Part 12

He was one who well deserved such affection. Sensitive, delicate in health and in feeling, imaginative, finely touched to all the fine issues of genius, his brief life was torn and tortured by alternate aspiration and doubt, by vast dreams of what he might achieve and miserable distrust of his ability to achieve anything. He died young and left behind him a journal recording these struggles with pathetic fidelity and one short prose poem, which has wide harmonies of classic dignity and echoing grandeur not surpassed by the “Hyperion” of Keats. Who that knows that music can ever forget it? “_O Mélampe! les dieux errants ont posé leur lyres sur les pierres; mais aucun—aucun ne l’y a oubliée._”

The sister also kept a journal. But while Maurice’s was addressed to himself or to curious posterity, hers was addressed only to him; even after death had snatched him from her, only to him. All her inmost thoughts go there, all her hopes, all her sorrows, and to pour them out to him is the great preoccupation of her life. She can say to him things she cannot say to others. He will understand. He has always understood. With great and with little events it is the same. A sunset walk in the fields and the death of a dear friend—each alike must be discussed with Maurice. All the emotion each brings with it must be confided to him. Anxiety for his health, for his future, for his happiness, is constantly blended with her own daily doings, the whole making a curious tissue of love, as fine and delicate as it is tender and true.

To turn to the brother’s journal from the sister’s is a fruitful lesson in human nature. In her life everything is related to him. In his she is an element, an episode, beloved, delightful, nothing more. Her name hardly occurs in his Journal, even casually. The letters he writes to her are affectionate, and appeal for comfort when he needs it. He was the sun of her life. In his, even before his marriage, she was only a tranquil star, shining quietly, treasured, but not always remembered. She knew this. Love always knows. Looking back, after he was gone, she wonders if she did not sometimes bore him. While she had him with her, the longed-for letters used to come, not always bringing what she demanded of them. “How my fingers burned to open that letter in which at last I was to see you. I have seen you, but I do not know you. You open only your head to me. It was your heart, your soul, the very inmost of your being, what makes your life, that I hoped to see.”

No lack of response made any difference in the sister’s ardent affection, however, unless perhaps to increase the ardor, as sometimes happens in this inconsequent world. Eugénie’s thought was ever on the beloved object, on his reading, on his thinking, on his material condition, on his varied failure and success in his efforts to overcome the maddening poverty which hampered his progress. Yet how strange are the vagaries of the human heart. With all her passionate thought and affection, I do not find that she gave much heed to the one interest which was positive in Maurice’s life, his desire to achieve enduring beauty for the delight of men. When a life is devoured by this longing, it measures all things and all people by their sympathy with it and contribution to it. It is perhaps just here that Eugénie failed to evoke the entire response she looked for from her brother’s heart. To be sure, when his writings were gathered together after his death, she expressed great interest and some enthusiasm. Yet even then her chief anxiety was that he should not be misrepresented, misunderstood, mispraised as pagan rather than Christian, and she did not hesitate to assert that he had no thought of fame and did not desire it.

How even our most unselfish love is absorbed in its own point of view! How hard it is to love others as they would be loved, not as we would be loved. Eugénie worried perpetually about Maurice’s soul, but very little about his reputation. She had not learned the profound truth and beauty of Madame de Choiseul’s remark: “I have always had the vanity of those I love: that is my fashion of loving.”

I wonder whether the young wife from the far Indies, whom Maurice married when death was already beginning to lay its hand on him, had any more sympathy with his aspirations for this world. There is no evidence that she had, though she was tender and devoted in her care and ministrations to the very last.

It is most curious to observe Eugénie’s relation to this new sister. Even for a mother, who has her own distinct, assured claim, it is hard enough to give up a son she loves. But a sister, with all a mother’s love, but only a sister’s intimacy, cannot see the forming of a new and stronger bond without some dread, some repugnance, some coldness at the heart. Eugénie, like all persons who analyze their feelings, was naturally inclined to doubt others’ affection because she doubted her own desert. When her friends fail to write to her, she hints her grief about it. When the tone of Maurice’s letters is indifferent, or she fancies that it is, she frets and broods over it. “Do you remember that little short letter that tormented me for a fortnight?” How, then, did she bear the intrusion of a stranger heart, sure to see into all the hidden places where even she had not been privileged to come? We can divine well enough how hard it was. Her tone about her new sister might indeed seem to be all praise. She is good, she is beautiful, she is devoted to Maurice, she fulfils all her duties and is a sweet companion and friend. Nevertheless, there is the faintest, perfectly unintentional patronage. Her family are not, perhaps, quite all they should be. Her dress, charming, delightful, appropriate, but is it a little startling for a country town, that black velvet hat with an ostrich plume, fit to amaze earth and heaven, as a neighbor puts it? But we do so want to be friendly, to do our part. “I hope Maurice will be happy with her. She isn’t just the sort of woman I am used to, for character, or heart, or face. She is a stranger. I am studying her. I am trying to get her near to me, to enter into her life, if she cannot enter into mine.”

