this repentant Magdalen, whose marble face expresses, according to the æsthetics of the day, at one and the same time joy and sadness, some statues are erected to good housewives "who shall re-establish order in an untidy house," to widows who have not re-married on account of their children, and to women "who shall have attained to the most illustrious position through the very modesty of their virtues." Further on are the busts of inventors of useful instruments, ornamented with the objects which they have invented: "the representation of a stocking-frame and that of a silk-throwing mill." As for the inventor of gunpowder, if he is ever discovered, there is no place for him in the Elysium.
Further away still, a magnificent tomb, surrounded with tobacco-plants, is consecrated to Nicot, who imported tobacco into Europe. A tuft of Lucern-grass, from Media, "surrounds with its tendrils the monument dedicated to the memory of the unknown husbandman who was the first to sow seed on our stony hills, and to present to us pasturage which renews itself four times a year on spots which were barren." And so on for all travellers who have brought into the country useful or agreeable plants. Seeing an urn in the midst of a nasturtium bed, a pedestal among the potatoes, the people would think of their benefactors, and their hearts would be softened. They would leave the island Grande-yatte better men; easy, too, as to their future, for this sublime spot would make the fortune of Paris. This Elysium would attract a crowd of rich foreigners, anxious to "deserve well" of France, so as to obtain the honour of being buried in the pantheon of virtuous men.
In the eyes of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre this enormous toy-fair was nothing less than "the re-establishment of one of the laws of nature most important to a nation--I would say an inexhaustible perspective of the Infinite." In the same way the reforms which have just been expounded all have for their object "the application of the laws of nature to the evils of society," and for a result the cure of these ills by the return of the "harmonious laws of nature" and the "natural affections." Unhappily for France, Saint-Pierre was not the only man who knew what he meant when he talked this jargon, without sense to us. In 1784 there was a large number of persons who imagined that there was something in it, and that, in fact, nothing was simpler than to return to the "harmonious laws of nature." The _Études de la Nature_ corresponded with a widely-diffused current of ideas, and that adds to their interest. They help to represent to us the condition of many minds at the beginning of the Revolution. At that time they thought to overthrow everything to the sound of the bagpipes, and they believed in the panacea of Elysiums.
We have sketched the general plan of the work; it now remains to point out some of the ideas "by the way," which are its chief riches. The author strongly suspected that he was never more interesting than when he gave loose rein to his pen, and he never refused himself a digression or fancy. "Descriptions, conjectures, insight, views, objections, doubts, and even my errors," he says in his "Plan of Work," "I collected them all." He did well; for it is when he wanders from the point and forgets his system that he is original and interesting.
In Art he could not disabuse his mind of the mania for moral effect; he does not even spare the landscape. "If one wishes to find a great deal of interest in a smiling and agreeable landscape, one must be able to see it through a great triumphal arch, ruined by time. On the contrary, a town full of Etruscan and Egyptian monuments looks much more antique when one sees it from under a green and flowery bower."
He is, however, much more realistic, and consequently more modern, than his description of his Elysium would lead one to suppose. He deserves to be pardoned his philosophical landscapes, because he was the first to say that there is nothing ugly in nature, one only needs to know how to look at it. Man disfigures it by his works, but that which he has not touched always retains its beauty. "The ugliest objects are agreeable when they are in the place where Nature put them." A crab or a monkey which appears to you hideous in a natural history collection, ceases to be so when you see it on the shore or in a virgin forest; they then form an integral part of the general beauty of the landscape.
The same with people. A fig for conventional types and mythological costumes! copy nature. Make real shoe-blacks with their blacking-boxes; real nuns with their mob-caps; real kitchens with the real milk-jug and saucepan. Make your great men look like other people, instead of representing them "like angel trumpeters at the day of judgment, hair flying, eyes wild, the muscles of the face convulsed, and their draperies floating about in the wind." "Those are," say the painters and sculptors, "expressions of genius. But men of genius and great men are not fools.... The coins of Virgil, Plato, Scipio, Epaminondas, and even of Alexander, represent them with a calm, tranquil air." Show us a real Cleopatra, not "an academical face without expression, a Sabine in stature, looking robust and full of health, her large eyes cast up to heaven, wearing around her big and massive arms a serpent coiled about them like a bracelet. No, make her as Plutarch shows her to us: 'Small, vivacious, sprightly, running about the streets of Alexandria at night disguised as a market-woman, and, concealed amongst some goods, being carried on Apollodore's shoulders to go and see Julius Cæsar.'"
In ethics Bernardin de Saint-Pierre warmly combats the theory of the influence of climate, race, soil, temperament and food upon the vicious or virtuous tendencies of men. It seemed to him absurd to say, like Montesquieu, that the mountain is republican, and the plain monarchic; that cold makes us conquerors, and heat slaves. That is only "a philosophical opinion ... refuted by all historical evidence."
