Part 30

Madame Swetchine's life was chiefly spent in Paris, where the French language, already long before, in St. Petersburg, grown easy and tripping on her tongue, became to her a second, perhaps more familiar, vernacular. She was a high-born, high-bred, refined, and elegant woman of the world--woman in the world we should rather say, for, in the truest sense, _of_ it she never was--who held brilliant, choicely-frequented _salons_, but who, without ostentation and without affectation, would go from her oratory, which indeed seems to have been a private "chapel," in the full ecclesiastic sense of that word, to her drawing-room; who had even, as Sainte-Beuve indulgently, but with something of his inseparable irony, intimates, the effect of vibrating from the one to the other in the course of the same evening. Madame Swetchine was married young very unequally to a man twenty-five years her senior; but she set the edifying example of half a century's wifely devotion to that husband whom, at the wish of her father, well beloved, she had dutifully accepted in place of a noble young suitor, the choice of her own affections.

Two volumes--both of "Thoughts," though one of them bears the title "Airelles"--shut up within themselves the fragrance that was Madame Swetchine. We cull a few specimens:

Often one is prophet for others only because one is historian for one's self.

The chains which bind us the closest are those which weigh on us the least.

The best of lessons for many persons would be to listen at key-holes; it is a pity for their sake that this is not honorable.

Go always beyond designated duties, and remain within permitted pleasures.

Upon the whole, there is in life only what we put there.

I love knowledge; I love intellect; I love faith--simple faith--yet more, I love God's shadow better than man's light.

He who has ceased to enjoy his friend's superiority has ceased to love him.

Since there must be chimeras, why is not perfection the chimera of all men?

"Woman is in some sort divine," said the ancient German. "Woman," says the follower of Mahomet, "is an amiable creature who only needs a cage." "Woman," says the European, "is a being nearly our equal in intelligence, and perhaps our superior in fidelity." Everywhere something detracted from our dignity!

No two persons ever read the same book or saw the same picture.

Strength alone knows conflict. Weakness is below even defeat, and is born vanquished.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

Madame Swetchine was a woman of wealth and of leisure so-called; but it may be doubted whether any poor woman in Paris worked harder. She carried with her when she went hence what, through all her conscientious activity, outward and inward, she had in her own being become; and she found besides that ample further reward, unknown, which she had thus grown capable of receiving.

Henri Frederic AMIEL, who lived an almost silent life of sixty years--not quite silent, for he piped a volume or two of ineffectual verse--became a bruit of marvel and of praise soon after his death, through the publication from his "Journal Intime" ["Private Journal"] of a select number of his "Thoughts" found recorded there. How permanent a glow may prove to be the brightness of fame for Amiel thus suddenly outbursting, time only will decide. Already two very opposite opinions find expression concerning his merit--one applausive to the point almost of veneration, the other very freely irreverent.

Both these two contradictory opinions admit of being apparently justified from the text of his "Journal." Take the following for an example on one side:

Is not mind simply that which enables us to merge finite reality in the infinite possibility around it? Or, to put it differently, is not mind the universal virtuality, the universe latent? If so, its zero would be the germ of the infinite, which is expressed mathematically by the double zero (00).

The foregoing sentence is unintelligible enough to make, probably, the impression of pretty pure jargon on most minds. But in truth the amount of such writing in Amiel's "Journal" is proportionally very small.

Another line of entries in the "Journal" tending to reflect disparagement upon the writer consists of reiterated confessions on Amiel's part of morbid weakness of will, with habits of helpless morbid introspection, which, disappointing the hopes of his friends, practically shut him up his whole life long in a well-nigh total sterility of genius. On this count of the indictment against Amiel it is quite impossible to defend him. He was inexcusably non-productive. His "Journal" itself shows that its author should have done more than that.

This book, admirably translated into English by Mrs. Humphrey Ward, exhibits Amiel in the character of a man who always thought and felt and spoke and wrote on the side of what was pure and good and noble. He was a profoundly religious soul. As the years went on with him, and he became more and more the passive prey of his own eternally active thought, there appear to be registered some decline from the simplicity, and some corruption from the wholesomeness, of his earlier religious experience. In fact, he at last seems to let go historical Christianity altogether, still clinging, however, pathetically to God, as Father, all the time that he regards God's fatherly providence over the world as only a subjective beautiful illusion of faith existing in his own imaginative mind!

