Chapter XX (3)

For some time the complaint of those who have been everywhere, and seen everything men of travel and of fashion ought to see, has been that the world is "used-up" for the tourist. Where can he now go for a fresh sensation? Asia and America remain no more untrodden fields than Europe; and as for the isles of the farthest sea, rich and idle "fugitives and vagabonds" have braved as many dangers among savage tribes as the early missionaries, from impulse no nobler than restlessness. Whither next shall they direct their strides? Iceland stood in favor for a year or two; but the cooks are bad there, and the inhabitants speak Latin. Japan has novelties, but bland Daimios are not trustworthy. The sightseeker has no relish for being among a people who, on very slight provocation, may perform upon him a process akin to their own "happy despatch." In the exhaustion of interest in mere horizontal locomotion, the Cain-like race we form part of try the effect of ascension to the highest and hugest cloud-capped peaks; but Matterhorn accidents have rather brought these mountains-of-the-(full)-moon performances into disfavour. Pending the discovery of some new wonder or feat, to occupy many vacant minds and stir a few energetic ones, and during the crisis of a Continental war, the migratory section amongst us must bear their misery as best they can. It may console them to hope that the flying-machine will yet be perfected, and air-sailing supersede Alpine climbing. Probably it would be quite as exciting, and it would not tire the limbs. If there be one geographical problem still left unsolved, it must be to find the site of that cave of Adullam which has sorely puzzled numbers of erudite Parliamentarians, one of whom was heard to make answer to a query regarding its locality that he "never was a geographer." For the purpose of stimulating the curiosity of the gentleman, and of guiding him in his search among the lore of school-boy days, we may take from a book well known a real, and not figurative, description of the Cave in which shelter was lately found by some forty wayfarers uncertain as to their route in a difficult country. "Leaving our horses," says an Adullamite, who long preceded them, "in charge of wild------, and taking one for a guide, we started for the cave, having a fearful gorge below, gigantic cliffs above, and the path winding along a shelf of the rock, narrow enough to make the nervous among us shudder. At length, from a great rock hanging on the edge of this shelf, we sprang by a long leap into a low window which opened into the perpendicular face of the cliff. We were then within the hold of, ------ and creeping half-doubled through a narrow crevice for a few rods, we stood beneath the dark vault of the first grand chamber of this mysterious and oppressive cavern. Our whole collection of lights did little more than make the damp darkness visible. After groping about as long as we had time to spare, we returned to the light of day, fully convinced that with ------ and his lion-hearted followers inside, all the strength of ------ under ------ could not have forced an entrance." Next to a search for the celebrated cave, we can {829} imagine no geographical extravagance equal to one for those Nile Sources that have been the dream of ancients and moderns. The undertaking possessed an the attraction of freshness. Your North-west passage is a mere track through a waste, without the possibility of novelty. What its dangers and privations, its few monotonous sights and events, were to half-a-dozen navigators they would be to half-a-dozen more. But in passing upward to the huge plateau in Central Africa where the Nile Basin lies, itself again overtopped by the lofty range of the Blue Mountains, down which giant cascades ceaselessly roll in unwitnessed splendor, the traveller encounters perils enough, but relieved with a human interest. The tribes he meets are many and unique in their habits, strangely unlike each other, within short distances, and having about them an extraordinary mixture of an incipient civilization with some of the most depraved of the customs of savage life. In the journey, too, there is endless variety. The expedition up the river, with its hunting episodes, its difficulties with mutinous servants and _seamen_, its devices to appease native cupidity and circumvent native cunning, and its encounters with those vilest of the pursuers of commerce, the slave-traders, forms one part of the interest; and next come inland rides through tangled forest shades, rude villages of cone-shaped huts, suspicious hordes of naked barbarians, to whom every new face is that of a plunderer of slaves or cattle, and "situations" in which it is impossible for the honest traveller to escape sharp contests with a party of Turkish marauders, for whose sins against the commandment he would otherwise be held responsible by the relentless javelin-men of the desert. All this offers adventure of a genuine description to him who has the love of it in his disposition; and such a man is Mr. Samuel White Baker. His impulses are irrepressible: nature made him a traveller. He is the modern counterpart of those primitive personages, the Columbuses of the times just succeeding the flood, whose purposeless wanderings into far space from the spot where the Mesopotamian cradle of mankind was rocked, peopled lands lying even beyond great seas; men whose feats were such that the philosophers of five thousand years after can hardly believe they performed them. If Mr. Baker had been a dweller in Charran, he would have begged the patriarch Abraham to give him camels, water-bags, and bushels of corn, and would have set off for the eastern margin of the globe, and the shores of the loud-sounding sea. Arrived there, he would have burned a tree hollow, and launched boldly forth upon the deep, to go whithersoever fortune listed.

