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.
Revolt she seems to have had none, doubt none, or only such momentary
dimming of the pure flame as serves to make it shine the brighter. It
does indeed trouble her a little to reflect that just those consolations
which the poor need are given only to the rich who need them not.
Life, she says, seems inside out and upside down, which was the view
of Prometheus and of Satan, but in Mademoiselle de Guérin it does not
strike us as Satanic. Also, her questioning of the divine order goes so
far as a regret that she cannot have her doves in heaven. But this pulls
her up with a shock, for in heaven we shall regret nothing—not even doves.
Some shreds of human frailty, some lingering hints of impatience and
irritability and nerves, we are pleased to find that even this saint
shares with us. How subtly and charmingly does she analyze them herself.
“I am not in the mood to write or to do anything amiable: quite the
contrary. There are days when the soul shuts itself up like a hedgehog.
If you were here, how I would prick you.” And again, in a little
different phase. “I am most unsuccessful in dealing with difficulties,
and am always in too great a hurry to get at what is to give me pleasure.”
Also, I wonder whether her friends really got near her and felt at ease
with her. Monsieur Anatole France speaks charmingly of _la douceur
impérieuse des saintes_. Had Mademoiselle de Guérin’s infinite gentleness
sometimes a touch of the imperious? I can hardly prove it. It is rare
and subtle and indefinable. But I divine it—a little. She remarks,
with beatific triumph, “I speak to everybody I love of the things of
eternity.” She did. She did. And it seems merely prophetic despair to
imply that the things of eternity might grow tiresome. But in this world
we are contented only with eternal change.
There are some special matters of absorbing interest to most women.
Eugénie de Guérin was a woman. Did she take no interest in these
matters? Beauty, for instance? It does not appear that she had any
special charm of feature or carriage. Was she aware of this? Did it
trouble her? If so, she seldom shows it. Yet there are words here and
there that set one thinking. When she was young, she says, she desired
passionately to be beautiful, because she was told that if she were so,
her mother would love her more. But as she grows older, she thinks only
of beauty of the soul. Nevertheless, coming age seems to affect her with
suggestions of ugliness, not of the soul only.
Dress again. Fair women employ it to enhance beauty, others to create
it. Did Eugénie give no thought to what she should put on? Not much,
I confess, beyond an exquisite sense of neatness and good order. Yet,
here, too, if you watch closely, you get a gleam of human vanity, like
the flash of a spangle on a sombre floor. She looks back and reviews the
preoccupations of her youth, long since laid aside and forgotten, she
says. “Dolls, toys, birds, butterflies I cherished, pretty and innocent
fancies of childhood. Then books, talk, jewels and ornaments a little,
dreams, fair dreams—but I am not writing a confession.”
If she had written one, would there have been men in it, fairy lovers
such as girls dream, an ideal blend of manly beauty and mad tenderness?
We do not know, but here again little things make us suspect. She tells
us she does not like novels, because the passions are let loose in
them—but she reads them. She pities the souls in purgatory because of the
terrible impatience with which they await release. What expectation on
earth can compare with it? she says. Not that of fortune, or of glory, or
of anything else that makes the human heart pant, unless perhaps it be
the longing of the beloved waiting for the lover. And elsewhere she draws
a domestic picture of quiet happiness, a little house in the fields, with
vines and poultry, and some one, whom? Not a peasant, she says, like ours
who beat their wives. “Do you remember—?” But she stops short and does
not give the name.
In such a picture the crowning object would be children and though she
does not mention them here, she does elsewhere, often, with all a born
mother’s tenderness. How charming is her dream of the way she would rear
them and teach them. “If I had a child to bring up, how gently I would do
it, how merrily, with all the care one gives a delicate flower. I would
speak to them of God with words of love. I would tell them that He loves
them even more than I do, that He gives them everything I give them, and
besides, the air, the sun, and the flowers, that He made the sky and the
beautiful stars.” When Maurice’s child is about to be born, after the
father’s death, she cries out in ecstasy. “How I long to have a baby in
the house, to play mother, and nurse it, and caress it.” Surely the real
woman is speaking to us here.
Other feminine affairs were of less interest to her, as we have seen with
things purely domestic. General society she shunned, and no doubt lost
by doing so. Occasionally she is tricked out and led to a party, where
she thinks every one remarks her ill, unaccustomed manner of dancing,
the truth probably being that no one noticed her at all. She might, no
doubt, have been successful in conversation, for she had wit, refinement,
distinction, and was capable of vivacity. But she avoided what she calls
the world, with a suggestion of inexpressible disdain, alleging to
herself that it was futile, frivolous, and unprofitable. Perhaps a good
part of the reason was that she herself was proud and shy and essentially
a spiritual aristocrat. “Books are my intellectual passion; but how few
there are that I like. It is just so with people. I rarely meet any one
that pleases me.” When you frequent the world in that spirit, it is
unprofitable indeed.
