Buildings become tombs when the race that constructed them has
disappeared. Libraries and manuscripts are catacombs where most of us
might wander in the dark forever, finding no issue. To know dead
generations and their environments through these channels, to feel a love
so strong that it calls the past forth from its winding-sheet, and gives
it life again, as Christ did Lazarus, is the privilege only of great
historians.
France is honoring the memory of such a man at this moment; one who for
forty years sought the vital spark of his country’s existence, striving
to resuscitate what he called “the great soul of history,” as it
developed through successive acts of the vast drama. This employment of
his genius is Michelet’s title to fame.
In a sombre structure, the tall windows of which look across the
Luxembourg trees to the Pantheon, where her husband’s bust has recently
been placed, a widow preserves with religious care the souvenirs of this
great historian. Nothing that can recall either his life or his labor is
changed.
Madame Michelet’s life is in strange contrast with the ways of the modern
spouse who, under pretext of grief, discards and displaces every reminder
of the dead. In our day, when the great art is to forget, an existence
consecrated to a memory is so rare that the world might be the better for
knowing that a woman lives who, young and beautiful, was happy in the
society of an old man, whose genius she appreciated and cherished, who
loves him dead as she loved him living. By her care the apartment
remains as it stood when he left it, to die at Hyères,—the furniture, the
paintings, the writing-table. No stranger has sat in his chair, no
acquaintance has drunk from his cup. This woman, who was a perfect wife
and now fills one’s ideal of what a widow’s life should be, has
constituted herself the vigilant guardian of her husband’s memory. She
loves to talk of the illustrious dead, and tell how he was fond of saying
that Virgil and Vico were his parents. Any one who reads the _Georgics_
or _The Bird_ will see the truth of this, for he loved all created
things, his ardent spiritism perceiving that the essence which moved the
ocean’s tides was the same that sang in the robin at the window during
his last illness, which he called his “little captive soul.”
The author of _La Bible de l’Humanité_ had to a supreme degree the love
of country, and possessed the power of reincarnating with each succeeding
cycle of its history. So luminous was his mind, so profound and
far-reaching his sympathy, that he understood the obscure workings of the
mediæval mind as clearly as he appreciated Mirabeau’s transcendent
genius. He believed that humanity, like Prometheus, was self-made; that
nations modelled their own destiny during the actions and reactions of
history, as each one of us acquires a personality through the struggles
and temptations of existence, by the evolving power every soul carries
within itself.
Michelet taught that each nation was the hero of its own drama; that
great men have not been different from the rest of their race—on the
contrary, being the condensation of an epoch, that, no matter what the
apparent eccentricities of a leader may have been, he was the expression
of a people’s spirit. This discovery that a race is transformed by its
action upon itself and upon the elements it absorbs from without, wipes
away at a stroke the popular belief in “predestined races” or
providential “great men” appearing at crucial moments and riding
victorious across the world.
An historian, if what he writes is to have any value, must know the
people, the one great historical factor. Radicalism in history is the
beginning of truth. Guided by this light of his own, Michelet discovered
a fresh factor heretofore unnoticed, that vast fermentation which in
France transforms all foreign elements into an integral part of the
country’s being. After studying his own land through the thirteen
centuries of her growth, from the chart of Childebert to the will of
Louis XVI., Michelet declared that while England is a composite empire
and Germany a region, France is a personality. In consequence he
regarded the history of his country as a long dramatic poem. Here we
reach the inner thought of the historian, the secret impulse that guided
his majestic pen.
The veritable hero of his splendid Iliad is at first ignorant and
obscure, seeking passionately like Œdipus to know himself. The interest
of the piece is absorbing. We can follow the gradual development of his
nature as it becomes more attractive and sympathetic with each advancing
age, until, through the hundred acts of the tragedy, he achieves a soul.
For Michelet to write the history of his country was to describe the long
evolution of a hero. He was fond of telling his friends that during the
Revolution of July, while he was making his translation of Vico, this
great fact was revealed to him in the blazing vision of a people in
revolt. At that moment the young and unknown author resolved to devote
his life, his talents, his gift of clairvoyance, the magic of his
inimitable style and creative genius, to fixing on paper the features
seen in his vision.
