Chapter LX: An Offering (1)

Clementina was always ready to accord any reasonable request Florimel could make of her; but her letter lifted such a weight from her heart and life that she would now have done whatever she desired, reasonable or unreasonable, provided only it was honest. She had no difficulty in accepting Florimel's explanation that her sudden disappearance was but a breaking of the social jail, the flight of the weary bird from its foreign cage back to the country of its nest; and that same morning she called upon Demon. The hound, feared and neglected, was rejoiced to see her, came when she called him, and received her caresses: there was no ground for dreading his company. It was a long journey, but if it had been across a desert instead of through her own country, the hope that lay at the end of it would have made it more than pleasant. She, as well as Lady Bellair, had friends upon the way, but no desire either to lengthen the journey or shorten its tedium by visiting them.

The letter would have found her at Wastbeach instead of London had not the society and instructions of the schoolmaster detained her a willing prisoner to its heat and glare and dust. Him only in all London must she see to bid good-bye. To Camden Town therefore she went that same evening, when his work would be over for the day. As usual now, she was shown into his room--his only one. As usual also, she found him poring over his Greek Testament. The gracious, graceful woman looked lovelily strange in that mean chamber--like an opal in a brass ring. There was no such contrast between the room and its occupant. His bodily presence was too weak to "stick fiery off" from its surroundings, and to the eye that saw through the bodily presence to the inherent grandeur, that grandeur suggested no discrepancy, being of the kind that lifts everything to its own level, casts the mantle of its own radiance around its surroundings. Still, to the eye of love and reverence it was not pleasant to see him in such _entourage_, and now that Clementina was going to leave him, the ministering spirit that dwelt in the woman was troubled.

"Ah!" he said, and rose as she entered, "this is then the angel of my deliverance!" But with such a smile he did not look as if he had much to be delivered from. "You see," he went on, "old man as I am, and peaceful, the summer will lay hold upon me. She stretches out a long arm into this desert of houses and stones, and sets me longing after the green fields and the living air--it seems dead here--and the face of God, as much as one may behold of the Infinite through the revealing veil of earth and sky and sea. Shall I confess my weakness, my poverty of spirit, my covetousness after the visual? I was even getting a little tired of that glorious God-and-man lover, Saul of Tarsus: no, not of him, never of _him_, only of his shadow in his words. Yet perhaps--yes, I think so--it is God alone of whom a man can never get tired. Well, no matter: tired I was, when lo! here comes my pupil, with more of God in her face than all the worlds and their skies He ever made."

"I would my heart were as full of Him too, then, sir," answered Clementina. "But if I am anything of a comfort to you, I am more than glad; therefore the more sorry to tell you that I am going to leave you, though for a little while only, I trust."

"You do not take me by surprise, my lady. I have of course been looking forward for some time to my loss and your gain. The world is full of little deaths--deaths of all sorts and sizes, rather let me say. For this one I was prepared. The good summer-land calls you to its bosom, and you must go."

"Come with me," cried Clementina, her eyes eager with the light of the sudden thought, while her heart reproached her grievously that only now first had it come to her.

"A man must not leave the most irksome work for the most peaceful pleasure," answered the schoolmaster. "I am able to live--yes, and do my work--without you, my lady," he added with a smile, "though I shall miss you sorely."

"But you do not know where I want you to come," she said.

"What difference can that make, my lady, except indeed in the amount of pleasure to be refused, seeing this is not a matter of choice? I must be with the children whom I have engaged to teach, and whose parents pay me for my labor--not with those who, besides, can do well without me."

"I cannot, sir--not for long at least."

"What! not with Malcolm to supply my place?"

Clementina blushed, but only like a white rose. She did not turn her head aside; she did not lower their lids to veil the light she felt mount into her eyes; she looked him gently in the face as before, and her aspect of entreaty did not change. "Ah! do not be unkind, master," she said.

"Unkind!" he repeated. "You know I am not. I have more kindness in my heart than any lips can tell. You do not know, you could not yet imagine, the half of what I hope of and for and from you."

"I _am_ going to see Malcolm," she said with a little sigh. "That is, I am going to visit Lady Lossie at her place in Scotland--your own old home, where so many must love you. _Can't_ you come? I shall be traveling alone, quite alone, except my servants."

A shadow came over the schoolmaster's face: "You do not _think_, my lady, or you would not press me. It pains me that you do not see at once it would be dishonest to go without timely notice to my pupils, and to the public too. But, beyond that quite, I never do anything of myself. I go not where I wish, but where I seem to be called or sent. I never even wish much, except when I pray to Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. After what He wants to give me I am wishing all day long. I used to build many castles, not without a beauty of their own--that was when I had less understanding--now I leave them to God to build for me: He does it better, and they last longer. See now, this very hour, when I needed help, could I have contrived a more lovely annihilation of the monotony that threatened to invade my weary spirit than this inroad of light in the person of my Lady Clementina? Nor will He allow me to get overwearied with vain efforts. I do not think He will keep me here long, for I find I cannot do much for these children. They are but some of His many pagans--not yet quite ready to receive Christianity, I think--not like children with some of the old seeds of the truth buried in them, that want to be turned up nearer to the light. This ministration I take to be more for my good than theirs--a little trial of faith and patience for me--a stony corner of the lovely valley of humiliation to cross. True, I _might_ be happier where I could hear the larks, but I do not know that anywhere have I been more peaceful than in this little room, on which I see you so often cast round your eyes curiously, perhaps pitifully, my lady."

