De Quincey shared Dante's rare capacity for retaining strong visual

images, his rare power of weaving them into a new and wonderful fabric.

But De Quincey, though as learned and as acute as Dante, had not Dante's

religious and philosophical convictions. A blind faith and scholastic

reason were the foundations of the great vision of the 'Divine Comedy.'

De Quincey had not the strong but limited conception of the world on

which to base his imagination, he had not the high religious vision to

nerve him to higher contemplation, and his work can never serve in any

way as a guide and message to mankind. De Quincey's visions, however,

have the merit of not being forced. He did not resolve to see what faith

and reason bade him.

While all controlled reasoning was suspended under the incantation of

opium, his quick mind, without conscious intent, without prejudice or

purpose, assembled such mysterious and wonderful sights and sounds as

the naked soul might see and hear in the world of actual experience. For

De Quincey's range of action and association was not as narrow as might

seem. He had walked the streets of London friendless and starving, saved

from death by a dram given by one even more wretched than he, only a few

months after he had talked with the king. De Quincey's latent images are

therefore not grotesque or mediaeval, not conditioned by any

philosophical theory, not of any Inferno or Paradise. The elements of

his visions are the simple elements of all our striking experiences: the

faces of the dead, the grieving child, the tired woman, the strange

foreign face, the tramp of horses' feet. And opium merely magnified

these simple elements, rendered them grand and beautiful without giving

them any forced connection or relative meaning. We recognize the traces

of our own transfigured experience, but we are relieved from the

necessity of accepting it as having an inner meaning. De Quincey's

singular hold on our affection seems, therefore, to be his rare quality

of presenting the unusual but typical dream or reverie as a beautiful

object of interest, without endeavoring to give it the character of an

allegory or a fable.

The greater part of De Quincey's writings however are historical,

critical, and philosophical in character rather than autobiographical;

but these are now much neglected. We sometimes read a little of 'Joan of

Arc,' and no one can read it without great admiration; the 'Flight of

the Tartars' has even become a part of "prescribed" literature in our

American schools; but of other essays than these we have as a rule only

a dim impression or a faint memory. There are obvious reasons why De

Quincey's historical and philosophical writings, in an age which devotes

itself so largely to similar pursuits, no longer recommend themselves to

the popular taste. His method is too discursive and leisurely; his

subjects as a rule too remote from current interest; his line of thought

too intricate. These failings, from our point of view, are the more to

be regretted because there has never been an English essayist more

entertaining or suggestive than De Quincey. His works cover a very wide

range of subject-matter,--from the 'Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth' to

the 'Casuistry of Roman Meals' and the 'Toilet of a Hebrew Lady.' His

topics are always piquant. Like Poe, De Quincey loved puzzling

questions, the cryptograms, the tangled under sides of things, where

there are many and conflicting facts to sift and correlate, the points

that are now usually settled in foot-notes and by references to German

authorities. In dealing with such subjects he showed not only that he

possessed the same keen logic which entertains us in Poe, but that he

was the master of great stores of learned information. We are never

wholly convinced, perhaps, of the eternal truth of his conclusions, but

we like to watch him arrive at them. They seem fresh and strange, and we

are dazzled by the constantly changing material. Nothing can be more

delightful than the constant influx of new objects of thought, the

unexpected incidents, the seemingly inexpugnable logic that ends in

paradox, the play of human interest in a topic to which all living

interest seems alien. There is scarcely a page in all De Quincey's

writings that taken by itself is actually dull. In each, one receives a

vivid impression of the same lithe and active mind, examining with

lively curiosity even a recondite subject: cracking a joke here and

dropping a tear there, and never intermitting the smooth flow of acute

but often irrelevant observation. The generation that habitually

neglects De Quincey has lost little important historical and

philosophical information, perhaps, but it has certainly deprived itself

of a constant source of entertainment.

As a stylist De Quincey marked a new ideal in English; that of

impassioned prose, as he himself expresses it,--prose which deliberately

exalts its subject-matter, as the opera does its. And it was really as

an opera that De Quincey conceived of the essay. It was to have its

recitatives, its mediocre passages, the well and firmly handled parts of

ordinary discourse. All comparatively unornamented matter was, however,

but preparative to the lyric outburst,--the strophe and antistrophe of

modulated song. In this conception of style others had preceded

him,--Milton notably,--but only half consciously and not with sustained

success. There could be no great English prose until the eighteenth

century had trimmed the tangled periods of the seventeenth, and the

romantic movement of the nineteenth added fire and enthusiasm to the

clear but conventional style of the eighteenth. Ruskin and Carlyle have

both the same element of _bravura_, as will be seen if one tries to

analyze their best passages as music. But in De Quincey this lyric

arrangement is at once more delicate and more obvious, as the reader may

assure himself if he re-read his favorite passages, noticing how many of

them are in essence exclamatory, or actually vocative, as it were. In

this ideal of impassioned prose De Quincey gave to the prose of the

latter part of the century its keynote. Macaulay is everywhere equally

impassioned or unimpassioned; the smooth-flowing and useful canal,

rather than the picturesque river in which rapids follow the long

reaches of even water, and are in turn succeeded by them. To conceive of

style as music,--as symmetry, proportion, and measure, only secondarily

dependent on the clear exposition of the actual subject-matter,--that is

De Quincey's ideal, and there Pater and Stevenson have followed him.

De Quincey's fame has not gone far beyond the circle of those who speak

his native tongue. A recent French critic finds him rough and rude,

sinister even in his wit. In that circle however his reputation has been

high, though he has not been without stern critics. Mr. Leslie Stephen

insists that his logic is more apparent than real: that his humor is

spun out and trivial, his jests ill-timed and ill-made. His claim that

his 'Confessions' created a new _genre_ is futile; they confess nothing

epoch-making,--no real crises of soul, merely the adventures of a truant

schoolboy, the recollections of a drunkard. He was full of contemptuous

and effeminate British prejudices against agnosticism and Continental

geniuses. "And so," Mr. Stephen continues, "in a life of seventy-three

years De Quincey read extensively and thought acutely by fits, ate an

enormous quantity of opium, wrote a few pages which revealed new

capacities in the language, and provided a good deal of respectable

padding for the magazines."

Not a single one of the charges can be wholly denied; on analysis De

Quincey proves guilty of all these offenses against ideal culture. Rough

jocoseness, diffusiveness, local prejudice, a life spent on details, a

lack of philosophy.--these are faults, but they are British faults,

Anglo-Saxon faults. They scarcely limit affection or greatly diminish

respect. De Quincey was a sophist, a rhetorician, a brilliant talker.

There are men of that sort in every club, in every community. We forgive

their eccentricity, their lack of fine humor, the most rigid logic, or

the highest learning. We do not attempt to reply to them. It is enough

if the stream of discourse flows gently on from their lips. A rich and

well-modulated vocabulary, finely turned phrases, amusing quips and

conceits of fancy, acute observations, a rich store of recondite

learning, these charm and hold us. Such a talker, such a writer, was De

Quincey. Such was his task, to amuse, to interest, and at times to

instruct us. One deeper note he struck rarely, but always with the

master's hand, the vibrating note felt in passages characteristic of

immensity, solitude, grandeur; and it is to that note that De Quincey

owes the individuality of his style and his fame.

There are few facts in De Quincey's long career that bear directly on

the criticism of his works. Like Ruskin, he was the son of a well-to-do

and cultivated merchant, but the elder De Quincey unfortunately died too

early to be of any help in life to his impulsive and unpractical boy,

who quarreled with his guardians, ran away from school, and neglected

his routine duties at Oxford. His admiration for Wordsworth and

Coleridge led him to the Lake country, where he married and settled

down. The necessity of providing for his family at last aroused him from

his life of meditation and indulgence in opium, and brought him into

connection with the periodicals of the day. After the death of his wife

in 1840 he moved with his children to the vicinity of Edinburgh, where

in somewhat eccentric solitude he spent the last twenty years of his

uneventful life.

[Illustration: Signature]

CHARLES LAMB

From 'Biographical Essays'

It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that in

every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest

much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential

_non_-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in

conformity to the current taste. They interest because to the world they

are _not_ interesting. They attract by means of their repulsion. Not as

though it could separately furnish a reason for loving a book, that the

majority of men had found it repulsive. _Prima facie_, it must suggest

some presumption _against_ a book that it has failed to gain public

attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud

against its own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign.

_That_ argues power. Hatred may be promising. The deepest revolutions of

mind sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to have left a reader

unimpressed is in itself a neutral result, from which the inference is

doubtful. Yet even _that_, even simple failure to impress, may happen at

times to be a result from positive powers in a writer, from special

originalities such as rarely reflect themselves in the mirror of the

ordinary understanding. It seems little to be perceived, how much the

great Scriptural idea of the _worldly_ and the _unworldly_ is found to

emerge in literature as well as in life. In reality, the very same

combinations of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the

harsh physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of

life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library divides

into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides

into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for

recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified

in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have

governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike

simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world

does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more

determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect;

and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than it

does, in the realities of life.

Charles Lamb, if any ever was, is amongst the class here contemplated;

he, if any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose works are destined to

be forever unpopular, and yet forever interesting; interesting moreover

by means of those very qualities which guarantee their non-popularity.