Amiel judges the present age and the current tendency of things:

The age of great men is going.... By continual leveling and division of labor society will become everything and man nothing.... A plateau with fewer and fewer undulations, without contrasts and without oppositions--such will be the aspect of human society. The statistician will register a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a progress of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of religion, and arithmetic of poetry.

He writes to himself a sort of "spiritual letter" that might almost have been Fenelon's (the date is 1852, he was therefore now thirty-one years old):

We receive everything, both life and happiness; but the _manner_ in which we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us, then, receive trustfully without shame or anxiety. Let us humbly accept from God even our own nature, and treat it charitably, firmly, intelligently. Not that we are called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease.

The first following "thought" is a deep intuition:

There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably at its purest in the last.

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Chateaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pigmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of every thing by mere force of genius.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to renounce a good once and for all costs less than to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail.

From entries fourteen years apart in date, we bring together, abridging them, two expressions of Amiel about Victor Hugo:

His ideal is the extraordinary, the gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His most characteristic words are immense, colossal, enormous, huge, monstrous. He finds a way of making even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which seems impossible to him is to be natural.

He does not see that pride is a limitation of the mind, and that a pride without limitations is a littleness of soul. If he could but learn to compare himself with other men, and France with other nations, he would see things more truly, and would not fall into these mad exaggerations, these extravagant judgments. But proportion and fairness will never be among the strings at his command. He is vowed to the Titanic; his gold is always mixed with lead, his insight with childishness, his reason with madness. He cannot be simple; the only light he has to give blinds you like that of a fire. He astonishes a reader and provokes him, he moves him and annoys him. There is always some falsity of note in him, which accounts for the _malaise_ he so constantly excites in me. The great poet in him cannot shake off the charlatan. A few shafts of Voltairean irony would have shriveled the inflation of his genius and made it stronger by making it saner. It is a public misfortune that the most powerful poet of a nation should not have better understood his _role_, and that, unlike those Hebrew prophets who scourged because they loved, he should devote himself proudly and systematically to the flattery of his countrymen. France is the world; Paris is France; Hugo is Paris; peoples, bow down!

Amiel had a just perception of the immense healing virtue lodged in happiness:

What doctor possesses such curative resources as those latent in a spark of happiness or a single ray of hope?

A vent of frank French distaste for the German type of book. Amiel had been reading the great nineteenth-century philosopher Lotze:

The noise of a mill-wheel sends one to sleep, and these pages without paragraphs, these interminable chapters, and this incessant dialectical clatter, affect me as though I were listening to a word-mill. I end by yawning like any simple non-philosophical mortal in the face of all this heaviness and pedantry. Erudition and even thought are not everything. An occasional touch of _esprit_, a little sharpness of phrase, a little vivacity, imagination, and grace, would spoil neither.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

The following shows a good heart as well as a wise head:

The errand-woman has just brought me my letters. Poor little woman, what a life! She spends her nights in going backwards and forwards from her invalid husband to her sister, who is scarcely less helpless, and her days are passed in labor. Resigned and indefatigable, she goes on without complaining, till she drops.

Lives such as hers prove something.... The kingdom of God belongs not to the most enlightened but to the best; and the best man is the most unselfish man. Humble, constant, voluntary self-sacrifice--this is what constitutes the true dignity of man.... Society rests upon conscience and not upon science. Civilization is, first and foremost, a moral thing.

He first passes judgment on Goethe, and then afterward checks himself:

He [Goethe] has so little soul. His way of understanding love, religion, duty, and patriotism has something mean and repulsive in it. There is no ardor, no generosity, in him. A secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, makes itself felt through all the wealth and flexibility of his talent.

One must never be too hasty in judging these complex natures. Completely lacking as he is in the sense of obligation and of sin, Goethe nevertheless finds his way to seriousness through dignity. Greek sculpture has been his school of virtue.