"It is not at all a fit place for _you_," said Clementina with a touch of indignation.

"Softly, my lady, lest, without knowing it, your love should make you sin. Who set thee, I pray, for a guardian angel over my welfare? I could scarce have a lovelier, true; but where is thy brevet? No, my lady: it is a greater than thou that sets me the bounds of my habitation. Perhaps He may give me a palace one day. If I might choose, it would be things that belong to a cottage--the whiteness and the greenness and the sweet odors of cleanliness. But the Father has decreed for His children that they shall know the thing that is neither their ideal nor His. Who can imagine how in this respect things looked to our Lord when He came and found so little faith on the earth? But perhaps, my lady, you would not pity my present condition so much if you had seen the cottage in which I was born, and where my father and mother loved each other, and died happier than on their wedding-day. There I was happy too until their loving ambition decreed that I should be a scholar and a clergyman. Not before then did I ever know anything worthy the name of trouble. A little cold and a little hunger at times, and not a little restlessness always, was all. But then--ah, then my troubles began. Yet God, who bringeth light out of darkness, hath brought good even out of my weakness and presumption and half-unconscious falsehood. When do you go?"

"To-morrow morning, as I purpose."

"Then God be with thee! He _is_ with thee, only my prayer is that thou mayst know it. He is with me, and I know it. He does not find this chamber too mean or dingy or unclean to let me know Him near me in it."

"Tell me one thing before I go," said Clementina: "are we not commanded to bear each other's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ? I read it to-day."

"Then why ask me?"

"For another question: does not that involve the command to those who have burdens that they should allow others to bear them?"

"Surely, my lady. But _I_ have no burden to let you bear."

"Why should I have everything and you nothing? Answer me that."

"My lady, I have millions more than you, for I have been gathering the crumbs under my Master's table for thirty years."

"You are a king," answered Clementina. "But a king needs a handmaiden somewhere in his house: that let _me_ be in yours. No, I will be proud, and assert my rights: I am your daughter. If I am not, why am I here? Do you not remember telling me that the adoption of God meant a closer relation than any other fatherhood, even His own first fatherhood, could signify? You cannot cast me off if you would. Why should you be poor when I am rich? You _are_ poor: you cannot deny it," she concluded with a serious playfulness.

"I will not deny my privileges," said the schoolmaster, with a smile such as might have acknowledged the possession of some exquisite and envied rarity.

"I believe," insisted Clementina, "you are just as poor as the apostle Paul when he sat down to make a tent, or as our Lord himself after he gave up carpentering."

"You are wrong there, my lady. I am not so poor as they must often have been."

"But I don't know how long I may be away, and you may fall ill, or--or--see some--some book you want very much, or--"

"I never do," said the schoolmaster.

"What! never see a book you want to have?"

"No, not now. I have my Greek Testament, my Plato and my Shakespeare, and one or two little books besides whose wisdom I have not yet quite exhausted."

"I can't bear it!" cried Clementina, almost on the point of weeping. "You will not let me near you. You put out an arm as long as the summer's, and push me away from you. _Let_ me be your servant." As she spoke she rose, and walking softly up to him where he sat, kneeled at his knees and held out suppliantly a little bag of white silk tied with crimson. "Take it--father," she said, hesitating, and bringing the word out with an effort: "take your daughter's offering--a poor thing to show her love, but something to ease her heart."

He took it, and weighed it up and down in his hand with an amused smile, but his eyes full of tears. It was heavy. He opened it. A chair was within his reach: he emptied it on the seat of it, and laughed with merry delight as its contents came tumbling out. "I never saw so much gold in my life if it were all taken together," he said. "What beautiful stuff it is! But I don't want it, my dear. It would but trouble me." And as he spoke he began to put it in the bag again. "You will want it for your journey," he said.

"I have plenty in my reticule," she answered. "That is a mere nothing to what I could have to-morrow morning for writing a cheque. I am afraid I am very rich. It is such a shame! But I can't well help it. You must teach me how to become poor. Tell me true: how much money have you?" She said this with such an earnest look of simple love that the schoolmaster made haste to rise that he might conceal his growing emotion.

"Rise, my dear lady," he said as he rose himself, "and I will show you." He gave her his hand, and she obeyed, but troubled and disappointed, and so stood looking after him while he went to a drawer. Thence, searching in a corner of it, he brought a half-sovereign, a few shillings and some coppers, and held them out to her on his hand with the smile of one who has proved his point. "There!" he said, "do you think Paul would have stopped preaching to make a tent so long as he had as much as that in his pocket? I shall have more on Saturday, and I always carry a month's rent in my good old watch, for which I never had much use, and now have less than ever."

Clementina had been struggling with herself: now she burst into tears.