He attacked with the same ardour the theory of heredity which has become so widespread in our day. "I myself ask where one has ever seen inclination to vice or virtue communicated through the blood?" History proves that that too is only "a philosophical opinion," and it is a good thing that it is so, for man would no longer be at liberty to choose between good and evil if these different doctrines were true.
It is curious to see the partisans of free-will preoccupying themselves, more than a hundred years ago, with the theory of heredity. It is a proof that ideas float about a long time in the air in the germ-stage before they come to maturity and are adopted into the general advance of thought. It would be as absurd to pretend that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had actually conceived the physiological law, whose consequences make him so indignant as to attribute the discoveries of Darwin to his grandfather Erasmus. It is none the less true that his generation had glimmering ideas of a number of questions which have become common-places in the second half of the nineteenth century.
With a little good will we find even in the _Études de la Nature_ a kind of embryo of Hegel's theory of Contradictions. Contraries produce agreement, said Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. "I look upon this great truth as the key to the whole of philosophy. It has been as fruitful in discoveries as this other maxim: 'Nothing has been made in vain.'" He adds: "Every truth, except the truths of fact, is the result of two contrary ideas.... If men paid attention to this law, it would put an end to most of their mistakes and their disputes; for one may say that everything being compensated by contraries, every man who affirms a simple proposition is only half right, because the contrary proposition exists equally in nature."
We have already said that he had not been happy in the field of science. It would be doing him a service to pass over in silence this part of his work, but his shade would not forgive us. He attached an enormous importance to it, and only attributed to the spirit of routine and professional jealousy the obstinacy of the learned men in taking no notice of his two chief discoveries--the origin of tides, and the elongation of the poles. We will explain them briefly. It is picturesque science if ever anything was.
The poles, says Saint-Pierre, are covered with an immense cupola of ice, "according to the experience of sailors, and also of common sense. The cupola of the north pole is about two thousand leagues in diameter, and twenty-five in height. It is covered with icicles, which are about ten leagues high. The cupola of the south pole is larger still. Each one melts alternately during half the year, according as each hemisphere is in summer or winter. The two poles are thus 'the sources of the sea, as the snow mountains are the sources of the principal rivers.' From the sides of the poles escape currents which produce the great movements of the ocean. This granted, the flow of these currents takes its course to the middle channel of the Atlantic ocean, drawn towards the line by the diminution of waters which the sun evaporates there continually. Two contrary currents or collateral eddies are thus produced, which are in fact the tides."
Now imagine the terrestrial globe capped at the two poles with these formidable glaciers, beside which Mont Blanc is only a mole-hill. The globe is necessarily oval in form. "In truth some celebrated academicians have laid down as a principle that the earth is flattened at the poles."[22] According to them "the curve of the earth is more sudden towards the equator in the sense north and south, because the degrees are there smaller; and the earth, on the contrary, is flatter towards the poles because the degrees are larger there."
Note that it is not only "celebrated academicians," but all the astronomers, all the geographers, every one having some notions of geometry, who conclude, from the increase in length of the degrees of the equator, that the earth is flat at the poles. But from these same measurements, of which he does not dispute the accuracy, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre draws an absolutely contrary conclusion. Here is an abridgment of his demonstration. "If one placed a degree of the meridian of the polar circle upon a degree of the same meridian at the equator, the first degree would exceed the second according to the experiments of the academicians. Consequently if one placed the whole arc of the meridian which crowns the polar circle, and which is forty-seven degrees, upon an arc forty-seven degrees of the same meridian near the equator, it would produce a considerable enlargement there, because its degrees are larger.... As the degrees of the polar curve are, on the contrary, larger than those of an arc of the circle, the entire curve must be as extensive as an arc of the circle; now it cannot be more extensive than by supposing it more enlarged and circumscribed at this arc; consequently the polar curve forms an elongated ellipsis."