All his life a traveller in the true sense, Mr. Baker last conceived the idea of securing for "England" the glory of discovering the sources of the Nile. This bit of patriotic sentiment undoubtedly added to the zest of the undertaking, to which, as has been said, he was impelled by instinct. He is a man of resolute will, and to think and to do are with him simultaneous acts. His preparations were instantly in progress, and from that moment his motto, come what might, was--Forward. Part of this perseverance no doubt was due to the encouragement of Mrs. Baker's presence. That lady is the model explorer's wife, and we could wish for such a race of women if there were any problems geographical left to be solved. She set out with Mr. Baker from Cairo, determined to go through all dangers with him, and well knowing their nature; and she successfully accomplished the task, and has returned to share his renown. To a full share of it she is really entitled; for Mrs. Baker was much more than a companion to her husband on his wanderings. She assisted him materially, not only tending him when sick, not only conciliating the natives by her kindness, but contributing to remove difficulties by wise {830} counsel, bearing all hardships uncomplainingly, and--rare virtue!--submitting to her lord's authority when he was warranted in deciding what was best to be done, or left undone. Mrs. Baker could also somewhat play the Amazon when occasion required. If she did not actually take the shield and falchion, and go to the front of the fight, she spread out the arms, loaded and prepared the weapons, and rendered brave and effective aid on an occasion when the Discoverer of the Great Basin of the Nile was likely to have become, if he did not succeed in intimidating his foes by the parade of his armory, a sweet morsel for the palate of the Latookas. Mr. Baker speaks with manly tenderness of his wife, and the picture drawn of her in his incidental references, will gain for her hosts of friends among his readers.

The narrative is quiet until he reaches Gondokoro. There, in March, 1863, he met Speke and Grant, who were descending the Nile, having completed the East African expedition. When there the report reached him on a certain morning that there were two white men approaching who had come from the sea. These were the travellers from the Victoria N'Yanza, the _other_, and smaller, source of the Nile. They had undoubtedly solved the mystery. Still they had left something for Baker to do, and candidly declared to him that they had not completed the actual exploration of the Nile sources. In N. lat. 2° 17' they had crossed the river which they had tracked from the Victoria Lake; but it had there (at Karuma Falls) taken an extraordinary bend westward, and when they met it again it was flowing from the W.S.W. There was clearly another source, and Kamrasi, King of Unyoro, had informed them that from the Victoria N'Yanza the Nile flowed westward for several days' journey, and fell into another lake called the Luta N'Zige, from which it almost immediately emerged again, and continued its course as a navigable river to the north. Speke and Grant would have tracked out this second source had not the tribes in the districts been at the time at fend, and on such occasions they will not abide the face of a stranger. Mr. Baker, guided by their hints, set out to complete what they had begun.

Gondokoro is a great slave-market--Mr. Baker says "a perfect hell," "a colony of cut-throats." The Egyptian authorities wink at what goes on, in consideration of liberal largesses. There were about six hundred traders there when Mr. Baker visited it, drinking, quarrelling, and beating their slaves. These ruffians made razzias on the cattle of the natives, who are a cleanly and rather industrious race of the picturesque type of savage. Their bodies are tattooed all over, and an immense cock's feather, rising out of the single tuft of hair left upon their shaven crowns, gives them rather an imposing appearance. Their weapons of defence are poisoned arrows, with which the traders at times make deadly acquaintance. Of course Mr. Baker had unforeseen difficulties on setting out. What traveller ever started on an expedition without meeting with his most irritating obstacles at the threshold? Mr. Baker, however, was an old hand, and it took a good deal to daunt him. His escort were as troublesome a set of vagabonds as could have been collected together probably in Africa itself. He had a mutiny to quell ere many days; and it is at this point we come to see what sort of man is our explorer. He is a muscular Christian of the stoutest type. Heavy fell his hand on skulls of sinning niggers--it was the readiest implement, and down went the offender under the blow so signally that his fellows saw and trembled. Mr. Baker was a great "packer." His asses and camels carried a vast amount of stuff, but so arranged and fitted that no breakdown occurred in the most trying situations for man and beast.

{831}

The Latookas were the first race of savages Mr. Baker encountered. They are about six feet high, and muscular and well-proportioned. They have a pleasing cast of countenance, and are in manner very civil. They are extremely clever blacksmiths, and shape their lances and bucklers most skilfully. One of the most interesting passages of the whole book is the author's account of this tribe:

"Far from being the morose set of savages that I had hitherto seen,
they are excessively merry, and always ready for either a laugh or a
fight. The town of Tarrangotté contained about three thousand
houses, and was not only surrounded by iron-wood palisades, but
every house was individually fortified by a little stockaded
courtyard. The cattle were kept in large kraals in various parts of
the town, and were most carefully attended to, fires being lit every
night to protect them from flies, and high platforms in three tiers
were erected in many places, upon which sentinels watched both day
and night, to give the alarm in case of danger. The cattle are the
wealth of the country, and so rich are the Latookas in oxen, that
ten or twelve thousand head are housed in every large town. . . .
The houses of the Latookas are bell-shaped. The doorway is only two
feet and two inches high, and thus an entrance must be effected on
all-fours. The interior is remarkably clean, but dark, as the
architects have no idea of windows."

