No More Learning

The episode is part of
the long story related by Æneas in Carthage to Dido the queen. )
F
"ORWARD we fare,
Called to the palace of Priam by war-shouts rending the air.
Here of a truth raged battle, as though no combats beside
Reigned elsewhere, no thousands about all Ilion died.
Here we beheld in his fury the war-god; foemen the roof
Scaling, the threshold blocked with a penthouse, javelin-proof.
Ladders rest on the walls, armed warriors climb by the door
Stair upon stair, left hands, to the arrows round them that pour,
Holding a buckler, the battlement ridge in the right held fast.
Trojans in turn wrench loose from the palace turret and tower;
Ready with these, when the end seems visible,- death's dark hour
Closing around them now,- to defend their lives to the last.
Gilded rafters, the glory of Trojan kings of the past,
Roll on the enemy. Others, with javelins flashing fire,
Form at the inner doors, and around them close in a ring.
Hearts grow bolder within us to succor the palace, to bring
Aid to the soldier, and valor in vanquished hearts to inspire.
There was a gate with a secret door, that a passage adjoined
Thridding the inner palace - a postern planted behind.
Here Andromache, ill-starred queen, oft entered alone,
Visiting Hector's parents, when yet they sate on the throne;
Oft to his grandsire with her the boy Astyanax led.
Passing the covered way to the roof I mount overhead,
Where Troy's children were hurling an idle javelin shower.
From it a turret rose, on the topmost battlement height
Raised to the stars, whence Troy and the Danaan ships and the
white
Dorian tents were wont to be seen in a happier hour.
With bright steel we assailed it, and where high flooring of tower
Offered a joint that yielded, we wrenched it loose, and below
Sent it a-drifting. It fell with a thunderous crash on the foe,
Carrying ruin afar. But the ranks close round us again,
Stones and the myriad weapons of war unceasingly rain.
Facing the porch, on the threshold itself, stands Pyrrhus in bright
Triumph, with glittering weapons, a flashing mirror of light.


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VIRGIL
15431
As to the light some viper, on grasses poisonous fed,
Swollen and buried long by the winter's frost in his bed,
Shedding his weeds, uprises in shining beauty and strength,
Lifts, new-born, his bosom, and wreathes his slippery length,
High to the sunlight darting a three-forked flickering tongue, -
Periphas huge strides near, and the brave Automedon, long
Charioteer to Achilles, an armor-bearer to-day.
All of the flower of Scyros beside him, warriors young,
Crowd to the palace too, while flames on the battlement play.
Pyrrhus in front of the host, with a two-edged axe in his hand,
Breaches the stubborn doors, from the hinges rends with his brand
Brass-clamped timbers, a panel cleaves, to the heart of the oak
Strikes, and a yawning chasm for the sunlight gapes at his stroke.
Bare to the eye is the palace within: long vistas of hall
Open; the inmost dwelling of Priam is seen of them all:
Bare the inviolate chambers of kings of an earlier day,
And they descry on the threshold the armed men standing at bay.
Groaning and wild uproar through the inner palace begin;
Women's wailings are heard from the vaulted cloisters within.
Shrieks to the golden stars are rolled. Scared mothers in fear
Over the vast courts wander, embracing the thresholds dear,
Clasping and kissing the doors. On strides, as his father in might,
Pyrrhus: no gate can stay him, nor guard withstand him to-night;
Portals yield at the thunder of strokes plied ever and aye;
Down from the hinges the gates are flung on their faces to lie.
Entry is broken; the enemy's hosts stream inwards and kill
All in the van, each space with a countless soldiery fill.
Not so rages the river, that o'er its barriers flows
White with foam, overturning the earth-built mounds that oppose,
When on the fields as a mountain it rolls, by meadow and wold,
Sweeping to ruin the herd and the stall. These eyes did behold
Pyrrhus maddened with slaughter; and marked on the sill of the gat
Both the Atridæ brethren. I saw where Hecuba sate,
Round her a hundred brides of her sons,— saw Priam with blood
Staining the altar-fires he had hallowed himself to his god.
Fifty his bridal chambers within,- each seeming a sweet
Promise of children's children,- in dust all lie at his feet!
Doors emblazoned with spoils, and with proud barbarian gold,
Lie in the dust! Where flames yield passage, Danaans hold!
“What was the fate,” thou askest, befell King Priam withal ? »
When he beholds Troy taken, his gates in confusion fall,
Foes in the heart of his palace, the old man feebly essays
Round his trembling shoulders the armor of bygone days;