One phase of human weakness did take hold of this celestial wanderer and
even threaten to disturb her saintly peace, and that was the ambition of
literature. She restrains it, subdues it, disclaims it. But no one could
take such nice care of expression as she does, could turn sentences so
daintily, so vigorously, and not take pride in them. She is like Saint
François de Sales, who announces the loftiest contempt for poor words,
but uses the most cunning skill to get all he can out of them.
Writing is almost a necessity to her, she says. She turns to her pen as
an outlet for all the struggles and trials and passions of her inner
life. “Writing is the sign that I am alive, as that of a brook is
running.” She looks to publication, too, makes delicate verses and sends
them to a review, which she thinks will print them, if it prints women’s
verses at all. Not that she cares for the public, oh, no! She writes only
to please a friend or two who can appreciate her. And her name must not
be used in print, oh, never! Still, there is a subtle charm about this
newspaper notoriety, you can hardly call it glory, which does appeal,
even to the saints.
Then she thinks it appeals too much. All earthly glory is vanity, even
that of the poet’s corner of a magazine. Can it be right for her to spend
time and thought which should belong to God on the mere tinkle of human
rhyming? She consults her confessor, who assures her that no great harm
is done. She consults Maurice, who is very round with her, tells her
not to worry about her conscience in the matter, but to write, tells
her to think a little more about the subject of her verses and less
about herself, and above all suggests that she should omit devotion and
mysticism and be human, advice by which he lays himself open to gentle
admonition and reproof.
But she sticks to her pen just the same. Who ever failed to, that was
born for it? Why, I may do good by writing, she urges. No doubt her
confessor persuaded her she might, with perfect justice as regarded doing
good to one person, at any rate.
But we must not emphasize too much all these petty and indifferent
preoccupations. None of them really counted, none of them was more than
a trifle beside the paramount, absorbing interest of Mademoiselle de
Guérin’s life. Not a page, hardly a paragraph, of her Journal but has
some allusion to God, to her desire for God, her thirst for God, her
complete, entire reference of all things earthly to what was, for her, at
any rate, their origin, their purpose, and their end. She has words of
marvellous mystical subtlety and grace, though the constant impression
is more powerful than any single words. “When a brook runs, it starts
full of foam and turmoil and grows clearer as it travels. The road I
wander in is God, or a friend, but above all, God. In Him I run my course
and find repose.” “In this vast silence, when God only speaks to me,
my soul is ravished and dead to everything else, above, below, within,
without; but the rapture does not last.”
Alas, no, it does not last. These ecstasies never do, whether earthly or
heavenly, unless in heaven. And persons who spend their lives in waiting
for them are apt to view the common, petty joys of earth with discontent.
This was unquestionably the case with Mademoiselle de Guérin. A word less
frequent than God in her Journal is ennui, but it is frequent enough.
People bore her, society bores her, little daily duties bore her. She
endures them and keeps a brave face because God bids, but the ennui is
there just the same.
Nor is it only ennui. She sees a vast amount of positive evil in life.
“Pessimism is half of saintliness,” says an excellent authority. It
was at least half of Mademoiselle de Guérin’s. Besides general human
suffering and cruelty and neglect, she has a set of individual troubles
which seem avoidable, some doubt as to her own salvation and very
considerable doubt as to the salvation of others. These things keep dark
clouds over her until the sun has hard work to break through. She speaks
perpetually of graves and death, always, to be sure, to draw a moral
lesson from them; but cannot moral lessons be drawn from sweeter things?
Even the great Christian poet, Donne, while expressing a preference for
the grave, found other matters more attractive still.
“I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay
With graves than cradles to wear out a day.”
But Mademoiselle de Guérin is more than “half in love with easeful death”
and inclines to woo him with all the strange fancies of Constance in
“King John.” “Hippolyte talks to me of Marie, of another world, of his
grief, of you, of death, of all the things I love so much.”
One is inclined to break in on a strain so morbid and abnormal with
reminders of “earthlier happy is the rose distilled,” or with the
somewhat brutal Philistinism of Horace Greeley’s comment on his dear
friend, Margaret Fuller, “A good husband and two or three bouncing babies
would have emancipated her from a good deal of cant and nonsense.”
But, though Mademoiselle de Guérin might herself have been happier as a
normal wife and mother, she would not have left us the fine, elaborate
analysis of an exquisite soul.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.