Mr. Baker notices the fact that the circular form of hut is the only style of architecture adopted among all the tribes of Central Africa, and also among the Arabs of Upper Egypt; and that although there are variations in the form of the roof, no tribe has ever yet dreamt of constructing a window. The Latookas are obliged constantly to watch for their enemy, a neighboring race of mule-riders, whose cavalry attacks they can hardly withstand, although of war-like habits, and accordingly--

"The town of Tarrangotté is arranged with several entrances in the
shape of low archways through the palisades: these are closed at
night by large branches of the hooked thorn of the bitter bush, (a
species of mimosa.) The main street is broad, but all others are
studiously arranged to admit only of one cow, single file, between
high stockades. Thus, in the event of an attack, these narrow
passages can be easily defended, and it would be impossible to drive
off their vast herds of cattle unless by the main street. The large
cattle kraals are accordingly arranged in various quarters in
connection with the great road, and the entrance of each kraal is a
small archway in the strong iron-wood fence, sufficiently wide to
admit one ox at a time. Suspended from the arch is a bell, formed of
the shell of the Dolape palm-nut, against which every animal must
strike either its horns or back on entrance. Every tinkle of the
bell announces the passage of an ox into the kraal, and they are
thus counted every evening when brought home from pasture."

The toilet of the natives is of the simplest, except in one particular. The Latooka savage is content that his whole body should be naked, but expends the most elaborate care on his headdress. Every tribe in this district has a distinct fashion of arranging it, but the Latookas reduce it to a science. Mr. Baker describes the process and the result:

"European ladies would be startled at the fact, that to perfect the
_coiffure_ of a man requires a period of from eight to ten years!
However tedious the operation the result is extraordinary. The
Latookas wear most exquisite helmets, all of which are formed of
their own hair, and are, of course, fixtures. At first sight it
appears incredible; but a minute examination shows the wonderful
perseverance of years in producing what must be highly inconvenient.
The thick crisp wool is woven with fine twine, formed from the bark
of a tree, until it presents a thick network of felt. As the hair
grows through this matted substance it is subjected to the same
process, until, in the course of years, a compact substance is
formed, like a strong felt, about an inch and a half thick, that has
been trained into the shape of a helmet. A strong rim of about two
inches deep is formed by drawing it together with thread, and the
front part of the helmet is protected by a piece of polished copper,
while a piece of the same metal, shaped like the half of a bishop's
mitre, and about a foot in length, forms the crest. The framework of
the helmet being at length completed, it must be perfected by an
arrangement of beads, should the owner of the head be sufficiently
rich to indulge in the coveted distinction. The beads most in
fashion are the red and the blue porcelain, about the size of small
peas. These are sewn on the surface of the felt, and so beautifully
arranged in sections of blue and red, that the entire helmet appears
to be formed of beads, and the handsome crest of polished copper,
surmounted by ostrich plumes, gives a most dignified and martial
appearance to this elaborate head-dress."

{832}

With Commoro, chief of the Latookas, Mr. Baker had a religious conversation. The savage was clever, even subtile. He does not appear, however to have shaken the faith of the traveller. Probably had Mr. Baker been a Bishop (Colenso) trained in the theology of the schools, he might have been driven crazy by this mid-African counterpart of the famous Zulu. The natives exhume the bones of their dead, and celebrate a sort of dance round them; and Mr. Baker asked his Latookan friend--

"Have you no belief in a future existence after death? Is not some
idea expressed in the act of exhuming the bones after the flesh is
decayed?"

_Commoro (loq.)_--"Existence after death! How can that be? Can a
dead man get out of his grave unless we dig him out?"

"Do you think a man is like a beast that dies and is ended?"

_Commoro._--"Certainly. An ox is stronger than a man, but he dies,
and his bones last longer; they are bigger. A man's bones break
quickly; he is weak."

"Is not a man superior in sense to an ox? Has he not a mind to
direct his actions?"

_Commoro._--"Some men are not so clever as an ox. Men must sow corn
to obtain food, but the ox and wild animals can procure it without
sowing."

"Do you not know that there is a spirit within you more than flesh?
Do you not dream and wander in thought to distant places in your
sleep? Nevertheless, your body rests in one spot. How do you account
for this?"

_Commoro_ (laughing.)--"Well, how do you account for it?"

. . .

"If you have no belief in a future state, why should a man be good?
Why should he not be bad, if he can prosper by wickedness?"

_Commoro_.--"Most people are bad; if they are strong, they take from
the weak. The good people are all weak; they are good because they are
not strong enough to be bad."

Extremes meet; there are sages of modern days whose much learning has brought them up to the intellectual pitch of the savage's materialism. They might, ingenious as they are, even take a lesson in sophistry from the Latookan. When driven into a corner by the use of St. Paul's metaphor, the astute Commoro answered:

"Exactly so; that I understand. But the original grain does not rise
again; it rots, like the dead man, and is ended. The fruit produced
is not the same grain that was buried, but the _production_ of that
grain. So it is with man. I die, and decay, and am ended; but my
children grow up, like the fruit of the grain. Some men have no
children, and some grains perish without fruit; then all are ended."

Nevertheless, the Latookans continue to dig out the bones of their kindred, and to perform a rite around them which is manifestly a tradition from the time when a belief in the immortality of the soul existed among them.

