Chapter XXXII: St. Pierre. 1737-1814

Principally known as the author of the most charming of all idyllic romances--_Paul et Virginie_. Beginning his career as civil engineer he afterwards entered the French army. A quarrel with his official superiors forced him to seek employment elsewhere, and he found it in the Russian service, where his scientific ability received due recognition.

Encouraged by the esteem in which he was held, he formed the project of establishing a colony on the Caspian shores, which should be under just and equal laws. St. Pierre submitted the scheme to the Russian Minister, who, as we should be apt to presume, did not receive it too favourably. He then went to Poland in the vain expectation of aiding the people of that hopelessly distracted country in throwing off the foreigners’ yoke. Failing in this undertaking, and despairing, for the time, of the cause of freedom, we next find him in Berlin and in Vienna. He had also previously visited Holland, in which great refuge of freedom he had been received with hospitality. In Paris, upon his return to France, his project of a free colony found better reception than in St. Petersburg--owing, perhaps, to the not altogether disinterested sympathy of the Government with the recently revolted American colonies. To further his plans he accepted an official post in the Ile de France, intending eventually to proceed to Madagascar, where was to be realised his long-cherished idea. On the voyage he discovered that his associates had formed a very different design from his own--to engage in the slave traffic. Separating from these nefarious speculators, he landed in the Ile de France, where he remained two years. It is to the experiences of this part of his life that we owe his _Paul et Virginie_, the scenes of which are laid in that tropical island.

Returning home once again, he made the acquaintance of D’Alembert and of other leading men of letters in Paris, and, particularly, of Rousseau, his philosophical master. At the period of the Great Revolution of 1789, St. Pierre lost his post as superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens under the old Bourbon Government, and he found himself reduced to poverty; and although his sympathies were with the party of constitutional, though not of radical, reform, the supremacy of the extreme revolutionists (1792-1794) exposed him to some hazard by reason of his known deistic convictions. Upon the establishment of the reactionary revolution of the Empire, St. Pierre recovered his former post, and, with the empty honour of the Imperial Cross, he received the more solid benefit of a pension and other emoluments.

His writings have been collected and published in two quarto volumes (Paris, 1836). Of these, after his celebrated romance, perhaps the most popular is _La Chaumière Indienne_ (“The Indian or Hindu Cottage”). His principal productions are _Etudes de la Nature_ (“Studies of Nature”), _Vœux d’un Solitaire_ (“Aspirations of a Recluse”), _Voyage à L’Ile de France_ (“Voyage to Mauritius”), and _L’Arcadie_ (“Arcadia”). His merits consist in a certain refinement of feeling, in charming eloquence in description of natural beauty, and in the humane spirit which breathes in his writings. Of the _Paul et Virginie_ he tells us--

“I have proposed to myself great designs in that little work....
I have desired to reunite to the beauty of Nature, as seen in the
tropics, the moral beauty of a small society of human beings. I
proposed to myself thereby to demonstrate several great truths;
amongst others this--that our happiness consists in living
according to Nature and Virtue.”

He assures us that the principal characters and events he describes are by no means only the imaginings of romance. In truth, it seems difficult to believe that the genius of the author alone could have impressed so wonderful an air of reality upon merely fictitious scenes. The popularity of the story was secured at once in the author’s own country, and it rapidly spread throughout Europe. _Paul et Virginie_ was successively translated into English, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. It became the fashion for mothers to give to their children the names of its hero and heroine, and well would it have been had they also adopted for them that method of innocent living which is the real, if too generally unrecognised, secret of the fascinating power of the book.

It is thus that he eloquently calls to remembrance the _natural_ feasts of his young heroine and hero:--

“Amiable children! thus in innocence did you pass your first days.
How often in this spot have your mothers, pressing you in their
arms, thanked Heaven for the consolation you were preparing for
them in their old age, and for the happiness of seeing you enter
upon life under so happy auguries! How often, under the shadow
of these rocks, have I shared, with them, your out-door repasts
_which had cost no animals their lives_. Gourds full of milk, of
newly-laid eggs, of rice cakes upon banana leaves, baskets laden
with potatoes, with mangoes, with oranges, with pomegranates,
with bananas, with dates, with ananas, offered at once the most
wholesome meats, the most beautiful colours, and the most agreeable
juices. The conversation was as refined and gentle as their food.”