Under date 1874, Amiel asks a question and answers it. He had before said, "My creed has melted away":

_Is_ there a particular Providence directing all the circumstances of our life, and therefore imposing all our trials upon us for educational ends? Is this heroic faith compatible with our actual knowledge of the laws of nature? Scarcely. But what this faith makes objective we may hold as subjective truth.... What he [the moral being] cannot change he calls the will of God, and to will what God wills brings him peace.

A melancholy fall from his earlier state! A whole sky between such conscious false motions toward self-deceiving and the victory which overcomes the world, even our faith. Amiel had now definitely lost his health.

Toward the end, occurs this striking and illuminating word about one of the worst of human passions:

Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object loved, it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its own triumph. Love is the forgetfulness of self; jealousy is the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The contrast is perfect.

Doubting Amiel still thinks that Christ is better than Buddha:

Sorrow is the most tremendous of all realities in the sensible world, but the transfiguration of sorrow, after the manner of Christ, is a more beautiful solution of the problem than the extirpation of sorrow, after the method of Cakyamouni [Buddha].

Amiel was a naturally noble spirit, not equal to making for himself the career that he needed. But the right career, made for him, would have left to history and to literature a very different man from the writer of Amiel's "Journal."

The very latest conspicuous French candidate for renown as a writer of _pensees_ is Joseph ROUX, a rural Roman Catholic priest, and a man still living. Out of a volume of his "Thoughts" lately translated and published in America under the title of "Meditations of a Parish Priest," we show the following specimen of literary criticism peculiarly pertinent to the subject of the present chapter:

Pascal is somber, La Rochefoucauld bitter, La Bruyere malicious, Vauvenargues melancholy, Chamfort acrimonious, Joubert benevolent, Swetchine gentle.

Pascal seeks, La Rochefoucauld suspects, La Bruyere spies, Vauvenargues sympathizes, Chamfort condemns, Joubert excuses, Swetchine mourns.

Pascal is profound, La Rochefoucauld penetrating, La Bruyere sagacious, Vauvenargues delicate, Chamfort paradoxical, Joubert ingenious, Swetchine contemplative.

_Pensee_-writing has gained such headway in France, there is so much literary history behind it there, and it is in itself so fascinating a form of literary activity, that, in that country at least, the fashion will probably never pass away.

XXV.

EPILOGUE.

How much author's anguish of self-tasking and of self-denial, in exploration, study, selection, rejection, condensation, retrenchment, to say nothing of the anxiety to be clear in expression, to be true, to be proportionate, to be just, finally, too, to be entertaining as well as instructive--this little book has cost the producer of it, no one is likely ever to guess that has not tried a similar task with similar application of conscience himself.

For instance, to name Ronsard, the brilliant, the once sovereign Ronsard--lately, after so long occultation of his orb, come, through the romanticists of to-day, or shall we write "of yesterday"? almost to brightness again--to name this poet, without at least giving in specimen the following celebrated sonnet from his hand, which, for the sake of making our present point the clearer, we may now show in a neat version by Mr. Andrew Lang (but why should Mr. Lang, in his fourth line, change Ronsard's "fair" to "young"?):

When you are very old, at evening You'll sit and spin beside the fire, and say, Humming my songs, "Ah well, ah well-a-day! When I was young, of me did Ronsard sing." None of your maidens that doth hear the thing, Albeit with her weary task foredone, But wakens at my name, and calls you one Blest, to be held in long remembering.

I shall be low beneath the earth, and laid On sleep, a phantom in the myrtle shade, While you beside the fire, a grandame gray, My love, your pride, remember and regret; Ah, love me, love! we may be happy yet, And gather roses while 'tis called to-day:

--then, for another instance, to pass over Boileau and not bring forward from him even so much as the following characteristic epigram, wherein this wit and satirist pays his sarcastic respects to that same poet Cotin whom (pp. 81 ff.) we showed Moliere mocking under the name of "Trissotin" (here we must do our own translating):

In vain, with thousandfold abuse, My foes, through all their works diffuse, Have thought to make me shocking to mankind; Cotin, to bring my style to shame, Has played a much more easy game, He has his verses to my pen assigned--

to achieve, we say, these abstinences, and abstinences such as these, was a problem hard indeed to solve.

