Part 17

Yes--the thing has come to pass in Africa, at Tahiti, on the coast of Madagascar, whence the savages repulsed, with vindictive hatred, their French invaders, and refused even to correspond with them save through the medium of another nation. The feelings with which the natives of the Marquesas regard at the present moment the embroidered gentry, who, "protected by their grand history," and headed by that valiant fighting man, Rear-Admiral Du Petit Thouars, took unwarrantable possession of their shores, are of course faithfully described in the above nonsensical outburst; and are not, as every body knows, those of fear and utter detestation for a crew of wicked mountebanks and gold-laced ruffians. Of course the children come to Du Petit Thouars, and the old men hold their peace, and kiss the hem of his regimentals; and that's the very reason why the said Du Petit points the fatal tubes of his heavy, double-banked frigates and corvettes at the fragile bamboo sheds that lie timidly and harmlessly in a grove of cocoa-nuts.

"For our part, whatever happens to us, poor or rich, happy or unhappy, while on this side of the grave, we will ever thank God for having given us this great France for our native land; and that not only on account of the many glorious deeds she has performed, but because in her we find especially at once the representative of the liberties of the world, and the country that links all others together by sympathetic ties--the initiation to universal love. This last feature is so strong in France, _that she has often forgotten herself_(!!) We must at present remind her of herself, and beseech her to love all the nations less than herself.

"Doubtless, every great nation represents an idea important to the human race. But, gracious heaven! how much more true is this of France! Suppose for a moment that she were eclipsed, at an end, the sympathetic bond of the world would be loosened, dissolved, and probably destroyed. Love, that constitutes the life of the world, would be wounded in its most vital part. _The earth would enter into the frozen age, where other worlds close at hand have already landed._"

We have never wittingly done injustice either to France or her people; but we confess we had no notion of the claims of both upon our regard and applause, until they were prominently put before us by her somewhat Quixotic historian.

In the first place, if you would heap up all the blood, the gold, the efforts of every kind, that each nation has expended for disinterested matters that were to be profitable only to the world, France would have a pyramid that would reach to heaven; "and yours, oh nations! all of you put together--oh yours! the pile of your sacrifices would reach up to the knee of an infant!"

And then God enlightens it more than any other nation, for she sees in the darkest night, when others can no longer distinguish. "During that dreadful darkness which often prevailed in the middle ages, and since, nobody perceived the sky. France alone saw it."

Rome is nowhere but in France. Rome held the pontificate of the dark ages--the royalty of the obscure; and France has been the pontiff of the ages of light.

Every other history is mutilated. France's is alone complete. Take the history of Italy, the last centuries are wanting; take the history of Germany or of England, the first are missing; take that of France, _with it you know the world_. Christianity has promised, France has performed. "The Christian had the faith that a God-made man would make a people of brothers, and would, sooner or later, unite the world in one and the same heart. This has not yet been verified, but it will be verified in us." The great and universal legend of France is the only complete one; other nations have only special legends which the world has not accepted. The natural legend of France, on the contrary, "is an immense, uninterrupted stream of light, a true milky way, upon which the world has ever its eyes fixed." An American once said, that for every man the first country is his native land, and the second is France. This surely was praise sufficient. But M. Michelet is very greedy of praise. "How many," says he, "_like better_ to live here than in their own country! As soon as ever they can break for a moment the thread that binds them, they come, poor birds of passage, to settle, take refuge, and enjoy here at least a moment's vital heat. They tacitly avow that this is the universal country." Beau Brummel certainly avowed it; but then he, "poor bird of passage," flew in a night from his own nest, to settle, take refuge, and enjoy a moment's vital peace in France, away from duns and creditors. Many, in similar circumstances, would unquestionably prefer Paris to London, provided they could break the thread which attaches them to their domestic responsibilities. France is the infant Solomon sitting in judgment. Who, but she, has preserved the tradition of the law? She has given her soul to the world, and the world is living on it now; but, strange condition! "what she has left is what she has given away. Come, listen to me well, and learn, oh nations! what without us you would never have learned:--_the more one gives, the more one keeps_. Her spirit may slumber within her, but it is always entire, and ever on the point of waking in its might."

Now all this must be taught to the infant as soon as it can lisp, and he will, no doubt, perfectly understand and appreciate it. The regeneration of France (which is already so perfect, and is, besides, the great exemplar of mankind) depends upon the child's proper appreciation of his birthplace. If he will believe all that has been said, he is far on the road, but by no means at the end of his journey. As soon as he is breeched, his mother must become his instructor, and increase the dose by some such foolish proceeding as the following:--

"Let her take him on St John's Day, when the earth performs her annual miracle, when every herb is in flower, when the plant seems to grow while you behold it; let her take him into the garden, embrace him, and say to him tenderly, 'You love me, you know only me. Well, listen! I am not all. You have another mother. All of us, men, women, children, animals, plants, and whatever has life, we have all a tender mother, who is ever feeding us, invisible, but present. Love her, my dear child; let us embrace her with all our hearts.'