It was impossible for Mr. Baker to reach the Lake toward which he pressed without appeasing Kamrasi, King of the Unyoros. But to do this was not easy when his stock of presents was getting low, and his men were so few and weak as to inspire no barbarian prince with the slightest fear. Yet, though debilitated with fever, his quinine exhausted, and Mrs. Baker stricken down in the disease, he pressed on with an unquenchable zeal--one would almost write worthy of a better cause. Finally, he was abundantly rewarded. Hurrying on in advance of his escort he reached at last, ere the sun had risen on what proved afterward a brilliant day, the summit of the hills that hem the great valley occupied by the vast Nile Source. There it lay "a sea of quicksilver" far beneath, stretching boundlessly off to the vast Blue Mountains which, on the opposite side towered upward from its bosom, and over whose breasts cascades could be discerned by the telescope tumbling down in numerous torrents. Standing 1500 feet above the level of the Lake, Mr. Baker shouted for joy that "England had won the Sources of the Nile!" and called the gigantic reservoir the Albert N'Yanza. The Victoria and Albert Lakes, then, are the {833} Nile Sources. Clambering down the steep--his wife, just recovered from fever, and intensely weak, leaning upon him--Mr. Baker reached the shore at length of the great expanse of water, and rushing into it, drank eagerly, with an enthusiasm almost reaching the ancient Egyptian point of Nile-worship.

Mr. Baker describes the Albert Lake as the grand reservoir, and the Victoria as the Eastern source.

"The Nile, cleared of its mystery, resolves itself into comparative
simplicity. The actual basin of the Nile is included between about
the 22° and 39° east longitude, and from 3° south to 18° north
latitude. The drainage of that vast area is monopolized by the
Egyptian river. . . The Albert N'Yanza is the great basin of the
Nile: the distinction between it and the Victoria N'Yanza is, that
the Victoria is a reservoir receiving the eastern affluents, and it
becomes the starting-point or the most elevated _source_ at the
point where the river issues from it at the Ripon Falls; the Albert
is a reservoir not only receiving the western and southern affluents
direct from the Blue Mountains, but it also receives the supply from
the Victoria and from the entire equatorial Nile basin. The Nile, as
it issues from the Albert N'Yanza is the entire Nile; prior to its
birth from the Albert Lake it is _not_ the entire Nile."

". . . Ptolemy had described the Nile sources as emanating from two
great lakes that received the snows of the mountains in Ethiopia.
There are many ancient maps existing upon which these lakes are
marked as positive. There can be little doubt that trade had been
carried on between the Arabs from the Red Sea and the coast opposite
Zanzitan in ancient times, and that the people engaged in such
enterprises had penetrated so far as to have gained a knowledge of
the existence of the two reservoirs."

The interest of Mr. Baker's volumes of course culminates with his account of the Great Lake. He embarked in a canoe of the country, and with his party in another, navigated it for a long distance, encountering storms and weathering them with a skill and courage which show him as cool and experienced a traveller on _sea_ as on land. On his return overland he was again in perils oft. But the same undying spirit which supported him through a dozen fevers carried him through every danger triumphantly. The English nation has reason to be proud of such men, and of such women as Mrs. Baker still more. Devotion like hers honors the sex. There is an end, however, of Nile voyaging with the old object. If the Victoria and Albert Lakes are revisited it will be in pursuit of other ends than mere geographical inquiry or curiosity. Mr. Baker seems to think that missionaries may be the first to follow in the track he has made, and it is a fact that next to professional explorers (if even second to them) those influenced by religious zeal have made the most daring expeditions into unknown regions. Livingstone has done even more in another part of Africa than Baker did on the great level, which, as he thinks, from its altitude, escaped being submerged at any previous part of the world's history, and may contain at this moment the descendants of a pre-Adamite race. On the ethnology of the central Africans he can throw no light, and his mere speculations are worthless, but he is doubtless right in considering that commerce must precede religious propagandism among those races, if anything is really to be done for their benefit. For commerce there are large opportunities, if only the abominable slave-trade, which makes fiends of the natives, were effectually suppressed. Mr. Baker writes warmly on this point, and none knows better the character and extent of the evil. A more interesting book of travel was never written than his Albert N'Yanza: in every page there is fresh and vivid interest. The author, who is admirable in many things, is a model narrator, and there is no romance at all equal in attraction to the simple and unvarnished, but full and picturesque, account of his protracted and exciting travels.

--------

{834}

Translated from the French.

THREE WOMEN OF OUR TIME.

EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN--CHARLOTTE BRONTË--RAHEL LEVIN.

BY GABRIEL CERNY.

It is now quite a number of years since it became the fashion to study women, and writers of note have called to life more than one who would have preferred being left to oblivion under her cold tombstone. Is it not enough to have lived once even if we have lived wisely? "No one would accept an existence that was to last forever," said a philosopher who had suffered from the injustice of mankind.

It seems, for example, as if the heroines of the seventeenth century must smile in pity to see the pettiest actions of their lives as well as the deepest inspirations of their hearts given up for food to the indiscreet curiosity and vivid imagination of the eminent philosopher who had so lovingly resuscitated them. And the intellectual women who came after them, are not they not often wounded by the judgments passed upon them by the most inquisitive and fertile of critics?