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VIRGIL
Girds, now harmless forever, his sword once more to his side;
Makes for the midst of the foemen, to die as a chieftain had died.
Deep in the palace heart, and beneath heaven's canopy clear,
Lay a majestic altar; a veteran bay-tree near
Over it hung, and in shadow inclosed the Penates divine.
Hecuba here, and her daughters, in vain surrounding the shrine, -
Like doves swooping from heaven in a tempest's gloom to the
ground,
Sate all huddled, and clinging the god's great images round!
When in the arms of his youth she beheld her Priam arrayed –
“What wild purpose of battle, my ill-starred husband,” she said,
“Ails thee to don these weapons, and whither fondly away?
Not such succor as thine can avail us in this sad day:
No man's weapons,-
if even our Hector caine at the call.
Hither, I pray thee, turn. One shrine shall shelter us all,
Else one death overwhelm us. ” She spake, then reaching her hand,
Gently the old man placed by the hallowed gods of his land.
Lo! from the ravaging Pyrrhus, Polites flying for life,
One of the sons of the king! Through foes, through weapons of
strife,
Under the long colonnades, down halls now empty, he broke,
Wounded to death. On his traces aflame with murderous stroke,
Pyrrhus - behind - the pursuer! Behold, each minute of flight,
—
Hand outreaching to hold him, and spear uplifted to smite!
When in his parents' view and before their faces he stood,
Fainting he fell; in a torrent his life poured forth with his blood !
Then - t ugh about and around him already the death-shade
hung -
Priam held not his peace, gave rein to his wrath and his tongue!
“Now may the gods, thou sinner, for this impiety bold -
If there still be an eye in the heaven these deeds to behold -
Pay thee,” he cried, “all thanks that are owed thee, dues that are
meet,-
Thou who hast made me witness mine own son die at my feet,
Yea, in the father's presence the earth with slaughter hast stained.
Not this wise did Achilles, the sire thou falsely hast feigned,
Deal with his enemy Priam. His heart knew generous shame,
Felt for a suppliant's honor, a righteous suppliant's claim,-
Hector's lifeless body to lie in the tomb he restored;
Home to my kingdom sent me, to reign once more as its lord. ”
The old man spake, and his weapon, a harmless, impotent thing,
Hurled; on the brass of the buckler it smote with a hollow ring,
Hung from the eye of the boss all nerveless. Pyrrhus in ire-
“Take these tidings thou, and relate this news to my sire:


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VIRGIL
15433
Seek Pelides and tell him the shameless deeds I have done;
Fail not to say his Pyrrhus appears a degenerate son!
Die meanwhiles. ” And the aged king to the altar he haled,
Trembling, and sliding to earth in his own son's blood as he trailed;
Twined in the old man's tresses his left, with his right hand drew
Swiftly the sword, to the hilt in his heart then sheathed it anew.
This was the story of Priam, — the end appointed that came,
Sent by the Fates, — to behold as he died Troy's city aflame,
Pergama falling around him, who once in his high command
Swayed full many a people, in pride ruled many a land,
Asia's lord. He is lying a giant trunk on the shore,
Head from his shoulders severed, a corpse with a name no more.
Translation of Sir Charles Bowen.
THE CURSE OF QUEEN DIDO
From the Æneid)
She
[Queen Dido, deserted by Æneas, curses him and his Roman posterity.
foreshadows the career of Hannibal. ]
ow from the
Nºrises, and sprinkles with new-born light earth's every plain.
Soon as the sleepless Queen, from her watch-towers set on the
steep,
Saw day whiten, the vessels with squared sails plowing the deep,
Desolate shores and abandoned ports, — thrice beating her fair
Breasts with her hand, thrice rending her yellow tresses of hair -
Father of earth and of heaven! and shall this stranger,” she cries,
« Wend on his treacherous way, flout Dido's realm as he flies?
Leaps no sword from the scabbard ? Is Tyre not yet on his trail ?
None of ye warping the ships from the dock-yards, hoisting the sail ?
Forth with the flame and the arrow! To sea, and belabor the main!
Ah, wild words! Is it Dido? Has madness troubled her brain ?
Ah, too late, poor Dido! the sin comes home to thee now!
Then was the hour to consider, when thou wast crowning his brow.
Look ye! - The faith and the honor of him who still, as they say,
Carries on shipboard with him his Trojan gods on the way!
Bore on his shoulders his aged sire! Ah! had I not force
Limb from limb to have torn him, and piecemeal scattered his corse
Over the seas? his crews to have slain, and, banquet of joy,
Served on the father's table the flesh of lulus the boy?
Even were chance in the battle unequal, — death was at hand.
Whom had Dido to fear? I had borne to the vessels the brand,


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VIRGIL
Filled with flames each deck, each hold, — child, people, and sire
Whelmed in the blazing ruin, and flung myself on the pyre!
Sun, whose flaming torches reveal earth's every deed;
Juno, witness of sad love's pains, who knowest my need;
Name on the midnight causeways howled, — thou, Hecate dire;
Sister avengers, Genius of Dido, soon to expire,-
Gently receive her and give to her crying misery heed;
Listen and hear these prayers! If the heavens' stern laws have de-
creed
Yon base soul shall find him a harbor, and float to the land;
Thus Jove's destinies order, and so fate finally stand;
Harassed in war by the spears of a daring people and wild,
Far from the land of his fathers and torn from the arms of his child,
May he in vain ask succor, and watch his Teucrian band
Dying a death untimely! and when this warrior proud
Under the hard conditions of peace his spirit has bowed,
Neither of monarch's throne nor of sunlight sweet let him taste;
Fall ere time overtakes him, and tombless bleach on the waste.
This last prayer as my life ebbs forth I pour with my blood;
Let not thy hatred sleep, my Tyre, to the Teucrian brood;
Lay on the tomb of Dido for funeral offering this! -
Neither be love nor league to unite my people and his!
Rise! thou Nameless Avenger from Dido's ashes to come,
Follow with fire and slaughter the false Dardanians home!
Smite them to-day, hereafter, through ages yet unexplored,
Long as thy strength sustains thee, and fingers cling to the sword!
Sea upon sea wage battle for ever! shore upon shore,
Speat upon spear! To the sires and the children strife evermore ! »
Translation of Sir Charles Bowen.
THE VISION OF THE FUTURE
From the Æneid)
[Æneas meets in the Elysian Fields his father, Anchises, who shows him
their most illustrious descendants. ]
A
FTER the rite is completed, the gift to the goddess addressed,
Now at the last they come to the realms where Joy has her
throne:
Sweet green glades in the Fortunate Forests, abodes of the blest,
Fields in an ampler ether, a light more glorious dressed,
Lit evermore with their own bright stars and a sun of their own.