"Why, what a misspending of precious sorrow!" exclaimed the schoolmaster. "Do you think because a man has not a gold-mine he must die of hunger? I once heard of a sparrow that never had a worm left for the morrow, and died a happy death notwithstanding." As he spoke he took her handkerchief from her hand and dried her tears with it. But he had enough ado to keep his own back. "Because I won't take a bagful of gold from you when I don't want it," he went on, "do you think I should let myself starve without coming to you? I promise you I will let you know--come to you if I can--the moment I get too hungry to do my work well and have no money left. Should I think it a disgrace to take money from _you_? That would show a poverty of spirit such as I hope never to fall into. My _sole_ reason for refusing now is that I do not need it."

But for all his loving words and assurances Clementina could not stay her tears. She was not ready to weep, but now her eyes were as a fountain.

"See, then, for your tears are hard to bear, my daughter," he said, "I will take one of these golden ministers, and if it has flown from me ere you come, seeing that, like the raven, it will not return if once I let it go, I will ask you for another. It _may_ be God's will that you should feed me for a time."

"Like one of Elijah's ravens," said Clementina, with an attempted laugh that was really a sob.

"Like a dove whose wings are covered with silver and her feathers with yellow gold," said the schoolmaster.

A moment of silence followed, broken only by Clementina's failures in quieting herself.

"To me," he resumed, "the sweetest fountain of money is the hand of love, but a man has no right to take it from that fountain except he is in want of it. I am not. True, I go somewhat bare, my lady; but what is that when my Lord would have it so?"

He opened again the bag, and slowly, reverentially indeed, drew from it one of the new sovereigns with which it was filled. He put it in a waistcoat pocket and laid the bag on the table.

"But your clothes are shabby, sir," said Clementina, looking at him with a sad little shake of the head.

"Are they?" he returned, and looked down at his lower garments, reddening and anxious. "I did not think they were more than a little rubbed, but they shine somewhat," he said. "They are indeed polished by use," he went on with a troubled little laugh: "but they have no holes yet--at least none that are visible," he corrected. "If you tell me, my lady, if you honestly tell me, that my garments"--and he looked at the sleeve of his coat, drawing back his head from it to see it better--"are unsightly, I will take of your money and buy me a new suit." Over his coat-sleeve he regarded her, questioning.

"Everything about you is beautiful," she burst out. "You want nothing but a body that lets the light through." She took the hand still raised in his survey of his sleeve, pressed it to her lips, and walked, with even more than her wonted state, slowly from the room.

He took the bag of gold from the table and followed her down the stair. Her chariot was waiting her at the door. He handed her in, and laid the bag on the little seat in front.

"Will you tell him to drive home?" she said with a firm voice, and a smile which if any one care to understand let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer, shabby, un-London-like man for a fortune-teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room--not to his Plato, not even to Saul of Tarsus, but to the Lord himself.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

SOME LAST WORDS FROM SAINTE-BEUVE.

It is seven years since the world of letters lost the prince of critics, the last of the critics. His unfinished and unpublished manuscripts were eagerly demanded and devoured; while obituaries, notices, reminiscences and those analyses which the French term _appreciations_ rained in from various quarters. The latest of these that deserves attention was an outline of Saint-Beuve's life and literary career by the Vicomte d'Haussonville, in which, with an affectation of impartiality and fairness, every page was streaked with malice; imperfect justice was done to Sainte-Beuve's intellect; his influence and reputation were understated; and a picture was given of him as a man which could not but be disagreeable and disappointing to the vast number who admired him as a writer. In regard to the first two points, ill-nature and inaccuracy can do no harm: Sainte-Beuve's fame and ability are perfectly well known to the reading public of to-day, and the opinion of posterity will rest upon his own merits rather than on the statements of any biographer, as he is one of the authors whose writings are sure to be more read than what other people write about them. The unpleasant personal impression is not so easily dismissed: however exaggerated we may be disposed to think it, the reflection occurs, "How this man was feared!" The appearance of the notice several years after Sainte-Beuve's death strengthens this conviction: M. d'Haussonville waited until his subject should be quite cold before he ventured to touch him.

The causes of this dread and dislike are not to be found in Sainte-Beuve's voluminous works, nor have I met with any evidence of it in the writings of his literary contemporaries. He obviously held that it is a critic's duty to be just before he is generous, and there may be a lack of geniality in his praise, though it is not given grudgingly; but I cannot recall an instance of literary spite in the large proportion of his writings with which I am familiar. His judgments are often severe, never harsh: he frequently dealt in satire, rarely, as far as my memory serves, in sarcasm, and he condemns irony as one of the least intelligent dispositions of the mind. The only case in which I remember having suspected Sainte-Beuve of ill-nature was in a notice of J. J. Ampere printed in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ shortly after the latter's death; but a person who had known Ampere long and well, and on the friendliest terms, declared that it gave an entirely fair description of the man, who, full of talent and amiability as he was, had many weaknesses. Two pleas only can justify disinterring and gibbeting an author's private life--either his having done the same by others, or his having made the public the confidant of his individual experience. Few writers have intruded their own personality upon their readers less than Sainte-Beuve has done: the poems and novels of his youth, which won fervent admiration from the literary leaders of that day, De Vigny, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, are now forgotten: he is known to readers of the last half century by a series of critical and biographical essays extending from 1823 or 1824 to 1870, which combine every attribute of perfect criticism except enthusiasm. The most prominent feature of his method is the conscientiousness with which he credits the person upon whom he passes judgment with every particle of worth which can be extracted from his writings, acts or sayings: he adopts as the basis of criticism the acknowledgment of whatever merit may exist in the subject of consideration; and his talent and patience for sifting the grain from the chaff are remarkable and admirable. An author who has left some forty volumes conceived in this spirit should have been safe against an effusion of spleen in his biographer. I am not assailing the fidelity of M. d'Haussonville's portrait--of which I have no means of judging--but the temper in which it is executed, which can be judged without difficulty. Besides the injustice already mentioned, it is disfigured by tittle-tattle, which tends to render the original ridiculous and repulsive, but does not add one whit to our knowledge of Sainte-Beuve as a man or an author.