The same qualities which will be found forbidding to the worldly and the

thoughtless, which will be found insipid to many even amongst robust and

powerful minds, are exactly those which will continue to command a

select audience in every generation. The prose essays, under the

signature of "Elia," form the most delightful section amongst Lamb's

works. They traverse a peculiar field of observation, sequestered from

general interest: and they are composed in a spirit too delicate and

unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong

sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered

by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross

lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the

objects casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in

the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections

and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring before the

tumult of new and revolutionary generations;--these traits in

combination communicate to the papers a grace and strength of

originality which nothing in any literature approaches, whether for

degree or kind of excellence, except the most felicitous papers of

Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverley, and some others in the

same vein of composition. They resemble Addison's papers also in the

diction, which is natural and idiomatic even to carelessness. They are

equally faithful to the truth of nature; and in this only they differ

remarkably--that the sketches of Elia reflect the stamp and impress of

the writer's own character, whereas in all those of Addison the personal

peculiarities of the delineator (though known to the reader from the

beginning through the account of the club) are nearly quiescent. Now and

then they are recalled into a momentary notice, but they do not act, or

at all modify his pictures of Sir Roger or Will Wimble. _They_ are

slightly and amiably eccentric; but the Spectator himself, in describing

them, takes the station of an ordinary observer.

Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his

'Elia,' the character of the writer co-operates in an undercurrent to

make the effect of the thing written. To understand in the fullest sense

either the gayety or the tenderness of a particular passage, you must

have some insight into the peculiar bias of the writer's mind, whether

native and original, or impressed gradually by the accidents of

situation; whether simply developed out of predispositions by the action

of life, or violently scorched into the constitution by some fierce

fever of calamity. There is in modern literature a whole class of

writers, though not a large one, standing within the same category; some

marked originality of character in the writer becomes a coefficient with

what he says to a common result; you must sympathize with this

_personality_ in the author before you can appreciate the most

significant parts of his views. In most books the writer figures as a

mere abstraction, without sex or age or local station, whom the reader

banishes from his thoughts. What is written seems to proceed from a

blank intellect, not from a man clothed with fleshly peculiarities and

differences. These peculiarities and differences neither do, nor

(generally speaking) _could_ intermingle with the texture of the

thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In such

books--and they form the vast majority--there is nothing to be found or

to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (_Sit venia verbo!_) But

in a small section of books, the objective in the thought becomes

confluent with the subjective in the thinker--the two forces unite for a

joint product; and fully to enjoy the product, or fully to apprehend

either element, both must be known. It is singular and worth inquiring

into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had no such

books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive qualified for this

mode of authorship, had journalism existed to rouse them in those days;

their "articles" would no doubt have been fearfully caustic. But as they

failed to produce anything, and Lucian in an after age is scarcely

characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais

and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the class described. In the

century following theirs came Sir Thomas Browne, and immediately after

him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others less

distinguished; in Germany, Hippel the friend of Kant, Harmann the

obscure, and the greatest of the whole body--John Paul Friedrich

Richter. In him, from the strength and determinateness of his nature as

well as from the great extent of his writing, the philosophy of this

interaction between the author as a human agency and his theme as an

intellectual reagency might best be studied. From him might be derived

the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the

universal into the concrete--of the pure intellect into the human nature

of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more

interesting--shy, delicate, evanescent--shy as lightning, delicate and

evanescent as the colored pencilings on a frosty night from the Northern

Lights, than in the better parts of Lamb.

To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character and

temperament should be understood in their coyest and most wayward

features. A capital defect it would be if these could not be gathered

silently from Lamb's works themselves. It would be a fatal mode of

dependency upon an alien and separable accident if they needed an

external commentary. But they do _not_. The syllables lurk up and down

the writings of Lamb, which decipher his eccentric nature. His character

lies there dispersed in anagram; and to any attentive reader the

re-gathering and restoration of the total word from its scattered parts

is inevitable without an effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in

knowing a result, to know also its _why_ and _how_; and in so far as

every character is likely to be modified by the particular experience,

sad or joyous, through which the life has traveled, it is a good

contribution towards the knowledge of that resulting character as a

whole to have a sketch of that particular experience. What trials did it

impose? What energies did it task? What temptations did it unfold? These

calls upon the moral powers, which in music so stormy many a life is

doomed to hear,--how were they faced? The character in a capital degree

molds oftentimes the life, but the life _always_ in a subordinate degree

molds the character. And the character being in this case of Lamb so

much of a key to the writings, it becomes important that the life should

be traced, however briefly, as a key to the character.

DESPAIR

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character--a

tumultuous dream--commencing with a music such as now I often heard in

sleep, music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations

of fast gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation

Anthem; and like that, gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement, of

infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The

morning was come of a mighty day--a day of crisis and of ultimate hope

for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and laboring in

some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not where,--somehow, but I

knew not how,--by some beings, but I knew not by whom,--a battle, a

strife, an agony, was traveling through all its stages,--was evolving

itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama; with which my

sympathy was the more insupportable from deepening confusion as to its

local scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I (as

is usual in dreams, where of necessity we make ourselves central to

every movement) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it.

I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet again had

not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the

oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I

lay inactive. Then like a chorus the passion deepened. Some greater

interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had

pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to

and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from

the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces;

and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the

features that were worth all the world to me; and but a moment

allowed--and clasped hands, with heart-breaking partings, and

then--everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell

sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death,

the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again, and yet

again reverberated--everlasting farewells!

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, "I will sleep no more!"

THE DEAD SISTER

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

On the day after my sister's death, whilst the sweet temple of her brain

was yet unviolated by human scrutiny, I formed my own scheme for seeing

her once more. Not for the world would I have made this known, nor have

suffered a witness to accompany me. I had never heard of feelings that

take the name of "sentimental," nor dreamed of such a possibility. But

grief even in a child hates the light, and shrinks from human eyes. The

house was large, there were two staircases; and by one of these I knew

that about noon, when all would be quiet, I could steal up into her

chamber. I imagine that it was exactly high noon when I reached the

chamber door; it was locked, but the key was not taken away. Entering, I

closed the door so softly that although it opened upon a hall which

ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent walls.

Then turning around, I sought my sister's face. But the bed had been

moved, and the back was now turned. Nothing met my eyes but one large

window wide open, through which the sun of midsummer at noonday was

showering down torrents of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was

cloudless, the blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it

was not possible for eye to behold or for heart to conceive any symbols

more pathetic of life and the glory of life.

Let me pause for one instant in approaching a remembrance so affecting

and revolutionary for my own mind, and one which (if any earthly

remembrance) will survive for me in the hour of death,--to remind some

readers, and to inform others, that in the original 'Opium Confessions'

I endeavored to explain the reason why death, _caeteris paribus_, is more

profoundly affecting in summer than in other parts of the year; so far

at least as it is liable to any modification at all from accidents of

scenery or season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the

antagonism between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the

dark sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we haunt

with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness is within us.

And the two coming into collision, each exalts the other into stronger

relief. But in my case there was even a subtler reason why the summer

had this intense power of vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of

death. And recollecting it, often I have been struck with the important

truth, that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us

through perplexed combinations of _concrete_ objects, pass to us as

_involutes_ (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable

of being disentangled, than ever reach us _directly_ and in their own

abstract shapes. It had happened that amongst our nursery collection of

books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark

evenings, as my three sisters with myself sate by the firelight round

the guard of our nursery, no book was so much in request amongst us. It

ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom

we all loved, before any candle was lighted would often strain her eye

to read it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would

endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all

constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden

lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of

feelings; and they suited also the divine revelations of power and

mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man--man

and yet _not_ man, real above all things and yet shadowy above all

things, who had suffered the passion of death in Palestine--slept upon

our minds like early dawn upon the waters.

The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differences in Oriental

climates; and all these differences (as it happens) express themselves

in the great varieties of summer. The cloudless sun-lights of

Syria--those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking

the ears of corn--that _must_ be summer; but above all, the very name of

Palm Sunday (a festival in the English Church) troubled me like an

anthem. "Sunday!" what was _that_? That was the day of peace which

masked another peace, deeper than the heart of man can comprehend.

"Palms!" what were they? _That_ was an equivocal word; palms in the

sense of trophies expressed the pomps of life; palms as a product of

nature expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still, even this explanation

does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and by the summer, by

the deep sound of rest below all rest, and of ascending glory, that I

had been haunted. It was also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep

images both in time and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at

hand when Palm Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in

place to Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be

the _omphalos_ (navel) of the earth? That pretension had once been made

for Jerusalem, and once for Delphi; and both pretensions had become

ridiculous as the figure of the planet became known. Yes, but if not of

the earth, for earth's tenant Jerusalem was the _omphalos_ of mortality.

Yet how? There on the contrary it was, as we infants understood, that

mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but for that very reason,

there it was that mortality had opened its very gloomiest crater. There

it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the grave; but for

that reason, there also it was that the Divine had been swallowed up by

the abyss; the lesser star could not rise before the greater would

submit to eclipse. Summer therefore had connected itself with death, not

merely as a mode of antagonism, but also through intricate relations to

Scriptural scenery and events.

Out of this digression, which was almost necessary for the purpose of

showing how inextricably my feelings and images of death were entangled

with those of summer, I return to the bedchamber of my sister. From the

gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet

childish figure, there the angel face; and as people usually fancy, it

was said in the house that no features had suffered any change. Had they

not? The forehead indeed,--the serene and noble forehead,--_that_ might

be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal

from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands laid palm to

palm as if repeating the supplications of closing anguish,--could these

be mistaken for life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to

those heavenly lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it was

_not_. I stood checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and

whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow,--the most mournful that ear

ever heard. Mournful! that is saying nothing. It was a wind that had

swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries. Many times since,

upon a summer day, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked

the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian,

but saintly swell; it is in this world the one sole _audible_ symbol of

eternity. And three times in my life I have happened to hear the same

sound in the same circumstances; namely, when standing between an open

window and a dead body on a summer day.

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast AEolian intonation, when my eye

filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps and glory of the

heavens outside, and, turning, when it settled upon the frost which

overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon me. A vault

seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky a shaft which ran up

forever. I in spirit rose, as if on billows that also ran up the shaft

forever, and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but _that_

also ran before us and fled away continually. The flight and the pursuit

seemed to go on for ever and ever. Frost, gathering frost, some Sarsar

wind of death, seemed to repel me; I slept--for how long I cannot say;

slowly I recovered my self-possession, and found myself standing as

before, close to my sister's bed.