Conceived and executed in this spirit, his history could be but a
stupendous epic, and proves once again the truth of Aristotle’s assertion
that there is often greater truth in poetry than in prose.
Seeking in the remote past for the origin of his hero, Michelet pauses
first before _the Cathedral_. The poem begins like some mediæval tale.
The first years of his youthful country are devoted to a mystic religion.
Under his ardent hands vast naves rise and belfries touch the clouds. It
is but a sad and cramped development, however; statutes restrain his
young ardor and chill his blood. It is not until the boy is behind the
plough in the fields and sunlight that his real life begins—a poor,
brutish existence, if you will, but still life. The “Jacques,” half man
and half beast, of the Middle Ages is the result of a thousand years of
suffering.
A woman’s voice calls this brute to arms. An enemy is overrunning the
land. Joan the virgin—“my Joan,” Michelet calls her—whose heart bleeds
when blood is shed, frees her country. A shadow, however, soon obscures
this gracious vision from Jacques’s eyes. The vast monarchical incubus
rises between the people and their ideal. Our historian turns in disgust
from the later French kings. He has neither time nor heart to write
their history, so passes quickly from Louis XI. to the great climax of
his drama—the Revolution. There we find his hero, emerging at last from
tyranny and oppression. Freedom and happiness are before him. Alas! his
eyes, accustomed to the dim light of dungeons, are dazzled by the sun of
liberty; he strikes friend and foe alike.
In the solitary galleries of the “Archives” Michelet communes with the
great spirits of that day, Desaix, Marceau, Kleber,—elder sons of the
Republic, who whisper many secrets to their pupil as he turns over faded
pages tied with tri-colored ribbons, where the cities of France have
written their affection for liberty, love-letters from Jacques to his
mistress. Michelet is happy. His long labor is drawing to an end. The
great epic which he has followed as it developed through the centuries is
complete. His hero stands hand in hand before the altar with the spouse
of his choice, for whose smile he has toiled and struggled. The
poet-historian sees again in the _Fête de la Fédération_ the radiant face
of his vision, the true face of France, _La Dulce_.
Through all the lyricism of this master’s work one feels that he has
“lived” history as he wrote it, following his subject from its obscure
genesis to a radiant apotheosis. The faithful companion of Michelet’s
age has borne witness to this power which he possessed of projecting
himself into another age and living with his subject. She repeats to
those who know her how he trembled in passion and burned with patriotic
emotion in transcribing the crucial pages of his country’s history,
rejoicing in her successes and depressed by her faults, like the classic
historian who refused with horror to tell the story of his compatriots’
defeat at Cannæ, saying, “I could not survive the recital.”
“Do you remember,” a friend once asked Madame Michelet, “how, when your
husband was writing his chapters on the Reign of Terror, he ended by
falling ill?”
“Ah, yes!” she replied. “That was the week he executed Danton. We were
living in the country near Nantes. The ground was covered with snow. I
can see him now, hurrying to and fro under the bare trees, gesticulating
and crying as he walked, ‘How can I judge them, those great men? How can
I judge them?’ It was in this way that he threw his ‘thousand souls’
into the past and lived in sympathy with all men, an apostle of universal
love. After one of these fecund hours he would drop into his chair and
murmur, ‘I am crushed by this work. I have been writing with my blood!’”
Alas, his aged eyes were destined to read sadder pages than he had ever
written, to see years as tragic as the “Terror.” He lived to hear the
recital of (having refused to witness) his country’s humiliation, and
fell one April morning, in his retirement near Pisa, unconscious under
the double shock of invasion and civil war. Though he recovered later,
his horizon remained dark. The patriot suffered to see party spirit and
warring factions rending the nation he had so often called the pilot of
humanity’s bark, which seemed now to be going straight on the rocks.
“_Finis Galliæ_,” murmured the historian, who to the end lived and died
with his native land.
Thousands yearly mount the broad steps of the Panthéon to lay their
wreaths upon his tomb, and thousands more in every Gallic schoolroom are
daily learning, in the pages of his history, to love _France la Dulce_.
Footnotes:
{1} “Newport of the Past,” _Worldly Ways and By-ways_.