Part 22

From Rousseau's "Confessions," we have not room to purvey further. It is a melancholy book--written under monomaniac suspicion on the part of the author that he was the object of a wide-spread conspiracy against his reputation, his peace of mind, and even his life. The poor, shattered, self-consumed sensualist and sentimentalist paid dear in the agonies of his closing years for the indulgences of an unregulated life. The tender-hearted, really affectionate, and loyal friend came at length to live in a world of his own imagination, full of treachery to himself. David Hume, the Scotchman, tried to befriend him; but the monomaniac was incapable of being befriended. Nothing could be more pitiful than were the decline and the extinction that occurred of so much brilliant genius, and so much lovable character. It is even doubtful whether Rousseau did not at last take his own life. The voice of accusation is silenced in the presence of an earthly retribution so dreadful. One may not indeed approve, but one may at least be free to pity, more than he blames, in judging Rousseau.

Accompanying, and in some sort complementing the "Confessions," are often published several detached pieces called "Reveries," or "Walks." These are very peculiar compositions, and very characteristic of the author. They are dreamy meditations or reveries, sad, even somber, in spirit, but "beautiful exceedingly," in form of expression. Such works as the "Rene" of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau's "Walks."

This author's books in general are now little read. They worked their work and ceased. But there are in some of them passages that continue to live. Of these, perhaps quite the most famous is the "Savoyard Curate's Confession of Faith," a document of some length, incorporated into the "Emile." This, taken as a whole, is the most seductively eloquent argument against Christianity that perhaps ever was written. It contains, however, concessions to the sublime elevation of Scripture and to the unique virtue and majesty of Jesus, which are often quoted, and which will bear quoting here. The Savoyard Curate is represented speaking to a young friend as follows:--

I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible that the Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in his manners! What an affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What sublimity in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses! What presence of mind, what subtilty, what truth, in his replies! How great the command over his passions! Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness and without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest reward of virtue, he described exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the resemblance was so striking that all the Fathers perceived it.

What prepossession, what blindness, must it be to compare the son of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion there is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy, easily supported his character to the last; and if his death, however easy, had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted whether Socrates, with all his wisdom, was anything more than a vain sophist. He invented, it is said, the theory of morals. Others, however, had before put them in practice; he had only to say what they had done, and reduce their examples to precepts. Aristides had been _just_ before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas gave up his life for his country before Socrates declared patriotism to be a duty; the Spartans were a sober people before Socrates recommended sobriety; before he had even defined virtue Greece abounded in virtuous men. But where could Jesus learn, among his compatriots, that pure and sublime morality of which he only has given us both precept and example? The greatest wisdom was made known amidst the most bigoted fanaticism, and the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honor to the vilest people on the earth. The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophizing with his friends, appears the most agreeable that could be wished for; that of Jesus, expiring in the midst of agonizing pains, abused, insulted, cursed by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared. Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed indeed the weeping executioner who administered it; but Jesus, in the midst of excruciating tortures, prayed for his merciless tormentors. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God. Shall we suppose the evangelic history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks of fiction; on the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ. Such a supposition, in fact, only shifts the difficulty without removing it; it is more inconceivable that a number of persons should agree to write such a history, than that one only should furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospel, the marks of whose truth are so striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero.

So far in eloquent ascription of incomparable excellence to the Bible and to the Founder of Christianity. But then immediately Rousseau's Curate proceeds:--

And yet, with all this, the same Gospel abounds with incredible relations, with circumstances repugnant to reason, and which it is impossible for a man of sense either to conceive or admit.

The compliment to Christianity almost convinces you--until suddenly you are apprised that the author of the compliment was not convinced himself!

Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the preface to his "Confessions," appealed from the judgment of men to the judgment of God. This judgment it was his habit, to the end of his days, thanks to the effect of his early Genevan education, always to think of as certainly impending. Let us adjourn our final sentence upon him until we hear that Omniscient award.

In pendant to what we have said and have shown of Rousseau, some notice may here properly be given of another celebrated writer, or writer perhaps we should say of a celebrated book, who stands to Rousseau in the relation of sequel and echo. We mean ST. PIERRE, the author of "Paul and Virginia."