O flight of the solitary child to the solitary God--flight from the

ruined corpse to the throne that could not be ruined!--how rich wert

thou in truth for after years! Rapture of grief that, being too mighty

for a child to sustain, foundest a happy oblivion in a heaven-born

dream, and within that sleep didst conceal a dream; whose meaning, in

after years, when slowly I deciphered, suddenly there flashed upon me

new light; and even by the grief of a child, as I will show you, reader,

hereafter, were confounded the falsehoods of philosophers.

In the 'Opium Confessions' I touched a little upon the extraordinary

power connected with opium (after long use) of amplifying the dimensions

of time. Space also it amplifies, by degrees that are sometimes

terrific. But time it is upon which the exalting and multiplying power

of opium chiefly spends its operation. Time becomes infinitely elastic,

stretching out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini that it seems

ridiculous to compute the sense of it, on waking, by expressions

commensurate to human life. As in starry fields one computes by

diameters of the earth's orbit, or of Jupiter's, so in valuing the

_virtual_ time lived during some dreams, the measurement by generations

is ridiculous--by millennia is ridiculous; by aeons, I should say, if

aeons were more determinate, would be also ridiculous. On this single

occasion, however, in my life, the very inverse phenomenon occurred. But

why speak of it in connection with opium? Could a child of six years old

have been under that influence? No, but simply because it so exactly

reversed the operation of opium. Instead of a short interval expanding

into a vast one, upon this occasion a long one had contracted into a

minute. I have reason to believe that a _very_ long one had elapsed

during this wandering or suspension of my perfect mind. When I returned

to myself, there was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was

alarmed; for I believed that if anybody should detect me, means would be

taken to prevent my coming again. Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips

that I should kiss no more, and slunk like a guilty thing with stealthy

steps from the room. Thus perished the vision, loveliest amongst all the

shows which earth has revealed to me; thus mutilated was the parting

which should have lasted forever; thus tainted with fear was the

farewell sacred to love and grief, to perfect love and perfect grief.

O Ahasuerus, everlasting Jew! fable or not a fable, thou, when first

starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe,--thou, when first flying

through the gates of Jerusalem and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing

curse behind thee,--couldst not more certainly have read thy doom of

sorrow in the misgivings of thy troubled brain, than I when passing

forever from my sister's room. The worm was at my heart; and confining

myself to that state of life, I may say, the worm that could not die.

For if when standing upon the threshold of manhood, I had ceased to feel

its perpetual gnawings, _that_ was because a vast expansion of

intellect,--it was because new hopes, new necessities, and the frenzy of

youthful blood, had translated me into a new creature. Man is doubtless

_one_ by some subtle _nexus_ that we cannot perceive, extending from the

new-born infant to the superannuated dotard; but as regards many

affections and passions incident to his nature at different stages, he

is _not_ one: the unity of man in this respect is coextensive only with

the particular stage to which the passion belongs. Some passions, as

that of sexual love, are celestial by one half of their origin, animal

and earthly by the other half. These will not survive their own

appropriate stage. But love which is _altogether_ holy, like that

between two children, will revisit undoubtedly by glimpses the silence

and the darkness of old age; and I repeat my belief--that unless bodily

torment should forbid it, that final experience in my sister's bedroom,

or some other in which her innocence was concerned, will rise again for

me to illuminate the hour of death.

LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. I knew her by her Roman

symbols. Who is Levana? Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for

very much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for telling you.

Levana was the Roman goddess that performed for the new-born infant the

earliest office of ennobling kindness,--typical, by its mode, of that

grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of that benignity in

powers invisible which even in pagan worlds sometimes descends to

sustain it. At the very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for

the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, it was laid on the

ground. _That_ might, bear different interpretations. But immediately,

lest so grand a creature should grovel there for more than one instant,

either the paternal hand as proxy for the goddess Levana, or some near

kinsman as proxy for the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect

as the king of all this world, and presented its forehead to the stars,

saying perhaps in his heart, "Behold what is greater than yourselves!"

This symbolic act represented the function of Levana. And that

mysterious lady, who never revealed her face (except to me in dreams),

but always acted by delegation, had her name from the Latin verb (as

still it is the Italian verb) _levare_, to raise aloft.

This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it has arisen that some

people have understood by Levana the tutelary power that controls the

education of the nursery. She that would not suffer at his birth even a

prefigurative or mimic degradation for her awful ward, far less could be

supposed to suffer the real degradation attaching to the non-development

of his powers. She therefore watches over human education.

Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers that shake

man's heart: therefore it is that she dotes upon grief. "These ladies,"

said I softly to myself, on seeing the ministers with whom Levana was

conversing, "these are the Sorrows; and they are three in number, as the

_Graces_ are three, who dress man's life with beauty; the _Parcae_ are

three, who weave the dark arras of man's life in their mysterious loom

always with colors sad in part, sometimes angry with tragic crimson and

black; the _Furies_ are three, who visit, with retributions called from

the other side of the grave, offenses that walk upon this; and once even

the _Muses_ were but three, who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute,

to the great burdens of man's impassioned creations. These are the

Sorrows, all three of whom I know." The last words I say _now_; but in

Oxford I said, "One of whom I know, and the others too surely I _shall_

know." For already in my fervent youth I saw (dimly relieved upon the

dark background of my dreams) the imperfect lineaments of the awful

sisters. These sisters--by what name shall we call them?

If I say simply "The Sorrows," there will be a chance of mistaking the

term; it might be understood of individual sorrow,--separate cases of

sorrow,--whereas I want a term expressing the mighty abstractions that

incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's heart; and I

wish to have these abstractions presented as impersonations; that is, as

clothed with human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to

flesh. Let us call them therefore _Our Ladies of Sorrow_.

The eldest of the three is named _Mater Lachrymarum_, Our Lady of

Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for

vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of

lamentation.--Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be

comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's

sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were

stiffened forever, which, heard at times as they tottered along floors

overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked

in heaven.

Her eyes are sweet and subtile, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes

rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a

diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go

abroad upon the winds, when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the

thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer

clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal

at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my

knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him

that so often and so gladly I talked with: whose pious daughter, eight

years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play

and village mirth to travel all day long on dusty roads with her

afflicted father. For this did God send her a great reward. In the

springtime of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, he

recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns forever over _her_;

still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked

within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is _now_ within a

second and a deeper darkness. This _Mater Lachrymarum_ also has been

sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar,

bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to

God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound.

By the power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly

intruder, into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless

children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her,

because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire,

let us honor with the title of "Madonna."

The second sister is called _Mater Suspiriorum_, Our Lady of Sighs. She

never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no

diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor

subtile; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with

perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises

not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops

forever, forever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She groans not. But

she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister Madonna is oftentimes

stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against Heaven, and demanding

back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamors, never defies,

dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers

is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is

in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight.

Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate

as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to

his rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah; of the Jew; of the

bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; of the English

criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in

sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes

forever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown

of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now

be availing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or towards

reparation that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up

to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to

the earth, our general mother, but for _him_ a stepmother,--as he points

with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against _him_

sealed and sequestered; every woman sitting in darkness, without love to

shelter her head or hope to illumine her solitude, because the

heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections,

which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social

necessities, now burn sullenly to waste like sepulchral lamps among the

ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked

kinsmen, whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that

are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary law,

and children of _hereditary_ disgrace:--all these walk with Our Lady of

Sighs. She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom

is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every

clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man she finds chapels of her

own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world,

carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have

received her mark upon their foreheads.

But the third sister, who is also the youngest--! Hush! whisper whilst

we talk of _her_! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should

live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like

that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not;

and her eyes rising so high _might_ be hidden by distance. But being

what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape

which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not

for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing

or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier

of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of

suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that

she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has

been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the

brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from

within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with

tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this

youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a

tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for though coming rarely amongst men,

she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And

_her_ name is _Mater Tenebrarum_,--Our Lady of Darkness.

These were the _Semnai Theai_, or Sublime Goddesses, these were the

_Eumenides_, or Gracious Ladies (so called by antiquity in shuddering

propitiation) of my Oxford dreams. Madonna spoke. She spoke by her

mysterious hand. Touching my head, she beckoned to our Lady of Sighs;

and _what_ she spoke, translated out of the signs which (except in

dreams) no man reads, was this:--

"Lo! here is he whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. This is he

that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him I beguiled, and from

heaven I stole away his young heart to mine. Through me did he become

idolatrous; and through me it was, by languishing desires, that he

worshiped the worm, and prayed to the wormy grave. Holy was the grave to

him; lovely was its darkness; saintly its corruption. Him, this young

idolator, I have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs! Do thou

take him now to _thy_ heart, and season him for our dreadful sister. And

thou,"--turning to the _Mater Tenebrarum_, she said,--"wicked sister,

that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from _her_. See that thy

sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tenderness to

sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope, wither the

relenting of love, scorch the fountains of tears, curse him as only thou

canst curse. So shall he be accomplished in the furnace, so shall he see

the things that ought _not_ to be seen, sights that are abominable, and

secrets that are unutterable. So shall he read elder truths, sad truths,

grand truths, fearful truths. So shall he rise again _before_ he dies.

And so shall our commission be accomplished which from God we had,--to

plague his heart until he had unfolded the capacities of his spirit."

SAVANNAH-LA-MAR

From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

God smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night by earthquake removed her,

with all her towers standing and population sleeping, from the steadfast

foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God

said:--"Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seventeen

centuries; this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a

monument to men of my mysterious anger, set in azure light through

generations to come; for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my

tropic seas." This city therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her

apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating

along the noiseless depths of ocean; and oftentimes in glassy calms,

through the translucid atmosphere of water that now stretches like an

air-woven awning above the silent encampment, mariners from every clime

look down into her courts and terraces, count her gates, and number the

spires of her churches. She is one ample cemetery, and has been for many

a year; but in the mighty calms that brood for weeks over tropic

latitudes, she fascinates the eye with a _Fata Morgana_ revelation as of

human life still subsisting, in submarine asylums sacred from the storms

that torment our upper air.

Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, by the peace of

human dwellings privileged from molestation, by the gleam of marble

altars sleeping in everlasting sanctity, oftentimes in dreams did I and

the Dark Interpreter cleave the watery veil that divided us from her

streets. We looked into the belfries, where the pendulous bells were

waiting in vain for the summons which should awaken their marriage

peals; together we touched the mighty organ keys, that sang no

_jubilates_ for the ear of Heaven, that sang no requiems for the ear of

human sorrow; together we searched the silent nurseries, where the

children were all asleep, and had been asleep through five generations.

"They are waiting for the heavenly dawn," whispered the Interpreter to

himself: "and when that comes, the bells and the organs will utter a

_jubilate_ repeated by the echoes of Paradise." Then turning to me he

said:--"This is sad, this is piteous; but less would not have sufficed

for the purpose of God. Look here. Put into a Roman clepsydra one

hundred drops of water; let these run out as the sands in an hour-glass,

every drop measuring the hundredth part of a second, so that each shall

represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part of an hour.

Now count the drops as they race along; and when the fiftieth of the

hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine are not, because already they

have perished; and fifty are not, because they are yet to come. You see

therefore how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the true and actual

present. Of that time which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part

but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is

still on the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, or it is

not. Yet even this approximation to the truth is _infinitely_ false. For

again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was found to represent

the present, into a lower series of similar fractions, and the actual

present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-six-millionth of an

hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very present, in which

only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote,

distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which

only man possesses, offers less capacity for his footing than the

slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb. Therefore also

even this incalculable shadow from the narrowest pencil of moonlight is

more transitory than geometry can measure, or thought of angel can

overtake. The time which _is_, contracts into a mathematic point; and

even that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its birth.

All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its

velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite;

but in God there is nothing transitory; but in God there _can_ be

nothing that tends to death. Therefore it follows that for God there can

be no present. The future is the present of God, and to the future it is

that he sacrifices the human present. Therefore it is that he works by

earthquake. Therefore it is that he works by grief. Oh, deep is the

plowing of earthquake! Oh, deep"--(and his voice swelled like a

_sanctus_ rising from the choir of a cathedral)--"Oh, deep is the

plowing of grief! But oftentimes less would not suffice for the

agriculture of God. Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand

years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he

raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not

else have been. Less than these fierce plowshares would not have stirred

the stubborn soil. The one is needed for earth, our planet,--for earth

itself as the dwelling-place of man; but the other is needed yet oftener

for God's mightiest instrument,--yes" (and he looked solemnly at

myself), "is needed for the mysterious children of the earth!"

THE BISHOP OF BEAUVAIS AND JOAN OF ARC

From 'Miscellaneous Essays'

Bishop of Beauvais! thy victim died in fire upon a scaffold--thou upon a

down bed. But for the departing minutes of life, both are oftentimes

alike. At the farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, and

flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the tortured and

torturer have the same truce from carnal torment; both sink together

into sleep; together both, sometimes, kindle into dreams. When the

mortal mists were gathering fast upon you two, bishop and shepherd

girl,--when the pavilions of life were closing up their shadowy curtains

about you,--let us try, through the gigantic glooms, to decipher the

flying features of your separate visions.

The shepherd girl that had delivered France--she from her dungeon, she

from her baiting at the stake, she from her duel with fire, as she

entered her last dream saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Domremy, saw the

pomp of forests in which her childhood had wandered. That Easter

festival which man had denied to her languishing heart, that

resurrection of springtime which the darkness of dungeons had

intercepted from her, hungering after the glorious liberty of forests,

were by God given back into her hands, as jewels that had been stolen

from her by robbers. With those, perhaps (for the minutes of dreams can

stretch into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss of childhood.

By special privilege, for _her_ might be created in this farewell dream,

a second childhood, innocent as the first; but not, like that, sad with

the gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. The mission had now been

fulfilled. The storm was weathered, the skirts even of that mighty storm

were drawing off. The blood that she was to reckon for had been exacted;

the tears that she was to shed in secret had been paid to the last. The

hatred to herself in all eyes had been faced steadily, had been

suffered, had been survived.

Bishop of Beauvais! because the guilt-burdened man is in dreams haunted

and waylaid by the most frightful of his crimes; and because upon that

fluctuating mirror, rising from the fens of death, most of all are

reflected the sweet countenances which the man has laid in ruins;

therefore I know, bishop, that you also, entering your final dream, saw

Domremy. That fountain of which the witnesses spoke so much, showed

itself to your eyes in pure morning dews; but neither dews nor the holy

dawn could cleanse away the bright spots of innocent blood upon its

surface. By the fountain, bishop, you saw a woman seated, that hid her

face. But as _you_ draw near, the woman raises her wasted features.

Would Domremy know them again for the features of her child? Ah, but

_you_ know them, bishop, well! Oh mercy! what a groan was _that_ which

the servants, waiting outside the bishop's dream at his bedside, heard

from his laboring heart, as at this moment he turned away from the

fountain and the woman, seeking rest in the forests afar off. Yet not

_so_ to escape the woman, whom once again he must behold before he dies.

In the forests to which he prays for pity, will he find a respite? What

a tumult, what a gathering of feet is there! In glades where only wild

deer should run, armies and nations are assembling; towering in the

fluctuating crowd are phantoms that belong to departed hours. There is

the great English Prince, Regent of France. There is my lord of

Winchester, the princely cardinal that died and made no sign. There is

the Bishop of Beauvais, clinging to the shelter of thickets. What

building is that which hands so rapid are raising? Is it a martyr's

scaffold? Will they burn the child of Domremy a second time? No; it is a

tribunal that rises to the clouds; and two nations stand around it,

waiting for a trial. Shall my Lord of Beauvais sit upon the judgment

seat, and again number the hours for the innocent? Ah! no; he is the

prisoner at the bar. Already all is waiting; the mighty audience is

gathered, the Court are hurrying to their seats, the witnesses are

arrayed, the trumpets are sounding, the judge is taking his place. Oh!

but this is sudden. My lord, have you no counsel?--"Counsel I have none;

in heaven above, or on earth beneath, counselor there is none now that

would take a brief from _me_; all are silent." Is it indeed come to

this? Alas! the time is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd

stretches away into infinity; but yet I will search in it for somebody

to take your brief: I know of somebody that will be your counsel. Who is

this that cometh from Domremy? Who is she in bloody coronation robes

from Rheims? Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking

the furnaces of Rouen? This is she, the shepherd girl, counselor that

had none for herself, whom I choose, bishop, for yours. She it is, I

engage, that shall take my lord's brief. She it is, bishop, that would

plead for you: yes, bishop, SHE--when heaven and earth are silent.

PAUL DEROULEDE

(1848-)

[Illustration: Paul Deroulede]

Paul Deroulede received his education in Paris, where he was born. In

accordance with the wishes of his friends, he was educated for the law;

but before even applying for admission to the bar he yielded to the

poetic instinct that had been strong in him since boyhood, and began,

under the name of Jean Rebel, to send verses to the Parisian

periodicals. When only twenty-three years of age he wrote for the

Academie Francaise a one-act drama in verse, 'Juan Strenner,' which

however was not a success. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in

the same year roused his martial spirit; he enlisted, and at once

entered active service, in which he distinguished himself by acts of

signal bravery. A wound near the close of the hostilities took him from

the field; and it was during the retirement thus enforced that he wrote

the lyrics, 'Songs of the Soldier,' that first made him famous

throughout his native country.

Not since the days of the 'Marseillaise' had the fighting spirit of the

French people found such sympathetic expression; his songs were read and

sung all over the country; they received the highest honor of the

Academy, and their popularity continued after peace was declared, nearly

one hundred and fifty editions having been exhausted up to 1895.

Deroulede now devoted himself to literature and politics. 'New Songs of

the Soldier' and a volume of 'Songs of the Peasant,' almost as popular

as the war songs, were interspersed with two more dramatic works, also

in verse, one of which, 'L'Hetman,' was received on the stage with great

favor. A cantata, 'Vive la France,' written in 1880, was set to music by

Gounod. He also wrote a novel and some treatises dealing with armies and

fighting, but his prose works did not attract much attention.

Deroulede's best verses are distinguished for their inspiration and

genuine enthusiasm. Careless of form and finish, not always stopping to

make sure of his rhymes or perfect his metre, he gave the freest vent to

his emotions. Some of the heart-glow which makes the exhilaration of

Burns's poems infectious is found in his songs, but they are generally

so entirely French that its scope is limited in a way that the Scotch

poet's, despite his vernacular, was not. The Frenchman's sympathy is

always with the harder side of life. In the 'Songs of the Soldier' he

plays on chords of steel. These verses resound with the blast of the

bugle, the roll of the drum, the flash of the sword, the rattle of

musketry, the boom of the cannon; and even in the 'Songs of the Peasant'

it is the corn and the wine, as the fruit of toil, that appeal to him,

rather than the grass and the flowers embellishing the fields.

THE HARVEST

From 'Chants du Paysan'

The wheat, the hardy wheat is rippling on the breeze.

'Tis our great mother's sacred mantle spread afar,

Old Earth revered, who gives us life, in whom we are,

We the dull clay the living God molds as he please.

The wheat, the hardy wheat bends down its heavy head,

Blessed and consecrate by the Eternal hand;

The stalks are green although the yellow ears expand:

Keep them, O Lord, from 'neath the tempest's crushing tread!

The wheat, the hardy wheat spreads like a golden sea

Whose harvesters--bent low beneath the sun's fierce light,

Stanch galley-slaves, whose oar is now the sickle bright--

Cleave down the waves before them falling ceaselessly.