In two works entirely devoted to woman, a _fantaisiste_ who was once an historian, has tried to explain the best means to insure happiness to the fairer half of the human race, with a minuteness very tender in intention but often quite repugnant to our taste. He states in detail the hygienic care indispensable to creatures weak in body, feeble in mind, and so helpless when left to themselves that in truth there are but two conditions in the world suitable for them--to be courtesans if they are beautiful, and maid-servants if they are destitute of physical charms; nay, such is the arrogance of this literary _Céladon_ that he would assign to the wife an inferior position and leave the husband to superintend not only business affairs but household matters. In short, when we read these books we seem to be attending a session of the Naturalization Society, teaching the public to rear and domesticate some valuable animal much to be distrusted.

Not even the toilettes of the eighteenth century have failed to arouse the interest of two authors of our day, who, displeased perhaps with the slight success of their book, have now abandoned the range of realities for the dreary delusions of a lawless realism. In a work as long as it is tiresome, they have described with feminine lucidity the various costumes of the ladies of the court of Louis XV., of the Revolution, and the Empire.

A book has now appeared which, according to its title, promises to show us the "Intellect of Women of our own Time," but in reality confines itself to giving three interesting biographies. The author was already known to the public through a romance which reveals true talent "Daniel Blady," the story of a musician, is written in the German style, and shows an elevation of sentiment, a straightforward honesty of principle, and above all a simplicity of devotion rarely to be met with in the world. M. Camille Selden admires modest women, incapable of personal ambition or vanity, who consecrate all the tender and enlivening faculties of soul and reason to the service of a husband, father, or brother, and such a woman he portrays in "Daniel Blady."

{835}

In order to represent fairly the women of our day M. Selden has selected three different characters; three names worn modestly, usefully, and honorably; three contrasts of position, race, doctrine, and education: a French Catholic, an English Protestant, a German Jewess: Eugénie de Guérin, Charlotte Brontë, and Rachel Varnhagen von Ense. They were all affectionate, devoted, and self-forgetful; two of them married, and the French-woman alone had the happy privilege of restoring to God a heart and soul that had belonged to no one.

I.

Eugénie de Guérin du Cayla was born and bred _en province_, although of a truly noble family, of Venetian origin it is said. Her mode of life was that of a woman of the middle class (_bourgeoise_) enjoying that comparative ease which we see in the country; a large house scantily furnished, a garden less cultivated than the fields, and servants of little or no training, who seem to form a part of the family.

Mlle. de Guérin lost her mother early, and having two brothers and a sister younger than herself, became burthened with the care of a household and family. Her letters and journal show her to us as she was at twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of age, not one of those persons of morose and frigid virtue who are good for nothing but to mend linen and take care of birds, but a woman of intelligent and unembarrassed activity. She made fires, visited the poultry-yard, prepared breakfast for the reapers, and when her work was done, betook herself in all haste to a little retreat which she dignified with the name of _study_, where she ran through some book or wrote a few pages--always charming, always strong--of a sort of journal of the actions of her life. Eugénie's especial favorite was her brother Maurice, who was five years younger than herself, and it would be impossible to speak of her without recalling the passionate maternal tenderness with which from her earliest youth she regarded this brother whom she had loved to rock and nurse in infancy.

"I remember that you sometimes made me jealous," she wrote to him one day, "it was because I was a little older than you, and I did not know that tenderness and caresses, _the hearts milk_, are lavished on the little ones."

Devotion was the principle motive-power of Eugénie's actions; ardent prayer and charity profoundly moved her; wind, snow, rain-storms, nothing checked her when she knew that in some corner of the village there were miseries to be relieved, tears to be wiped away. She felt sympathy with all living creatures, even if they were inanimate like trees and flowers; she sighed when the wind bowed them down; "she pitied them, comparing them to unhappy human beings bending beneath misfortune," and imitating the example of the great saint, Francis of Assisi, she would gladly have conversed with lambs and turtle-doves.

Mlle. de Guérin pitied the educated peasants who knew how to read and yet could not pray. "Prayer to God," she said, "is the only fit manner to celebrate any thing in this world." And again, "Nothing is easier than to speak to the neglected ones of this world; they are not like us, full of tumultuous or perverse thoughts that prevent them from hearing."

She loved religion with its festivals and splendors; and breathed in God with the incense and flowers on the altar, nor could she ever have understood an invisible, abstract God, a God simply the guardian of morality as Protestants believe him to be.

Most women become useful only through some being whom they love and to whom they refer the actions of their lives; it is their noblest and most natural instinct to efface and lose themselves in another's glory. Having no husband or children, Mlle. de Guérin attached herself to her brother Maurice, a delicate nature, a sad {836} and suffering soul, destined to self-destruction, a lofty but unquiet spirit that was never to find on earth the satisfaction and realization of his hopes. "You are the one of all the family," he wrote to her, "whose disposition is most in sympathy with my own, so far as I can judge by the verses that you send me, in all of which there is a gentle reverie, a tinge of melancholy, in short, which forms, I believe, the basis of my character." Mlle. de Guérin's letters to her brother were not only tender and consoling, but strong and healthy in their tone. Indeed, he needed them, for terrible were his sufferings from the ill-will and indifference of others. He wrote and tried to establish himself as a critic; but some publishers rejected him and others evaded his proposals with vague promises, until with despair he saw every issue closed to him, and knew not what answer to make to his father, who grew impatient at the constant failure of his expectations.