A defence of Sainte-Beuve is not within the purpose of the present article; but it was impossible for one who has known him favorably for twenty years through his works and the testimony of his most distinguished literary compeers to speak of him at all without protesting against the detraction to which his memory has been subjected. Two small posthumous volumes have lately been issued in France,[C] revealing qualities which might expose the dead man to a mean revenge, though to most readers they will have a delightful freshness unspoiled by any bitter flavor. They consist of a series of notes on all sorts of subjects, literary, dramatic, religious and political, one of them being actually made up of the jottings in his later notebooks, while the other contains the memoranda of a sort of high-class gossip with which Sainte-Beuve supplied a friend, the editor of _La Revue Suisse_, during the years 1843-45. These were not to be published as they stood, but to be used by the editor, M. Juste Olivier, as he should think best: they are fragmentary, mere bits of raw material--if any product of that accomplished brain can be so termed--to be worked up by another hand. They were qualified by marginal observations, such as "This is for you alone," "This is rather strong," and they were to be absolutely anonymous, the author allowing himself the luxury of free speech, of writing exactly as he thought and felt; in short, of trusting his indiscretion to M. Olivier's discretion. The latter used his judgment independently; Sainte-Beuve's views and comments often became merely one ingredient in an article for which others supplied the rest; and the editor kneaded the whole into shape to his own liking. But the MSS. remained intact, and were confided by M. Olivier to M. Jules Troubat, Sainte-Beuve's private secretary and editor, who has published them in their integrity, he tells us, with the exception of "a few indispensable suppressions." The other volume, as we have said, is composed of his notebooks. These last were intended to take the place of memoirs by Sainte-Beuve himself, who wrote a short preface, under the name of M. Troubat, destined for a larger volume to appear after his death. He published, however, the greater part of those which he had already collected in vol. ii. of the _Causeries de Lundi_: the present series contains the notes which accumulated subsequently. M. Troubat has given them to the world as they stood. Both books abound in the characteristics of the author's style--good sense, moderation, perception, discrimination, delicacy, sparkle, unerring taste, as well as judgment in matters of intelligence. A parcel of disconnected passages cannot possess the flow and finish of a complete essay, but each bit has the clearness, incisiveness and smooth polish of his native wit. They give us Sainte-Beuve's first impression, thought, mental impulse, about daily events regarding which he sometimes afterward modified his opinion. Not often, however, for he had, if not precisely the prophetic vision which belongs to genius or minds illuminated by enthusiasm or sympathy, that keen far-sightedness which recognizes at a distance rather than foresees the coming event or man. He tells a quantity of anecdotes, and he had exactly the sort of humor and absence of tenderness for human weakness which perceives the point that makes a story good in the greatest variety of speeches and situations. The key to the dislike and fear with which some people must have regarded him while living lies probably in just this appreciation. It is vain to assert that humor is necessarily kindly, or the adjectives "grim" and "savage" would not so often be tacked to it. Nobody could have hoped that friendship would blind Sainte-Beuve to an absurdity: on the other hand, even his enemies might count on his recognition if they had said a good thing, and his not spoiling it in the repetition, as too many friends do. This produced an impartiality in his verdicts which is the moral essence of criticism, but perhaps the most trying quality to the subject of it: he says himself that he had irritated and envenomed more people by his praise than by his blame. He had not a high opinion of human nature, which is curiously illustrated by his female portraits: when there has been only a doubt of a woman's virtue, he never gives her the benefit of the doubt; when there has not been even the suspicion of a slip, he presumes that she kept her secrets better than most people do. He was sensitive to the accusation of cynicism, and resented extremely an article in _L'Union_ of June, 1855, in which he was set down as having not only a skeptical mind, but a skeptical heart; which was no doubt very nearly true. Yet he was on his guard against his natural cynicism in his literary judgments at least, as one need but glance over them to see. In the _Cahiers_ he cites an expression of his fair friend Madame d'Arbonville: "How many good things there are besides the things which we like! We ought to make room within ourselves for a certain _opposite_;" and he adds that this should be the motto of a liberal and intelligent critic. These convictions helped to make his criticism as admirable, as invaluable, as it is; but the sharpness from which his literary work is free makes his private observations on men and things more entertaining. There are few people so well-natured as not to enjoy the peculiar pungency which gives many of the passages in the two volumes before us their relish: now and then it is as if we had got hold of the cruets which were to season a whole article. There is a batch of anecdotes about Lamartine, whose conspicuous gifts and position put his puerile vanity in relief; and that vanity Sainte-Beuve never spared. Lamartine set the fashion of his own idolatry by constituting himself the high priest; adulation was not enough--he demanded adoration; and he received it. He had a habit of contemplating himself from an objective but highly-idealizing point of view, best expressed by saying that he had a hero-worship for himself: his memoirs and other autobiographical writings are full of it, and in his intercourse it perpetually overflowed. "That is the brow they have tried to bend to the dust!" he exclaimed, standing before his own likeness in Ary Scheffer's studio. Lord Houghton, among his many good stories, had one of spending an evening at Lamartine's in Paris with a circle of celebrities. Alfred de Vigny, who had been out of town, presented himself. "Welcome back!" said Lamartine magnificently. "You come from the provinces: do they admire us down there?"--"They adore you," replied De Vigny with a bow. The conversation was a prolonged paean to the host, with choral strophe and antistrophe. One of the party began to rehearse the aspects in which Lamartine was the greatest man in France--"As a poet, as an orator, as an historian, as a statesman;" and as he paused, "And as a _soldier_," added Lamartine with a sublime gesture, "if ever France shall need him." This may have been the country neighbor who, we learn from Sainte-Beuve, pronounced Lamartine to be Fenelon without his didacticism, Rousseau without his sophistry, Mirabeau without his incendiary notions. Still, there were asides in the dialogue. One evening, the week before the overthrow of the provisional government of which Lamartine was president, he had a crowded reception, and, notwithstanding the failure and imminent downfall of his administration, he was radiant with satisfaction. "What can M. de Lamartine have to be so pleased about?" said one of his friends to another. "He is pleased with himself," was the reply.--"One of those speeches," observes Sainte-Beuve, "which only friends find to make." But Lamartine was by no means solitary in this infatuation. Sainte-Beuve remarks that "Nothing is so common in our days: some think themselves God, some the Son of God, some archangels. Pierre Leroux thinks himself the first, De Vigny the last: Lamartine is a good prince--he is satisfied to be a seraph."