This is a very famous little classic. It is a kind of prose idyll, a pastoral of lowly and simple life, a life lived by the subjects of it in the spirit of return to the conditions of nature, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau idealized the conditions of nature to be. The author's own personal experience furnished him the hint, the ground, and the material, of his bucolic romance. It had happened to St. Pierre, in the course of a somewhat fruitless and vagabond life, to be sent in an official capacity to Mauritius, or the Isle of France. In this remote island, as in a kind of Utopia, the scene of the story of "Paul and Virginia" is laid.

St. Pierre was already thirty-one years old when he took his distant voyage; he stayed three years in Mauritius, and then he waited sixteen years, becoming therefore, fifty years old, before he made use of what he had experienced in publishing his romance of "Paul and Virginia." He had meantime seen a great deal of Rousseau during the latter's declining years, and from him had learned that art of writing by virtue of which he was destined to constitute the second of succession in a literary line to be continued after him in Chateaubriand and Lamartine, in Madame de Stael and George Sand.

It is the historical importance thus attaching to St. Pierre's name, even more perhaps than it is the merit and the fame of his books, or of his book--for of his books other than "Paul and Virginia," we need not trouble our readers with even the titles--that warrants us in listing him, as we do, among the select "immortals" of French literature. St. Pierre's distinguishing note was the supposed return to nature and to natural unsophisticated sentiment accomplished in his writings.

But the return, with him, was by no means completely satisfactory. There was always something unreal in St. Pierre's passion for nature; and the feeling with which he wrote seems, to us of to-day, to have been neither very deep nor very sincere. Still, all was accepted and was highly effective in its time; Europe was flooded with tears in reading "Paul and Virginia," much as afterward it was flooded with tears in reading an equally notable, but far less wholesome book, that prose masterpiece of the youthful Goethe, "The Sorrows of Werther." The "Corinne" of Madame de Stael afterward, later the "Jocelyn" of Lamartine, later again the passionate earlier novels of George Sand, served to their respective fresh generations of readers a somewhat similar office, that of stimulating and of expressing the vague longing and aspiration of youth.

The plot of "Paul and Virginia" is simplicity itself. Two young French widows--widows we may euphemistically call the women both, though the mother of Paul had never been married--meet, strangers to each other, in Mauritius, and their children, Paul and Virginia respectively, grow up from babyhood together, as if brother and sister, in a state of nature such as never was anywhere in the world outside of a romance, until at last, Virginia undertaking a vain voyage to France to bring round a rich alienated aunt of her mother's, perishes by shipwreck on her return; in prompt sequel of which calamity, all the remaining personages of the tale, down to the very dog, naturally and sentimentally, one after another, die. The story is represented as told to a traveler in the Isle of France by a sympathetic old man who had been an eye-witness of all.

Two extracts, one from the beginning, and one from the end, of the romance, will sufficiently indicate its quality.

Paul and Virginia being now about twelve years of age, Virginia goes, accompanied by Paul, to restore to the master a runaway female slave to whom he had been cruel, and to intercede with him on the sufferer's behalf. She has accomplished her purpose, and the two have set out to return. They lose their way. This is the state of the case at the point at which our first extract begins, as follows:

"God will have pity on us," replied Virginia; "he listens to the voice of the little birds which ask him for food." She had scarcely uttered these words when they heard the noise of water falling from a neighboring rock. They hastened to it, and, after having quenched their thirst at this spring clearer than crystal, they gathered and ate a few cresses which grew on its banks. As they were looking around them to find some more substantial nourishment, Virginia descried a young palm-tree among the trees of the wood. The cabbage which is found at the top of this tree, inclosed within its leaves, is an excellent food; but although its stalk is not thicker than a man's leg it was more than sixty feet high. The wood of this tree is indeed composed only of a collection of filaments; but its internal bark is so hard that it blunts the sharpest hatchets, and Paul had not even a knife. He thought of setting fire to this palm-tree at its foot. Another difficulty--he had no steel to strike fire with, and besides, in this island so covered with rocks, I do not believe it would be possible to find a single flint. Necessity inspires industry, and often the most useful inventions have come from men reduced to extremity. Paul resolved to light a fire after the manner of the negroes. With the sharp end of a stone he made a small hole in the branch of a tree that was very dry, which he placed under his feet; he then with the edge of the stone made a point to another branch equally dry, but of a different kind of wood. He next placed the piece of pointed wood in the small hole of the branch which was under his feet, and turning it rapidly round in his hands, as one turns a mill to froth chocolate, he in a few moments perceived smoke and sparks arise from the point of contact. He collected together dry herbs and other branches of trees, and set fire to the foot of the palm-tree, which soon afterward fell with a violent noise. The fire served him also in stripping the cabbage of the long woody and prickly leaves which enclosed it. Virginia and he ate a part of this cabbage raw, and the rest cooked in the ashes, and they found them equally agreeable to the taste.... After their meal ... an hour of walking brought them to the banks of a large river, which barred their way.... The noise of its waters terrified Virginia; she dared not try to ford it. Paul accordingly took Virginia on his back, and passed thus laden over the slippery rocks of the river, regardless of the turbulence of the waters. "Fear not," said he to her; "I feel myself very strong with you." ... When Paul had passed over, and was on the bank, he wished to continue his journey laden with his sister, flattering himself that he could ascend in that manner the mountain of the Three Peaks, which he saw before him at the distance of half a league; but his strength soon began to fail, and he was obliged to set her on the ground and to throw himself down beside her.... Virginia plucked from an old tree, which hung over the banks of the river, some long leaves of hart's tongue which hung down from its trunk. She made of these a kind of buskins with which she bound her feet, which the stones of the way had caused to bleed, for in her hurry to do good she had forgotten to put on her shoes. Feeling herself relieved by the freshness of the leaves she broke off a branch of bamboo and began to walk, leaning with one hand on the cane and with the other on her brother.

In this manner they walked on slowly through the woods; but the height of the trees and the thickness of their foliage made them soon lose sight of the mountain of the Three Peaks, by which they had directed themselves, and even of the sun, which was already setting. After some time they quitted, without perceiving it, the beaten path which they had till then followed, and found themselves in a labyrinth of trees, shrubs, and rocks, which had no farther outlet. Paul made Virginia sit down, and ran almost distracted in search of a path out of this thick wood; but he wearied himself in vain. He climbed to the top of a lofty tree, to discover at least the mountain of the Three Peaks, but he could perceive nothing around him but tops of trees, some of which were illuminated by the last rays of the setting sun. Already the shadow of the mountains covered the forests in the valleys; the wind was going down, as is usual at sunset; a profound silence reigned in these solitudes, and no noise was heard but the cry of the stags who came to seek repose in these unfrequented recesses. Paul, in the hope that some hunter might hear him, cried out as loud as he could: "Come! Come! and help Virginia!" But only the echoes of the forest answered to his voice and repeated several times successively: "Virginia! Virginia!"

Paul now descended from the tree, overcome with fatigue and disappointment; ... he began to weep. Virginia said to him: "Do not weep, my dear, unless you wish to overwhelm me with grief.... O! I have been very imprudent." And she began to shed tears. Nevertheless, she said to Paul, "Let us pray to God, my brother, and he will have pity on us." Scarcely had they finished their prayer when they heard the barking of a dog.... "I believe," said Virginia, "it is Fidele, our house-dog."

Of course all turned out happily. A rescue party had come in search of the estray, and they were soon brought with rejoicing home.

Such as the foregoing passage will have served to show is the charm of unfallen simplicity and innocence represented by St. Pierre to have been cast, forming as if an Eden in the wilderness, about these happy children of nature on whom society had had no chance to exercise its baneful power. True, they suffered, though in Eden. True, others sinned, as well as suffered, about them, for there was slavery and there was cruelty; but that was in the wilderness outside; in Eden they did not sin. It was all Rousseauism in experiment and reduced to absurdity. By Rousseauism we indicate the doctrinal dream of that dreamer; by no means the actual waking practice of the man that dreamed.

It may seem a strange marring of the idea of a sufficiency in nature, let nature but be unhindered by society, to renew the world in the purity of paradise, that the end of the idyll of Paul and Virginia should have come about through an effort on the part of Virginia's mother, made quite in the spirit of the present artificial order of things, to secure a bequest from an aunt of hers in France, whom the niece had offended by marrying as she did; but so it was. Virginia undertakes the necessary voyage, and, as we have already said, perishes by shipwreck on the coast of Mauritius in returning. The heart-rending agony of the final catastrophe we have no space to exhibit. The author seems to hint that Virginia might have been saved, could she have brought herself to assent to the desire of an entreating honest stalwart seaman that she should disembarrass her person of her clothes. It is almost the step taken from the sublime to the ridiculous for the author to make his heroine perish thus as a martyr to her own invincible modesty.

