the more liberal
tendencies
of modern English statesmanship.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v18 - Mom to Old
”
When I had assured him that no harm or prejudice could
possibly accrue to him, he opened a large chest, which appeared
to be full of drugs, and taking therefrom the smallest quantity
of a certain white powder, he mixed it up with some bread into
the form of pill, and putting it into paper gave it me, with
proper directions how it should be administered. Seeing that
he made no mystery of his knowledge, I began to question him
upon the nature and properties of this particular medicine, and
upon his practice in general. He answered me without any re-
serve; not like our Persian doctors, who only make a parade of
fine words, and who adjust every ailment that comes before them
to what they read in their Galen, their Hippocrates, and their
Abou Avicenna.
When I had learned all I could, I left him with great demon-
stration of friendship and thankfulness, and immediately returned
to Mirza Ahmak, who doubtless was waiting for me with great
## p. 10313 (#137) ##########################################
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
10313
impatience. Having divested myself of my borrowed cloak and
resumed my own dress, I appeared before him with a face made
up for the occasion; for I wished to make him believe that the
lettuce and cucumbers had done their duty. At every word I
pretended to receive a violent twitch; and acted my part so true
to life, that the stern and inflexible nature of Mirza Ahmak him-
self was moved into somewhat like pity for me.
"There! there! " said I, as I entered his apartment, "in the
name of Allah take your prize:" and then pretending to be
bent double, I made the most horrid grimaces, and uttered deep
groans: "there! I have followed your orders, and now throw my-
self upon your generosity. " He endeavored to take the object of
his search from me, but I kept it fast; and whilst I gave him to
understand that I expected prompt reward, I made indications
of an intention to swallow it, unless he actually gave me some-
thing in hand. So fearful was he of not being able to answer
the King's interrogatories concerning the pill, so anxious to get
it into his possession, that he actually pressed a gold piece upon
me. No lover could sue his mistress with more earnestness to
grant him a favor than the doctor did me for my pill. I should
very probably have continued the deceit a little longer, and have
endeavored to extract another piece from him: but when I saw
him preparing a dose of his own mixture to ease my pain, I
thought it high time to finish; and pretending all of a sudden to
have received relief, I gave up my prize.
When once he had got possession, he looked at it with intense
eagerness, and turned it over and over on his palm, without
appearing one whit more advanced in his knowledge than before.
At length, after permitting him fully to exhaust his conjectures,
I told him that the Frank doctor had made no secret in saying
that it was composed of jivch, or mercury. "Mercury, indeed! »
exclaimed Mirza Ahmak, "just as if I did not know that. And
so, because this infidel, this dog of an Isauvi, chooses to poison
us with mercury, I am to lose my reputation, and my prescrip-
tions (such as his father never even saw in a dream) are to be
turned into ridicule. Who ever heard of mercury as a medicine?
Mercury is cold, and lettuce and cucumber are cold also. You
would not apply ice to dissolve ice? The ass does not know the
first rudiments of his profession. No, Hajji, this will never do:
we must not permit our beards to be laughed at in this manner. "
He continued to inveigh for a considerable time against his
rival; and would no doubt have continued to do so much longer,
## p. 10314 (#138) ##########################################
10314
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
but he was stopped by a message from the King, who ordered
him to repair forthwith to his presence. In the greatest trepida-
tion he immediately put himself into his court dress, exchanged
his common black lambskin cap for one wound about with a
shawl, huddled on his red-cloth stockings, called for his horse,
and taking the pill with him, went off in a great hurry, and full
of the greatest apprehension at what might be the result of the
audience.
་་
The doctor's visit to the King had taken place late in the
evening; and as soon as he returned from it he called for me.
I found him apparently in great agitation, and full of anxiety.
Hajji," said he, when I appeared, "come close to me;" and
having sent every one else out of the room, he said in a whis-
per, "This infidel doctor must be disposed of somehow or other.
What do you think has happened? The Shah has consulted him;
he had him in private conference for an hour this morning, with-
out my being apprised of it. His Majesty sent for me to tell
me its result; and I perceive that the Frank has already gained
great influence. It seems that the King gave him the history
of his complaints,- of his debility, of his old asthma, and of
his imperfect digestion,- but talked in raptures of the wretch's
sagacity and penetration: for merely by looking at the tongue
and feeling the pulse, before the infidel was told what was the
state of the case, he asked whether his Majesty did not use the
hot-baths very frequently; whether, when he smoked, he did not
immediately bring on a fit of coughing; and whether, in his
food, he was not particularly addicted to pickles, sweetmeats, and
rice swimming in butter? The King has given him three days
to consider his case, to consult his books, and to gather the opin-
ions of the Frank sages on subjects so important to the State of
Persia, and to compose such a medicine as will entirely restore
and renovate his constitution. The Centre of the Universe then
asked my opinion, and requested me to speak boldly upon the
natures and properties of Franks in general, and of their medi-
cines. I did not lose this opportunity of giving utterance to my
sentiments; so, after the usual preface to my speech, I said, 'that
as to their natures, the Shah, in his profound wisdom, must know
that they were an unbelieving and an unclean race: for that they
treated our Prophet as a cheat, and ate pork and drank wine.
without any scruple; that they were women in looks, and in man-
ners bears; that they ought to be held in the greatest suspicion,
for their ultimate object (see what they had done in India) was
## p. 10315 (#139) ##########################################
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
10315
to take kingdoms, and to make Shahs and Nabobs their humble
servants. As to their medicines,' I exclaimed, 'Heaven preserve
your Majesty from them! they are just as treacherous in their
effects as the Franks are in their politics: with what we give to
procure death, they pretend to work their cures. Their principal
ingredient is mercury' (and here I produced my pill); and they
use their instruments and knives so freely, that I have heard it
said they will cut off a man's limbs to save his life. ' I then
drew such a picture of the fatal effects likely to proceed from the
foreign prescription, that I made the Shah promise that he would
not take it without using every precaution that his prudence and
wisdom might suggest. To this he consented; and as soon as
the Frank shall have sent in the medicine which he is preparing,
I shall be summoned to another interview. Now, Hajji," added
the doctor, "the Shah must not touch the infidel's physic; for if
perchance it were to do good, I am a lost man. Who will ever
consult Mirza Ahmak again? No: we must avert the occurrence
of such an event, even if I were obliged to take all his drugs
myself. "
We parted with mutual promises of doing everything in our
power to thwart the infidel doctor; and three days after, Mirza
Ahmak was again called before the King in order to inspect
the promised ordonnance, and which consisted of a box of pills.
He of course created all sorts of suspicions against their effi-
cacy, threw out some dark hints about the danger of receiving
any drug from the agent of a foreign power, and finally left the
Shah in the determination of referring the case to his ministers.
The next day, at the usual public audience, when the Shah was
seated on his throne, and surrounded by his prime vizier, his
lord high treasurer, his minister for the interior, his principal
secretary of state, his lord chamberlain, his master of the horse,
his principal master of the ceremonies, his doctor in chief, and
many other of the great officers of his household,― addressing
himself to his grand vizier, he stated the negotiations which he
had entered into with the foreign physician, now resident at his
court, for the restoration and the renovation of the royal person;
that at the first conference, the said foreign physician, after a due
inspection of the royal person, had reported that there existed
several symptoms of debility; that at the second, after assuring
the Shah that he had for three whole days employed himself
in consulting his books and records, and gathering from them
the opinions of his own country sages on the subject, he had
## p. 10316 (#140) ##########################################
10316
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
combined the properties of the various drugs into one whole,
which, if taken interiorly, would produce effects so wonderful that
no talisman could come in competition with it. His Majesty then
said that he had called into his councils his Hakîm bashi, or head
physician, who, in his anxiety for the weal of the Persian mon-
archy, had deeply pondered over the ordonnances of the foreigner,
and had set his face against them, owing to certain doubts and
apprehensions that had crept into his mind, which consisted, first,
whether it were politic to deliver over the internal administration
of the royal person to foreign regulations and ordonnances; and sec-
ond, whether in the remedy prescribed there might not exist such
latent and destructive effects as would endanger, undermine, and
finally overthrow that royal person and constitution which it was
supposed to be intended to restore and renovate. "Under these
circumstances," said the Centre of the Universe, raising his voice
at the time, "I have thought it advisable to pause before I pro-
ceeded in this business; and have resolved to lay the case before
you, in order that you may, in your united wisdom, frame such
an opinion as may be fitting to be placed before the King; and
in order that you may go into the subject with a complete knowl-
edge of the case, I have resolved, as a preparatory act, that each
of you, in your own persons, shall partake of this medicine, in
order that both you and I may judge of its various effects. "
To this most gracious speech the grand vizier and all the
courtiers made exclamations: "May the King live for ever! May
the royal shadow never be less! We are happy not only to take
physic, but to lay down our lives in your Majesty's service! We
are your sacrifice, your slaves! May God give the Shah health,
and a victory over all his enemies! " Upon which the chief of
the valets was ordered to bring the foreign physician's box of
pills from the harem, and delivered it to the Shah in a golden
salver. His Majesty then ordered the Hakim bashi to approach,
and delivering the box to him, ordered him to go round to all
present, beginning with the prime vizier, and then to every man
according to his rank, administering to each a pill.
This being done, the whole assembly took the prescribed
gulp; after which ensued a general pause, during which the King
looked carefully into each man's face to mark the first effects
of the medicine. When the wry faces had subsided, the con-
versation took a turn upon the affairs of Europe; upon which
his Majesty asked a variety of questions, which were answered
## p. 10317 (#141) ##########################################
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
10317
by the different persons present in the best manner they were
able.
The medicine now gradually began to show its effects. The
lord high treasurer first a large, coarse man, who to this mo-
ment had stood immovable, merely saying belli, belli, yes, yes,
whenever his Majesty opened his mouth to speak-now appeared
uneasy; for what he had swallowed had brought into action a store
of old complaints which were before lying dormant.
The eyes
of all had been directed towards him, which had much increased.
his perturbed state; when the chief secretary of state, a tall, thin,
lathy man, turned deadly pale, and began to stream from every
pore. He was followed by the minister for the interior, whose
unhappy looks seemed to supplicate a permission from his Maj-
esty to quit his august presence. All the rest in succession were
moved in various ways, except the prime vizier, a little old man,
famous for a hard and unyielding nature, and who appeared to
be laughing in his sleeve at the misery which his compeers in
office were undergoing.
As soon as the Shah perceived that the medicine had taken
effect, he dismissed the assembly, ordering Mirza Ahmak, as soon
as he could ascertain the history of each pill, to give him an
official report of the whole transaction; and then retired into his
harem.
me.