The wheat, the hardy wheat ranged in its serried rows,

Seems like some noble camp upon the distant plain.

Glory to God!--the crickets chirp their wide refrain;

From sheaf to sheaf the welcome bread-song sweeping goes.

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Thomas

Walsh.

IN GOOD QUARTERS

From 'Poemes Militaires'

MIREBEAU, 1871

Good old woman, bother not.

Or the place will be too hot:

You might let the fire grow old--

Save your fagots for the cold:

I am drying through and through.

But she, stopping not to hear,

Shook the smoldering ashes near:

"Soldier, not too warm for you!"

Good old woman, do not mind;

At the storehouse I have dined:

Save your vintage and your ham,

And this cloth--such as I am

Are not used to--save it too.

But she heard not what I said--

Filled my glass and cut the bread:

"Soldier, it is here for you!"

Good old woman--sheets for me!

Faith, you treat me royally:

And your stable? on your hay?

There at length my limbs to lay?

I shall sleep like monarchs true.

But she would not be denied

Of the sheets, and spread them wide:

"Soldier, it is made for you!"

Morning came--the parting tear:

Well--good-by! What have we here?

My old knapsack full of food!

Dear old creature--hostess good--

Why indulge me as you do?

It was all that she could say,

Smiling in a tearful way:

"I have one at war like you!"

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Thomas

Walsh.

"GOOD FIGHTING!"

From 'Poemes Militaires'

The Kroumirs leave their mountain den;

Sing, bullets, sing! and bugles, blow!

Good fighting to our gallant men,

And happy they who follow, when,

Brothers in arms so dear, these go.

Yea, happy they who serve our France,

And neither pain nor danger fly;

But in the front of war's advance

Still deem it but a glorious chance,

To be among the brave who die!

No splendid war do we begin,

No glory waits us when 'tis past;

But marching through the fiery din,

We see our serried ranks grow thin,

And blood of Frenchmen welling fast.

French blood!--a treasure so august,

And hoarded with such jealous care,

To crush oppression's strength unjust,

With all the force of right robust,

And buy us back our honor fair:--

We yield it now to duty's claim,

And freely pour out all our store;

Who judges, frees us still from blame;

The Kroumirs' muskets war proclaim:--

In answer let French cannon roar!

Good fighting! and God be your shield,

Our pride's avengers, brave and true!

France watches you upon the field.

Who wear her colors never yield,

For 'tis her heart ye bear with you!

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Katharine

Hillard.

LAST WISHES

From 'Poemes Militaires'

A grave for me--a grave--and why?

I do not wish to sleep alone:

Let me within the trenches lie,

Side by side with my soldiers thrown.

Dear old comrades of wars gone by,

Come, 'tis our final "halt" is nigh:

Clasp your brave hearts to my own.

A sheet for me--a sheet--and why?

Such is for them on their beds who moan:

The field is the soldier's place to die,

The field of carnage, of blood and bone.

Dear old comrades of wars gone by,

This is the prayer of my soul's last sigh:

Clasp your brave hearts to my own.

Tears for me--these tears--and why?

Knells let the vanquished foe intone!

France delivered!--I still can cry,

France delivered--invaders flown!

Dear old comrades of wars gone by,

Pain is nothing, and death--a lie!

Clasp your brave hearts to my own!

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Thomas

Walsh.

RENE DESCARTES

(1596-1650)

[Illustration: RENE DESCARTES.]

The broad scope of literature is illustrated by its inclusion of the

writings of Rene Descartes (Latinized, Renatus Cartesius). Deliberately

turning away from books, and making naught alike of learned precedent

and literary form, he yet could not but avail himself unconsciously of

the heritage which he had discarded.

This notable figure in seventeenth-century philosophy was born of

ancient family at La Haye, in Touraine, France, March 31st, 1596; and

died at Stockholm, Sweden, February 11th, 1650. From a pleasant student

life of eight years in the Jesuit college at La Fleche, he went forth in

his seventeenth year with unusual acquirements in mathematics and

languages, but in deep dissatisfaction with the long dominant scholastic

philosophy and the whole method prescribed for arriving at truth. In a

strong youthful revolt, his first step was a decision to discharge his

mind of all the prejudices into which his education had trained his

thinking. As a beginning in this work he went to Paris, for observation

of facts and of men. There, having drifted through a twelvemonth of

moderate dissipation, he secluded himself for nearly two years of

mathematical study, as though purposing to reduce his universe to an

equation in order to solve it. The laws of number he could trust, since

their lines configured the eternal harmony.

At the age of twenty-one he entered on a military service of two years

in the army of the Netherlands, and then of about two years in the

Bavarian army. From 1621, for about four years, he was roaming as an

observer of men and nature in Germany, Belgium, and Italy, afterward

sojourning in Paris about three and a half years. In 1629 he began

twenty years of study and authorship in practical seclusion in Holland.

His little work, 'Discours de la Methode' (Leyden, 1637), is often

declared to have been the basis for a reconstitution of the science of

thought. It would now perhaps be viewed by the majority of critics

rather as a necessary clearing of antiquated rubbish from the ground on

which the new construction was to rise. Next to it among his works are

usually ranked 'Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,' and 'Principia

Philosophiae.'

The long sojourn in Holland was ended in September 1649, in response to

an urgent invitation from the studious young Queen Christina of Sweden,

who wanted the now famous philosopher as an ornament to her court. After

some hesitancy he sailed for Stockholm, where only five months afterward

he died.

It has been said of Descartes that he was a spectator rather than an

active worker in affairs. He was no hero, no patriot, no adherent of any

party. He entered armies, but not from love of a cause; the army was a

sphere in which he could closely observe the aspects of human life. He

was never married, and probably had little concern with love. His

attachment to a few friends seems to have been sincere. For literature

as such he cared little. Erudition, scholarship, historic love, literary

elegance, were nothing to him. Art and aesthetics did not appeal to him.

Probably he was not a great reader, even of philosophic writers. He

delighted in observing facts with a view to finding, stating, and

systematizing their relations in one all-comprehending scheme. He never

allowed himself to attack the Church in either its doctrine or its

discipline. As a writer, though making no attempt at elegance in style,

he is deemed remarkably clear and direct when the abstruseness of his

usual themes is considered.

Descartes's method in philosophy gives signs of formation on the model

of a process in mathematics. In all investigations he would ascertain

first what must exist by necessity; thus establishing axioms evidenced

in all experience, because independent of all experience. The study of

mathematics for use in other departments drew him into investigations

whose results made it a new science. He reformed its clumsy

nomenclature, also the algebraic use of letters for quantities; he

introduced system into the use of exponents to denote the powers of a

quantity, thus opening the way for the binomial theorem; he was the

first to throw clear light on the negative roots of equations; his is

the theorem by use of which the maximum number of positive or negative

roots of an equation can be ascertained. Analytical geometry originated

with his investigation of the nature and origin of curves.

His mathematical improvements opened the way for the reform of physical

science and for its immense modern advance. In his optical

investigations he established the law of refraction of light. His

ingenious theory of the vortices--tracing gravity, magnetism, light, and

heat, to the whirling or revolving movements of the molecules of matter

with which the universe is filled--was accepted as science for about a

quarter of a century.

In mental science Descartes's primary instrument for search of truth was

Doubt: everything was to be doubted until it had been proved. This was

provisional skepticism, merely to provide against foregone conclusions.

It was not to preclude belief, but to summon and assure belief as

distinct from the inane submission to authority, to prejudice, or to

impulse. In this process of doubting everything, the philosopher comes

at last to one fact which he cannot doubt--the fact that he exists; for

if he did not exist he could not be thinking his doubt. _Cogito, ergo

sum_ is one point of absolute knowledge; it is a clear and ultimate

perception.

The first principle of his philosophy is, that our consciousness is

truthful in its proper sphere, also that our thought is truthful and

trustworthy under these two conditions--when the thought is clear and

vivid, and when it is held to a theme utterly distinct from every other

theme; since it is impossible for us to believe that either man who

thinks, or the universe concerning which he thinks, is organized on the

basis of a lie. There are "necessary truths," and they are discoverable.

A second principle is, the inevitable ascent of our thought from the

fragmentary to the perfect, from the finite to the infinite. Thus the

thought of the infinite is an "innate idea," a part of man's potential

consciousness. This principle (set forth in one of the selections given

herewith) is the Cartesian form of the _a priori_ argument for the

Divine existence, which like other _a priori_ forms is viewed by critics

not as a proof in pure logic, but as a commanding and luminous appeal to

man's entire moral and intellectual nature.

A third principle is, that the material universe is necessarily reduced

in our thought ultimately to two forms, extension and local

movement--extension signifying matter, local movement signifying force.

There is no such thing as empty space; there are no ultimate indivisible

atoms; the universe is infinitely full of matter.

A fourth principle is, that the soul and matter are subsistences so

fundamentally and absolutely distinct that they cannot act in reciprocal

relations. This compelled Descartes to resort to his strained

supposition that all correspondence or synchronism between bodily

movements and mental or spiritual activities is merely reflex or

automatic, or else is produced directly by act of Deity. For relief from

this violent hypothesis, Leibnitz modified the Cartesian philosophy by

his famous theory of a pre-established harmony.

Descartes did a great work, but it was not an abiding reconstruction:

indeed, it was not construction so much as it was a dream--one of the

grandest and most suggestive in the history of thought. Its audacious

disparagement of the whole scholastic method startled Europe, upon the

dead air of whose philosophy it came as a refreshing breath of

transcendental thought. Its suggestions and inspirations are traceable

as a permanent enrichment, though its vast fabric swiftly dissolved. The

early enthusiasm for it in French literary circles and among professors

in the universities of Holland scarcely outlasted a generation. Within

a dozen years after the philosopher's death, the Cartesian philosophy

was prohibited by ecclesiastical authorities and excluded from the

schools. In the British Isles and in Germany the system has been usually

considered as an interesting curiosity in the cabinet of philosophies.