Though ignorant of the world, Mlle, de Guérin did not the less suspect the dangers that Christian faith may encounter. One day, a voice that seemed to come from heaven told her that Maurice no longer prayed; and then we find her trembling and uneasy. "I have received your letter," she says, "and I see you in it, but I do not recognize you; for you only open your mind to me, and it is your heart, your soul, your inmost being that I long to see. Return to prayer, your soul is full of love and craves expansion; believe, hope, love, and all the rest shall be added. If I could only see you a Christian! Oh! I would give my life and everything else for that." . . . Like all persons who try to dispense with the divine restraints of the precepts of the gospel, poor Maurice struggled in a dreary world; his sensitive and poetic soul saw God everywhere except in his own heart; he longed sometimes to be a flower, or a bird, or verdure; his brain and imagination ran away with him, and his soul poured itself forth without restraint, and lost its way through wandering from the veritable Source of life.

This passion for nature led him to write a work which shows genuine power even if it be unproductive; a prose poem in which Christianity is forgotten for the sake of fable and antiquity. But thanks to his sister's prayers, Maurice was one of those who return to God. He passed away without agitation or suffering, smiling on all, and begging his sister Eugénie to read him some spiritual book. At the bottom of his heart he had never ceased to love God, and he returned to him as a little child returns to its mother.

Eugénie did not give herself up to vain despair after Maurice's death. Thinking perpetually of him whom she had loved so deeply, she busied herself with the writings which he had left behind him, and prayed for his soul, recommending him also to the prayers of her friends. She still addressed herself to him, and oppressed with sadness unto death, communed with his absent soul, imploring him to come to her. "Maurice, my friend, what is heaven, that home of friends? Will you never give me any sign of life? Shall I never hear you, as the dead are sometimes said to make themselves heard? Oh! if it be possible, if there exist any communication between this world and the other, return to me!"

But one day she grew weary of this unanswered correspondence, and a moral exhaustion took possession of her. "_Let us cast our hearts into eternity_," she cried. These were her last words, and she died, glad to see her life accomplished, confiding in the mercy of God, in his goodness who reunites the soul which he has severed here below, but never has forgotten in their bereavement.

{837}

II.

Charlotte Brontë, (Currer Bell,) whom M. Camille Selden offers to us as a type of energy and virtue, was the daughter of a country clergyman. Sad was the childhood and sad the youth of the poor English girl. Her mother was an invalid, her father a man of gloomy and almost fierce disposition, their means were so limited as to border upon poverty, and as if to complete the dreary picture, the scenery about the parsonage was "austere and lugubrious to contemplate, like the sea beneath an impending tempest."

In England the clerical profession is totally unlike the holy mission of a Catholic clergyman. The ecclesiastical life there is a career, not a vocation. "Mr. Brontë never left home unarmed," a singular method of preaching peace to the world and reconciliation among brethren. He was a good father, no doubt--almost all Englishmen are so. But he kept his family at a distance, and spoke to them seldom, and then in a curt and supercilious manner. His morose spirit did not relish the society of children, and if he became the preceptor of his little family, it was rather in order to fulfil a duty and conform himself to custom, than from a feeling of tenderness or even solicitude for their future welfare. Thus the minister's children lived amid influences which were cold and serious, but upright, and in a certain sense strengthening. There are so many children in every English family that parents of the middle class are obliged to treat them less as subordinates than as auxiliaries. The children are less familiar with their parents but more respectful than among us; life is not so easy and gentle, education more masculine.

Independence is the goal toward which all young English people tend, and both girls and boys are early taught that labor alone can lead them to it. In France we long impatiently for the time to shut up our children in the high-walled barracks which we dignify with the name of boarding-schools; for it is extremely necessary, we say, to be rid of idle, noisy boys. Girls are generally educated at home, but either through weakness or indifference, they are treated with far too much indulgence. "Poor little things!" we say pathetically; "who can tell what fate awaits them in married life?" for in this country we so far forget Christian duty as to make marriage a necessity, an obligation, a matter of business, instead of seeking therein, as the English do, a basis of true happiness.

Children, educated as they are in England, early acquire habits of observation and reflection; sitting around the tea-table in the evening, they listen to the conversation of their grandparents, and are often questioned upon the most serious subjects. This is Protestantism, you say. Not at all: it is the remains of the Christian spirit anterior to the Reformation. This spirit is exhibited in habits as in laws. If family life among us were truly catholic, we should possess all this and in greater perfection.

There is another practice in England which is often beneficial, and which we do not dare to adopt openly in France. I mean the habit of writing out one's impressions. This seems to be as natural in England as thought; and mothers, young girls, and men consider it a duty to keep an account of the good ideas that occur to them or of the interesting facts they may observe.

In France, on the contrary, true literary culture is closed to women, and there is a general outcry whenever any woman takes the liberty of publishing a work under her own name. It is thought quite natural that a young girl, with a dress outrageously _decolletée_ and her head covered with flowers, should appear upon a stage and sing a _bravura_; but let her venture to write, and the world accuses her of want of reserve.

A Frenchman has such a horror of anything methodical and serious that he prefers to educate his daughters without thought or reflection, at hap-hazard and with no provision for {838} the future. Frenchwomen understand everything without study, it is said; this may be true, and the merit is not so great as to make it worth while to deny the assertion. What a superficial method! what an incredible way to acquire knowledge and judgment!