The crafty old doctor had now his rival within his power; of
course he set the matter in such a light before the King that his
Majesty was deterred from making the experiment of the foreign
physician's ordonnance, and it was forthwith consigned to oblivion.
When he next saw me, and after he had made me acquainted
with the preceding narrative, he could not restrain his joy and
exultation. "We have conquered, friend Hajji," would he say to
"The infidel thought that we were fools; but we will teach
him what Persians are. Whose dog is he, that he should aspire
to so high an honor as prescribing for a king of kings? No:
that is left to such men as I. What do we care about his new
discoveries? As our fathers did, so are we contented to do.
The prescription that cured our ancestors shall cure us; and what
Locman and Abou Avicenna ordained, we may be satisfied to
ordain after them. " He then dismissed me, to make fresh plans
for destroying any influence or credit that the new physician
might acquire, and for preserving his own consequence and rep-
utation at court.
## p. 10318 (#142) ##########################################
10318
1
EDUARD MÖRIKE
EDUARD MÖRIKE
(1804-1875)
ENTLEST and sweetest of all the Suabian poets was Eduard
Mörike. He was born on September 8th, 1804, at Ludwigs-
burg, the birthplace also of Justinus Kerner, David Strauss,
and Friedrich Theodor Vischer, with all of whom Mörike subse-
quently formed friendships. He was destined for the ministry, and
studied theology at Tübingen. The gentleness of his character and
his quiet winning manners seemed to have marked him for this
career. He served as curate in several places in Würtemberg, and
in 1834 secured an independent pastorate at
Cleversulzbach, near Weinsberg. Here he
remained until in 1843 the state of his
health obliged him to resign. For several
years he earned his livelihood as a pri-
vate teacher; and in 1851, having married
the daughter of the lady with whom he
and his sister had been living, he went to
Stuttgart, where he had been appointed
to a tutorship in St. Katharine's Institute.
In 1866 he was forced to retire altogether
from active labors. The remaining years of
his life were rendered happy by the com-
forts of a congenial home, and by inter-
course with the steadily increasing number
of friends and admirers who sought the poet out. He died on June
4th, 1875. This was the simple outward life of the man, without stir-
ring adventure or event, and without heart-breaking grief. But his
inner life was as rich as it was sunny. This contented him. From
the quiet beauties of his mental world he dreaded to go forth into
the actualities of life. Few poets have been able in the same degree
to make the circumstances of their career conform so well to their
intellectual needs. The simple character and customs of his Suabian
countrymen were sufficient for him; the Suabian landscapes satisfied
him. He felt no desire to study men under other conditions, or to
seek new emotions under strange skies. He lived in his own poet's
heart: the unaccustomed and the sublime left his simple spirit un-
touched. His life was that of a poet, without the storm and stress
and without the world-woe.
## p. 10319 (#143) ##########################################
EDUARD MÖRIKE
10319
His first important work was a novel in two volumes, published
in 1832, and entitled 'Maler Nolten' (Nolten the Painter). In its first
form much was obscure; but in the revision which Mörike undertook
late in life, the underlying design of the work came out more clearly,
and the early crudities were polished away by the maturer hand.
The story is full of finely poetic fancy; it is one of the best exam-
ples of that perfectly naïve blending of the realistic and fantastic,
of the natural and the supernatural, which is one of Mörike's char-
acteristic charms. But the novel is now outlived. It had its roots
in the soil of Romanticism, where the mysterious "blue flower" still
bloomed in the vesper light of a departing day. Its intense subject-
ivity transcends all psychological interest, and by losing its foothold
in reality deprives the book of a lasting place in literature.
But Maler Nolten' was an undoubted success, and won for its
author a host of friends. In 1838, however, appeared a book which
still remains his most important contribution to literature,-the first
edition of his collected poems. Whether these lyrics have the fresh-
ness of the folk-song, the solemnity of the hymn, or the pathos and
humor of the idyl, their tone is always true. A convincing proof
of Mörike's lyric quality is his popularity with the great song com-
posers. The perfect form of the simple song, which charms with
its naïve grace and thrills with its restrained emotion, is attained
in his poetry as in that of no other German bard except Goethe
and Uhland. Clearness, harmony, and limpid flow distinguished his
diction, which is free from all "patchwork" and useless phrases;
while sincerity of feeling and tenderness of sympathy characterize
his conceptions. In his delicate fancy no sharp boundary separates
the real world from the fairy realms of the imagination; and in the
midst of scenes from actual life there suddenly appear elves and
gnomes and nixies, which seem to have their being by the same
right of reality as the men and women of coarser mold. This is the
privilege only of the naïve and unspoiled poet, to whom fancy is as
real as fact. It is only from such a mind that the true folk-song and
the true fairy tale can spring.
And Mörike has enriched German literature with one of its most
charming fairy tales, 'Das Hutzelmännlein' (The Little Dried-up Man),
published in 1852. Four years later came the idyllic tale 'Mozart
auf der Reise nach Prag' (Mozart on the Way to Prague). His 'Die
Regenbrüder' (Rain Brothers) was taken by Ignaz Lachner as the
text of his opera.
Translations from Theocritus and Anacreon-for
Mörike was a close student of the Greeks-and several compilations
complete the list of the poet's literary works.
General recognition came to Mörike slowly. Nevertheless his
poems passed through five editions during his lifetime; and as he
## p. 10320 (#144) ##########################################
10320
EDUARD MÖRIKE
added poem after poem to his lyric treasury, leaf after leaf was
added to the chaplet of his fame. Before he died, Mörike had come
to be recognized as one of the chief lyric poets of his time; and the
succeeding generation has sustained this judgment. He was the last
great poet of the Suabian group.
MY RIVER
IVER! my river in the young sunshine!
Oh, clasp afresh in thine embrace
This longing, burning frame of mine,
And kiss my breast, and kiss my face!
So there! -Ha, ha! — already in thine arms!
I feel thy love—I shout -I shiver;
But thou outlaughest loud a flouting song, proud river,
And now again my bosom warms!
-
R
The droplets of the golden sunlight glide.
Over and off me, sparkling, as I swim
Hither and thither down thy mellow tide,
Or loll amid its crypts with outstretched limb;
I fling abroad my arms, and lo!
Thy wanton waves curl slyly round me;
But ere their loose chains have well bound me,
Again they burst away and let me go!
O sun-loved river! wherefore dost thou hum,
Hum, hum alway, thy strange, deep, mystic song
Unto the rocks and strands? -for they are dumb,
And answer nothing as thou flowest along.
Why singest so all hours of night and day?
Ah, river! my best river! thou, I guess, art seeking
Some land where souls have still the gift of speaking
With nature in her own old wondrous way!
Lo! highest heaven looms far below me here;
I see it in thy waters, as they roll,
So beautiful, so blue, so clear,
'Twould seem, O river mine, to be thy very soul!
Oh, could I hence dive down to such a sky,
Might I but bathe my spirit in that glory,
So far outshining all in ancient fairy story,
I would indeed have joy to die!
## p. 10321 (#145) ##########################################
EDUARD MÖRIKE
What on cold earth is deep as thou? Is aught?
Love is as deep, love only is as deep:
Love lavisheth all, yet loseth, lacketh naught;
Like thee, too, love can neither pause nor sleep.
Roll on, thou loving river, thou! Lift up
Thy waves, those eyes bright with a riotous laughing!
Thou makest me immortal! I am quaffing
The wine of rapture from no earthly cup!
XVIII-646
At last thou bearest me, with soothing tone,
Back to thy bank of rosy flowers:
Thanks, then, and fare thee well! Enjoy thy bliss alone!
And through the year's melodious hours
Echo forever from thy bosom broad
All glorious tales that sun and moon be telling;
And woo down to their soundless fountain dwelling
The holy stars of God!
A
TWO LOVERS
SKIFF swam down the Danube's tide;
Therein a bridegroom sate, and bride,—
He one side, she the other.
"Tell me, my dearest heart," said she,
"What present shall I make to thee? "
And back her little sleeve she stripped,
And deeply down her arm she dipped.
And so did he, the other side,
And laughed and jested with his bride:
"Fair lady Danube, give me here
Some pretty gift to please my dear. "
She drew a sparkling sword aloft,
Just such the boy had longed for, oft.
The boy, what holds he in his hand?
Of milk-white pearls a costly band.
He binds it round her jet-black hair;
She looks a princess, sitting there.
10321
"Fair lady Danube, give me here,
Some pretty gift to please my dear! "
## p. 10322 (#146) ##########################################
:
10322
EDUARD MÖRIKE
Once more she'll try what she can feel;
She grasps a helmet of light steel.
On his part, terrified with joy,
Fished up a golden comb the boy.
A third time clutching in the tide,
Woe! she falls headlong o'er the side.
The boy leaps after, clasps her tight;
Dame Danube snatches both from sight.
Dame Danube grudged the gifts she gave:
They must atone for't in the wave.
An empty skiff glides down the stream,
The mountains hide the sunset gleam.
And when the moon in heaven did stand,
The lovers floated dead to land,
He one side, she the other.
AN HOUR ERE BREAK OF DAY
From Lyrics and Ballads of Heine and other German Poets': G. P. Putnam's
Sons, publishers. Translated by Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892, by
Frances Hellman.
s I once sleeping lay,
An hour ere break of day,
As
Sang near the window, on a tree,
A little bird, scarce heard by me
An hour ere break of day.
"Give heed to what I say:
Thy sweetheart false doth play
Whilst I am singing this to thee,
He hugs a maiden, cozily,
An hour ere break of day. "
"Alas! no further say!
Hush! I'll not hear thy lay!
Fly off, away fly from my tree,-
Ah! love and faith are mockery
An hour ere break of day. "
## p. 10323 (#147) ##########################################
10323
JOHN MORLEY
(1838-)
HE not infrequent union in English public life of the man of
letters with the politician, is illustrated in the career of John
Morley. In an address on the study of literature, deliv-
ered by him in 1887 to the students of the London Society for the
Extension of University Teaching, he refers to the fact that he has
strayed from literature into the region of politics, adding that he is
"not at all sure that such a journey conduces to the aptness of one's
judgment on literary subjects. " Had Mr. Morley's essays in criticism
been concerned exclusively with literature,
his political life might not have been of
profit to him as a man of letters. As it
is, his Miscellanies'- studies of men and
their times-and his biographies witness to
the fruitful influence of actual contact with
present-day affairs upon the critical spirit.