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VIRGIL
15435
Some are training their limbs on the wrestling-green, and compete
Gayly in sport on the yellow arenas; some with their feet
Treading their choral measures, or singing the hymns of the god
While their Thracian priest, in a sacred robe that trails,
Chants them the air with the seven sweet notes of his musical
scales,
Now with his fingers striking, and now with his ivory rod.
Here are the ancient children of Teucer, fair to behold,
Generous heroes, born in the happier summers of old, -
Ilus, Assaracus by him, and Dardan, Founder of Troy.
Far in the distance yonder are visible armor and car
Unsubstantial; in earth their lances are planted; and far
Over the meadows are ranging the chargers freed from employ.
All the delight they took when alive in the chariot and sword,
All of the loving care that to shining coursers was paid,
Follows them now that in quiet below Earth's breast they are laid.
Banqueting here he beholds them to right and to left on the sward,
Chanting in chorus the Pæan, beneath sweet forests of bay;
Whence, amid wild wood covers, the river Eridanus, poured,
Rolls his majestic torrents to upper earth and the day.
Chiefs for the land of their sires in the battle wounded of yore,
Priests whose purity lasted until sweet life was no more,
Faithful prophets who spake as beseemed their god and his shrine,
All who by arts invented to life have added a grace,
All whose services earned the remembrance deep of the race,
Round their shadowy foreheads the snow-white garland entwine.
Then as about them the phantoms stream, breaks silence the seer,
Turning first to Musæus, — for round him the shadows appear
Thickest to crowd, as he towers with his shoulders over the throng,–
« Tell me, ye joyous spirits, and thou, bright master of song,
Where is the home and the haunt of the great Anchises, for whom
Hither we come, and have traversed the awful rivers of gloom ? »
Briefly in turn makes answer the hero: “None has a home
In fixed haunts. We inhabit the dark thick glades, on the brink
Ever of moss-banked rivers, and water meadows that drink
Living streams. But if onward your heart thus wills ye to go,
Climb this ridge. I will set ye in pathways easy to know. ”
Forward he marches, leading the way; from the heights at the end
Shows them a shining plain, and the mountain slopes they descend.
There withdrawn to a valley of green in a fold of the plain
Stood Anchises the father, his eyes intent on a train, -
Prisoned spirits, soon to ascend to the sunlight again, -


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VIRGIL
Numbering over his children dear, their myriad bands,
All their destinies bright, their ways, and the work of their hands.
When he beheld Æneas across those flowery lands
Moving to meet him, fondly he strained both arms to his boy;
Tears on his cheek fell fast, and his voice found slowly employ.
«Here thou comest at last, and the love I counted upon
Over the rugged path has prevailed. Once more, O my son,
I may behold thee, and answer with mine thy voice as of yore.
Long I pondered the chances, believed this day was in store,
Reckoning the years and the seasons. Nor was my longing belied.
O'er how many a land, past what far waters and wide,
Hast thou come to mine arms! What dangers have tossed thee, my
child!
Ah, how I feared lest harm should await thee in Libya wild! ”
« Thine own shade, my sire, thine own disconsolate shade,
Visiting oft my chamber, has made me seek thee,” he said.
“Safe upon Tuscan waters the fleet lies. Grant me to grasp
Thy right hand, sweet father; withdraw thee not from its clasp. ”
e
So he replied; and a river of tears flowed over his face.
Thrice with his arms he essayed the beloved one's neck to embrace;
Thrice clasped vainly: the phantom eluded his hands in flight,
Thin as the idle breezes, and like some dream of the night.
There Æneas beholds in a valley withdrawn from the rest
Far-off glades, and a forest of boughs that sing in the breeze;
Near them the Lethe river that glides by abodes of the blest.
Round it numberless races and peoples floating he sees.
So on the flowery meadows in calı, clear summer, the bees
Settle on bright-hued blossoms, or stream in companies round
Fair white lilies, till every plain seems ringing with sound.
Strange to the scene Æneas, with terror suddenly pale,
Asks of its meaning, and what be the streams in the distant vale,
Who those warrior crowds that about yon river await.
Answer returns Anchises: “The spirits promised by Fate
Life in the body again. Upon Lethe's watery brink
These of the fountain of rest and of long oblivion drink.
Ever I yearn to relate thee the tale, display to thine eyes,
Count thee over the children that from my loins shall arise,
So that your joy may be deeper on finding Italy's skies. ”
“O my father! and are there, and must we believe it,” he said,
« Spirits that fly once more to the sunlight back from the dead?