If there happens to be amongst my readers a graduate of science, the defects of this reasoning must be obvious to him. Saint-Pierre implicitly believes that the two verticals whose angle forms a degree meet in the centre of the earth, which would be true if the earth was a perfect sphere, but which is not so at all if it is flat at the poles, as all the world admits it to be, or if it is elongated, as he maintains. He was apparently unaware that the curve of a contour at a certain point is defined according to the radius of the circle of curvature at that point, and that the curve is greater than the radius, and consequently the degree of the circle of curvature is smaller. The smallness of the degrees at the equator is, then, a proof that the curve is larger there, or, what comes to the same thing, that the earth is flat at the poles. His strange mistake proves that his scientific equipment was limited to the most elementary knowledge of geometry, which makes his audacity in continually going to war against "the celebrated academicians," against Newton, and every scholar whose works thwarted his poetical ideas about the universe, very characteristic. It is the indication of a strong dash of infatuation, to which is joined an equally large dash of obstinacy. He never admits that he might have been mistaken. He fought all his life for his theory about the tides and his elongation of the poles. He judged of men by their manner of speaking of it, or being silent; it was for him the touchstone of character no less than of the intelligence. Whosoever expressed an objection to it was an ignoramus or a fool, if he was not malicious. Whosoever said nothing was a vulgar pedant, an abject flatterer, one of those servile creatures who "only flatter accredited systems by which one gains pensions." (Letter to Duval, December 23, 1785.) All the French scholars had the misfortune to place themselves in one of these positions, and many sharp words were the consequence.
Bernardin is not the first nor the last writer who has mistaken his real vocation. His was neither science, nor philosophy, nor teaching. It was the love of the fields, the profound feeling and passion for this living and changing spectacle which we call a landscape. The design of his work impelled him to abandon himself to his adoration. He lost himself in it, and the result was a book which, when it appeared, was unique. From end to end it is nothing but descriptions; of the tropics, of Russia, of the Island of Malta, of Normandy, and of the environs of Paris. His travels had taught him to observe. The hurricane in the Indian Ocean, and the aurora borealis of Finland had made him more sensitive than ever to the sweetness of French scenery, to the charm of a bit of meadow, or a hedge in flower. He is, besides, much more sure of himself than in the beginning, much more capable of depicting whatever struck his fancy. His powers did not betray him any more as they had done in the _Voyage to the Isle of France_. There is an end of general descriptions and abstract epithets; at the first glance we are made to distinguish the characteristic of each tree, each tuft of grass, the colour of every stone, and of merging those particular and manifold impressions in a general impression. Here, for example, is a scene in Normandy, taken from the first _étude_, into which enter only "localities, animals, and vegetables of the commonest kind in our climate." It has all the air of having been destined by the author to instruct those persons who do not admire anything less than the Bay of Naples. In any case it was a revelation in the way of a landscape, taken no matter whence, and of the colours which the French language even then offered to its painters in prose and verse.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre supposes himself to be upon "the most barren spot, a rock at the mouth of a river," and to be at liberty to ornament it with plants suitable to such a soil. These plants spring to life under his pen, and one sees them overrun this miserable corner of earth until its bareness disappears under a glorious mantle of vegetation in all sorts of brilliant and soft tints. "That on the side towards the sea the waves shall cover with foam, its rocks clad with wrack, fucus, and seaweed of all colours and all forms--green, brown, purple, in tufts and garlands, as I have seen it in Normandy, on crags of marl, detached from its cliffs by the sea; then on the side towards the river one shall see on the yellow sand, fine turf mixed with clover, and here and there some tufts of marine wormwood. Let us plant there some willows, not like those of our meadows, but with their natural growth--let us not forget the harmony of the different ages--that we may have some of these willows smooth and succulent, shooting their young branches into the air, and others very old, whose drooping branches form cavernous bowers; let us add to these their auxiliary plants, such as green mosses and golden-tinted lichens, which variegate their grey bark, and a few of those convolvuli called lady's smocks, which like to climb round the trunk and adorn the branches that have no apparent flowers with their heart-shaped leaves and bell-shaped flowers, white as snow. Let us also place there the animal life natural to the willow and its plants--the flies, beetles, and other insects, with the winged creatures who do battle with them, such as the aquatic dragon-flies, gleaming like burnished steel, who catch them in the air, the water-wagtails who, with their tails cocked, pursue them to earth, and the kingfishers who lie in wait for them at the water's edge."
Here we have the rock quite covered with a thousand different tints, and yet remark that Saint-Pierre has only given us one kind of tree. Let us finish the picture. "Contrast with the willow the alder, which like it grows on the banks of rivers, and which by its form, resembling a turret, its broad leaves, its dusky green colour, its fleshy roots, like cords running along the banks and binding up the soil, differs in every way from the thick mass, the light-green foliage, grey underneath, and the taproots of the willow; add to this the plants of different ages which cling to the alder, like so many odalisques of greenery, with their parasites, such as the maidenhair fern, shining out like a star on its humid trunk, the long hart's-tongue fern hanging down from its branches, and the other accessories of insects, birds, and even quadrupeds, which probably contrast in form, in colour, in manner and instincts with those of the willow."