Mr. Morley has enriched his literary products
through his public life. The biographer of
Richard Cobden, of Edmund Burke, and of
Horace Walpole was certainly aided in his
estimates of these statesmen by his own
political experience; and in his estimates of
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, by contact
with the social-philosophic and humanita-
rian spirit of the extreme Gladstone party. It is significant that Mr.
Morley chose as subjects of political biography, men identified with.
the more liberal tendencies of modern English statesmanship. He
himself is a radical and a scientific idealist, who places his reliance
upon the future rather than upon the past. His political career did
not open, however, until he was well established as a writer and
editor. Born at Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1838, he was educated at
Cheltenham, and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained his
B. A. in 1859. Ten years later he was an unsuccessful candidate to
Parliament for his native place. In the mean time he had undertaken
the editorship of the Fortnightly Review, a position which he held
from 1867 to 1882. Mr. Morley's sound literary sense, and his well-
developed critical faculty, were put to valuable use in the conduct of
JOHN MORLEY
## p. 10324 (#148) ##########################################
10324
JOHN MORLEY
this important periodical. He drew to his aid men like George Henry
Lewes, Bagehot, and Cairnes. The apparently insignificant innovation
of signing articles was due to his influence. His editorial qualifica-
tions were further exhibited in his conduct of the Pall Mall Gazette
from 1880 to 1883, and of Macmillan's Magazine from 1883 to 1885.
From 1883, however, he was drawn more and more into a purely
political career. In that year he had been a successful candidate for
Newcastle-on-Tyne; and in 1886 he was appointed chief secretary for
Ireland, an office to which he was reappointed in 1892.
In Morley's essays and biographies he exhibits the same spirit
of radicalism which has governed his political career. He is drawn
naturally to a consideration of those writers, thinkers, and statesmen
whose influence upon their times has been in the direction of essen-
tially modern ideals of government and social constitution, or who
have stood as representatives of a new order in opposition to the old.
For this reason Mr. Morley has found congenial subjects of critical
biography in the French philosophers and thinkers of the eighteenth
century. His studies of Vauvenargues, of Turgot, of Condorcet, of
Diderot, are written in a spirit of sympathetic criticism which wit-
nesses to his divination of the dominating social and political forces
of a given era, and to his recognition of the concrete expression of
these forces in the individual. In this sense his life of Rousseau is
a study of French politics in the eighteenth century. The author of
the Social Contract,' although more of a vaporist and dreamer than
a politician, exerted a strong influence upon the political temper of
his own and later times. Mr. Morley traces this influence through the
social and political confusions of the Revolution, and into the readjust-
ing forces of the nineteenth century, where it gives birth to those
"schemes of mutualism, and all other shapes of collective action for
a common social good, which have possessed such commanding attrac-
tion for the imagination of large classes of good men in France ever
since. " In his elaborate analysis of the 'Social Contract,' Mr. Morley
displays his own insight into difficult problems of society and of poli-
tics. His modern habit of mind is shown in his appreciation of the
time-spirit as the most reliable interpreter of the phenomena of his-
tory. He is indeed a historical critic rather than a creator in the
domain of literature. He has used the essay more as a vehicle for his
political reflections than for itself as a literary product. He possesses,
however, ideals of style which are high, exacting, and comprehensive.
These are expressed in his clear, strong English, compactly fitted
to his thought. He has given to the literature of his century a not
inconsiderable body of vigorous and well-tempered prose.
## p. 10325 (#149) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10325
ROUSSEAU AT MONTMORENCY
From Rousseau'
THE
HE many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hid-
den in such profound obscurity that we are as yet unable
to explain why in certain natures a period of stormy moral
agitation seems to be the indispensable antecedent of their highest
creative effort. Byron is one instance, and Rousseau is another,
in which the current of stimulating force made rapid way from
the lower to the higher parts of character, only expending itself
after having traversed the whole range of emotion and faculty,
from their meanest, most realistic, most personal forms of exer-
cise, up to the summit of what is lofty and ideal. No man was
ever involved in such an odious complication of moral maladies
as beset Rousseau in the winter of 1758. Within three years of
this miserable epoch he had completed not only the 'New Heloïsa,'
which is the monument of his fall, but the 'Social Contract,'
which was the most influential, and 'Emilius,' which was perhaps
the most elevated and spiritual of all the productions of the pro-
lific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor light-
hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
lay in the circumstance that he began to write late; and it is true
that no other author so considerable as Rousseau waited until the
age of fifty for the full vigor of his inspiration. No tale of years,
however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength
and incommunicable savor; nor can the splendid mechanical move-
ment of those characters which keep the balance of the world
even, impart to literature the peculiar quality, peculiar but not
the finest, that comes from experience of the black and unlighted
abysses of the soul.
The period of actual production was externally calm. The
'New Heloïsa' was completed in 1759, and published in 1761.
The Social Contract' was published in the spring of 1762, and
'Emilius' a few weeks later. Throughout this period Rousseau
was, for the last time in his life, at peace with most of his fel-
lows; that is to say, though he never relented from his antipathy
to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more real
and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them trans-
formed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.
The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among
the greatest people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg
## p. 10326 (#150) ##########################################
10326
JOHN MORLEY
(1702-64) was a marshal of France, and as intimate a friend of
the King as the King was capable of having. The Maréchale de
Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one of the most beautiful, and
continued to be one of the most brilliant leaders of the last
aristocratic generation that was destined to sport on the slopes of
the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal and homely
soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating, unamiable. Their
dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect sincerity and
straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient apart-
ment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated
when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was
a constant guest at their table, where he met the highest names
in France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or
to walk with him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable as
ever to shine in conversation, yet eager to show his great friends
that they had to do with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought
him of reading the 'New Heloïsa' aloud to them. At ten in
the morning he used to wait upon the maréchale, and there by
her bedside he read the story of the love, the sin, the repent-
ance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the wisdom of Wol-
mar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones which
enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the
rest of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
enchanted. This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the
uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at
least as maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess
as it was in presences less imposing.
One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which
a man bears himself in his relations with persons of greater con-
sideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies
with a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had
a dog whose name was Duc. When he came to sit at a duke's
table, he changed his dog's name to Turc. Again, one day in a
transport of tenderness he embraced the old marshal - the duch-
ess embraced Rousseau ten times a day, for the age was effusive:
"Ah, monsieur le maréchal, I used to hate the great before I
knew you, and I hate them still more, since you make me feel
so strongly how easy it would be for them to have themselves
adored. " On another occasion he happened to be playing at
chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
cottage. In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, he
## p. 10327 (#151) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10327
insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he
said with respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honor your Serene
Highness too much not to beat you at chess always. " A few
days after, the vanquished prince sent him a present of game,
which Rousseau duly accepted. The present was repeated; but
this time Rousseau wrote to Madame de Boufflers that he would
receive no more, and that he loved the prince's conversation
better than his gifts. He admits that this was an ungracious
proceeding; and that to refuse game "from a prince of the blood.
who throws so much good feeling into the present, is not so
much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his inde-
pendence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
know his place. " Considering the extreme virulence with which
Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind
from his friends, we find some inconsistency in this condemna-
tion of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung; unless
the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is allowed to
modify the quality of the donation, and that would be a hardly
defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame
de Boufflers, the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet
more intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judi-
cious warning when she bade him beware of laying himself open
to a charge of affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness
of his virtue, and so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus
would have accepted such marks of esteem without feeling in
them any hurt to their disinterestedness and frugality. " Perhaps
there is a flutter of self-consciousness that is not far removed
from this affectation, in the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us
that after dining at the castle, he used to return home gleefully
to sup with a mason who was his neighbor and his friend. On
the whole, however, and so far as we know, Rousseau conducted
himself not unworthily with these high people. His letters to
them are for the most part marked by self-respect and a moder-
ate graciousness; though now and again he makes rather too
much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his independence
with something too much of protestation. Their relations with
him are a curious sign of the interest which the members of
the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing the
destruction both of them and their world. The Maréchale de
Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate
in the place of honor at her table, and embraces his Theresa.
## p. 10328 (#152) ##########################################
10328
JOHN MORLEY
The Prince of Conti pays visits of courtesy, and sends game
to a man whom he employs at a few sous an hour to copy
manuscript for him. The Countess of Boufflers, in sending him
the money, insists that he is to count her his warmest friend.
When his dog dies, the countess writes to sympathize with his
chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to replace it. And
when persecution and trouble and infinite confusion came upon
him, they all stood as fast by him as their own comfort would
allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the un-
happy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities
which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men,
and made women devoted to him, until he drove both men and
women away? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot,
as with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have
now parted company. But they are instantly succeeded by new
devotees. And the lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not
silly women led captive by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was
one of the most distinguished spirits of her time. Her friend-
ship for him was such, that his sensuous vanity made Rousseau
against all reason or probability confound it with a warmer form;
and he plumes himself in a manner most displeasing on the vic-
tory which he won over his own feelings on the occasion.
As a
matter of fact he had no feelings to conquer, any more than the
supposed object of them ever bore him any ill-will for his indif-
ference, as in his mania of suspicion he afterwards believed.
There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Mont-
morency, which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would
ever have afflicted him, if his natural irritation had not been
made intense and irresistible by the cruel distractions that fol-
lowed the publication of 'Emilius. ' He was tolerably content
with his present friends. The simplicity of their way of dealing
with him contrasted singularly, as he thought, with the never-
ending solicitudes, as importunate as they were officious, of the
patronizing friends whom he had just cast off. Perhaps, too, he
was soothed by the companionship of persons whose rank may
have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his old literary
friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with him in the
peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers, indeed,
wrote a tragedy; but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko. ' That Rousseau was
thoroughly capable of this hateful emotion of sensitive literary
## p. 10329 (#153) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10329
jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others
of a meanness of this kind, unless he is capable of it himself.
The resounding success which followed the 'New Heloïsa' and
'Emilius' put an end to this apprehension, for it raised him
to a pedestal in popular esteem as high as that on which Vol-
taire stood triumphant. This very success unfortunately brought
troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last chance of ending his
days in full reasonableness.
Meanwhile he enjoyed his last interval of moderate whole-
someness and peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green
earth. One of the letters commemorates his delight in the great
scudding southwest winds of February, soft forerunners of the
spring, so sweet to all who live with nature. At the end of his
garden was a summer-house, and here even on wintry days he sat
composing or copying. It was not music only that he copied.