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15437
Souls that anew to the body return, and the fetters of clay?
Can there be any who long for the light thus blindly as they? ”
«Listen, and I will resolve thee the doubt,” Anchises replies.
Then unfolds him in order the tale of the earth and the skies.
«In the beginning, the earth, and the sky, and the spaces of night,
Also the shining moon, and the sun Titanic and bright,
Fed on an inward life, and with all things mingled, a mind
Moves universal matter, with Nature's frame is combined.
Thence man's race, and the beast, and the bird that on pinions flies,
All wild shapes that are hidden the gleaming waters beneath,
Each elemental seed, has a fiery force from the skies;
Each its heavenly being, that no dull clay can disguise,
Bodies of earth ne'er deaden, nor limbs long destined to death.
Hence their fears and desires; their sorrows and joys: for their sight,
Blind with the gloom of a prison, discerns not the heavenly light.
“Now, when at last life leaves them, do all sad ills, that belong
Unto the sinful body, depart; still many survive
Lingering with them, alas! for it needs must be that the long
Growth should in wondrous fashion at full completion arrive.
So due vengeance racks them, for deeds of an earlier day
Suffering penance, and some to the winds hang viewless and thin,
Searched by the breezes; from others the deep infection of sin
Swirling water washes, or bright fire purges, away.
Each, in his own sad ghost, we endure; then pass to the wide
Realms of Elysium. Few in the fields of the happy abide,
Till great time, when the cycles have run their courses on high,
Takes the inbred pollution, and leaves to us only the bright
Sense of heaven's own ether, and fire from the springs of the sky.
When for a thousand years they have rolled their wheels through
the night,
God to the Lethe river recalls this myriad train,
That with remembrance lost once more they may visit the light,
And, at the last, have desire for a life in the body again. ”
[The future heroes of Rome pass by: among the last, the Marcelli. The
death of the young Marcellus, nephew and heir of Augustus, had recently oc-
curred when this book was read by Virgil at court. The bereft mother was
said to have fainted at this passage. ]
“Lo where decked in a conqueror's spoils Marcellus, my son,
Strides from the war! How he towers o'er all of the warrior train!


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VIRGIL
«When Rome reels with the shock of the wild invaders' alarm,
He shall sustain her state. From his war-steed's saddle his arm
Carthage and rebel Gaul shall destroy, and the arms of the slain
Victor a third time hang in his father Quirinus's fane. ”
Then Æneas,- for near him a youth seemed ever to pace,
Fair, of an aspect princely, with armor of glittering grace,
Yet was his forehead joyless, his eye cast down as in grief, —
“Who can it be, my father, that walks at the side of the chief ?
Is it his son, or perchance some child of his glorious race
Born from remote generations? And hark, how ringing a cheer
Breaks from his comrades round! What a noble presence is here!
Though dark night with her shadow of woe floats over his face! »
Answer again Anchises began with a gathering tear:-
“Ask me not, O my son, of thy children's infinite pain!
Fate one glimpse of the boy to the world will grant, and again
Take him from life. Too puissant methinks to immortals on high
Rome's great children had seemed, if a gift like this from the sky
Longer had been vouchsafed! What wailing of warriors bold
Shall from the funeral plain to the War-god's city be rolled!
What sad pomp thine eyes will discern, what pageant of woe,
When by his new-made tomb thy waters, Tiber, shall now!
Never again such hopes shall a youth of thy lineage, Troy,
Rouse in his great forefathers of Latium! Never a boy
Nobler pride shall inspire in the ancient Romulus-land!
Ah, for his filial love! for his old-world faith! for his hand
Matchless in battle! Unharmed what foemen had offered to stand
Forth in his path, when charging on foot for the enemy's ranks,
Or when plunging the spur in his foam-flecked courser's flanks!
Child of a nation's sorrow! if thou canst baffle the Fates'
Bitter decrees; and break for a while their barrier gates,
Thine to become Marcellus! I pray thee, bring me anon
Handfuls of lilies, that I bright flowers may strew on my son,
Heap on the shade of the boy unborn these gifts at the least,
Doing the dead, though vainly, the last sad service. ”
Translation of Sir Charles Bowen.