These books give us daily glimpses of Paris thirty years ago, of that incessant mental movement, inquiry, desire for novelty and vivacity of transient interest which dazzle the brain as the scintillation of the sun upon the unstable waves does the eye. In all great cities, quite as much as in villages, there is a topic which for the moment occupies everybody, and which cannot be escaped, whether you enter a drawing-room, pick up a newspaper or rush into the street: the chief difference is, that in the great cities it changes oftener--"every fortnight here," says Sainte-Beuve of Paris. The history of many a nine days' wonder may be gathered from the _Chroniques_: we can mark the first effect of occurrences startling at the time, some of which are now wholly forgotten, while others have become historical; we witness the appearance of new divinities who have since found their pedestals, niches or obscure corners. Among these was Ponsard, chiefly known in this country, to those who remember Mademoiselle Rachel's brief, gleaming transit, as the author of _Horace et Lydie_, a light, bright, graceful piece based upon Horace's "Donec gratus eram tibi."

M. Ponsard, who was from the south of France, arrived in Paris in 1843 with a tragedy called _Lucrece_, which had been in his pocket for three years. It was read first at the house of the actor Bocage before a party of artists, actors and men of letters such as Paris alone can bring together. The litterateurs gave their opinion with caution and an oracular ambiguity which did not commit them too much: Gautier, on being asked how he liked it, replied, "It did not put me to sleep;" but the sculptor Preault, not having a literary reputation at stake, declared that if there were a "Roman prize" for tragedy (as there is for music and the fine arts, entitling the fortunate competitor to four years' travel and study in classic lands at the expense of the government) the author would set out on the morrow for the Eternal City. The play was read again a week or two afterward in the drawing-room of the Comtesse d'Agoult, the beautiful, gifted, reckless friend of Lizst's youth, and mother of the wife of Von Bulow and Wagner. The success was complete. Sainte-Beuve was again present; and Lamartine was among the audience full of admiration: the poor young poet could not nerve himself to come. The play was read by Bocage, who took the principal part, that of Brutus, when it was brought out at the Odeon. The chaste Lucretia was played by Madame Dorval, whose strength lay in parts of a different kind, and who announced her new character to a friend with the comment, "I only play women of virtue now-a-days." Reports of the new tragedy, which had been heard only in secret session, soon got about Paris, and excited intense curiosity and impatience; one of the daily papers published a scene from _Lucrece_; the sale was immense; everybody praised it to the skies, even members of the Academy. The next day the hoax came out: a clever but third-rate writer, M. Mery, had made April fools of the wits of Paris. The piece itself was soon performed, and made what is called in this country an immense sensation: the theatre, long out of favor, was crowded every night; the papers were full of it every morning; it was the topic about which everybody talked. Authors who had lately written less popular plays were somewhat envious and spiteful; Victor Hugo pronounced _Lucrece_ to be Livy versified; Dumas repeated (or invented) the speech of an enthusiastic notary, who exclaimed, "What a piece! Not one of my clerks could have written it." Madame de Girardin had just brought out her tragedy of _Judith_ at the Theatre Francais, with the powerful support of Rachel in the principal character: the drama, when read by Rachel and Madame de Girardin (whose beauty, wit and social position gave her during her whole life a fictitious rank in a certain set, of which none were better aware than the members of it) in Madame Recamier's drawing-room, had produced a better effect than it did upon the stage, where it was considered a respectable failure. Madame de Girardin could not control or conceal her chagrin, and meeting M. Ponsard one evening at the Duchesse de Grammont's, declined to have him presented to her. He took his honors so quietly--so tamely in the opinion of some people--that Madame Dorval exhorted him: "Wake up! wake up! you look like a hen that has hatched an eagle's egg." Since the Augustan age of French literature, since Corneille and Racine, a really fine tragedy on a classic subject had been unknown, and the romantic reaction was then at its height. The moral view of _Lucrece_ was a new and important element of success. "The religious feeling of the Roman matron, the inviolability of the domestic hearth, are these not new? do not they count for much?" observed the virtuous philosopher Ballanche, the devoted, unselfish friend of Madame Recamier. Sainte-Beuve was greatly impressed by the nobility of the characters and treatment, and after pointing out its beauties and shortcomings, set the seal to his encomium by affirming that the secret of the power of _Lucrece_ was that it had soul.