He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts of his romance,
which he sold to the Duchess of Luxembourg and other ladies for
some moderate fee. Sometimes he moved from his own lodging
to the quarters in the park which his great friends had induced
him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was of
white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude,
in the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every
kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me,
that I composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of 'Emilius. '
With what eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to
breathe the balmy air! What good coffee I used to take under the
porch in company with my Theresa! My cat and my dog made
the rest of our party. That would have sufficed for all my life,
and I should never have known weariness. And so to the as-
surance, so often repeated under so many different circumstances,
that here was a true heaven upon earth, where if fate had only
allowed, he would have known unbroken innocence and lasting
happiness.
## p. 10330 (#154) ##########################################
10330
JOHN MORLEY
CONDORCET
From Critical Miscellanies'
OⓇ
F THE illustrious thinkers and writers who for two genera-
tions had been actively scattering the seed of revolution in
France, only Condorcet survived to behold the first bitter
ingathering of the harvest. Those who had sown the wind were
no more; he only was left to see the reaping of the whirlwind,
and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it. Voltaire and
Diderot, Rousseau and Helvétius, had vanished; but Condorcet
both assisted at the Encyclopædia and sat in the Convention,—
the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also
came in due season to partake of its fruit, at once a precursor,
and a sharer in the fulfillment. In neither character has he
attracted the good-will of any of those considerable sections and
schools into which criticism of the Revolution has been mainly
divided. As a thinker he is roughly classed as an Economist;
and as a practical politician he figured first in the Legislative
Assembly, and next in the Convention. Now, as a rule, the
political parties that have most admired the Convention have
had least sympathy with the Economists; and the historians who
are most favorable to Turgot and his followers are usually most
hostile to the actions and associations of the great revolutionary
chamber successively swayed by a Vergniaud, a Danton, a Robes-
pierre. Between the two, Condorcet's name has been allowed to
lie hidden for the most part in a certain obscurity, or else has
been covered with those taunts and innuendoes which partisans
are wont to lavish on men of whom they do not know exactly
whether they are with or against them.
Generally, the men of the Revolution are criticized in blocks.
and sections, and Condorcet cannot be accurately placed under
any of these received schools. He was an Economist, but he
was something more; for the most characteristic article in his
creed was a passionate belief in the infinite perfectibility of human
nature. He was more of a Girondin than a Jacobin, yet he
did not always act, any more than he always thought, with the
Girondins; and he did not fall when they fell, but was proscribed
by a decree specially leveled at himself. Isolation of this kind is
assuredly no merit in political action, but it explains the coldness
with which Condorcet's memory has been treated; and it flowed.
from some marked singularities both of character and opinion,
## p. 10331 (#155) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10331
which are of the highest interest, if we consider the position of
the man, and the lustre of that ever-memorable time. « Condor-
cet," said D'Alembert, "is a volcano covered with snow. " Said
another, less picturesquely, "He is a sheep in a passion. " "You
may say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relation to his per-
son," wrote Madame Roland, "that it is a subtle essence soaked
in cotton. " The curious mixture disclosed by sayings like these,
of warm impulse and fine purpose with immovable reserve, only
shows that he of whom they were spoken belonged to the class
of natures which may be called non-conducting. They are not
effective, because without this effluence of power and feeling
from within, the hearer or onlooker is stirred by no sympathetic
thrill. They cannot be the happiest, because consciousness of the
inequality between expression and meaning, between the influence
intended and the impression conveyed, must be as tormenting as
to one who dreams is the vain effort to strike a blow. If to be
of this non-conducting temperament is impossible in the really
greatest sorts of men, like St. Paul, St. Bernard, or Luther, at
least it is no proper object of blame; for it is constantly the
companion of lofty and generous aspiration. It was perhaps
unfortunate that Condorcet should have permitted himself to be
drawn into a position where his want of that magical quality
by which even the loathed and loathsome Marat could gain the
sympathies of men, should be so conspicuously made visible.
Frankly, the character of Condorcet, unlike so many of his con-
temporaries, offers nothing to the theatrical instinct. None the
less on this account should we weigh the contributions which he
made to the stock of science and social speculation, and recog-
nize the fine elevation of his sentiments, his noble solicitude for
human well-being, his eager and resolute belief in its indefinite
expansion, and the devotion which sealed his faith by a destiny
that was as tragical as any in those bloody and most tragical
days.
I
UNTIL the outbreak of the Revolution, the circumstances of
Condorcet's life were as little externally disturbed or specially
remarkable as those of any other geometer and thinker of the
time. He was born in a small town in Picardy, in the year 1743.
His father was a cavalry officer; but as he died when his son was
only three years old, he could have exerted no influence upon the
## p. 10332 (#156) ##########################################
10332
JOHN MORLEY
future philosopher, save such as comes of transmission through
blood and tissue. Condillac was his uncle, but there is no record
of any intercourse between them. His mother was a devout and
trembling soul, who dedicated her child to the Holy Virgin, and
for eight years or more made him wear the dress of a little girl,
by way of sheltering him against the temptations and unbelief of
a vile world. So long as women are held by opinion and usage
in a state of educational and political subjection which prevents
the growth of a large intelligence, made healthy and energetic
by knowledge and by activity, we may expect to read of pious
extravagances of this kind. Condorcet was weakened physically
by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrous clothing;
and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented him
from growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire.
His earliest instructors, as happened to most of the skeptical phi-
losophers, were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall.
That these adroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions
which their order had acquired in three centuries, and with the
training of the nation almost exclusively in their hands, should
still have been unable to shield their persons from proscription
and their creed from hatred, is a remarkable and satisfactory in-
stance how little it avais ecclesiastical bodies to have a monopoly
of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be out of
harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as
the spirit of the time. The Jesuits were the great official teach-
ers of France for the first half of the eighteenth century. In
1764 the order was thrust forth from the country, and they left
behind them an army of the bitterest enemies Christianity has
ever had.
To do them justice, they were destroyed by weapons
which they had themselves supplied. The intelligence which
they had so honorably developed and sharpened, turned inevita-
bly against the incurable faults in their own system. They were
admirable teachers of mathematics. Condorcet, instructed by the
Jesuits at Rheims, was able, when he was only fifteen years old,
to go through such performances in analysis as to win especial
applause from illustrious judges like D'Alembert and Clairaut.
It was impossible, however, for Jesuits, as it has ever been for
all enemies of movement, to constrain within prescribed limits
the activity which has once been effectively stirred. Mathematics
has always been in the eyes of the Church a harmless branch of
knowledge; but the mental energy that mathematics first touched
## p. 10333 (#157) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10333
is sure to turn itself by-and-by to more complex and dangerous
subjects in the scientific hierarchy.
At any rate, Condorcet's curiosity was very speedily drawn
to problems beyond those which geometry and algebra pretend to
solve. "For thirty years," he wrote in 1790, "I have hardly ever
passed a single day without meditating on the political sciences. "
Thus, when only seventeen, when the ardor of even the choicest
spirits is usually most purely intellectual, moral and social feeling
was rising in Condorcet to that supremacy which it afterwards
attained in him to so admirable a degree. He wrote essays on
integral calculus, but he was already beginning to reflect upon
the laws of human societies and the conditions of moral obliga-
tion. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profound sensi-
bility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early
enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of
a kind of syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only
the later shape into which an instinctive impulse threw itself
by way of rational intrenchment. This sensibility caused Condor-
cet to abandon the barbarous pleasures of the chase, which had
at first powerfully attracted him. To derive delight from what
inflicts pain on any sentient creature revolted his conscience
and offended his reason; because he perceived that the character
which does not shrink from associating its own joy with the
anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted to
the finest impressions of humanity. It was this same sensibility,
fortified by reason, which drove him while almost still at school to
reflect, as he confided to Turgot he had done, on the moral ideas
of virtue and justice.
It is thus assured that from the beginning Condorcet was
unable to satisfy himself with the mere knowledge of the special-
ist, but felt the necessity of placing social aims at the head and
front of his life, and of subordinating to them all other pursuits.
That he values knowledge only as a means to social action, is
one of the highest titles to our esteem that any philosopher can
have. Such a temper of mind has penetrated no man more fully
than Condorcet, though there are other thinkers to whom time
and chance have been more favorable in making that temper
permanently productive. There is a fine significance in his words,
after the dismissal of the great and virtuous Turgot from office:
"We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I
mean to apply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for
## p. 10334 (#158) ##########################################
10334
JOHN MORLEY
the future laboring only for the gloriole, after flattering oneself
for a while that one was working for the public weal. " It is
true that a geometer, too, works for the public weal; but the
process is tardier, and we may well pardon an impatience that
sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness of mankind. There is
something much more attractive about Condorcet's undisguised dis-
appointment at having to exchange active public labor for geo-
metrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction conventionally
professed by statesmen when driven from place to their books.
His correspondence shows that even when his mind seemed to
be most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly
on the alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely
to stimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the
strength of justice in society. It would have been, in one sense,
more fortunate for him to have cared less for high social inter-
ests, if we remember the contention of his latter days, and the
catastrophe which brought them to so frightful a close. But
Condorcet was not one of those natures who can think it happi-
ness to look passively out from the tranquil literary watch-tower
upon the mortal struggles of a society in a state of revolution.
In measuring other men of science -as his two volumes of
Eloges abundantly show-one cannot help being struck by the
eagerness with which he seizes on any trait of zeal for social
improvement, of anxiety that the lives and characters of our
fellows should be better worth having. He was himself too
absolutely possessed by this social spirit to have flinched from
his career, even if he had foreseen the martyrdom which was to
consummate it. "You are very happy," he once wrote to Tur-
got, "in your passion for the public good, and your power to
satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior
to that of study. "
In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became con-
nected with the Academy; to the mortification of his relations,
who hardly pardoned him for not being a captain of cavalry, as
his father had been before him. About the same time or a little
later, he performed a pilgrimage of a kind that could hardly help
making a mark upon a character so deeply impressible. In com-
pany with D'Alembert, he went to Ferney and saw Voltaire. To
the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has never been
any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It is
true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a
"
## p. 10335 (#159) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10335
great ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual
authority, pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously
invoked, throughout western Europe. But these were the repre-
sentatives of a powerful organization and an accepted system.
Voltaire filled a place before men's eyes in the eighteenth cen-
tury as conspicuous and as authoritative as that of St. Bernard in
the twelfth. The difference was that Voltaire's place was abso-
lutely unofficial in its origin, and indebted to no system nor
organization for its maintenance. Again, there have been others,
like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more permanent
contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers and
elevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the
most part labored for the generation that followed them, and won
comparatively slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire,
during his life, enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that
belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid
to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved
for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before
or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side,
sɔ precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so
thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women
who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame
has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous.
With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of
this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly
inquire.