Englishwomen on the contrary, devote themselves to a regular course of instruction; they read a great deal, making extracts and critical notes, and thus avoid idleness and _ennui_, those two terrible diseases that affect womankind. Unfortunately abuses glide into their reading, and novels or even newspapers hold a place there which they ought not to occupy. This is a fruit of Protestantism, of free inquiry, and if our faith were firm and practical, we should know how to avoid the abuse and accept the useful side of this custom.

But there is again a situation which Englishwomen meet with a better grace than Frenchwomen--we mean the _misfortune_ of remaining unmarried at twenty-eight or thirty years of age--of becoming _old maids_. With us, as soon as a daughter comes into the world we begin to think of amassing her dower; for it is the value of this dower which is to secure a good or bad marriage for her. We persuade her that it is almost a disgrace to remain unmarried, but by a tacit agreement we conceal from her the fact that marriage, as the Church instituted it, is the union of two souls equal in the sight of God, and that in giving her hand to a man, she becomes half of himself and flesh of his flesh. No, it is not a question of heart or of duty; she marries a man whom she has known scarcely two months, and her family triumphantly congratulate themselves on being freed from the unpleasant possibility of harboring _an old maid_. To avoid this, some marriages are a mere _sale_, a present shame, a future misery, and a final sin.

As in England daughters have no dower, and sons are valued much more highly, young women are early prepared not to marry, and are neither sadder nor more unfortunate on that account. Care of the little ones in the family; that pleasant occupation belonging by right to maiden aunts, (_tantes berceuses,_) study, attentive observation of men and things, and the consciousness of intellectual worth, sustain the Englishwomen until the moment, often distant, and never to arrive for many a one, when a good, sincere, and intelligent man shall unite her lot to his; but as she has self-respect and does not consider loss of youth as loss of caste, she does not accept the suitor unless she knows him well and is certain that he does not wish to take her or buy her _pour faire une fin_.

Charlotte, like Eugénie and like Rahel, of whom we shall speak in her turn, was rather insignificant in appearance; her features were irregular, her forehead prominent, and her eyes small but deep and piercing in expression. She was educated with two of her sisters in a boarding-school, where the regimen was hard and unhealthy, the uniform coarse, and the food insufficient and ill cooked. Mr. Brontë turned a deaf ear to his eldest daughter's complaints for a long time, and did not decide to take his children home until one of them had already sunk under the injudicious treatment. Charlotte was then placed with Miss W----, with whom she lived eight years as pupil and second teacher. And here M. Camille Selden gives us some excellent remarks upon the difference existing between the French lay _pension_ with its supplementary course, and the English boarding-school.

"In the former, as in a well-disciplined army, every movement, every manoeuvre must be executed in union, even the recess is subject to rules. In the midst of her battalion of teachers and sub-mistresses, the French directress, _en grande tenue_, resembles a brilliant colonel marching proudly at the head of his squadron in a review."

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"The object of education in England is at once simpler and gentler. It is thought there to be the duty of a woman, as of a man, to develop the judgment by study; that reflection and observation are equally necessary to teach both sexes how to live wisely and think justly. Therefore we never hear of courses of study where under the pretext of maternal education, gentlemen in black coats give out _bribes_ for history, geography--nay, even philosophy, to little girls who come there apparently to study under maternal supervision, but in reality to learn to receive company and dress tastefully; in one word, to rehearse the worldly comedy which a little later they will be condemned to enact."

The author should have completed his picture by giving an exact account of our houses of religious education; but I think he knows little about them, and cares little to get information concerning them, which accounts for certain wants in his book.

Poor Charlotte Brontë was never young, partly because of her childish sufferings, but chiefly because of her serious and inquiring nature, which applied its powers to investigating and analyzing the sources of everything. She did not indulge in the childish ideas of a school girl, and being free from the dangerous enthusiasm that imagination engenders, she understood the full extent of human misery without exaggerating it, and if she was deprived of illusions at least she was spared disappointment. And yet she suffered; her vigorous soul, her fertile intellect imprisoned in this common-place situation, were stifled as in a cage; and to complete her misery came religious terrors, frightful visions of "failing grace and impossible salvation," until her awe-struck heart recoiled in affright.

Like all souls ardently loving goodness and thirsting from the true love, she sighed after the bliss of heaven: "I would be willing," she exclaimed, "I would be willing to exchange my eighteen years for gray hairs--or even to stand on the verge of the grave, if by that means I could be assured of the divine mercy;" but alas! in the practices of that dry and personal religion in which each one answers to himself for himself, and whence confidence is banished as a weakness, where should she look for help?

Meanwhile the circle of poverty was drawing closer and closer about Charlotte and her sisters, and a thousand thoughts sprang up in the brain of the courageous girl: "I wish to make money, no matter how--if only the means be honest! nothing would discourage me," said she; "but I should not care to be a cook--I should prefer being housemaid." In the evening, when every one else was in bed, she used to meet her sisters in the little parlor, and they would read to each other their literary efforts in a low voice. They decided with one accord that Charlotte must write to Southey and send him a book of her poems. The poet saw no great merit in these effusions and tried to discourage Charlotte, giving her at the same time excellent moral advice upon the nothingness of celebrity and the dangers of ambition.