The humaneness of their manners had attracted to the charming arbour, which they had formed for themselves, all kinds of beautiful birds, who sought there their daily meals and the caresses of their human protectors. Our readers will not be displeased to be reminded of this charming scene:--

“Virginie loved to repose upon the slope of this fountain, which
was decorated with a pomp at once magnificent and wild. Often
would she come there to wash the household linen beneath the shade
of two cocoa-nut trees. Sometimes she led her goats to feed in this
place; and, while she was preparing cheese from their milk, she
pleased herself in watching them as they browsed the herbage upon
the precipitous sides of the rocks, and supported themselves in
mid-air upon one of the jutting points as upon a pedestal. Paul,
seeing that this spot was loved by Virginie, brought from the
neighbouring forest the nests of all sorts of birds. The fathers
and mothers of these birds followed their little ones, and came
and established themselves in this new colony. Virginie would
distribute to them from time to time grains of rice, maize, and
millet. As soon as she appeared, the blackbirds, the _bengalis_,
whose flight is so gentle, the cardinals, whose plumage is of the
colour of fire, quitted their bushes; parroquets, green as emerald,
descended from the neighbouring lianas, partridges ran along under
the grass--all advanced pell-mell up to her feet like domestic
hens. Paul and she delighted themselves with their transports of
joy, with their eager appetites, and with their loves.”

In his views upon national education, St. Pierre invites the serious attention of legislators and educators to the importance of accustoming the young to the nourishment prescribed by Nature:--

“They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children
to the vegetable _régime_. The peoples living upon vegetable foods,
are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least
exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last
longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The
greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most
vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The
Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence,
from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist
all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows
in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The
Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred
years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect
that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by his virtues; Archytas,
by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by
his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his
time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the
father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh
diet introduces many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to
bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon
the beauty of the body and upon the tranquility of the mind. This
regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life.[193]

“I have seen an instance of it in a young Englishman aged fifteen,
and who did not appear to be twelve years of age. He was of a most
interesting figure, of the most robust health, and of the most
sweet disposition. He was accustomed to take very long walks. He
was never put out of temper by any annoyance that might happen. His
father, Mr. Pigott, told me that he had brought him up entirely
upon the Pythagorean regimen, the good effects of which he had
known by his own experience. He had formed the project of employing
a part of his fortune, which was considerable, in establishing
in English America a society of dietary reformers who should be
engaged in educating, under the same regimen, the children of
the colonists in all the arts which bear upon agriculture. Would
that this educational scheme, worthy of the best and happiest
times of Antiquity, might succeed! Physically, it suits a warlike
people no less than an agricultural one. The Persian children, of
the time of Cyrus, and by his orders, were nourished upon bread,
water, and vegetables.... It was with these children, become men,
that Cyrus made the conquest of Asia. I observe that Lycurgus
introduced a great part of the physical and moral regimen of the
Persian children into the education of those of the Lacedemonians.”
(_Etudes._)[194]

* * * * *

Of the many practical witnesses of this period, more or less interesting, for the sufficiency, or rather superiority, of the reformed regimen, four names stand out in prominent relief--Franklin, Howard, Swedenborg, Wesley--prominent either for scientific ability or for philanthropic zeal. To his early resolution to betake himself to frugal living, Benjamin Franklin, then in a printer’s office in Boston, attributes mainly his future success in life.[195]

It was to his pure dietary that the great Prison Reformer assigns his immunity, during so many years, from the deadly jail-fever, to the infection of which he fearlessly exposed himself in visiting those hotbeds of _malaria_--the filthy prisons of this country and of continental Europe. (See the correspondence of John Howard--_passim_.) Equally significant is the testimony of the eminent founder of Methodism whose almost unexampled energy and endurance, both of mind and body, during some fifty years of continuous persecution, both legal and popular, were supported (as he informs us in his _Journals_) mainly by abstinence from gross foods; while, in regard to Emanuel Swedenborg, if abstinence does not assume so prominent a place in his theological or other various writings as might have been expected from his special opinions, the cause of such silence must be referred not to personal addiction to an _anti-spiritualistic_ nourishment (for he himself was notably frugal) but to preoccupation of mental faculties which seem to have been absorbed in the elaboration of his well-known spiritualistic system.

The limits of this work do not permit us to quote all the many writers of the eighteenth century whom philosophy, science, or profounder feeling urged _incidentally_ to question the necessity or to suspect the barbarism of the Slaughter-House. But there are two names, amongst the highest in the whole range of English philosophic literature, whose expression of opinion may seem to be peculiarly noteworthy--the author of the _Wealth of Nations_ and the historian of the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.