"Let there be nothing more. No metaphysics that destroy the impression. Let him brood over that sublime and tender mystery, which his whole life will not suffice to clear up. That is a day he will never forget. Throughout all the trials of life and the intricacies of science, amid all his passions and stormy nights, the gentle sun of St John's Day will ever illumine the deepest recesses of his heart with the immortal blossom of the purest, best love."

The little gentleman, however, is not done with yet. The dose is not yet strong enough, although quite as strong as his mother, gentle creature, could mix it. The early jacket is discarded in favour of the swallow-tailed coat, and the youth passes into the hands of his father:--

"His father takes him--'tis a great public festival--immense crowds in Paris--he leads him from Notre Dame to the Louvre, the Tuileries, the triumphal arch. From some roof or terrace, he shows him the people, _the army passing, the bayonets clashing and glittering, and the tricolored flag_. In the moments of expectation especially, before the _fete_, by the fantastic reflections of the illumination, in that awful silence which suddenly takes place in that dark ocean of people, he stoops towards him and says, 'There, my son, look, there is France--there is your native country! All this is like one man, one soul, one heart. They would all die for one; and each man ought also to live and die for all. Those men passing yonder, who are armed, and now departing, are going away to fight for us. They leave here their father, their aged mother, who will want them. You will do the same; you will never forget that your mother is France.'"

The education is very nearly completed. The father suffers the swallow-tail to wear out, the incipient mustache to take root, and then he leads his second and better self to the mountain-side. This time he does not stoop over him, for the youth is erect, and is as big a man as his father. "Climb that mountain, my son," says the venerable gentleman, "provided it be high enough; look to the four winds, you will see nothing but _enemies_."

And so, by a very roundabout process, we reach the heart of the mystery. M. Michelet loves fighting--remembers Waterloo--is game--is eager for another round, and in his heart believes one Frenchman to be equal to at least half a dozen Englishmen. He burns for one more trial of strength--a last decisive tussle; and he writes a philosophical work to prove the physical bout essential to the dignity, the grandeur, and the redemption of his country. Every time, we repeat the words, that he looks upon a bayonet, his heart bounds within him, and his only hope, teacher and professor of the College of France though he be, rests in trumpets, drums, swords, the epaulette, the sabredash, and the tricolor.

We have surely wasted ink enough upon this theme. In common with ourselves, the reader will regard with due commiseration, a manifestation of wicked folly, which will do no harm only because it comes in an age not ripe for bloodshed, or happily too humanized for unprovoked, gratuitous warfare; and because the French people themselves, under a politic king and a peace-seeking ministry, have learned a little to regard the blessings of undisturbed domestic quietness. We quit the main subject of M. Michelet's book, to draw attention to a few insulated passages worthy of the better days of the author, and certainly out of place in the present volume. It were not possible for M. Michelet to write four hundred pages that should not, here and there, give evidence of his great genius--his general common sense, and his touching sympathy for the suffering and the oppressed. There are passages in the work under consideration that have universal interest, and claim universal attention; his appeals on behalf of children and women, the most neglected and oppressed of the community, let them be found where they may, in England or in France, in Europe or in Asia, are instinct with truthfulness and honest vigour; his vindication of the _mission_ of the child, philosophical and just, is beaming with the light that burns so steadily and clearly in the poems of our own Wordsworth, which have especial reference to the holy character of the "Father of the Man."

It is in one of the insulated passages of which we speak, that M. Michelet bitterly and very sensibly complains of the exclusive regard which modern romance writers have shown for the prisons and kennels, the monsters and thieves of civilized societies; of the disposition every where exhibited to descend rather than ascend for the choice of a subject, or the selection of a hero. We have felt the inconvenience of the same sickly taste in this country, and can understand the complainings over productions similar to that of _The Mysteries of Paris_, whilst we remember our own inferior and not less baneful _Dick Turpins_ and _Jack Sheppards_. Hurtful to the morals of a nation, these productions are equally unjust to the national character. We have drawn our estimate of the present literature of France from what we have seen and heard of her least healthy writers. As well might the novels of Mr Ainsworth, or the miserable burlesques of Mr Albert Smith, be accepted as the representatives of the Romance and Drama of the modern English school. It is not one of the least crimes of which these unwholesome writers are guilty, that they present to their own countrymen, and to the world at large, only foul exceptions, hideously exaggerated, which they would have us believe are faithful pictures of the mass; and in their eager endeavours to interest and excite the unthinking many, rouse the disgust and alarm of all well-constituted and thoughtful minds. The perilous consequences of popular literature in France are finely pointed out by M. Michelet. The timid take fright, when the people are represented as monsters in the books which are greedily devoured, and intensely applauded by the majority of their readers. "What!" cry the citizens, "are the people so constituted? Then, let us increase our police, arm ourselves, shut our doors, and bolt them." And all the alarm has been occasioned by a conceited, and it may be clever, coxcomb, who, descending from his drawing-room, has asked the first passenger in the street where-abouts the People lived. He met with a fool, who directed him to the galleys, the prisons, and the stews.