The result of all is before the reader; and, good or bad, it is, we are bound to confess, the very best that, within the given limits, we could do. Such students of our subject as we may fortunately have succeeded in making hungry for still more knowledge than we ourselves supply, we can conscientiously send, for further partial satisfaction of their desire, to that series of books, already once named by us, which has lately been published at Chicago, under the title, "The Great French Writers." Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Co. have done a true service to the cause of letters in general, and in particular to the cause of what may be called international letters, in reproducing this series of books. They are good books, they are well translated, and they appear in handsome form. Madame de Sevigne, Montesquieu, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and three names that, together with all of their several kinds, economists, philosophers, historians, we here have been obliged to omit, Turgot, Victor Cousin, Thiers, are in the list of authors treated in the volumes thus far issued.

An interesting doubt may, in retrospect of all, be submitted, without author's solution supplied, to entertain the speculation of the wisely considerate reader. Let the earlier still living French literature, that part of the whole body, we mean, ending, say, with the date of Montesquieu, which, in a rough approximate way, may be described as dominated by the spirit of classicism--let this be compared with the later French literature, that section in which the leaven of romanticism has strongly worked, and do you find existing an important fundamental difference in intimate quality between the one and the other? Is the later literature of a certain softer fiber, a more yielding consistence, than characterizes the earlier? Does the earlier present a harder, more quartz-like structure, a substance better fitted to resist yet for ages to come the slow but tireless tooth of time?

INDEX.

The merest approximation only can be attempted in hinting here the pronunciation of French names. In general, the French distribute the accent pretty evenly among all the syllables of their words. We mark an accent on the final syllable chiefly in order to correct a natural English tendency to slight that syllable in pronunciation. In a few cases we let a well-established English pronunciation stand. N notes a peculiar nasal sound, ue, a peculiar vowel sound, having no equivalent in English.

Ab'e-lard, Pierre (1079-1142), 13.

Academy, French, 16, 62, 119, 238, 264.

AEs'chy-lus, 77, 118, 127, 128.

AEsop, 69.

Alembert. _See_ D'Alembert.

Al-ex-an'der (the Great), 12, 103.

AM'I-EL, Henri Frederic, 313-318.

Am-y-ot' (am-e-o'), Jacques (1513-1593), 14.

An-ac're-on, 256.

Anderson, Melville B., 281.

An'ge-lo, Michael, 120, 282.

Ariosto, 208.

Ar-is-toph'a-nes, 32.

Ar-nauld' (ar-no'), Antoine (1612-1694), 94.

Arnold, Matthew, 248, 276, 291, 298, 299.

Arthur (King), 12.

Attwell, Henry, 309.

Au'-gus-tine, St., Latin Christian Father, 67.

Au-gus'tus (the emperor), 103.

Bacon, Francis, 43, 53.

Baker, Jehu, 185.

BAL'ZAC, Honore de (1799-1850), 174, 275, 293-298, 303.

Bal'zac, Jean Louis Guez de (1594-1654), 15, 16.

Beau-mar-chais' (bo-mar-sh'a), Pierre Augustin Caron de (1732-1799), 239.

BE-RAN-GER (ba-roN-zha'), Pierre Jean de (1780-1857), 13, 256-263.

Ber-si-er' (ber-see-a'), Eugene, 157

Bismarck, 244.

Boi-leau'-Des-pre-aux'(bwae-lo-da-pra-o'), Nicolas (1636-1711), 14, 17, 18, 67, 68, 127, 128, 130, 285, 311, 319.

Bolton, A. S., 57.

BOS-SU-ET' (bo-sue-a'), Jacques Benigne (1627-1704), 16, 17, 62, 63, 100, 127, 129, 137-142, 153, 154, 157, 158, 161, 162, 184, 286-293, 311.

BOUR-DA-LOUE', Louis (1632-1704), 10, 17, 63, 111, 115, 137, 140, 142-148, 150, 151, 291, 292.

Bryant, William Cullen, 69, 70.

Bryce, James, 192.

Buckle, Henry Thomas, 189.

Buffon (bue-foN), Georges Louis Leclerc de (1707-1788), 238, 309.

Bur'gun-dy, Duke of (1682-1712), 133, 136, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165.

Burke, Edmund, 43, 61, 192.

Burns, Robert, 256.