When I had assured him that no harm or prejudice could
possibly accrue to him, he opened a large chest, which appeared
to be full of drugs, and taking therefrom the smallest quantity
of a certain white powder, he mixed it up with some bread into
the form of pill, and putting it into paper gave it me, with
proper directions how it should be administered. Seeing that
he made no mystery of his knowledge, I began to question him
upon the nature and properties of this particular medicine, and
upon his practice in general. He answered me without any re-
serve; not like our Persian doctors, who only make a parade of
fine words, and who adjust every ailment that comes before them
to what they read in their Galen, their Hippocrates, and their
Abou Avicenna.
When I had learned all I could, I left him with great demon-
stration of friendship and thankfulness, and immediately returned
to Mirza Ahmak, who doubtless was waiting for me with great
## p. 10313 (#137) ##########################################
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
10313
impatience. Having divested myself of my borrowed cloak and
resumed my own dress, I appeared before him with a face made
up for the occasion; for I wished to make him believe that the
lettuce and cucumbers had done their duty. At every word I
pretended to receive a violent twitch; and acted my part so true
to life, that the stern and inflexible nature of Mirza Ahmak him-
self was moved into somewhat like pity for me.
"There! there! " said I, as I entered his apartment, "in the
name of Allah take your prize:" and then pretending to be
bent double, I made the most horrid grimaces, and uttered deep
groans: "there! I have followed your orders, and now throw my-
self upon your generosity. " He endeavored to take the object of
his search from me, but I kept it fast; and whilst I gave him to
understand that I expected prompt reward, I made indications
of an intention to swallow it, unless he actually gave me some-
thing in hand. So fearful was he of not being able to answer
the King's interrogatories concerning the pill, so anxious to get
it into his possession, that he actually pressed a gold piece upon
me. No lover could sue his mistress with more earnestness to
grant him a favor than the doctor did me for my pill. I should
very probably have continued the deceit a little longer, and have
endeavored to extract another piece from him: but when I saw
him preparing a dose of his own mixture to ease my pain, I
thought it high time to finish; and pretending all of a sudden to
have received relief, I gave up my prize.
When once he had got possession, he looked at it with intense
eagerness, and turned it over and over on his palm, without
appearing one whit more advanced in his knowledge than before.
At length, after permitting him fully to exhaust his conjectures,
I told him that the Frank doctor had made no secret in saying
that it was composed of jivch, or mercury. "Mercury, indeed! »
exclaimed Mirza Ahmak, "just as if I did not know that. And
so, because this infidel, this dog of an Isauvi, chooses to poison
us with mercury, I am to lose my reputation, and my prescrip-
tions (such as his father never even saw in a dream) are to be
turned into ridicule. Who ever heard of mercury as a medicine?
Mercury is cold, and lettuce and cucumber are cold also. You
would not apply ice to dissolve ice? The ass does not know the
first rudiments of his profession. No, Hajji, this will never do:
we must not permit our beards to be laughed at in this manner. "
He continued to inveigh for a considerable time against his
rival; and would no doubt have continued to do so much longer,
## p. 10314 (#138) ##########################################
10314
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
but he was stopped by a message from the King, who ordered
him to repair forthwith to his presence. In the greatest trepida-
tion he immediately put himself into his court dress, exchanged
his common black lambskin cap for one wound about with a
shawl, huddled on his red-cloth stockings, called for his horse,
and taking the pill with him, went off in a great hurry, and full
of the greatest apprehension at what might be the result of the
audience.
་་
The doctor's visit to the King had taken place late in the
evening; and as soon as he returned from it he called for me.
I found him apparently in great agitation, and full of anxiety.
Hajji," said he, when I appeared, "come close to me;" and
having sent every one else out of the room, he said in a whis-
per, "This infidel doctor must be disposed of somehow or other.
What do you think has happened? The Shah has consulted him;
he had him in private conference for an hour this morning, with-
out my being apprised of it. His Majesty sent for me to tell
me its result; and I perceive that the Frank has already gained
great influence. It seems that the King gave him the history
of his complaints,- of his debility, of his old asthma, and of
his imperfect digestion,- but talked in raptures of the wretch's
sagacity and penetration: for merely by looking at the tongue
and feeling the pulse, before the infidel was told what was the
state of the case, he asked whether his Majesty did not use the
hot-baths very frequently; whether, when he smoked, he did not
immediately bring on a fit of coughing; and whether, in his
food, he was not particularly addicted to pickles, sweetmeats, and
rice swimming in butter? The King has given him three days
to consider his case, to consult his books, and to gather the opin-
ions of the Frank sages on subjects so important to the State of
Persia, and to compose such a medicine as will entirely restore
and renovate his constitution. The Centre of the Universe then
asked my opinion, and requested me to speak boldly upon the
natures and properties of Franks in general, and of their medi-
cines. I did not lose this opportunity of giving utterance to my
sentiments; so, after the usual preface to my speech, I said, 'that
as to their natures, the Shah, in his profound wisdom, must know
that they were an unbelieving and an unclean race: for that they
treated our Prophet as a cheat, and ate pork and drank wine.
without any scruple; that they were women in looks, and in man-
ners bears; that they ought to be held in the greatest suspicion,
for their ultimate object (see what they had done in India) was
## p. 10315 (#139) ##########################################
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
10315
to take kingdoms, and to make Shahs and Nabobs their humble
servants. As to their medicines,' I exclaimed, 'Heaven preserve
your Majesty from them! they are just as treacherous in their
effects as the Franks are in their politics: with what we give to
procure death, they pretend to work their cures. Their principal
ingredient is mercury' (and here I produced my pill); and they
use their instruments and knives so freely, that I have heard it
said they will cut off a man's limbs to save his life. ' I then
drew such a picture of the fatal effects likely to proceed from the
foreign prescription, that I made the Shah promise that he would
not take it without using every precaution that his prudence and
wisdom might suggest. To this he consented; and as soon as
the Frank shall have sent in the medicine which he is preparing,
I shall be summoned to another interview. Now, Hajji," added
the doctor, "the Shah must not touch the infidel's physic; for if
perchance it were to do good, I am a lost man. Who will ever
consult Mirza Ahmak again? No: we must avert the occurrence
of such an event, even if I were obliged to take all his drugs
myself. "
We parted with mutual promises of doing everything in our
power to thwart the infidel doctor; and three days after, Mirza
Ahmak was again called before the King in order to inspect
the promised ordonnance, and which consisted of a box of pills.
He of course created all sorts of suspicions against their effi-
cacy, threw out some dark hints about the danger of receiving
any drug from the agent of a foreign power, and finally left the
Shah in the determination of referring the case to his ministers.
The next day, at the usual public audience, when the Shah was
seated on his throne, and surrounded by his prime vizier, his
lord high treasurer, his minister for the interior, his principal
secretary of state, his lord chamberlain, his master of the horse,
his principal master of the ceremonies, his doctor in chief, and
many other of the great officers of his household,― addressing
himself to his grand vizier, he stated the negotiations which he
had entered into with the foreign physician, now resident at his
court, for the restoration and the renovation of the royal person;
that at the first conference, the said foreign physician, after a due
inspection of the royal person, had reported that there existed
several symptoms of debility; that at the second, after assuring
the Shah that he had for three whole days employed himself
in consulting his books and records, and gathering from them
the opinions of his own country sages on the subject, he had
## p. 10316 (#140) ##########################################
10316
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
combined the properties of the various drugs into one whole,
which, if taken interiorly, would produce effects so wonderful that
no talisman could come in competition with it. His Majesty then
said that he had called into his councils his Hakîm bashi, or head
physician, who, in his anxiety for the weal of the Persian mon-
archy, had deeply pondered over the ordonnances of the foreigner,
and had set his face against them, owing to certain doubts and
apprehensions that had crept into his mind, which consisted, first,
whether it were politic to deliver over the internal administration
of the royal person to foreign regulations and ordonnances; and sec-
ond, whether in the remedy prescribed there might not exist such
latent and destructive effects as would endanger, undermine, and
finally overthrow that royal person and constitution which it was
supposed to be intended to restore and renovate. "Under these
circumstances," said the Centre of the Universe, raising his voice
at the time, "I have thought it advisable to pause before I pro-
ceeded in this business; and have resolved to lay the case before
you, in order that you may, in your united wisdom, frame such
an opinion as may be fitting to be placed before the King; and
in order that you may go into the subject with a complete knowl-
edge of the case, I have resolved, as a preparatory act, that each
of you, in your own persons, shall partake of this medicine, in
order that both you and I may judge of its various effects. "
To this most gracious speech the grand vizier and all the
courtiers made exclamations: "May the King live for ever! May
the royal shadow never be less! We are happy not only to take
physic, but to lay down our lives in your Majesty's service! We
are your sacrifice, your slaves! May God give the Shah health,
and a victory over all his enemies! " Upon which the chief of
the valets was ordered to bring the foreign physician's box of
pills from the harem, and delivered it to the Shah in a golden
salver. His Majesty then ordered the Hakim bashi to approach,
and delivering the box to him, ordered him to go round to all
present, beginning with the prime vizier, and then to every man
according to his rank, administering to each a pill.
This being done, the whole assembly took the prescribed
gulp; after which ensued a general pause, during which the King
looked carefully into each man's face to mark the first effects
of the medicine. When the wry faces had subsided, the con-
versation took a turn upon the affairs of Europe; upon which
his Majesty asked a variety of questions, which were answered
## p. 10317 (#141) ##########################################
JAMES JUSTINIAN MORIER
10317
by the different persons present in the best manner they were
able.
The medicine now gradually began to show its effects. The
lord high treasurer first a large, coarse man, who to this mo-
ment had stood immovable, merely saying belli, belli, yes, yes,
whenever his Majesty opened his mouth to speak-now appeared
uneasy; for what he had swallowed had brought into action a store
of old complaints which were before lying dormant.
The eyes
of all had been directed towards him, which had much increased.
his perturbed state; when the chief secretary of state, a tall, thin,
lathy man, turned deadly pale, and began to stream from every
pore. He was followed by the minister for the interior, whose
unhappy looks seemed to supplicate a permission from his Maj-
esty to quit his august presence. All the rest in succession were
moved in various ways, except the prime vizier, a little old man,
famous for a hard and unyielding nature, and who appeared to
be laughing in his sleeve at the misery which his compeers in
office were undergoing.
As soon as the Shah perceived that the medicine had taken
effect, he dismissed the assembly, ordering Mirza Ahmak, as soon
as he could ascertain the history of each pill, to give him an
official report of the whole transaction; and then retired into his
harem.
me.