“It may, indeed, be doubted [writes the founder of the science of
Political Economy] whether butchers’ meat is _anywhere_ a necessary
of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese,
and butter, or oil (where butter is not to be had), it is known
from experience, can, _without any butchers’ meat, afford the most
plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most
invigorating diet_.”[196]

As for the reflections of the first of historians, who seems always carefully to guard himself from the expression of any sort of emotion not in keeping with the character of an impartial judge and unprejudiced spectator, but who, on the subject in question, cannot wholly repress the _natural_ feeling of disgust, they are sufficiently significant. Gibbon is describing the manners of the Tartar tribes:--

“The thrones of Asia have been repeatedly overturned by the
shepherds of the North, and their arms have spread terror and
devastation over the most fertile and warlike countries of Europe.
On this occasion, as well as on many others, the sober historian is
forcibly awakened from a pleasing vision, and is compelled, with
some reluctance, to confess that the pastoral manners, which have
been adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence,
are much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a
military life.

“To illustrate this observation, I shall now proceed to consider a
nation of shepherds and of warriors in the three important articles
of (1) their diet, (2) their habitations, and (3) their exercises.
1. The corn, or even the rice, which constitutes the ordinary
and wholesome food of a civilised people, can be obtained only
by the patient toil of the husbandman. Some of the happy savages
who dwell between the tropics are plentifully nourished by the
liberality of Nature; but in the climates of the North a nation
of shepherds is reduced to their flocks and herds. The skilful
practitioners of the medical art will determine (if they are able
to determine) how far the temper of the human mind may be affected
by the use of animal or of vegetable food; and whether the common
association of carnivorous and cruel deserves to be considered
in any other light than that of an innocent, perhaps a salutary,
prejudice of humanity. Yet if it be true that the sentiment of
compassion is imperceptibly weakened by the sight and practice of
domestic cruelty, we may observe that _the horrid objects which
are disguised by the arts of European refinement_ are exhibited in
their naked and most disgusting simplicity in the tent of a Tartar
shepherd. The Oxen or the Sheep are slaughtered by the same hand
from which they were accustomed to receive their daily food, and
the bleeding limbs are served, with very little preparation, on the
table of their unfeeling murderers.”[197]

To the poets, who claim to be the interpreters and priests of Nature, we might, with justness, look for celebration of the anti-materialist living. Unhappily we too generally look in vain. The prophet-poets--Hesiod, Kalidâsa, Milton, Thomson, Shelley, Lamartine--form a band more noble than numerous. Of those who, not having entered the very sanctuary of the temple of humanitarianism, have been content to officiate in its outer courts, Burns and Cowper occupy a prominent place. That the latter, who felt so keenly

“The persecution and the pain
That man inflicts on all inferior kinds
Regardless of their plaints,”

and who has denounced with so eloquent indignation the pitiless wars “waged with defenceless innocence,” and the protean shapes of human selfishness, should yet have stopped short of the _final_ cause of them all, would be inexplicable but for the blinding influence of habit and authority. Nevertheless, his picture of the savagery of the Slaughter-House, and of some of its associated cruelties, is too forcible to be omitted:

“To make him sport,
To justify the phrensy of his wrath,
_Or his base gluttony_, are causes good
And just, in his account, why bird and beast
Should suffer torture, and the stream be dyed
With blood of their inhabitants impaled.
Earth groans beneath the burden of a war
Waged with defenceless Innocence: while he,
_Not satisfied to prey on all around,
Adds tenfold bitterness to death by pangs
Needless, and first torments ere he devours_.
Now happiest they who occupy the scenes
The most remote from his abhorred resort.

* * * * *

Witness at his feet
The Spaniel dying for some venial fault,
Under dissection of the knotted scourge:
_Witness the patient Ox, with stripes and yells
Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs
To madness, while the savage at his heels
Laughs at the frantic sufferer’s fury spent
Upon the heedless passenger o’erthrown_.
He, too, is witness--noblest of the train
Who waits on Man--the flight-performing Horse:
With unsuspecting readiness he takes
His murderer on his back, and, pushed all day,
With bleeding sides, and flanks that heave for life,
To the far-distant goal arrives, and dies!
So little mercy shows, who needs so much!
Does Law--so jealous in the cause of Man[?]--
Denounce no doom on the delinquent? None.”[198]