The bereaved mother has visions of her departed daughter's accomplished felicity in the world unseen. These she describes to the neighbor, who, a venerable old man, tells the traveler the tale. Now for the final extract from the text of the book:

"O my worthy neighbor!" said she [Paul's mother] to me [the old man who tells the whole story]: "I thought last night I beheld Virginia clothed in white, in the midst of groves and delicious gardens. She said to me: 'I enjoy the most desirable happiness.' Then she approached Paul with a smiling air and bore him away with her. As I endeavored to retain my son I felt that I myself was quitting the earth, and that I was following him with inexpressible pleasure. I then wished to bid my friend farewell, when I perceived her following us with Mary and Domingo. [These are negro slaves of the two mothers.] But what seems still more strange is, that Madame de la Tour [Virginia's mother] had the same night a dream attended with similar circumstances."

I replied to her, "My friend, I believe that nothing happens in the world without the permission of God. Dreams do sometimes foretell the truth."

Madame de la Tour related to me that the same night she had also had a dream entirely similar. I had never observed in these two ladies the least propensity to superstition; I was therefore struck with the resemblance of their dreams, and I had no doubt but that they would be soon realized. This opinion, that truth sometimes presents itself to us during our sleep, is generally spread among all the nations of the earth. The most illustrious men of antiquity have entertained it, amongst others, Alexander, Caesar, the Scipios, the two Catos, and Brutus, who were by no means inclined to superstition. The Old and the New Testament supply us with a variety of examples of dreams that have been realized....

But whether this opinion concerning dreams be true or not, those of my unfortunate friends were speedily realized. Paul died two months after the death of his dear Virginia, whose name he incessantly pronounced. Margaret [Paul's mother] beheld her end approach a week after that of her son with a joy which virtue only can feel. She bade Madame de la Tour the most tender farewell, "in the hope," she said, "of a sweet and eternal reunion. Death is the greatest of all blessings," added she; "we ought to desire it. If life be a punishment we ought to wish for its end; if it be a trial, we should wish it short."

The governor took care of Domingo and Mary, who were no longer able to labor, and who did not long survive their mistresses. As for poor Fidele, he pined away about the same time as he lost his master.

I conducted Madame de la Tour to my house. She bore up under these heavy afflictions with an incredible fortitude of mind. She had comforted Paul and Margaret up to their last moments, as if she had only their misfortune to support. When she no longer beheld them, she spoke of them every day as of beloved friends who were in the neighborhood. She survived them, however, but a month....

The body of Paul was placed by the side of Virginia, at the foot of the same bamboos; and near the same spot the remains of their tender mothers and their faithful servants were laid. No marble was raised over their humble turf, no inscription engraved to celebrate their virtues; but their memory remains indelible in the hearts of those whom they have assisted.

If we have treated somewhat lightly this romance of sentimentalism and of naturalism it is because of the taint of ungenuineness--that is, of unreality more or less conscious on the author's part--that we seem to ourselves to discover in its pages. But the masterpiece of Bernardin de St. Pierre is after all a serious literary fact. For instance, if "Paul and Virginia" had never been written it is doubtful if we should ever have had that series of romantico-realistic little pieces of fiction from the pen of George Sand, out of one of which we shall presently exemplify this woman of genius to our readers. A production in literature is to be judged not only by its own inherent quality, but also, perhaps not less by its entail of influence.

"Paul and Virginia," in becoming a school-book for the learning of French, may be said to have bought increase of celebrity at the price of some diminution in fame. In our own opinion, however, which, after all that we have said, hardly needs to be thus expressly stated, the book still remains quite as famous as its intrinsic merits entitle it to be. Its chief security of renown in the future lies, and will continue more and more to lie, in the striking fact of its renown in the past.

We formally part with Rousseau and with his first literary foster-child. But we shall trace their features still, again and again, persisting in authors to follow who could not escape a tell-tale impress, open to all to see, stamped from that singularly fecund, and singularly potent, literary paternity.

XVIII.

THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS.

A cenotaph is a monument erected to the memory of one dead, but not marking the spot in which his remains rest. The present chapter is a cenotaph to the French Encyclopaedists. It is in the nature of a memorial of their literary work, but it will be found to contain no specimen extracts from their writings.