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15439
MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
(1848-)
BY GRACE KING
-
He Vicomte Eugène Melchior de Vogüé, born at Nice, February
25th, 1848, is the leader, to characterize him in the most
summary way, in the reactionary movement which has been
the historic event of French literature during the last quarter of the
century. He was the precursor of the movement, the evangelist of
it, before it found official expression in literature; when, in the day
of national misfortune and national need, the eyes of serious French-
men were opened to the slough of sensuality, which, draining through
their literature and art into their life and manners, had diseased
their inorality and enervated their will. Various names, when the
reaction first stirred thought, were essayed to define or describe the
movement, — such as Neo-Christian, and Spiritualization of Thought;
it has been called Fiesolist, and likened to the Pre-Raphaelite move-
ment in England: but as time progresses, any sectarian class or
period appellation seems to be too narrow for what is essentially a
national evolution, a patriotic as well as a literary renaissance. More
than any other man in French literature, M. de Vogüé has been the
medium to express the broad nationality and Catholicity of the new
birth; and it would be hardly too much praise to say that in the
clear-sighted conservation of religion and politics, in his life and
works, he typified it.
On the first of January, 1890, in an open New-Year's letter « To
Those who are Twenty Years Old,” — that is, to those who were born
during the Franco-Prussian war,— he gives the keynote of his life
and works: «All who are capable of it owe to our country mental,
more imperiously even than military, service. ” Twenty years before,
he, a young soldier, in that crucial period just past his majority, was
enduring the moral and physical suffering of defeat, the humiliation
of prospective national and political annihilation. But he relates how
the light shone before him on his road to Damascus:
«It is now nearly twenty years ago that the truth made itself known in
a food to the one who writes these lines, as to many others,— to all those
who were being carried along the road to Germany on the night of the first
and second of September, 1870. The miserable procession was descending
the slopes that lay between Bazeilles and Douzy. Below us the bivouac fires
of the conquerors starred the valley of the Meuse. From the field of blood
where were camped the hundred thousand men whom we thought sleeping,


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15440
MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
worn out with their victory, there arose upon the air one strong, one single
voice from the hundred thousand breasts. They sang he hymn of Luther.
The solemn prayer spread over the whole horizon, it filled the heavens,
as far as there were fires -- Germans. Far along in the night we heard it:
it was so grand, so majestic, that not one of us could help thrilling with awe;
even those, who, crushed by suffering and fatigue, were being driven out of
what had been France,-- even they forgot their grief for a moment in the
unwelcome emotion. More than one of us, young as we were, and unripened
by reflection, saw clearly in that moment what power it was that had van-
quished us: it was not the girdle of steel cannon, nor the weight of regiments;
it was the one superior soul, made up of all those different souls, steeped in
one Divine national faith, firmly convinced that behind their cannon,
God was
marching with them at the side of their old King. ”
« Methods of instruction and military training,” he exclaims, «Krupp can-
non and Mauser guns - nothing but accidents, all those things! Accidental
also the sagacity of a Moltke, and of his lieutenants. What made these in-
struments terrible?
The serious submissive soul of the people who used them!
((
((
From military service and imprisonment, Vogüé passed into what
was intended as his career, — diplomacy; and was made attaché to the
French embassy at Constantinople. Traveling through the East -
Palestine, Syria, Egypt -- among the aged monuments of human effort,
the echoes of a vanished civilization, truth again came to him in a
flood of new ideas: “History appeared to him not as a corpse to be
dissected, a tomb of the Past to be explored, but as humanity itself, —
alive, present, vital; a drama to be seen with one's own eyes, felt in
one's own veins; . a thing of himself, of his brothers, of his
country. ” Picturesqueness of aspect, memories recalled of distant
ages, visions, intuitions, dreams,— these are the things of greatest
interest to me,” he says frankly; in other words, the predominance of
idea over fact, of the soul of the race over the soul of the individual.
His letters written in the first glow of these illuminations from the
East, and published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, made Vogüé's
name known in the literary world of the day. From Constantinople
he was transferred to St. Petersburg, where he remained several
years; years of fruitful literary activity, his labors — Russian stories,
and studies of Russian life - enriching not merely the thought and lit-
erature of his own country, but of Europe and America. The door of
Russian literature, opened by Mérimée, had swung to again. Vogüé
has propped it open; and the great stream of what he calls “the
new realism pleading the cause of humanity,” that poured through
its pages upon the arid mockery and materialism of French letters,
was a divine irrigation upon desiccated seed. In the light of the har-
vest that arose therefrom in the literature of the world, it would seem
impossible to do full justice to the importance of this one benefit
conferred by Vogüé upon his fellow-men, without accepting his own
belief that literature is a mission, not a profession.