Yet the unity of all truth through relations vital, subtle, firm, and

universal, though seen only in a vision of the night, abides when the

night is gone.

With the impressive and noteworthy 'Discours de la Methode' (Leyden,

1637), were published three essays supporting it: 'La Dioptrique,' 'Les

Meteores,' 'La Geometrie.' Of his other works, the most important are

'Meditationes de Prima Philosophia' (Paris, 1641; Amsterdam, 1642), and

'Principia Philosophiae' (Amsterdam, 1644). A useful English translation

of his most important writings, with an introduction, is by John Veitch,

LL.D.,--'The Method, Meditations, and Selections from the Principles'

(Edinburgh, 1853; 6th ed., Blackwoods, Edinburgh and London, 1879). See

also, English translations of portions of his philosophical works, by W.

Cunningham (1877), Lowndes (1878), Mahaffy (1880), Martineau (1885),

Henry Rogers, Huxley, and L. Stephen.

For his Life, see 'Vie de Descartes,' by Baillet (2 vols. 1691);

'Descartes sa Vie,' etc., by Millet (2 vols. 1867-71); 'Descartes and

his School,' by Kuno Fischer (English translation, 1887).

OF CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ELEMENTARY LOGICAL THOUGHT

From the 'Discourse on Method'

As a multitude of laws often only hampers justice, so that a State is

best governed when, with few laws, these are rigidly administered; in

like manner, instead of the great number of precepts of which Logic is

composed, I believed that the four following would prove perfectly

sufficient for me, provided I took the firm and unwavering resolution

never in a single instance to fail in observing them.

The _first_ was never to accept anything for true which I did not

clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy

and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was

presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground

of doubt.

The _second_, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into

as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate

solution.

The _third_, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing

with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little

and little, and as it were step by step, to the knowledge of the more

complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects

which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and

sequence.

And the _last_, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and

reviews so general, that it might be assured that nothing was omitted.

The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which

geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most

difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things to the

knowledge of which man is competent are mutually connected in the same

way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond

our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we

abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in

our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from

another. And I had little difficulty in determining the objects with

which it was necessary to commence, for I was already persuaded that it

must be with the simplest and easiest to know, and, considering that of

all those who have hitherto sought truth in the Sciences, the

mathematicians alone have been able to find any demonstrations,--that

is, any certain and evident reasons,--I did not doubt but that such must

have been the rule of their investigations. I resolved to commence,

therefore, with the examination of the simplest objects, not

anticipating, however, from this any other advantage than that to be

found in accustoming my mind to the love and nourishment of truth, and

to a distaste for all such reasonings as were unsound. But I had no

intention on that account of attempting to master all the particular

sciences commonly denominated Mathematics: but observing that however

different their objects, they all agree in considering only the various

relations or proportions subsisting among those objects, I thought it

best for my purpose to consider these proportions in the most general

form possible; without referring them to any objects in particular,

except such as would most facilitate the knowledge of them, and without

by any means restricting them to these, that afterwards I might thus be

the better able to apply them to every other class of objects to which

they are legitimately applicable. Perceiving, further, that in order to

understand these relations I should sometimes have to consider them one

by one, and sometimes only to bear them in mind, or embrace them in the

aggregate, I thought that in order the better to consider them

individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines,

than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more

distinctly represented to my imagination and senses; and on the other

hand, that in order to retain them in the memory, or embrace an

aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters the

briefest possible. In this way I believed that I could borrow all that

was best both in geometrical analysis and in algebra, and correct all

the defects of the one by help of the other.

AN ELEMENTARY METHOD OF INQUIRY

From the 'Discourse on Method'

Seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose

that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and

because some men err in reasoning and fall into paralogisms, even on the

simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error

as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken

for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same

thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be

experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of

them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever

entered into my mind when awake had in them no more truth than the

illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that whilst

I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary

that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that

this truth,--"_I think, hence I am,_"--was so certain and of such

evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged

by the skeptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might without

scruple accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I

was in search.

In the next place, I attentively examined what I was, and as I observed

that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor

any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose

that I was not; and that on the contrary, from the very circumstance

that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly

and certainly followed that I was; while on the other hand, if I had

only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever

imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to

believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose

whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it

may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing;

so that "I"--that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am--is wholly

distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter,

and is such that although the latter were not, it would still continue

to be all that it is.

After this I inquired in general into what is essential to the truth and

certainty of a proposition; for since I had discovered one which I knew

to be true, I thought that I must likewise be able to discover the

ground of this certitude. And as I observed that in the words "_I think,

hence I am,_" there is nothing at all which gives me assurance of their

truth beyond this, that I see very clearly that in order to think it is

necessary to exist,--I concluded that I might take, as a general rule,

the principle that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly

conceive are true; only observing however that there is some difficulty

in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.

In the next place, from reflecting on the circumstance that I doubted,

and that consequently my being was not wholly perfect (for I clearly saw

that it was a greater perfection to know than to doubt), I was led to

inquire whence I had learned to think of something more perfect than

myself; and I clearly recognized that I must hold this notion from some

Nature which in reality was more perfect. As for the thoughts of many

other objects external to me, as of the sky, the earth, light, heat, and

a thousand more, I was less at a loss to know whence these came; for

since I remarked in them nothing which seemed to render them superior to

myself, I could believe that if these were true, they were dependences

on my own nature in so far as it possessed a certain perfection; and if

they were false, that I held them from nothing,--that is to say, that

they were in me because of a certain imperfection of my nature. But this

could not be the case with the idea of a Nature more perfect than

myself: for to receive it from nothing was a thing manifestly

impossible; and because it is not less repugnant that the more perfect

should be an effect of and dependence on the less perfect, than that

something should proceed from nothing, it was equally impossible that I

could hold it from myself: accordingly it but remained that it had been

placed in me by a Nature which was in reality more perfect than mine,

and which even possessed within itself all the perfections of which I

could form any idea,--that is to say, in a single word, which was

God....

I was disposed straightway to search for other truths; and when I had

represented to myself the object of the geometers, which I conceived to

be a continuous body, or a space indefinitely extended in length,

breadth, and height or depth, divisible into divers parts which admit of

different figures and sizes, and of being moved or transposed in all

manner of ways (for all this the geometers suppose to be in the object

they contemplate), I went over some of their simplest demonstrations.

And in the first place, I observed that the great certitude which by

common consent is accorded to these demonstrations is founded solely

upon this, that they are clearly conceived in accordance with the rules

I have already laid down. In the next place, I perceived that there was

nothing at all in these demonstrations which could assure me of the

existence of their object: thus, for example, supposing a triangle to be

given, I distinctly perceived that its three angles were necessarily

equal to two right angles, but I did not on that account perceive

anything which could assure me that any triangle existed; while on the

contrary, recurring to the examination of the idea of a Perfect Being, I

found that the existence of the Being was comprised in the idea in the

same way that the equality of its three angles to two right angles is

comprised in the idea of a triangle, or as in the idea of a sphere, the

equidistance of all points on its surface from the centre, or even still

more clearly; and that consequently it is at least as certain that God,

who is this Perfect Being, is, or exists, as any demonstration of

geometry can be.

THE IDEA OF GOD

From the 'Meditations'

There only remains, therefore, the idea of God, in which I must consider

whether there is anything that cannot be supposed to originate with

myself. By the name God I understand a substance infinite, eternal,

immutable, independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I

myself, and every other thing that exists,--if any such there be,--were

created. But these properties are so great and excellent, that the more

attentively I consider them, the less I feel persuaded that the idea I

have of them owes its origin to myself alone. And thus it is absolutely

necessary to conclude, from all that I have before said, that God

exists; for though the idea of substance be in my mind owing to

this,--that I myself am a substance,--I should not however have the idea

of an infinite substance, seeing I am a finite being, unless it were

given me by some substance in reality infinite.

And I must not imagine that I do not apprehend the infinite by a true

idea, but only by the negation of the finite, in the same way that I

comprehend repose and darkness by the negation of motion and light:

since, on the contrary, I clearly perceive that there is more reality in

the infinite substance than in the finite, and therefore that in some

way I possess the perception (notion) of the infinite before that of the

finite, that is, the perception of God before that of myself; for how

could I know that I doubt, desire, or that something is wanting to me,

and that I am not wholly perfect, if I possessed no idea of a being more

perfect than myself, by comparison with which I knew the deficiencies of

my nature?

And it cannot be said that this idea of God is perhaps materially false,

and consequently that it may have arisen from nothing (in other words,

that it may exist in me from my imperfection), as I before said of the

ideas of heat and cold, and the like; for on the contrary, as this idea

is very clear and distinct, and contains in itself more objective

reality than any other, there can be no one of itself more true, or less

open to the suspicion of falsity.

The idea, I say, of a being supremely perfect and infinite, is in the

highest degree true; for although perhaps we may imagine that such a

being does not exist, we nevertheless cannot suppose that this idea

represents nothing real, as I have already said of the idea of cold. It

is likewise clear and distinct in the highest degree, since whatever the

mind clearly and distinctly conceives as real or true, and as implying

any perfection, is contained entire in this idea. And this is true,

nevertheless, although I do not comprehend the infinite, and although

there may be in God an infinity of things that I cannot comprehend, nor

perhaps even compass by thought in any way; for it is of the nature of

the infinite that it should not be comprehended by the finite: and it is

enough that I rightly understand this, and judge that all which I

clearly perceive, and in which I know there is some perfection, and

perhaps also an infinity of properties of which I am ignorant, are

formally or eminently in God, in order that the idea I have of him may

become the most true, clear, and distinct of all the ideas in my mind.