Bussy (bues-se'), Count, 106.

By'ron, Lord, 43, 307.

Caesar, Julius, 48, 103.

Calas (cae-lae'), Jean, 211.

Calvin, John (1509-1564), 13.

Carlyle, Thomas, 209, 212.

Catherine (Empress of Russia), 237.

Cham-fort' (shaeN-for'), Sebastien Nicolas (1741-1794), 69, 261, 318.

Char-le-magne (shar-le-man), 12.

Charles I. (of England), 129, 139.

Charles IX. (of France), 53.

CHA-TEAU-BRI-AND'(shae-to-bre-aeN') Francois Auguste de (1768-1848), 10, 18, 159, 175, 226, 229, 248-255, 276, 311, 315.

Cicero, 63, 310.

"Classicism," 15, 18, 275, 276.

Claude (klod), Jean (1619-1687), 137.

Coleridge, S. T., 13, 33, 38, 39.

Comines (ko-meen'), Philippe de (1445-1509), 13, 26, 29.

Conde (koN-dae'), Prince of, "The Great Conde" (1621-1686), 112.

Condillac (koN-de-yaek), Etienne Bonnot de (1715-1780), 238.

Condorcet (koN-dor-sa'), Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat de (1743-1794), 100, 101.

Constant (koN-sto'N), Benjamin (1767-1830), 243.

Coquerel (kok-rel'), Athanase Laurent Charles (1795-1868), 157.

CORNEILLE (kor-nal'), Pierre (1606-1684), 10, 16, 17, 19, 64, 65, 117-127, 129, 137, 138, 200, 285, 291, 292.

Cotin (ko-taN') Abbe (17th century), 81, 319.

Cotton, Charles (1630-1687), 40, 43, 45.

Cousin (koo-zaN'), Victor (1792-1867), 101, 290, 291, 320.

Cowper, William, 173.

D'Alembert (dae-laeN-ber'), Jean le Rond (1717-1783), 17, 219, 238.

Dante, Alighieri, 76, 77, 91, 281.

Demosthenes, 63.

Descartes (da-kaert'), Rene (1596-1650), 16, 86, 92.

D'Holbach (dol-bak'), properly, Holbach, Paul Henri Thyry, (1723-1789), 238.

Dickens, Charles, 33, 116, 295, 296.

DIDEROT (de-dro), Denis (1713-1784), 17, 191, 209, 236, 237, 238, 285.

Dryden, John, 43, 127.

Duclos (due-klo'), Charles Pineau (1704-1772), 238.

"_Ecrasez l'Infame_," 210.

Edward (the Black Prince), 24, 26.

Edwards, President Jonathan, 145.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 43, 45, 52.

Encyclopaedists, 17, 167, 209, 235-239, 249.

Epictetus, 54.

Erasmus, 39, 99.

Euripides, 64, 118, 127, 129.

_Fabliaux_ (fab'le-o'), 12.

Faugere (fo-zher'), Armand Prosper (1810), 101.

Felix, Pere, 157.

Fenelon (fan-loN'), Francois de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715), 17, 134, 137, 153, 158-173, 310, 315.

Flechier (flache-a'), Esprit (1632-1710), 137.

Foix (fwae), Count of, 27, 28.

FROISSART (frwae-sar'), Jean (1337-1410?), 13, 22-29.

Gaillard (ga-yar'), Gabriel Henri (1726-1806), 119.

Gargant'ua, 29, 34-37.

Gibbon, Edward, 118, 241.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 184, 229, 244, 245, 281, 305, 317.

Goldsmith, Oliver, 67, 184, 269.

Grignan (green-yaeN'), Madame de, 108.

Grimm, Friedrich Melchior (1723-1807), 238.

Grimm, Herman, 244.

Guizot, Francois Pierre Guillaume (1787-1874), 199, 320.

Guyon (ge-yoN') Madame (1648-1717), 161, 172, 173.

Hallam, Henry, 21, 33.

Havet (ae-va') (editor of Pascal's works), 101.

Hawkesworth, Doctor, 169.

Hazlitt, William Carew, 43.

Helvetius (el-va-se-uess'), Claude Adrien (1715-1771), 238.

Henriette, Princess, 129, 139.