When they both together were soothing the last hours of the beloved one, Eugénie has nothing but praise and affection for her sister-in-law. But who could miss the poignancy of the quiet remark that the sister lies awake all night and hears the wife ministering to the husband as she herself would like to minister? It is hard to tell which is more significant, this comment or that of a few weeks earlier: “They are happy. Maurice is a perfect husband. He is worth a hundred of what he was a year ago. He told me so himself. He confides in me just as much as ever. We often talk together intimately.”

On one point Maurice’s marriage seems to be as satisfactory as it could be, that of religion. His wife does not appear to have distracted him in any way from his salvation, which would have been hard for Eugénie; nor yet does the wife promote it more than the sister did, which would have been even harder. Maurice’s salvation! That was the object of Eugénie’s daily thoughts and of her nightly prayers. Maurice’s salvation! While she had him under her own motherly wing, all was well. He might perhaps have been too easily distracted, not intensely serious, as she was; but at least his faith was firmly grounded and she sent him out into the great world, confident that he would be a white soldier of Christ always.

Alas, how often such hopes are disappointed! Not that Maurice really sinned, or went astray. Most would have thought him virtuous enough, Christian enough. But he took a certain interest in the heresies of his adored teacher, Lamennais, and, to the half-cloistered sister at any rate, he appeared much tainted with the follies and incredulities of an unbelieving age. How she longed to have him back with her, at least in spirit! How she prayed that he might pray! How she trembled and shrank at the thought that after being separated on earth they might not be united in heaven! “I am not holy enough to convert you, nor strong enough to draw you with me. God alone can do that. Oh, how I ask it of him, for all my happiness goes with it. Perhaps you cannot imagine, with your philosophic eye you cannot see, the tears of a Christian eye, weeping for a soul that may be lost, a soul so much beloved, a brother’s soul, the sister of one’s own.”

At least she had the satisfaction of feeling that in the end her prayers were answered and that the frail and wavering spirit returned to die in the faith in which she had cradled it. Taking a view with which the unregenerate will find it hard to sympathize, she declares that errors of the intellect are much more serious, more dangerous than errors of the heart. To her fond hope it seemed that on her brother’s deathbed intellectual errors were all forgotten, and after he had left her she resented bitterly the verdict of great writers, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, that he would live to posterity as a poet of nature whose essential spirit was much less Christian than Greek.

I have said that Mademoiselle de Guérin’s secluded and in a sense impersonal life was filled by two great preoccupations. One was her brother. It will be evident by this time that the other was God. “There is one thing needful, to possess God,” wrote Amiel at the beginning of his Journal. Assuredly few human beings have possessed God, have been more thoroughly possessed by the thought of God, than Eugénie de Guérin. All thoughts, all passions, all hopes, all griefs are referred constantly, in prayer and meditation, to that one source, to that one end. It is indeed beautiful to see how completely the two great interests of her life merge in each other. Madame de Sévigné adored her daughter more than God, felt and admitted that the earthly idol usurped God’s place in her eager, tender, frantic mother’s heart. Madame du Deffand worshipped Horace Walpole instead of God, a frail and singular substitute, it will certainly be admitted. With Mademoiselle de Guérin there was never any question of conflict. Her two loves were absolutely united, and one simply enhanced the other. To one object she addressed herself almost as freely as to the other, and it was matter of regret to her that she did not quite: “I speak as I please to this little book [her Journal, addressed to Maurice]. I tell it everything, thoughts, griefs, pleasures, feelings, everything but what can be told only to God, and even then I am sorry to leave anything at the bottom of the box.”

After her brother’s death, she recognizes, in a passage of wonderful self-analysis, the huge, the over-mastering power of earthly affection, yet at once her permanent instinct blends God with it all in a complete, supreme effort of submission to his will. “Shall we never be rid of our affections? Neither grief, nor anguish, nor death has power to change us. To love, always to love, to love right down into the grave, to love the earthly remnants, to love the body that has borne the soul, even though the soul has fled to heaven!... All happiness is dead for me on earth. I have buried my heart’s life. I have lost the charm of my existence. I cannot tell all that my brother was to me or how profoundly I had hidden in him all my happiness. My future, my hopes, my old age, all were one with his, and then he was a soul that understood me. He and I were two eyes in one forehead. Now we are torn apart and God has come between us. His will be done!”