The extraordinary favor with which this play was received marked an epoch in a small way, a return to antique ideas and themes, to more elevated subjects and modes of dealing with them. Six weeks after its appearance Sainte-Beuve writes: "We have always been rather apish in France: the Grecian, Roman and biblical tragedies which every day now brings forth are innumerable. Who will deliver me from these Greeks and Romans? Here we are overrun by them again after forty years' insurrection, and by the Hebrews to boot." The high-water mark of the author's popularity was the publication of a trifle called the _Anti-Lucrece_, which was sold in the purlieus of the Odeon: next day there was a rumor that a second _Anti-Lucrece_ was in preparation. But the tide had turned: six months later, when the theatre reopened after the summer vacation with the same tragedy, Sainte-Beuve records: "_Lucrece_ has reappeared only to die, not by the poignard, but of languor, coldness, premature old age. It is frightful how little and how fast we live in these times--works as well as men. We survive ourselves and our children: the generations are turned upside down. Here is a piece which scarcely six months ago all Paris ran to hear without being asked:... now they are tired of it already, and can find nothing in it: it is like last year's snow." The death-blow of the tragedy was given, Sainte-Beuve says, not by the dagger, but by a luckless blunder of the actor who played Lucretia's father, and who, instead of saying, _L'assassin palissant_ ("The assassin turning pale,") said, _L'assassin polisson_ ("The scamp of an assassin"); which set everybody laughing; and that was the end of it.

M. Ponsard might console himself, if he liked, by the reflection that his play, if not immortal, had killed his fair rival's _Judith_ and swallowed up Victor Hugo's _Burgraves_, which had been acted at the Theatre Francais a month before _Lucrece_ was first produced. Regarding the former, Sainte-Beuve shows unwonted tenderness or policy. "Never let me be too epigrammatic about Madame de Girardin," he wrote to M. Olivier: "I would not seem to play the traitor to her smiles;" though in reference to a sharp encounter between her and Jules Janin he hints that she has claws of her own. He does not deny himself the pleasure of mentioning Victor Hugo's little weaknesses. At the first three representations of _Les Burgraves_ the theatre was packed with the author's friends: on the fourth a less partial public hissed to that degree that the curtain was dropped, and thenceforward each night was stormier until the play was withdrawn. Hugo could not bring himself to allow that he had been hissed, and, being behind the scenes, said to the actors, with the fatal sibilation whistling through the house, "They are interrupting my play" (_On trouble ma piece_); which became a byword with these wicked wits. Sainte-Beuve, with his infallible instinct of wherein dwelt the vital greatness or defect of a production, characterizes the piece as an exaggeration. He admits that it has talent, especially in the preface, but adds, "Hugo sees all things larger than life: they look black to him--in _Ruy Blas_ they looked red. But there is grandeur in the _Burgraves_: he alone, or Chateaubriand, could have written the introduction.... The banks of the Rhine are not so lofty and thunder-riven as he makes out, nor is Thessaly so black, nor Notre Dame so enormous, but more elegant, as may be seen from the pavement. But this is the defect of his eye."