The crafty old doctor had now his rival within his power; of
course he set the matter in such a light before the King that his
Majesty was deterred from making the experiment of the foreign
physician's ordonnance, and it was forthwith consigned to oblivion.
When he next saw me, and after he had made me acquainted
with the preceding narrative, he could not restrain his joy and
exultation. "We have conquered, friend Hajji," would he say to
"The infidel thought that we were fools; but we will teach
him what Persians are. Whose dog is he, that he should aspire
to so high an honor as prescribing for a king of kings? No:
that is left to such men as I. What do we care about his new
discoveries? As our fathers did, so are we contented to do.
The prescription that cured our ancestors shall cure us; and what
Locman and Abou Avicenna ordained, we may be satisfied to
ordain after them. " He then dismissed me, to make fresh plans
for destroying any influence or credit that the new physician
might acquire, and for preserving his own consequence and rep-
utation at court.
## p. 10318 (#142) ##########################################
10318
1
EDUARD MÖRIKE
EDUARD MÖRIKE
(1804-1875)
ENTLEST and sweetest of all the Suabian poets was Eduard
Mörike. He was born on September 8th, 1804, at Ludwigs-
burg, the birthplace also of Justinus Kerner, David Strauss,
and Friedrich Theodor Vischer, with all of whom Mörike subse-
quently formed friendships. He was destined for the ministry, and
studied theology at Tübingen. The gentleness of his character and
his quiet winning manners seemed to have marked him for this
career. He served as curate in several places in Würtemberg, and
in 1834 secured an independent pastorate at
Cleversulzbach, near Weinsberg. Here he
remained until in 1843 the state of his
health obliged him to resign. For several
years he earned his livelihood as a pri-
vate teacher; and in 1851, having married
the daughter of the lady with whom he
and his sister had been living, he went to
Stuttgart, where he had been appointed
to a tutorship in St. Katharine's Institute.
In 1866 he was forced to retire altogether
from active labors. The remaining years of
his life were rendered happy by the com-
forts of a congenial home, and by inter-
course with the steadily increasing number
of friends and admirers who sought the poet out. He died on June
4th, 1875. This was the simple outward life of the man, without stir-
ring adventure or event, and without heart-breaking grief. But his
inner life was as rich as it was sunny. This contented him. From
the quiet beauties of his mental world he dreaded to go forth into
the actualities of life. Few poets have been able in the same degree
to make the circumstances of their career conform so well to their
intellectual needs. The simple character and customs of his Suabian
countrymen were sufficient for him; the Suabian landscapes satisfied
him. He felt no desire to study men under other conditions, or to
seek new emotions under strange skies. He lived in his own poet's
heart: the unaccustomed and the sublime left his simple spirit un-
touched. His life was that of a poet, without the storm and stress
and without the world-woe.
## p. 10319 (#143) ##########################################
EDUARD MÖRIKE
10319
His first important work was a novel in two volumes, published
in 1832, and entitled 'Maler Nolten' (Nolten the Painter). In its first
form much was obscure; but in the revision which Mörike undertook
late in life, the underlying design of the work came out more clearly,
and the early crudities were polished away by the maturer hand.
The story is full of finely poetic fancy; it is one of the best exam-
ples of that perfectly naïve blending of the realistic and fantastic,
of the natural and the supernatural, which is one of Mörike's char-
acteristic charms. But the novel is now outlived. It had its roots
in the soil of Romanticism, where the mysterious "blue flower" still
bloomed in the vesper light of a departing day. Its intense subject-
ivity transcends all psychological interest, and by losing its foothold
in reality deprives the book of a lasting place in literature.
But Maler Nolten' was an undoubted success, and won for its
author a host of friends. In 1838, however, appeared a book which
still remains his most important contribution to literature,-the first
edition of his collected poems. Whether these lyrics have the fresh-
ness of the folk-song, the solemnity of the hymn, or the pathos and
humor of the idyl, their tone is always true. A convincing proof
of Mörike's lyric quality is his popularity with the great song com-
posers. The perfect form of the simple song, which charms with
its naïve grace and thrills with its restrained emotion, is attained
in his poetry as in that of no other German bard except Goethe
and Uhland. Clearness, harmony, and limpid flow distinguished his
diction, which is free from all "patchwork" and useless phrases;
while sincerity of feeling and tenderness of sympathy characterize
his conceptions. In his delicate fancy no sharp boundary separates
the real world from the fairy realms of the imagination; and in the
midst of scenes from actual life there suddenly appear elves and
gnomes and nixies, which seem to have their being by the same
right of reality as the men and women of coarser mold. This is the
privilege only of the naïve and unspoiled poet, to whom fancy is as
real as fact. It is only from such a mind that the true folk-song and
the true fairy tale can spring.
And Mörike has enriched German literature with one of its most
charming fairy tales, 'Das Hutzelmännlein' (The Little Dried-up Man),
published in 1852. Four years later came the idyllic tale 'Mozart
auf der Reise nach Prag' (Mozart on the Way to Prague). His 'Die
Regenbrüder' (Rain Brothers) was taken by Ignaz Lachner as the
text of his opera.
Translations from Theocritus and Anacreon-for
Mörike was a close student of the Greeks-and several compilations
complete the list of the poet's literary works.
General recognition came to Mörike slowly. Nevertheless his
poems passed through five editions during his lifetime; and as he
## p. 10320 (#144) ##########################################
10320
EDUARD MÖRIKE
added poem after poem to his lyric treasury, leaf after leaf was
added to the chaplet of his fame. Before he died, Mörike had come
to be recognized as one of the chief lyric poets of his time; and the
succeeding generation has sustained this judgment. He was the last
great poet of the Suabian group.
MY RIVER
IVER! my river in the young sunshine!
Oh, clasp afresh in thine embrace
This longing, burning frame of mine,
And kiss my breast, and kiss my face!
So there! -Ha, ha! — already in thine arms!
I feel thy love—I shout -I shiver;
But thou outlaughest loud a flouting song, proud river,
And now again my bosom warms!
-
R
The droplets of the golden sunlight glide.
Over and off me, sparkling, as I swim
Hither and thither down thy mellow tide,
Or loll amid its crypts with outstretched limb;
I fling abroad my arms, and lo!
Thy wanton waves curl slyly round me;
But ere their loose chains have well bound me,
Again they burst away and let me go!
O sun-loved river! wherefore dost thou hum,
Hum, hum alway, thy strange, deep, mystic song
Unto the rocks and strands? -for they are dumb,
And answer nothing as thou flowest along.
Why singest so all hours of night and day?
Ah, river! my best river! thou, I guess, art seeking
Some land where souls have still the gift of speaking
With nature in her own old wondrous way!
Lo! highest heaven looms far below me here;
I see it in thy waters, as they roll,
So beautiful, so blue, so clear,
'Twould seem, O river mine, to be thy very soul!
Oh, could I hence dive down to such a sky,
Might I but bathe my spirit in that glory,
So far outshining all in ancient fairy story,
I would indeed have joy to die!
## p. 10321 (#145) ##########################################
EDUARD MÖRIKE
What on cold earth is deep as thou? Is aught?
Love is as deep, love only is as deep:
Love lavisheth all, yet loseth, lacketh naught;
Like thee, too, love can neither pause nor sleep.
Roll on, thou loving river, thou! Lift up
Thy waves, those eyes bright with a riotous laughing!
Thou makest me immortal! I am quaffing
The wine of rapture from no earthly cup!
XVIII-646
At last thou bearest me, with soothing tone,
Back to thy bank of rosy flowers:
Thanks, then, and fare thee well! Enjoy thy bliss alone!
And through the year's melodious hours
Echo forever from thy bosom broad
All glorious tales that sun and moon be telling;
And woo down to their soundless fountain dwelling
The holy stars of God!
A
TWO LOVERS
SKIFF swam down the Danube's tide;
Therein a bridegroom sate, and bride,—
He one side, she the other.
"Tell me, my dearest heart," said she,
"What present shall I make to thee? "
And back her little sleeve she stripped,
And deeply down her arm she dipped.
And so did he, the other side,
And laughed and jested with his bride:
"Fair lady Danube, give me here
Some pretty gift to please my dear. "
She drew a sparkling sword aloft,
Just such the boy had longed for, oft.
The boy, what holds he in his hand?
Of milk-white pearls a costly band.
He binds it round her jet-black hair;
She looks a princess, sitting there.
10321
"Fair lady Danube, give me here,
Some pretty gift to please my dear! "
## p. 10322 (#146) ##########################################
:
10322
EDUARD MÖRIKE
Once more she'll try what she can feel;
She grasps a helmet of light steel.
On his part, terrified with joy,
Fished up a golden comb the boy.
A third time clutching in the tide,
Woe! she falls headlong o'er the side.
The boy leaps after, clasps her tight;
Dame Danube snatches both from sight.
Dame Danube grudged the gifts she gave:
They must atone for't in the wave.
An empty skiff glides down the stream,
The mountains hide the sunset gleam.
And when the moon in heaven did stand,
The lovers floated dead to land,
He one side, she the other.
AN HOUR ERE BREAK OF DAY
From Lyrics and Ballads of Heine and other German Poets': G. P. Putnam's
Sons, publishers. Translated by Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892, by
Frances Hellman.
s I once sleeping lay,
An hour ere break of day,
As
Sang near the window, on a tree,
A little bird, scarce heard by me
An hour ere break of day.
"Give heed to what I say:
Thy sweetheart false doth play
Whilst I am singing this to thee,
He hugs a maiden, cozily,
An hour ere break of day. "
"Alas! no further say!
Hush! I'll not hear thy lay!
Fly off, away fly from my tree,-
Ah! love and faith are mockery
An hour ere break of day. "
## p. 10323 (#147) ##########################################
10323
JOHN MORLEY
(1838-)
HE not infrequent union in English public life of the man of
letters with the politician, is illustrated in the career of John
Morley. In an address on the study of literature, deliv-
ered by him in 1887 to the students of the London Society for the
Extension of University Teaching, he refers to the fact that he has
strayed from literature into the region of politics, adding that he is
"not at all sure that such a journey conduces to the aptness of one's
judgment on literary subjects. " Had Mr. Morley's essays in criticism
been concerned exclusively with literature,
his political life might not have been of
profit to him as a man of letters. As it
is, his Miscellanies'- studies of men and
their times-and his biographies witness to
the fruitful influence of actual contact with
present-day affairs upon the critical spirit.
