French Classics Part 36

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

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

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

He first pa.s.ses judgment on Goethe, and then afterward checks himself:

He [Goethe] has so little soul. His way of understanding love, religion, duty, and patriotism has something mean and repulsive in it.

There is no ardor, no generosity, in him. A secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, makes itself felt through all the wealth and flexibility of his talent.

One must never be too hasty in judging these complex natures.

Completely lacking as he is in the sense of obligation and of sin, Goethe nevertheless finds his way to seriousness through dignity.

Greek sculpture has been his school of virtue.

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

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

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

Toward the end, occurs this striking and illuminating word about one of the worst of human pa.s.sions:

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

Doubting Amiel still thinks that Christ is better than Buddha:

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Pensee_-writing has gained such headway in France, there is so much literary history behind it there, and it is in itself so fascinating a form of literary activity, that, in that country at least, the fas.h.i.+on will probably never pa.s.s away.

XXV.

EPILOGUE.

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

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

When you are very old, at evening You'll sit and spin beside the fire, and say, Humming my songs, "Ah well, ah well-a-day!

When I was young, of me did Ronsard sing."

None of your maidens that doth hear the thing, Albeit with her weary task foredone, But wakens at my name, and calls you one Blest, to be held in long remembering.

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

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

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

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

The result of all is before the reader; and, good or bad, it is, we are bound to confess, the very best that, within the given limits, we could do. Such students of our subject as we may fortunately have succeeded in making hungry for still more knowledge than we ourselves supply, we can conscientiously send, for further partial satisfaction of their desire, to that series of books, already once named by us, which has lately been published at Chicago, under the t.i.tle, "The Great French Writers."

Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Co. have done a true service to the cause of letters in general, and in particular to the cause of what may be called international letters, in reproducing this series of books. They are good books, they are well translated, and they appear in handsome form.

Madame de Sevigne, Montesquieu, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and three names that, together with all of their several kinds, economists, philosophers, historians, we here have been obliged to omit, Turgot, Victor Cousin, Thiers, are in the list of authors treated in the volumes thus far issued.

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