In emphasizing this divine possession of Mademoiselle de Guérin, we must not, however, imply that she was actually unbalanced, or not alive to the common needs and duties of daily life. Her religion was active as well as passive. Even in the more ecstatic rites of spiritual devotion she recognizes a wholesome practical efficacy, as in her striking remark about confession. “What ease, what light, what strength come to me every time I say right out, ‘I was at fault.’” Such a normal attitude makes one regret more than ever that, in our day, at any rate, those make most use of confession who have very little to confess.

In the wide practice of charity it does not appear that Mademoiselle de Guérin was especially active. Yet here too it is evident that she gave not only money but the comfort and the sage, kindly counsel which are worth much more than money, whenever occasion called for them.

So with domestic pursuits. Though her family were of old, high standing, they were poor, lived simply, kept few attendants, and the daughters of the house were wont to turn their prudent hands to every sort of service. Eugénie had evidently been trained in the methods of careful French housekeeping. She dusts, she mends, she lays the table, she cooks, in emergency she takes the linen to the brook and washes it after the picturesque, muscular European fashion. She often finds pleasure in all these doings, also, has a true domestic sense of order and finish and propriety. Nay, she does her washing with real lightness of heart, seeing charms in it which perhaps escape the average laundress. “It is a real joy to wash, to see the fish swim by, to watch the little wavelets, the twigs, the leaves, the blossoms floating in the stream. The brook brings so much that is pretty to the toiler who knows how to see.”

But even here we note that the toiler’s thoughts were not wholly on her toil, however well she might perform it. She was not born to labor with contented indifference. Her heart was too restless, too eager, too bent on vast reveries beyond the limits of this world’s cleanliness. Therefore she willingly lets her sister be housekeeper and only stands ready to help when needed. If little tasks absorb too much of her time, she complains, almost petulantly. “I have hardly opened a book to-day. My time has been passed with things quite different from reading, things nothing in themselves, not even worth mentioning, yet which fill up every moment.” And always, through the humblest of such tasks, runs the glowing current of those thoughts which to her were the only reality in a world of tawdry, trivial, incoherent phantoms. Even when the phantoms burn her fingers, she thinks only of Saint Catherine of Sienna, who had a taste for cooking. “It gave her so many subjects for meditation. I can well believe it, if for nothing but the sight of the fire and the little burns one gets, which make one think of purgatory.”

For she was thinking of hell, and purgatory, and heaven all the time, or as I said in beginning, more justly, she was thinking of God, which included them all three, and far more. God entered into every step she took, and every breath she breathed.

We may trace Him in all her earthly affections. They were deep and strong. We have seen this in regard to Maurice. It was just as true in regard to all others. Her father she cherished tenderly. She knew that he depended on her for everything and she was ready to give him everything at any moment. The deepest workings of her soul she kept from him, because she knew that he would not wholly understand them, and in covering them even with a certain duplicity she only practiced the precept of one who had penetrated the spiritual life as deeply as she, though from a different angle, “the law of love is higher than the law of truth.” Her friendships for other women, also, were profoundly sincere and lasting. She gives much and asks little, just tenderness shown in a brief letter, or a fleeting word. Who has analyzed the passing of friendship more delicately than she? “It is said that women never love each other. I do not know. There may be deep affections that last only a short time. But I have always mistrusted these, for myself and for those I love. Nothing is sadder than a bit of death in the heart. Therefore, when I see an affection dying, I set to work to rekindle it with all my power.” Hers also is this perfect expression of a heart inclined to tenderness: “Our affections are born one of another.”

Yet, as with Maurice, in all these relations God was first. The thought of Him sanctified them. The sense of his presence enhanced and beautified them. Except as they turned towards Him, they could not live and did not deserve to live. “The tenderest affections of the heart, what are they, if they are not bent towards heaven, if they are not offered up to God? They are as mortal as ourselves. We should love not for this world, but for another.”

As with human love, so is it for Eugénie with all other phases of the inner life. By nature she had keen intellectual instincts, liked to read, liked to think, would even have been inclined to think with broad audacity. She had eminently the habit of reflection and analysis which makes solitude fruitful and also makes it dangerous. What scholar could express the charm of lonely hours with more depth and delicacy than this slightly tutored girl? “I love to linger over my thoughts, to bend over each one and breathe its fragrance, to enjoy them fully before they fade away.” Books are a refuge, a resource, a consolation to her. She hates to leave them, even for the brief journeys she is called upon to make.

Also, the very interesting catalogue of her limited bookshelf contains some authors of distinctly profane persuasion, whom she does not always shun. Victor Hugo fascinates her. Sometimes, indeed, the quality of the text forces her to confine her attention to the pictures, but again she is wrapt by the adventures of Jean Valjean and the flamboyant mediævalism of “Notre Dame de Paris.” She tries to break a long day by an exciting novel, picks “The Chamber of Poisons” for its title, but finds only disappointments, pet toads, Jesuits turned into hobgoblins, big names in petty places. She has no taste for poisons, she says. Or again, she turns to Sainte-Beuve’s “Volupté,” having been assured by her confessor that pure minds may pass untainted through strange regions. She likes the book, not perhaps wholly fathoming its depths of morbid suggestiveness. But the best is Molière. She tries him once, is delighted, and means to read more. Now what could be further apart than the worlds of Molière and Eugénie de Guérin?