She decided then to make a journey to Belgium in order to study French, but she was almost immediately recalled home. The old aunt who had kept house during her absence was dead, her father was becoming blind, and her brother was subject to attacks of delirium in which he threatened his father's life. It was amid these terrible calamities that Miss Brontë wrote "Jane Eyre," the most powerful of her novels.

The next plan was that she and her sisters should all write together and get a volume printed at their own expense under the names of Ellis, Acton, and Currer Bell. It may well be imagined that this unfortunate book, sent out like a foundling into the literary world, met with no success, for if the beginnings of any career are precarious, the obstacles presented by literature are insurmountable to any one {840} not possessed of immense energy. We know Charlotte well enough to feel sure that she was not a woman to waste away in the dejection of sterile discouragement; she began to write again, and composed "The Professor." Alas! the poor little book travelled about from publisher to publisher without finding rest anywhere; and such was the naïveté of its author, that in her eagerness to send her rejected book to each new bookseller, she forgot to remove the old postage stamps from the package--not an encouraging recommendation to any editor to accept the _leavings_ of his _confrères!_

It was at Manchester, during six weeks that she passed there with her father, who was forced to undergo an operation for cataract, that Miss Brontë finished "Jane Eyre." Messrs. Smith and Elder of London accepted the manuscript without hesitation, and from that time the obscure young girl was a celebrity whom every one longed to know and to receive.

Charlotte's literary success brought a ray of joy into Mr. Brontë's melancholy household, but it was of short duration. Twice within two months the inhabitants of Haworth saw the window-blinds of the parsonage closed, and heard the bell toll a death-knell. Charlotte's brother, prostrated by excesses, and consumed internally, died in the course of fifteen minutes; but they were minutes of awful anguish; in the grasp of the death-agony the dying man started to his feet, crying out that he would die standing, and that his will should give way only with his breath. Her elder sister, Emily, left home for the last time when she followed his bier to the grave; and another sister, the youngest and Charlotte's well-beloved, Anna Brontë, sustained herself awhile by dint of care and tenderness, but her lungs were affected and she soon began to languish; she too declined and died.

Poor Charlotte now found herself alone with her father who had lost five of his six children. She devoted herself to writing, as much to distract her grief as to deceive the long hours of the day; and henceforth her personality presented two distinct faces. She was a conscientious Englishwoman, a clergyman's daughter attached to her duties, and an authoress, ardent and active in defence of her convictions, and not without a certain obstinacy. "Her success continued, and she was obliged to submit to the exhibition to which English enthusiasm and bad taste subject their favorites. Miss Brontë had to go to dinner-parties, and to reunions of unlooked-for luxury and splendor; but the distinction that flattered her most was being placed by Thackeray in the seat of honor to hear the first lecture of this celebrated author at Willis's Rooms."

But solitude which had been the foundation and habit of her life, rendered her unfit for the world. Miss Brontë had suffered too much to preserve that serenity of temper and freedom of spirit necessary to enable one to talk easily and agreeably, and often would she sit silent amid a cross-fire of conversation all around her "I was forced to explain," she said, "that I was silent because I could talk no more."

Charlotte Brontë had arrived at the age of thirty-eight years without having had her heart touched with any emotion stronger than dutiful affection for her family. But--and here prose intrudes itself a little--her father had a vicar, and what could an English vicar do but be married? He loved Charlotte, and moreover, she had become a good match; but on one hand the fear of a refusal, and on the other the dread of the embarrassment for a clergyman of sharing the existence of a literary woman, prevented him from declaring his affections. At last, however, he took courage, and I ask myself if this courage was not rendered more attainable by Charlotte herself. At all events she accepted his offer without hesitation; but her father, who was too selfish to allow his daughter to occupy herself with any one but himself, opposed the marriage, and the enamored vicar left Haworth.

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The privation that Mr. Brontë experienced after his vicar's departure--a privation that Miss Brontë's temperament must have made him feel more sensibly--was such that he recalled the suitor, and the marriage took place. It was a dreary ceremony: no relations, no friends, so that the bride positively had no one to lead her to the altar; for her father had refused to be present at the marriage for fear of feeling agitated, faithful to the end to the dry and egotistical line of conduct he had marked out for himself.

The wife devoted herself bravely to seconding her husband in the duties of his ministry. She visited the poor, had a Sunday-school, improvised prayers and knew the Bible by heart. She was happy--but her happiness was of short duration, for physical and moral sufferings had exhausted her, and she died just as life had become harmonized according to her wishes.

A celebrated author, a strong and courageous woman, aspiring after a Christian life, she gave all that a heart can give which is not possessed of the true light; and M. Selden is right in saying at the close: "Charlotte is better than her heroines." There are few authors of whom one could say as much.

III.

From England _with its maintien compassé_, and cold religious tenets, M. Camille Selden takes us to Germany, the land of sentiment and intellectual research, and introduces us to a Jewess in Berlin, that we may see what a German _salon_ was at the end of the eighteenth century.

Rahel Levin was only twenty years old when she lost her father, a wealthy Israelite, gloomy and violent in his bearing at home, but amiable and attractive in society.