Mr. Morley has enriched his literary products
through his public life. The biographer of
Richard Cobden, of Edmund Burke, and of
Horace Walpole was certainly aided in his
estimates of these statesmen by his own
political experience; and in his estimates of
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, by contact
with the social-philosophic and humanita-
rian spirit of the extreme Gladstone party. It is significant that Mr.
Morley chose as subjects of political biography, men identified with.
the more liberal tendencies of modern English statesmanship. He
himself is a radical and a scientific idealist, who places his reliance
upon the future rather than upon the past. His political career did
not open, however, until he was well established as a writer and
editor. Born at Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1838, he was educated at
Cheltenham, and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained his
B. A. in 1859. Ten years later he was an unsuccessful candidate to
Parliament for his native place. In the mean time he had undertaken
the editorship of the Fortnightly Review, a position which he held
from 1867 to 1882. Mr. Morley's sound literary sense, and his well-
developed critical faculty, were put to valuable use in the conduct of
JOHN MORLEY
## p. 10324 (#148) ##########################################
10324
JOHN MORLEY
this important periodical. He drew to his aid men like George Henry
Lewes, Bagehot, and Cairnes. The apparently insignificant innovation
of signing articles was due to his influence. His editorial qualifica-
tions were further exhibited in his conduct of the Pall Mall Gazette
from 1880 to 1883, and of Macmillan's Magazine from 1883 to 1885.
From 1883, however, he was drawn more and more into a purely
political career. In that year he had been a successful candidate for
Newcastle-on-Tyne; and in 1886 he was appointed chief secretary for
Ireland, an office to which he was reappointed in 1892.
In Morley's essays and biographies he exhibits the same spirit
of radicalism which has governed his political career. He is drawn
naturally to a consideration of those writers, thinkers, and statesmen
whose influence upon their times has been in the direction of essen-
tially modern ideals of government and social constitution, or who
have stood as representatives of a new order in opposition to the old.
For this reason Mr. Morley has found congenial subjects of critical
biography in the French philosophers and thinkers of the eighteenth
century. His studies of Vauvenargues, of Turgot, of Condorcet, of
Diderot, are written in a spirit of sympathetic criticism which wit-
nesses to his divination of the dominating social and political forces
of a given era, and to his recognition of the concrete expression of
these forces in the individual. In this sense his life of Rousseau is
a study of French politics in the eighteenth century. The author of
the Social Contract,' although more of a vaporist and dreamer than
a politician, exerted a strong influence upon the political temper of
his own and later times. Mr. Morley traces this influence through the
social and political confusions of the Revolution, and into the readjust-
ing forces of the nineteenth century, where it gives birth to those
"schemes of mutualism, and all other shapes of collective action for
a common social good, which have possessed such commanding attrac-
tion for the imagination of large classes of good men in France ever
since. " In his elaborate analysis of the 'Social Contract,' Mr. Morley
displays his own insight into difficult problems of society and of poli-
tics. His modern habit of mind is shown in his appreciation of the
time-spirit as the most reliable interpreter of the phenomena of his-
tory. He is indeed a historical critic rather than a creator in the
domain of literature. He has used the essay more as a vehicle for his
political reflections than for itself as a literary product. He possesses,
however, ideals of style which are high, exacting, and comprehensive.
These are expressed in his clear, strong English, compactly fitted
to his thought. He has given to the literature of his century a not
inconsiderable body of vigorous and well-tempered prose.
## p. 10325 (#149) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10325
ROUSSEAU AT MONTMORENCY
From Rousseau'
THE
HE many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hid-
den in such profound obscurity that we are as yet unable
to explain why in certain natures a period of stormy moral
agitation seems to be the indispensable antecedent of their highest
creative effort. Byron is one instance, and Rousseau is another,
in which the current of stimulating force made rapid way from
the lower to the higher parts of character, only expending itself
after having traversed the whole range of emotion and faculty,
from their meanest, most realistic, most personal forms of exer-
cise, up to the summit of what is lofty and ideal. No man was
ever involved in such an odious complication of moral maladies
as beset Rousseau in the winter of 1758. Within three years of
this miserable epoch he had completed not only the 'New Heloïsa,'
which is the monument of his fall, but the 'Social Contract,'
which was the most influential, and 'Emilius,' which was perhaps
the most elevated and spiritual of all the productions of the pro-
lific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor light-
hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
lay in the circumstance that he began to write late; and it is true
that no other author so considerable as Rousseau waited until the
age of fifty for the full vigor of his inspiration. No tale of years,
however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength
and incommunicable savor; nor can the splendid mechanical move-
ment of those characters which keep the balance of the world
even, impart to literature the peculiar quality, peculiar but not
the finest, that comes from experience of the black and unlighted
abysses of the soul.
The period of actual production was externally calm. The
'New Heloïsa' was completed in 1759, and published in 1761.
The Social Contract' was published in the spring of 1762, and
'Emilius' a few weeks later. Throughout this period Rousseau
was, for the last time in his life, at peace with most of his fel-
lows; that is to say, though he never relented from his antipathy
to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more real
and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them trans-
formed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.
The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among
the greatest people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg
## p. 10326 (#150) ##########################################
10326
JOHN MORLEY
(1702-64) was a marshal of France, and as intimate a friend of
the King as the King was capable of having. The Maréchale de
Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one of the most beautiful, and
continued to be one of the most brilliant leaders of the last
aristocratic generation that was destined to sport on the slopes of
the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal and homely
soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating, unamiable. Their
dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect sincerity and
straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient apart-
ment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated
when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was
a constant guest at their table, where he met the highest names
in France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or
to walk with him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable as
ever to shine in conversation, yet eager to show his great friends
that they had to do with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought
him of reading the 'New Heloïsa' aloud to them. At ten in
the morning he used to wait upon the maréchale, and there by
her bedside he read the story of the love, the sin, the repent-
ance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the wisdom of Wol-
mar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones which
enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the
rest of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
enchanted. This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the
uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at
least as maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess
as it was in presences less imposing.
One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which
a man bears himself in his relations with persons of greater con-
sideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies
with a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had
a dog whose name was Duc. When he came to sit at a duke's
table, he changed his dog's name to Turc. Again, one day in a
transport of tenderness he embraced the old marshal - the duch-
ess embraced Rousseau ten times a day, for the age was effusive:
"Ah, monsieur le maréchal, I used to hate the great before I
knew you, and I hate them still more, since you make me feel
so strongly how easy it would be for them to have themselves
adored. " On another occasion he happened to be playing at
chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
cottage. In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, he
## p. 10327 (#151) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10327
insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he
said with respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honor your Serene
Highness too much not to beat you at chess always. " A few
days after, the vanquished prince sent him a present of game,
which Rousseau duly accepted. The present was repeated; but
this time Rousseau wrote to Madame de Boufflers that he would
receive no more, and that he loved the prince's conversation
better than his gifts. He admits that this was an ungracious
proceeding; and that to refuse game "from a prince of the blood.
who throws so much good feeling into the present, is not so
much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his inde-
pendence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
know his place. " Considering the extreme virulence with which
Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind
from his friends, we find some inconsistency in this condemna-
tion of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung; unless
the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is allowed to
modify the quality of the donation, and that would be a hardly
defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame
de Boufflers, the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet
more intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judi-
cious warning when she bade him beware of laying himself open
to a charge of affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness
of his virtue, and so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus
would have accepted such marks of esteem without feeling in
them any hurt to their disinterestedness and frugality. " Perhaps
there is a flutter of self-consciousness that is not far removed
from this affectation, in the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us
that after dining at the castle, he used to return home gleefully
to sup with a mason who was his neighbor and his friend. On
the whole, however, and so far as we know, Rousseau conducted
himself not unworthily with these high people. His letters to
them are for the most part marked by self-respect and a moder-
ate graciousness; though now and again he makes rather too
much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his independence
with something too much of protestation. Their relations with
him are a curious sign of the interest which the members of
the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing the
destruction both of them and their world. The Maréchale de
Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate
in the place of honor at her table, and embraces his Theresa.
## p. 10328 (#152) ##########################################
10328
JOHN MORLEY
The Prince of Conti pays visits of courtesy, and sends game
to a man whom he employs at a few sous an hour to copy
manuscript for him. The Countess of Boufflers, in sending him
the money, insists that he is to count her his warmest friend.
When his dog dies, the countess writes to sympathize with his
chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to replace it. And
when persecution and trouble and infinite confusion came upon
him, they all stood as fast by him as their own comfort would
allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the un-
happy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities
which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men,
and made women devoted to him, until he drove both men and
women away? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot,
as with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have
now parted company. But they are instantly succeeded by new
devotees. And the lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not
silly women led captive by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was
one of the most distinguished spirits of her time. Her friend-
ship for him was such, that his sensuous vanity made Rousseau
against all reason or probability confound it with a warmer form;
and he plumes himself in a manner most displeasing on the vic-
tory which he won over his own feelings on the occasion.
As a
matter of fact he had no feelings to conquer, any more than the
supposed object of them ever bore him any ill-will for his indif-
ference, as in his mania of suspicion he afterwards believed.
There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Mont-
morency, which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would
ever have afflicted him, if his natural irritation had not been
made intense and irresistible by the cruel distractions that fol-
lowed the publication of 'Emilius. ' He was tolerably content
with his present friends. The simplicity of their way of dealing
with him contrasted singularly, as he thought, with the never-
ending solicitudes, as importunate as they were officious, of the
patronizing friends whom he had just cast off. Perhaps, too, he
was soothed by the companionship of persons whose rank may
have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his old literary
friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with him in the
peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers, indeed,
wrote a tragedy; but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko. ' That Rousseau was
thoroughly capable of this hateful emotion of sensitive literary
## p. 10329 (#153) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10329
jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others
of a meanness of this kind, unless he is capable of it himself.
The resounding success which followed the 'New Heloïsa' and
'Emilius' put an end to this apprehension, for it raised him
to a pedestal in popular esteem as high as that on which Vol-
taire stood triumphant. This very success unfortunately brought
troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last chance of ending his
days in full reasonableness.
Meanwhile he enjoyed his last interval of moderate whole-
someness and peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green
earth. One of the letters commemorates his delight in the great
scudding southwest winds of February, soft forerunners of the
spring, so sweet to all who live with nature. At the end of his
garden was a summer-house, and here even on wintry days he sat
composing or copying. It was not music only that he copied.