But perhaps I am something more than I suppose myself to be; and it may

be that all those perfections which I attribute to God in some way exist

potentially in me, although they do not yet show themselves and are not

reduced to act. Indeed, I am already conscious that my knowledge is

being increased and perfected by degrees; and I see nothing to prevent

it from thus gradually increasing to infinity, nor any reason why, after

such increase and perfection, I should not be able thereby to acquire

all the other perfections of the Divine nature; nor in fine, why the

power I possess of acquiring those perfections, if it really now exist

in me, should not be sufficient to produce the ideas of them. Yet on

looking more closely into the matter I discover that this cannot be; for

in the first place, although it were true that my knowledge daily

acquired new degrees of perfection, and although there were potentially

in my nature much that was not as yet actually in it, still all these

excellences make not the slightest approach to the idea I have of the

Deity, in whom there is no perfection merely potentially, but all

actually existent; for it is even an unmistakable token of imperfection

in my knowledge, that it is augmented by degrees. Further, although my

knowledge increase more and more, nevertheless I am not therefore

induced to think that it will ever be actually infinite, since it can

never reach that point beyond which it shall be incapable of further

increase. But I conceive God as actually infinite, so that nothing can

be added to his perfection. And in fine, I readily perceive that the

objective being of an idea cannot be produced by a being that is merely

potentially existent,--which properly speaking is nothing, but only a

being existing formally or actually.

And truly, I see nothing in all that I have now said which it is not

easy for any one who shall carefully consider it, to discern by the

natural light; but when I allow my attention in some degree to relax,

the vision of my mind being obscured and as it were blinded by the

images of sensible objects, I do not readily remember the reason why the

idea of a being more perfect than myself must of necessity have

proceeded from a being in reality more perfect. On this account I am

here desirous to inquire further whether I, who possess this idea of

God, could exist supposing there were no God. And I ask, from whom could

I in that case derive my existence? Perhaps from myself, or from my

parents, or from some other causes less perfect than God; for anything

more perfect, or even equal to God, cannot be thought or imagined. But

if I were independent of every other existence, and were myself the

author of my being, I should doubt of nothing, I should desire nothing,

and in fine, no perfection would be wanting to me; for I should have

bestowed upon myself every perfection of which I possess the idea, and I

should thus be God. And it must not be imagined that what is now wanting

to me is perhaps of more difficult acquisition than that of which I am

already possessed; for on the contrary, it is quite manifest that it was

a matter of much higher difficulty that I, a thinking being, should

arise from nothing, than it would be for me to acquire the knowledge of

many things of which I am ignorant, and which are merely the accidents

of a thinking substance; and certainly, if I possessed of myself the

greater perfection of which I have now spoken,--in other words, if I

were the author of my own existence,--I would not at least have denied

to myself things that may be more easily obtained, as that infinite

variety of knowledge of which I am at present destitute. I could not

indeed have denied to myself any property which I perceive is contained

in the idea of God, because there is none of these that seems to be more

difficult to make or acquire; and if there were any that should happen

to be more difficult to acquire, they would certainly appear so to me

(supposing that I myself were the source of the other things I possess),

because I should discover in them a limit to my power.

PAUL DESJARDINS

(------)

BY GRACE KING

What a man stands for, in the life and literature of his day, is easily

enough estimated when his name passes current in his language for a

hitherto undesignated shade of meaning. One of the most acute and

sensitive of contemporary French critics, M. Jules Lemaitre, in an

article on an evolutionary phase in modern literature, expresses its

significant characteristic to be--"L'ideal de vie interieure, la morale

absolue,--si je puis m'exprimer ainsi, le Desjardinisme" (The ideal of

spiritual life, absolute morality,--if I may so express myself,

Desjardinism). The term, quickly appropriated by another French critic,

and one of the remarkable women of letters of her day,--the late Baronne

Blaze de Bury,--is literally interpreted as "summing up whatever is

highest and purest and of most rare attainment in the idealism of the

present hour." And she further, with the intuition of her sex, feeling a

pertinent question before it is put, singles out the vital germ of

difference which distinguishes this young writer as typical of the

idealism of the hour, and makes him its name-giver:--"What is in other

men the indirect and hidden source of their public acts, is in Paul

Desjardins the direct source of life itself--the life to be lived; and

also of the mode in which that life is to be conceived and to be made

apparent to the world." Of the life, "sincerity is its prime virtue.

Each leader proves his faith by his individual conduct, as by his

judgments on events and men. The pure passion of abstract thought fires

each to do the best that is his to do. His life is to be the

word-for-word translation of his own spirit."

The death-bed repentance of a century, born skeptical, reared decadent,

and professing practical materialism; the conversion of a literature

from the pure passion of the senses to the pure passion of abstract

thought; the assumption of an apostolic mission by journalists,

novelists, playwrights, college professors, and scientific masters, will

doubtless furnish the century to come with one of its most curious and

interesting fields of study. It is an episode in evolution which may

indeed be termed dramatic, this fifth act of the nineteenth-century epic

of France,--or it might be called, of Paris; the story of its pilgrimage

from revolution to evolution. M. Melchior de Vogue, himself one of the

apostles of the new life, or of the new work in the old life, of

France, describes the preparation of the national soil for the growth of

Desjardinism. He says:--

"The French children who were born just before 1870 grew up in an

atmosphere of patriotic mourning and amidst the discouragement of

defeat. National life, such as it became reconstituted after that

terrible shock, revealed to them on all sides nothing but abortive

hopes, paltry struggles of interest, and a society without any

other hierarchy but that of money, and without other principle or

ideal than the pursuit of material enjoyment. Literature ...

reflected these same tendencies; it was dejected or vile, and

distressed the heart by its artistic dryness or disgusted it by its

trivial realism. Science itself ... began to appear to many what it

is in reality, namely, a means, not an end; its prestige declined

and its infallibility was questioned.... Above all, it was clear

from too evident social symptoms that if science can satisfy some

very distinguished minds, it can do nothing to moralize and

discipline societies....

"For a hundred years after the destruction of the religious and

political dogmas of the past, France had lived as best she could on

some few fragile dogmas, which had in their turn been consecrated

by a naive superstition; these dogmas were the principles of

1789--the almightiness of reason, the efficacy of absolute liberty,

the sovereignty of the people--in a word, the whole _credo_ of the

revolution.... In order to shake that faith [in these principles]

... it was necessary that human reason, proclaimed infallible,

should turn its arms against itself. And that is what happened.

Scientific criticism, after having ruined old dogmatism, ... made

as short work of the revolutionary legend as of the monarchical

one, and showed itself as pitiless for the rights of man as it had

been for the rights of God. All these causes combined, sufficiently

explain the nihilism and pessimism which invaded the souls of the

young during the past ten years.... Clear-sighted boys analyzed

life with a vigor and a precision unknown to their predecessors;

having analyzed it, they found it bad; they turned away from life

with fear and horror. There was heard from the peaks of

intelligence a great cry of discouragement:--'Beware of deceitful

nature; fear life, emancipate yourselves from life!' This cry was

first uttered by the masters of contemporary thought,--a

Schopenhauer, a Taine, a Tolstoy; below them, thousands of humbler

voices repeat it in chorus. According to each one's turn of mind,

the new philosophy assumed shades different in appearance--Buddhist

nirvana, atheistic nihilism, mystic asceticism; but all these

theories proceeded from the same sentiment, and all these doctrines

may be reduced to the same formula:--'Let us depreciate life, let

us escape from its snares.'"

Paul Desjardins, by name and family, belongs to the old _bourgeoisie_ of

France, that reserve force of Gallic virtue to which the French people

always look for help in political and moral crises. Like most of the

young men of distinction in the French world of letters, he combines

professional and literary work; he is professor of rhetoric at the Lycee

Veuves in Paris, and a member of the brilliant editorial staff of the

Journal des Debats. Paris offered to his grasp her same old choice of

subjects, to his eye the same aspects of life, which form her one

freehold for all artists, and he had but the instrument of his

guild--his pen; the series of his collected contributions to journals

and magazines bear a no more distinctive title than the hackneyed one of

'Notes Contemporaines,' but the sub-titles betray at once the trend of

originality: 'Great Souls and Little Lives,' 'The Obscure Ones,'

'Companions of the New Life'; and in the treatment of these subjects,

and especially in his sketches of character and critical essays upon the

literature of his day, Desjardins's originality resolves itself more and

more clearly into spirituality of thought, expressed in an incorruptible

simplicity of style. To quote from Madame de Bury again:--"One of the

chief characteristics of Paul Desjardins's utterances is their total

disinterestedness, their absolute detachment from self. Nowhere else

have you the same indescribable purity, the same boundless generosity of

joy in others' good, the same pervading altruism."

These writings were the expression of a mind on a journey, a quest,--not

of any one definite mind, for so completely has the personality of the

author been subdued to his mission, that his mind seems typical of the

general mind of young France in quest of spirituality, his individuality

a common one to all participants in the new movement, as it is called.

In 1892 the boldest effort of Desjardins's,--a small pamphlet, 'The

Present Duty,'--appeared. It created a sensation in the thinking world

of Paris. It marked a definite stage accomplished in the new movement,

and an arrival at one stopping-place at least. While the critics were

still diagnosing over the pamphlet as a theory, a small band of men,

avowing the same convictions as Desjardins, proceeded to test it as a

practical truth. They enrolled themselves into a "Union for Moral

Action," which had for its object to associate together, without regard

to religious or political beliefs, all serious-minded men who cared to

work for the formation of a healthy public opinion, for a moral

awakening, and for the education and strengthening of the modern

decadent or enervated will power. In general, it is common interests,

doctrines, needs, that bring men together in associations. The Union for

Moral Action sought, on the contrary, to associate men of diverse

interests and opinions--adversaries even,--into collaboration for the

common morality. In response to the interpellations, questions, and

doubts evoked by 'The Present Duty,' Desjardins published in the Debats

a series of articles on 'The Conversion of the Church.' They contributed

still more to differentiate him from the other leaders of the new

movement; in fact, few caring to share the responsibility of such

radical utterances, he has been left in literary isolation in his

advanced position: a position which, although it can but command the

admiration and respect of the press and the educational and religious

contingent of Paris, none the less attracts sarcasm and irony in the

world's centre of wit, sensual tolerance, and moral skepticism. As the

reproach of his literary confreres expresses it, the author has given

way before the apostle. The "life to be lived" commanded the sacrifice.