Amidst these theatrical diversions the chronicler alludes to the fashionable preaching which occupied the gay world at hours when playhouses and drawing-rooms were not open. There was a religious revival going on in Paris almost equal to that which Moody and Sankey have produced here. "During Passion Week" (1843) "the crowd in all the churches, but at Notre Dame particularly, was prodigious. M. de Ravignan preached three times a day--at one o'clock for the women of the gay world, in the evening for the men, at other hours for the workingmen. He adapted his sermons to the different classes: to the women of the world he spoke as a man who knows the world and has belonged to it. They rushed, they crowded, they wept. I do not know how many communicants there were at Easter, but I believe the figure has not been so high for fifty years." At Advent of the same year the same scenes were repeated, with the Abbe Lacordaire in the pulpit. This excitement, and the debates in the Chamber on the subject of the theological lectures at the Sorbonne and College of France, call forth some excellent pages regarding the condition of Catholicism in France and the Gallican Church, and a brief, rapid review of the causes of the decline of the latter, which Sainte-Beuve asserts (more than thirty years ago) to be defunct. "Gallicanism, the noblest child of Catholicism, is dead before his father, _who in his dotage remains obstinately faithful to his principles_.... Gallicanism in its dissolution left a vast patrimony: the Jesuits may grab a huge bit of it, but the bulk will be diminished and disseminated.... At the rate things are going, Catholicism is tending to become _a sect_." The insight of this is as remarkable as the expression. Some years afterward, marking the progress of liberal ideas in religion, he says: "Men's conceptions of God are constantly changing. What was the atheism of yesterday will be the deism of to-morrow."

There are few Frenchman of any calling who are indifferent to politics, and the men of letters almost without exception are interested spectators when not actors in public affairs. From 1843 to 1845, the period of the _Chroniques_, was a dead calm in the political horizon of France, undisturbed by the little distant cloud of warfare in Algiers: the Legitimists worked up farcical fermentations which had no more body or head than those of the present day, although the chances of the party were rather better. The duke of Bordeaux (as the Comte de Chambord was then called) made an excursion to England one Christmas, which was seized as an occasion, or more probably was a preconcerted signal, for a dreary little demonstration of loyalty on the part of his adherents, who crossed over to pay their respects to him in London: by great arithmetical efforts their number was added up and made to amount to four hundred, though whether so many really went was doubted. There were a few old noblemen of great family: Berryer the eminent lawyer and Chateaubriand were the only names of individual distinction in the list, and the chief results were that Queen Victoria was annoyed (some of the Orleans family being on a visit to her at the time) and intimated her annoyance, and that the superb Chateaubriand was spoken of in the English newspapers as "the good old man;" which Sainte-Beuve enjoyed extremely.

The _Cahiers_ extend from 1847 to 1869, including the vicissitudes which brought about the Second Empire, whose annihilation Sainte-Beuve died half a year too soon to witness. In January, 1848, he felt the storm brewing in the air, though he little guessed from what quarter it would come nor on whose head it would burst. On the revolution of the 24th of February he writes: "What events! what a dream! I was prepared for much, but not so soon, nor for this.... I am tempted to believe in the nullity of every judgment, my own in particular--I who make it a business to judge others, and am so short-sighted.... The future will disclose what no one can foresee. There is no use in talking of ordinary wisdom and prudence: they have been utterly at fault. Guizot, the historian-philosopher, has turned out more stupid than a Polignac: Utopia and the poet's dream, on the contrary, have become facts and reality. I forgive Lamartine everything: he has been great during these days, and done honor to the poetic nature." But afterward, in looking back to the poet's reign, he grew satirical: "It was in the time of the good provisional government, which did so many things and left so many undone. The fortunes of France crumbled to pieces in a fortnight, but it was under the invocation of equality and fraternity. As to liberty, it only existed for madmen, and the wise took good care to make no use of it. 'The great folk are terribly scared,' said my portress, but the small fry triumphed: it was their turn. So much had never been said about work before, and so little was never done. People walked about all day, planted liberty-trees at every street-corner, illuminated willy-nilly, and perorated in the clubs and squares until midnight. The Exchange rang with disasters in the morning: in the evening it sparkled with lanterns and fireworks. It was the gayest anarchy for the lower classes of Paris, who had no police and looked after themselves. The street-boys ran about with flags; workmen without work, but paid nevertheless, walked in perpetual procession; the demireps had kicked over the traces, and on the sidewalks the most virtuous fellow-citizenesses were hugged without ceremony: it must be added that they did not resent it too much. The grisettes, having nothing to eat, gave themselves away for nothing or next to nothing, as during the Fronde. The chorus of the Girondists was sung on every open lot, and there was a feast of addresses. Lamartine wrought marvels such as Ulysses might have done, and he was the siren of the hour. Yet they laughed and joked, and the true French wit revived. There was general good-humor and amiability in those first days of a most licentious spring sunshine. There was an admixture of bad taste, as there always is in the people of Paris when they grow sentimental. They made grotesque little gardens round the liberty-trees, which they watered assiduously.... The small fry adored their provisional government, as they formerly did their good king Louis XII., and more than one simple person said with emotion, 'It must be admitted that we are well governed, _they talk so well!_'" Before three months had elapsed the provisional government was at an end: "their feet slipped in blood--literally, in torrents of blood." "The politicians of late years have been playing a game of chess, intent wholly upon the board, but never giving a thought to the table under the board. But the table was alive, the back of a people which began to move, and in the twinkling of an eye chessboard and men went to the devil."