He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts of his romance,
which he sold to the Duchess of Luxembourg and other ladies for
some moderate fee. Sometimes he moved from his own lodging
to the quarters in the park which his great friends had induced
him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was of
white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude,
in the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every
kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me,
that I composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of 'Emilius. '
With what eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to
breathe the balmy air! What good coffee I used to take under the
porch in company with my Theresa! My cat and my dog made
the rest of our party. That would have sufficed for all my life,
and I should never have known weariness. And so to the as-
surance, so often repeated under so many different circumstances,
that here was a true heaven upon earth, where if fate had only
allowed, he would have known unbroken innocence and lasting
happiness.
## p. 10330 (#154) ##########################################
10330
JOHN MORLEY
CONDORCET
From Critical Miscellanies'
OⓇ
F THE illustrious thinkers and writers who for two genera-
tions had been actively scattering the seed of revolution in
France, only Condorcet survived to behold the first bitter
ingathering of the harvest. Those who had sown the wind were
no more; he only was left to see the reaping of the whirlwind,
and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it. Voltaire and
Diderot, Rousseau and Helvétius, had vanished; but Condorcet
both assisted at the Encyclopædia and sat in the Convention,—
the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also
came in due season to partake of its fruit, at once a precursor,
and a sharer in the fulfillment. In neither character has he
attracted the good-will of any of those considerable sections and
schools into which criticism of the Revolution has been mainly
divided. As a thinker he is roughly classed as an Economist;
and as a practical politician he figured first in the Legislative
Assembly, and next in the Convention. Now, as a rule, the
political parties that have most admired the Convention have
had least sympathy with the Economists; and the historians who
are most favorable to Turgot and his followers are usually most
hostile to the actions and associations of the great revolutionary
chamber successively swayed by a Vergniaud, a Danton, a Robes-
pierre. Between the two, Condorcet's name has been allowed to
lie hidden for the most part in a certain obscurity, or else has
been covered with those taunts and innuendoes which partisans
are wont to lavish on men of whom they do not know exactly
whether they are with or against them.
Generally, the men of the Revolution are criticized in blocks.
and sections, and Condorcet cannot be accurately placed under
any of these received schools. He was an Economist, but he
was something more; for the most characteristic article in his
creed was a passionate belief in the infinite perfectibility of human
nature. He was more of a Girondin than a Jacobin, yet he
did not always act, any more than he always thought, with the
Girondins; and he did not fall when they fell, but was proscribed
by a decree specially leveled at himself. Isolation of this kind is
assuredly no merit in political action, but it explains the coldness
with which Condorcet's memory has been treated; and it flowed.
from some marked singularities both of character and opinion,
## p. 10331 (#155) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10331
which are of the highest interest, if we consider the position of
the man, and the lustre of that ever-memorable time. « Condor-
cet," said D'Alembert, "is a volcano covered with snow. " Said
another, less picturesquely, "He is a sheep in a passion. " "You
may say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relation to his per-
son," wrote Madame Roland, "that it is a subtle essence soaked
in cotton. " The curious mixture disclosed by sayings like these,
of warm impulse and fine purpose with immovable reserve, only
shows that he of whom they were spoken belonged to the class
of natures which may be called non-conducting. They are not
effective, because without this effluence of power and feeling
from within, the hearer or onlooker is stirred by no sympathetic
thrill. They cannot be the happiest, because consciousness of the
inequality between expression and meaning, between the influence
intended and the impression conveyed, must be as tormenting as
to one who dreams is the vain effort to strike a blow. If to be
of this non-conducting temperament is impossible in the really
greatest sorts of men, like St. Paul, St. Bernard, or Luther, at
least it is no proper object of blame; for it is constantly the
companion of lofty and generous aspiration. It was perhaps
unfortunate that Condorcet should have permitted himself to be
drawn into a position where his want of that magical quality
by which even the loathed and loathsome Marat could gain the
sympathies of men, should be so conspicuously made visible.
Frankly, the character of Condorcet, unlike so many of his con-
temporaries, offers nothing to the theatrical instinct. None the
less on this account should we weigh the contributions which he
made to the stock of science and social speculation, and recog-
nize the fine elevation of his sentiments, his noble solicitude for
human well-being, his eager and resolute belief in its indefinite
expansion, and the devotion which sealed his faith by a destiny
that was as tragical as any in those bloody and most tragical
days.
I
UNTIL the outbreak of the Revolution, the circumstances of
Condorcet's life were as little externally disturbed or specially
remarkable as those of any other geometer and thinker of the
time. He was born in a small town in Picardy, in the year 1743.
His father was a cavalry officer; but as he died when his son was
only three years old, he could have exerted no influence upon the
## p. 10332 (#156) ##########################################
10332
JOHN MORLEY
future philosopher, save such as comes of transmission through
blood and tissue. Condillac was his uncle, but there is no record
of any intercourse between them. His mother was a devout and
trembling soul, who dedicated her child to the Holy Virgin, and
for eight years or more made him wear the dress of a little girl,
by way of sheltering him against the temptations and unbelief of
a vile world. So long as women are held by opinion and usage
in a state of educational and political subjection which prevents
the growth of a large intelligence, made healthy and energetic
by knowledge and by activity, we may expect to read of pious
extravagances of this kind. Condorcet was weakened physically
by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrous clothing;
and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented him
from growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire.
His earliest instructors, as happened to most of the skeptical phi-
losophers, were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall.
That these adroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions
which their order had acquired in three centuries, and with the
training of the nation almost exclusively in their hands, should
still have been unable to shield their persons from proscription
and their creed from hatred, is a remarkable and satisfactory in-
stance how little it avais ecclesiastical bodies to have a monopoly
of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be out of
harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as
the spirit of the time. The Jesuits were the great official teach-
ers of France for the first half of the eighteenth century. In
1764 the order was thrust forth from the country, and they left
behind them an army of the bitterest enemies Christianity has
ever had.
To do them justice, they were destroyed by weapons
which they had themselves supplied. The intelligence which
they had so honorably developed and sharpened, turned inevita-
bly against the incurable faults in their own system. They were
admirable teachers of mathematics. Condorcet, instructed by the
Jesuits at Rheims, was able, when he was only fifteen years old,
to go through such performances in analysis as to win especial
applause from illustrious judges like D'Alembert and Clairaut.
It was impossible, however, for Jesuits, as it has ever been for
all enemies of movement, to constrain within prescribed limits
the activity which has once been effectively stirred. Mathematics
has always been in the eyes of the Church a harmless branch of
knowledge; but the mental energy that mathematics first touched
## p. 10333 (#157) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10333
is sure to turn itself by-and-by to more complex and dangerous
subjects in the scientific hierarchy.
At any rate, Condorcet's curiosity was very speedily drawn
to problems beyond those which geometry and algebra pretend to
solve. "For thirty years," he wrote in 1790, "I have hardly ever
passed a single day without meditating on the political sciences. "
Thus, when only seventeen, when the ardor of even the choicest
spirits is usually most purely intellectual, moral and social feeling
was rising in Condorcet to that supremacy which it afterwards
attained in him to so admirable a degree. He wrote essays on
integral calculus, but he was already beginning to reflect upon
the laws of human societies and the conditions of moral obliga-
tion. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profound sensi-
bility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early
enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of
a kind of syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only
the later shape into which an instinctive impulse threw itself
by way of rational intrenchment. This sensibility caused Condor-
cet to abandon the barbarous pleasures of the chase, which had
at first powerfully attracted him. To derive delight from what
inflicts pain on any sentient creature revolted his conscience
and offended his reason; because he perceived that the character
which does not shrink from associating its own joy with the
anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted to
the finest impressions of humanity. It was this same sensibility,
fortified by reason, which drove him while almost still at school to
reflect, as he confided to Turgot he had done, on the moral ideas
of virtue and justice.
It is thus assured that from the beginning Condorcet was
unable to satisfy himself with the mere knowledge of the special-
ist, but felt the necessity of placing social aims at the head and
front of his life, and of subordinating to them all other pursuits.
That he values knowledge only as a means to social action, is
one of the highest titles to our esteem that any philosopher can
have. Such a temper of mind has penetrated no man more fully
than Condorcet, though there are other thinkers to whom time
and chance have been more favorable in making that temper
permanently productive. There is a fine significance in his words,
after the dismissal of the great and virtuous Turgot from office:
"We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I
mean to apply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for
## p. 10334 (#158) ##########################################
10334
JOHN MORLEY
the future laboring only for the gloriole, after flattering oneself
for a while that one was working for the public weal. " It is
true that a geometer, too, works for the public weal; but the
process is tardier, and we may well pardon an impatience that
sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness of mankind. There is
something much more attractive about Condorcet's undisguised dis-
appointment at having to exchange active public labor for geo-
metrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction conventionally
professed by statesmen when driven from place to their books.
His correspondence shows that even when his mind seemed to
be most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly
on the alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely
to stimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the
strength of justice in society. It would have been, in one sense,
more fortunate for him to have cared less for high social inter-
ests, if we remember the contention of his latter days, and the
catastrophe which brought them to so frightful a close. But
Condorcet was not one of those natures who can think it happi-
ness to look passively out from the tranquil literary watch-tower
upon the mortal struggles of a society in a state of revolution.
In measuring other men of science -as his two volumes of
Eloges abundantly show-one cannot help being struck by the
eagerness with which he seizes on any trait of zeal for social
improvement, of anxiety that the lives and characters of our
fellows should be better worth having. He was himself too
absolutely possessed by this social spirit to have flinched from
his career, even if he had foreseen the martyrdom which was to
consummate it. "You are very happy," he once wrote to Tur-
got, "in your passion for the public good, and your power to
satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior
to that of study. "
In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became con-
nected with the Academy; to the mortification of his relations,
who hardly pardoned him for not being a captain of cavalry, as
his father had been before him. About the same time or a little
later, he performed a pilgrimage of a kind that could hardly help
making a mark upon a character so deeply impressible. In com-
pany with D'Alembert, he went to Ferney and saw Voltaire. To
the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has never been
any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It is
true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a
"
## p. 10335 (#159) ##########################################
JOHN MORLEY
10335
great ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual
authority, pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously
invoked, throughout western Europe. But these were the repre-
sentatives of a powerful organization and an accepted system.
Voltaire filled a place before men's eyes in the eighteenth cen-
tury as conspicuous and as authoritative as that of St. Bernard in
the twelfth. The difference was that Voltaire's place was abso-
lutely unofficial in its origin, and indebted to no system nor
organization for its maintenance. Again, there have been others,
like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more permanent
contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers and
elevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the
most part labored for the generation that followed them, and won
comparatively slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire,
during his life, enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that
belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid
to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved
for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before
or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side,
sɔ precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so
thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women
who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame
has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous.
With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of
this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly
inquire.