The picture is now complete as regards form and colour, but how much is wanting to it still! First of all the _flash of light_. We light up our rock with the "first flush of dawn," and we see at the same time strong shadows and transparent ones thrown upon the grass, and dark and silvery green shades flung upon the blue of the heavens, and reflected in the water. Now we will put life into it. "Let us imagine here what neither painting nor poetry can render--the odour of the herbs, even that of the sea, the trembling of the leaves, the humming of the insects, the morning song of the birds, the rumbling, hollow murmurs, alternated with the silence of the billows which break on the shore, and the repetitions that the echoes make of all these sounds in the distance, as they lose themselves in the sea and seem like the voices of the nereids." Now it is finished, and if you do not breathe the salt air, do not feel yourself surrounded by the universal life, before this medley of changing colours and variable forms, this rustling, murmuring, roaring, it must be that the feeling for nature is not awakened in you--you are before Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's day, and the nineteenth century has passed in vain for you.
Perhaps we see better still the indefatigable activity of nature in the _Jardin abandonné_. It is a French garden, with straight, trimmed walks, symmetrical flower-beds, regular fountains, and mythological statues. A country house stands in the midst of it. The hand of man has been withdrawn from this place, once so well cared for, and it becomes what the general life of earth chooses to make of it. It is soon done. "The ponds become swamps; the hedges of yoke-elm look ragged; all the arbours are choked up, and all the avenues overgrown. The vegetation natural to the soil declares war against the foreign vegetation; the starry thistles, and the vigorous mullein choke the English turf with their large leaves; thick masses of coarse grass and clover crowd round the judas trees; dog rose-briers climb upon them with their thorny brambles, as though they were going to take them by assault; tufts of nettles take possession of the naiad's urn, and forests of reeds the Vulcan's forges; greenish patches of moss cover the faces of the Venuses, without respect for their beauty. Even the trees besiege the house; wild cherry trees, elms, and maples rise to the roof, thrusting their long taproots into its raised parapet, finally taking command of its proud cupolas." In the eyes of a passer-by this is merely a ruin; in Bernardin's it is the re-establishment of order and beauty. Man appears to him nowhere so mischievous as when he alters the landscape.
His descriptions of foreign countries had a very great success and a great influence. As his first book was not much read, it is through the second that he has been the father of exoticism in French literature. Chateaubriand found his path prepared when he wrote _Atala_. Another had already revealed the virgin forest, dazzled the eyes with tropical colouring, and amused the mind with strange types and costumes. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre carried the taste for exoticism to childishness, as we do in our day, and he it was who invented exhibitions of savages and semi-savages. He dreamed of drawing to Paris Indians with their canoes, caravans of Arabs mounted on camels and bullocks, Laplanders in their reindeer sledges, Africans and Asiatics. "What a delight for us," he said, "to take part in their joy, to see their dances in our public squares, and to hear the drums of the Tartars, and the ivory horns of the negroes, resounding around the statues of our kings."
To sum up, the _Études de la Nature_ is a beautiful prose poem upon a bad philosophical thesis. In Bernardin de Saint-Pierre Providence had a compromising advocate, which happens, however, pretty often. Not content with dragging the final causes into everything, he gave them such a royal following of false ideas and scientific errors, that the reading of his book becomes in places irksome. In order to find pleasure in it to-day we must follow his advice, throw away reason and give ourselves up entirely to feeling. In such a case it is impossible not to be touched with this effort to recall man to the thought of the Infinite, or not to let oneself be seduced by the charm of the advocate. As soon as we have given up disputing with the author on fundamental grounds, we are filled with pleasure at his sincere enthusiasm, the wealth of his sensations and their quite modern subtilty. He is himself as though intoxicated by the vividness of his impressions. By the strength of his love for nature he confounds it with the Divinity, and adores the works instead of the Author of them. He speaks of nature with a tenderness which communicates itself to his writing and wins over his reader. He wished to re-open the door to Providence, he re-opened it to the great god Pan; a result which was not worth the other, no doubt, but which has had immense consequences in our century.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] Introduction to _l'Arcadie_.
[19] That is Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's account of the conversation. In reality, Rousseau had not visited le Forez. He had been tempted to go there, but was dissuaded from his project by "a landlady" whom he consulted as to the route he should follow, and whose description prevented him from going to seek Dianas and Sylvanders amongst a population of blacksmiths. (_The Confessions_, year 1732.)
[20] Literary Correspondence, April, 1785.
[21] Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had developed his ideas upon the education of women, long before the publication of the _Études de la Nature_, in a speech delivered in 1777, without success, at an academical meeting in the country. Some of the details given here are borrowed from this _Discours sur l'Education des femmes_.
[22] The celebrated academician to whom allusion is made in this passage is Pierre Bouguer, who took part in the scientific expedition sent to the equator in 1736 to determine the shape of the earth. The quotation which follows is taken from his _Traité de la Navigation_,