Among the entries of the next ten or twelve years are sketches of the leading statesmen and scraps of their conversation: those of Thiers are very animated. Sainte-Beuve says that he has a happiness of verbal expression which eludes his pen; "yet raise him upon a pinnacle of works of art" (of which M. Thiers has always been a patron publicly and privately), "of historical monuments and flatterers, and he will never be aught but the cleverest of marmosets." If he had lived another twelvemonth, Sainte-Beuve might have had some other word for the Great Citizen. On Guizot he is still more severe, making him out a mere humbug, and of the poorest sort. When the poet Auguste Barbier became a candidate for the French Academy, M. Guizot had never heard of him, and had to be told all about him and his verses--there was surely no disgrace in this ignorance on the part of a man engrossed in studies and pursuits of a more serious nature--but before a week was over he was heard expressing amazement that another person knew nothing of Barbier, and talking of his poems as if he had always been familiar with them. The Duchesse de Broglie said: "What M. Guizot has known since morning he pretends to have known from all eternity."

This paper might be prolonged almost to the length of the volumes themselves by quoting all the keen, sagacious or brilliant sayings which they contain. Two more, merely to exemplify Sainte-Beuve's command of words in very different lines of thought: "The old fragments of cases in [Greek: phi] and [Greek: then], the ancient remains of verbs in [Greek: mi] the second aorists, which alone survive the other submerged tenses, always produce the same effect upon me, in view of the regular declensions and conjugations, as the multitude of the isles and Cyclades in relation to the Peloponnesus and the rest of the mainland on the map of Greece: there was a time when they were all one. The rocks and peaks still stand to attest it."--"_Never_ is a word which has always brought bad luck to him who used it from the tribune."

M. Troubat speaks of the correspondence of Sainte-Beuve as destined for publication: the _Chroniques_ and _Cahiers_ are like anchovies to whet the appetite for a longer and more continuous reading.

SARAH B. WISTER.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] _Chroniques Parisiennes_ and _Les Cahiers de Sainte-Beuve_.

A FEW LETTERS.

BROOKSIDE, April 12, 1872.

Dear Cousin Bessie: It does not seem possible that but two months from to-day I saw you standing on your porch in good old Applethorpe bidding me an April "farewell." I can see you now, as I saw you then, smiling--or rather laughing--and saying, "Write! write often; and if you can't find any _real_ news, make something up." I little thought then I should so soon find material for correspondence. He was very sick at first, but really seems better now. But I forgot you don't know anything about him. Well! neither do _I_ much, but "what I have I give unto thee." So, I'll begin at the beginning of my romance.

Day before yesterday, as I was engaged in the very romantic work of ploughing, I heard a clattering of hoofs and the snort and pant of a horse at full tear. In an instant the runaway was brought up, bang! against my fence. It was the work of but a moment to leap over and seize the animal. I then perceived his rider clinging, senseless, to the saddle by one stirrup. It is a great mercy to him that he was not killed, but he had been dragged but a short distance, and was therefore not severely injured. I secured the horse to the fence as quickly as possible, and then disengaged the gentleman. Upon removing him to the house, sending for a physician and applying various remedies, his consciousness was restored, and we soon discovered his injuries as well as a little of his history. His wounds prove to be bruises about the head and face (more disfiguring than serious), and a broken leg which it will take several weeks to cure.

So here he is on my hands till he is well. I'm not sorry, either, for "it is not good for man to be alone," and I find him my nearest neighbor--like me an orphan, like me with a small fortune, consisting principally of his farm, and about my age. I've no doubt we shall get along capitally. I shall write every few days of his progress, knowing that you will be interested in whatever interests me. Don't forget to send me all the gossip of Applethorpe, for I am going to make my neighbor acquainted with all the inhabitants of Applethorpe by proxy--_i. e._, through your letters; so write your most entertaining ones, as I expect to read them all aloud to amuse and interest a captious invalid. "No more at present" from your affectionate cousin,

PHILIP AUBREY.

TO MISS BESSIE LINTON, Applethorpe.

APPLETHORPE, April 20, 1872.

MY DEAR BOY: Your letter duly rec'd. I am glad you have found companionship, though I am sorry for him that it should be an accident that literally "threw" him in your way. You did not tell me his name, or anything but the bare fact of his accident. Be sure that you will find in me an interested listener--or rather _reader_--of anything you may choose to tell me. But don't leave accounts of _yourself_ out of your letters in order to make room for _him_. Remember, you are my only relation, the only person in the world in whom I have a right to be interested. It does not seem possible to me, when I think of it, that there is only five years' difference in our ages: why, I'm sure I feel ten years older, instead of five. I was very young at fifteen to take charge of a great boy of ten; and if it were not that you were the good boy you always were, I never could have fulfilled the charge your dying mother left me. Do not think, dear, I was not _glad_ to do it for her. Could I ever, _ever_, if I worked five times as hard as I have since she left you, repay all that she did for me, the poor miserable, shy orphan left to her care?

But out upon these memories! Let us deal with the present and future.

_Item._ Mary Montrose's engagement to Joel Roberts is "out" to-day. I'm glad, for I'm tired of keeping the secret. Poor dear Mary! I do _hope_ she will be happy. She inquires very cordially after you every time she sees me. She doesn't know she blasted one of my most precious hopes when she told me she was engaged to Joel.

Good-bye, dear! Be sure and write long letters to your affectionate cousin,

BESSIE L----.

BROOKSIDE, April 30, 1872.