"One day," writes M. Michelet, "there came a man to the famous Themistocles, and proposed to him an art of memory. He answered bitterly, 'Give me rather the art of forgetfulness.' May God give me this art, to forget from this moment all your monsters, your fantastic creations, those shocking exceptions with which you perplex my subject! You go about, spyglass in hand; you hunt in the gutters, and find there some dirty filthy object, and bring it to us, exclaiming--'Triumph! we have found the people!'

"To interest us in them, they show them to us forcing doors and picking locks. To these picturesque descriptions they add those profound theories, by which the People, if we listen to them, justify themselves in their own eyes for this crusade against property. Truly, it is a great misery, in addition to so many others, for them to have these imprudent friends. These theories and these acts are by no means of the people. The mass is, doubtless, neither pure nor irreproachable; but still, if you want to characterise it by the idea which prevails in the immense majority, you will find it occupied in founding by toil, economy, and the most respectable means, the immense work which constitutes the strength of this country, the participation of all classes in property."

We believe it sincerely and heartily. The great writers of all ages have believed it. Your low-minded scribblers have never doubted it; but it is far easier to depict the limited class, with its violence and felony, its startling incidents and painful murders--far less difficult to give picturesque effect to its nauseous jargon and offensive situations, than it is to work the simple portraiture of a whole community, who have nothing to offer to the artist but the delicate and unobtrusive material, such as Goldsmith could weave into a fabric whose colour and texture shall endure and enchant for all time.

"I feel," continues M. Michelet, with great tenderness--"I feel I am alone, and I should be sad indeed if I had not with me my faith and hope. I see myself weak, both by nature and my previous works, in presence of this mighty subject, as at the foot of a gigantic monument, that I must move all alone. Alas! how disfigured it is to-day; how loaded with foreign accumulations, moss, and mouldiness; spoilt by the rain and mud, and by the injuries it has received from passengers! The painter, the man of _art for art_, comes and looks at it; what pleases him is precisely that moss. But I would pluck it off. Painter, now passing by! This is not a plaything of art--this is our altar!"

"To know the life of the people, their toils and sufferings," he continues, "I have but to interrogate my own memory." He has himself sprung from the labouring population. Before he wrote books, he _composed_ them in the literal sense of that term. He arranged letters before he grouped ideas; the sadness of the workshop, and the wearisomeness of long hours, are things known to his experience. The short narrative of his early struggles forms another beautiful passage in this singular and very unequal production. The great lesson which he brought with him from his season of difficulty and affliction, is one that authorizes him to approach the people as a teacher and a friend, and ought to have inspired him with nobler aims than he puts forth to-day. He has seen the disorders of destitution, the vices of misery; but he has seldom found them extinguishing original goodness of heart, or interfering with the noble sentiments that adorn the lowest as well as the highest of mankind. There is nothing new, he tells us, in this observation. At the time of the cholera in France, every body beheld one class eager to adopt the orphan children. What class was that? _The Poor._

Whilst in poverty himself, his soul was kept free from envy by noting the unremitting devotedness, the indefatigable sacrifices of hard-working families--a devotedness, he assures us, not even exhausted in the immolation of one life, but often continued from one to another for several generations.

The two families from which he descended were originally peasants. These families being very large, many of his father's and mother's brothers and sisters would not marry, in order that they might the better contribute to the education of some of the boys, whom they sent to college. This was a sacrifice of which he was early made aware, and which he never forgot. His grandfather, a music-master of Laon, came to Paris with his little savings after the Reign of Terror, where his son, the author's father, was employed at the _Imprimerie des Assignats_. His little wealth was made over to the same son, and all was invested in a printing-office. To facilitate the arrangement, a brother and a sister of the eldest son would not marry, but the latter espoused a sober damsel of Ardennes. M. Michelet, the child of this industrious pair, was born in the year 1798 in the choir of a church of nuns, then occupied by the printing-office. "Occupied, I say, but not profaned; for what is the Press in modern times but the holy ark?"