Desjardins makes now but rare appearances in his old journalistic

places, and in literature he has determinately severed connections

through which fame and fortune might confidently be expected. He now

gives his writings anonymously to the small weekly publication, the

official organ of the Union for Moral Action, depending for his living

upon his professorial position in the College St. Stanislas.

'Une Critique,' one of Desjardins's earliest essays, strikes the note of

his life and writings at a time when he himself was unconscious of its

portentous meaning to his world and his literature:--

"Whatever deserves to be, deserves the best attention of our

intellect. Everything calls for interest, only it must be an

interest divested of self-interest, and sincere. But above all we

must labor--labor hard--to understand, respect, and tenderly love

in others whatever contains one single grain of simple intrinsic

Goodness. Believe me, this is everywhere, and it is everywhere to

be found, if you will only look for it....

"The supremacy of the truly Good!--here lies the root of the whole

teaching--the whole new way of looking at things and judging

men....

"New views of the universality of our world, of poetry, of

religion, of kindness (human kindness), of virtue, of worth!...

Think it over; these are the objects on which our new generation is

fixing its thoughts, and trying to awaken yours. This it is which

is so new!"

Translation of Madame Blaze de Bury.

[Illustration: signature]

THE PRESENT DUTY

There are many of us who at times have forgotten our personal troubles,

however great they were, by picturing to ourselves the moral distress of

souls around us, and by meditating on the possible remedy for this

universal ill. Some remain serene before this spectacle; they resign

themselves to fatal evil and inextricable doubt; they look with cold

blood on that which is. Others, like the one who speaks here, are more

affirmative because they are more impassioned, more wounded, knowing

neither how to forget nor how to be patient, nor yet how to despair

peaceably; they are less troubled by that which is, than by that which

ought to be; they have even turned towards that which ought to be, as

towards the salvation for which their whole heart is calling. It is

their weakness not to know how to interest themselves for any length of

time in what does not in some way assume the aspect of a duty that

concerns them. They do not contest, in fact, that it is a weakness not

to be able to look with a disinterested eye on disease, corporal or

spiritual; a weakness to feel the necessity of having something to do at

the bedside of the dying, even if that something be in vain,--to employ

the anguish of one's heart in preparing, even up to the supreme moment,

remedies in the shadow of the chamber.

We are in a state of war. It would be almost cowardly to be silent about

our intimate beliefs, for they are contradicted and attacked. We must

not content ourselves with a pacification or truce which will permit

us with facile weakness to open all the pores of our intelligence to

ideas contrary to our conviction. It is necessary on the contrary to

gird ourselves, to intrench ourselves. There is to-day, between us

and many of our contemporaries, an irreconcilable disagreement that

must be faced, a great combat in which parts must be taken. As far as

I can see this is what it is. In a word, are subjection to animal

instinct, egoism, falsehood, absolutely evil, or are they merely

"inelegances"?--that is to say, things deprecated just at present, but

which, well ornamented and perfumed with grace, might not again attract

us, satisfy us, furnish us a type of life equivalent after all to the

life of the sages and saints; for nothing shows us with certainty that

the latter is any better than the former. Are justice and love a sure

good, a sure law, and the harbor of safety? Or are they possible

illusions, probable vanities? Have we a destiny, an ideal, or are we

agitating ourselves without cause and without purpose for the amusement

of some malicious demiurge, or simply for the absurd caprice of great

Pan? This is the question that divides consciences. A great subject of

dispute; surely greater than that of the divinity of Jesus Christ, for

example, than that even of the existence of a personal God, or of any

other purely speculative question you please; and above all, one more

urgent: for there are counter-blows in it, which frighten me in my

every-day existence,--me, a man kept to the business of living from the

hour I awake to the light until the hour I go to sleep; and according to

the answer I may give myself on this point, is the spirit in which I dig

in my little garden.

Personally I have taken sides, after reflection; after experience also,

I do profess with conviction that humanity has a destiny and that we

live for something. What is to be understood exactly by this word

humanity? In short, I know not, only that this, of which I know nothing,

does not exist yet, but it is on the road to existence, on the road to

make itself known; and that it concerns me who am here. What must be

understood by this word destiny? I do not know much more; I have only,

so far, dreams about it, dreams born of some profound but incommunicable

love, which an equal love only could understand; my conscience is not

pure enough to conceive a stronger conviction; I only affirm that this

destiny of humanity, if it were known, would be such that all men,

ignorant or simple, could participate in it. It is already something to

know that, in short, I see at least by lightning-flashes, from which

side the future will shine; and I walk towards it, and live thus,

climbing up in a steep dark forest towards a point where a light is

divined, a light that cannot deceive me, but which the obtruding

branches of a complicated and apparent life hide from me. That which

will bring me nearer it is not arguing about the probable nature of the

light, but walking; I mean, fortifying in myself and others a will for

the Good....

We have on one side undecided and lukewarm allies, on the other

adversaries; and we are forced necessarily to combat. This necessity

will become clearer each day; ... it is the "antagonism of negatives and

positives--of those who tend to destroy and those who tend to

reconstruct."... There is no question here, be it understood, of knowing

whether we are deceiving ourselves in choosing such or such a particular

duty; that I would concede without trouble, having always estimated that

our moral judgments, like our acts, have need of ceaseless revision and

amelioration, according to an endless progression. There is a question

of much more; of knowing in an absolute manner whether there be a duty

for us or not.... Good is in fact that which ought to be. Like Christ,

who according to St. Paul is not a Yes and a No, but a Yes, duty is a

Yes; to slip into it the shadow of a possibility of a No is to destroy

it....

The men of to-day are thus negatives or positives, as they range

themselves under one opinion or the other. And they must range

themselves under one of the two. They cannot escape. The question which

divides us, to know whether we live in vain, imposes itself upon every

one who opens his lips or moves his finger, upon every conscious being

who breathes. That So-and-so never speaks of it, never thinks of it, may

be; but their lives answer for them and testify loudly enough. I confess

that at first sight the negatives seem for the moment the more numerous.

They include many groups, which I shall not enumerate here. I range with

them the charming uncertain ones, like M. Renan and his melodious

disciples, the sombre and nihilistic Buddhists; all those to whom the

law of the completion of man through the good is indeed foolish and

chimerical, since their lives imply the negation of it: I mean to say

the immense multitude of those who live in any kind of way, good easy

people, refined possibly, from caprice, coquetry or laziness, but in

complete moral anaesthesia.

Now we come to the positives. They include first of all, true

Christians, and all true Jews, attached to the profound spirit of their

religion; then the philosophers and poets who affirm or sing the moral

ideal, the new disciples of Plato, the Stoics, the Kantians, famous or

unknown, to whom life alone, outside of all speculation, is a solid

affirmation of the possibility and sufficiency of the good. That the

actions of these men and women, on the way to creating themselves free

beings, human beings, have the same value as doctrine, cannot be denied.

They labor and suffer here and there, each one in his own cell; each one

making his own goodness consist in the realization of what he believes

to be the absolute good; making themselves faithful servants of

something; existing outside of themselves; the city, religion, charity,

justice, truth even, or beauty, conceived as modes of adoration.... All

these compose, it seems to me, one and the same Church, having the

philosophers and poets of duty for doctors of divinity, the heroes of

duty for congregation. These may be called by the general name of

"Positives."

Let our eyes be opened: everything that surrounds us is vitiated; many

of the children playing on the promenades are sickly, their little faces

are often enough marked with livid blotches, their bones are often

enough twisted, sad symptoms of the degradation of parents. At every

street corner are distributed libertine productions by traders in the

depravity of the weak. If any one wishes to recognize the furnace of

vice burning within us, let him observe merely the looks cast upon an

honest woman as she passes, by respectable men, old men. What savage

expressions intercepted under the feverish light of the electric lamps!

What tension, what spasms of covetousness! What hallucinations of

pleasure and of gold! Tragic matter here, but low tragedies _a la_

Balzac, not those acted under an open sky by heroes. A few pistol-shots

from time to time, a few poisonings, some drownings: that is all that

transpires of the interior evil. The rest passes away in suppressed

tears, brooding hatreds, in accepted shame. In such confusion the

consciences of the best, of the most disinterested ones, lose the

cleanness of their stamp. "You are smiling there at an obscenity," said

I to a friend; he protested; then reflecting, agreed with me, quite

astonished that he had not perceived it. Honest men are troubled by all

this circumjacent corruption. And rightly so, for at the bottom they are

parts of it; they are distinguished from it only by more cleanliness,

education, elegance, but not by principle.

In fact, from top to bottom, all this society lives on sensation; that

is the common trait through it all, and it is graded according to the

quality of its sensations.... Fundamentally there is only sensation,

with here and there unequally subtle nerves. There are no terms less

reconcilable one to another than research of sensation and moral

obligation. There is nothing more opposed. Therefore he who expects all

from his sensations depends absolutely on externals, upon the fortuitous

things of life, in all their incoherence; he is no longer a self-centre,

he feels himself no longer responsible, his personality is dissolved,

evaporated; it does not react, and ambient nature already absorbs him,

like some dead thing....

And this is where we are. I recognize then the evil; I see it in its

extent. Nevertheless, to paint this lamentable picture once more is not

to show our moral ideas. Our moral idea is what we believe touching the

life which shall be best; it is not exactly our life.

Ever since the antique Medea of Ovid uttered that cry, many others, one

after another, have groaned over the fact that, seeing the best and

approving it, they yet follow the worst--alas!

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