But, in the main, she reads the writers of this life only to condemn them. Bossuet, Pascal, the Fathers, the “Imitation,” are her daily and nightly company. Such books are all that Christians should read or even recognize. As for the general diffusion of book-learning and education, she deplores it with the real obscurantism of mediæval superstition. The peasants, she says, were once simple-minded, earnest, reverent, devout. Now they go to school, they read the newspapers, they acquire the superficial jargon of modern culture, and as a consequence they are atheistic in their talk and immoral in their lives.

The same intense and constant preoccupation with the mystical point of view that affected Mademoiselle de Guérin’s intellectual pursuits entered into her æsthetic enjoyments. Art in its technical form was completely out of her world. She probably saw pictures with the other curiosities of Paris, but they made no appeal, and churches to her were churches, not in any way creations of architectural art. Music alone she approaches with a sort of groping sense of its vast emotional possibility. But as to this she would undoubtedly have agreed with Cowper that all music not directly intended and employed for the worship of God was corrupting, enervating, debasing. “Oh, if I knew music!” she cries, in a moment of enthusiasm. “They say it is so good for the disorders of the soul.” Yet it does not touch her. “Nothing in the world has such power to move and stimulate the soul. I know it, but I do not feel it.” And a similar experience calls forth words profoundly characteristic for more than music. “I listened to wonders, yet nothing astonished me. Is there then no astonishment save in heaven?”

But there was one region of beauty in which Eugénie’s soul opened and flowered with the most exquisite delicacy and sensibility of response and that was the world of nature. The subtle, dreamy, suggestive landscape of France, which has meant so much to poets and painters, has rarely been felt or rendered with more perfection than by this simple girl who spent her life with flowers and birds and clouds and stars. “I tried to begin a letter to you yesterday,” she says, “but I could not write. All my soul was at the window.” How often her soul was at the window, all ears, all eyes, stirred to wild joy or grief by the breath of light winds, or the dance of blossoms in sunshine, or the drift of autumn leaves. Now it is fair spring weather that delights her, now it is the long and wind-swept rains of autumn. The vast tranquillity of summer nights at times befits her mood. And again she welcomes the tumult of great storms and cries out for even thunder to jar the too monotonous quiet. Not the heart of Keats or Shelley was more vividly, more blissfully or painfully, at one with little sounds, or fleeting sights, or unknown odors that vanish as quickly as they come.

She reads Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s description of the strawberry vine, which, he says, would make matter for a volume, with all its relations and experiences. “I,” she says, “am like the strawberry vine, bound up with earth and air and sky, with the birds, with so many things, visible and invisible, that I should never get through describing them, without counting what lives hidden in the folds of my heart, like the insects that dwell in the thickness of a leaf.” And again, “I wish my heart did not feel the condition of the air and of the season so much that it opens and closes like a flower with cold or sun. I don’t understand it, but so it is, so long as the soul is encased in this frail habitation of the body.”

But nature is never all to her, never enough for her. She must have God. Either she sees Him as the whole life and beauty of it all, hears his voice in the breeze and in the storm, feels his hand in the motion of flowers and of stars, or she turns away from the beauty of earth as too apt to distract from the beauty of heaven. “The sky to-day is pale and languid like a fair face after a fever. This look of languor is full of charm. The blending of greenness and decay, of flowers that open with flowers that fall, of singing birds and creeping brooks, the breath of storm and May sunshine mingled, give an effect of fine fabrics ruffled and tossed together, of sad and sweet at once, which fills me with delight. But this is Ascension day: let us leave earth and earth’s skies; let us rise above our fragile dwelling place and follow where Christ has gone before us.” In another mood the quiet, subtle sounds of night seem to penetrate devotion with an overpowering tenderness, to waft thought higher even than meditation undisturbed. “It is black night. But you can still hear the crickets, the streamlet, and the nightingale, just one, which sings, sings, sings, in the thick darkness. What a perfect accompaniment to evening prayer!”

I said in beginning that Mademoiselle de Guérin had no active personal life of her own. This is as true of her as perhaps of any of us. She followed the thought of others and of God as the shadow follows the sun. At the same time, she was human, she was a woman, she was made of earth, as we all are. It is a study of exceeding interest to watch the stirrings of humanity, even barely perceptible and quickly crushed, in this white, pure vessel filled with the glow of an unearthly adoration.