The printing-office, prosperous at first, fed by the debates of the assemblies and the news of the armies, was overthrown in 1800 by the general suppression of the newspapers. The printer was allowed to publish only an ecclesiastical journal; and even this sanction was withdrawn in favour of a priest whom Napoleon thought safe, but was mistaken. The family of M. Michelet was ruined. They had but one resource; it was to print for their creditors a few works belonging to the printer. They had no longer any journeymen; they did the work themselves. The father, who was occupied with his employment abroad, could render no assistance, but the mother, though sick, turned binder, cut and folded. The child--the future historian--was the compositor; the grandfather, very old and feeble, betook himself to the hard work of the press, and printed with his palsied hands.

The young compositor, at twelve years of age, knew four words of Latin which he had picked up from an old bookseller, who had been a village teacher, and doted on grammar. The scene of the lad's labors--his workshop--was a cellar. For company he had occasionally his grandfather who came to see them, and always, without interruption, an industrious spider, that worked at the compositor's side, and even more assiduously than he. There were severe privations to undergo, but there was also much compensation.

"I had the kindness of my parents, and their faith in my future prospects, a faith which is truly inexplicable, when I reflect how backward I was. Save the binding duties of my work, I enjoyed extreme independence, which I never abused. I was apprenticed, but without being in contact with coarse-minded people, whose brutality, perhaps, would have crushed the precious blossom of liberty within me. In the morning, before work, I went to my old grammarian, who gave me a task of five or six lines. I have retained thus much; that the quantity of work has much less to do with it than is supposed; children can imbibe but a very little every day; like a vase with a narrow neck, pour little or pour much, you will never get a great deal in at a time."

We have said that in his struggles the aspiring boy knew nothing of envy. It is to-day his solemn belief that man would never know envy of himself, he must be taught it. The year 1813 arrived, and the home of the historian, as well as France herself--it was the time of Moscow--looked very cheerless. The penury of the family was extreme. It was proposed to get the compositor a situation in the Imperial printing-office. The parents, more fond than reasonable, refused the offer, and strong in the belief that the child would yet save the household, obtained an entrance for him in the college of Charlemagne. The tale is told. From that hour he rose. His studies ended soon and well. In the year 1821 he procured, by competition, a professorship in a college. In 1827, two works, which appeared at the same time--_Vico_ and _Precis d'Histoire Moderne_--gained him a professorship in the _Ecole Normale_.

"I grew up like grass between two paving-stones; but this grass has retained its sap as much as that of the Alps. My very solitude in Paris, my free study, and my free teaching, (ever free and every where the same,) have raised without altering me. They who rise almost always lose by it; because they become changed, they become mongrels, bastards; they lose the originality of their own class without gaining that of another. The difficulty is not to rise, but in rising to remain one's self."

There is also another difficulty; one which, judging from the volume before us, M. Michelet has yet to overcome: we mean the difficulty--after education, and after achieving the heights to which honourable ambition aspires--of forgetting the terrible and bitter punishment of early penury and trouble; of cherishing no longer the anger and hatred that were borne against the world, whilst the struggler looked upon it as a world in arms against him. The author of THE PEOPLE tells us, that in his saddest hours he knew no _envy_ towards mankind; but he acknowledges also, that in his sufferings, he deemed all rich men, all men, _bad_; that he pined into a misanthropic humour, and, in the most deserted quarters of Paris, sought the most deserted streets. "I conceived an excessive antipathy against the human species." The writer, to use his own expression, "is raised, but not altered." The antipathy, somewhat chastened by prosperity, is not removed. It takes a bodily form in the volume that teaches France to regard the earth as her enemy, and calls upon her to vindicate her pre-eminence and glory in the field of battle and of blood.

THE ROSE OF WARNING

A LEGEND FROM THE GERMAN. BY A. LODGE.

Where towering o'er the vale on high, Those ice-bound summits pierce the sky; And on the mountain flood amain, The giant oak, and dusky plane, Uptorn, with ever-deepening sound, Rush roughly 'mid the gorge profound: Behold--where horrors mark the scene, And loveliest Nature smiles between, Yon ivied arch and turrets gray, Mouldering in serene decay; Half choked, the scanty columns rise, Where the prone roof in fragments lies;-- Of yore, so legends tell, the fane Was call'd, of sainted Bernard's train; Pious Brethren, self denying, Fill'd with thoughts of holy dying, Here, 'mid penance, prayer, and praise, Content they wore their tranquil days; Now the heavenly truths expounding, In the Lord's good work abounding; For deeds of love the dome was bless'd; The hungry fed, the faint had rest;-- Thus they gave their light to shine, And the Bread of Life divine!