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MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
15441
a
con-
The Exhibition of 1889 has been generally adopted as
venient date for the manifestation the literary reaction in France,
and Vogüé's eloquent article upon it as its manifesto. For him the
Exhibition was before all a problem of moral significance, an awak-
enment of 'energies in a people restored to their consciousness of
self. “Let us hope,” he concludes, that science will one day reveal
the Central Motor, the motor whence are derived the sometimes
conflicting applications of power. We shall then learn that there is
.
not found the transmission of the sovereign energy,—that there the
principle itself stands condemned. The laws of the outward universe
are but the reflex of the moral world within; and the universal force
once adequately distributed in its proper channel will inspire the
human heart for all the purposes of human life. In this new order
of things, Force must regain its ancient name; with us, as with the
Romans, it must be called Virtue. We may find at last, that in truth
all metamorphoses of Force are but the transmutations of Virtue. ”
The following extract from an article on the Neo-Christian move-
ment in France, written by M. de Vogüé for Harper's Magazine, is
the most authentic word upon it and his connection with it:-
“Whatever may be the effective result of the Neo-Christian crises, they
will require a long time to come to a head; and when the religious idea has
conquered the cultivated classes, it will have to reconquer by a slow process
of infiltration the people at large, whom M. Taine has shown as returning to
paganism. Popular beliefs have persisted obstinately beneath the unbelief
of higher spheres, and yielded only gradually to the preaching of incredulity.
They will be born again with the same slowness, as a consequence of preach-
ing in the opposite sense.
We are in the presence of a nebula which
is forming and wandering in the celestial space. The Creator always knows
the hour and the place which he has marked for the condensation of this
nebula into the solidity and brightness of an organized world. However
imperfect and vague the nebula may be, men of good will prefer it to the
gloom from which we are issuing. They are of opinion that the search after
the ideal is a great sign of the raising up of France, where everything was
on the point of sinking into gross realism,- both characters and minds, both
public morality and intellectual productions. Those who have been the arti-
sans of the present movement have the right to think that they have not
lost their day's work; and since the writer of these pages has been often
mocked for the part he has taken in the movement, may he be here allowed
to claim openly his share in it. ”
XXVI–966
Grace Tug


## p. 15442 (#392) ##########################################

15442
MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
DEATH OF WILLIAM I. OF GERMANY
W".
Let us
milliAM I. lies beneath the dome in the centre of the cold
bare edifice in which the Lutherans of Prussia pray. In
the empty temple there is only death and God- unless
those four statues with fixed gaze, as rigid beneath their armor,
as immovable as he over whom they watch, be men.
suppose -- the impossible - a stranger ignorant of the whole his-
tory of our times; he visits this monument, raises the military
cloak, and asks who is this officer who sleeps here in the uniform
of the First Regiment of the Grenadier Guards. Let us suppose
-again the impossible — that one of these fixities should open
his mouth in reply, and simply repeat what his schoolmaster
had taught him of the Emperor's life. The ignorant visitor would
smile at these fantastic words: he would think the sergeant was
reciting some marvelous fable of old Germany. For the real of
to-day will become the marvelous of to-morrow; future ages will
be found admiring but incredulous, as we now are for that which
was the real in the olden times: for we do not know how to
look at the dream moment in which fate makes us live; habit
and the use of each day blind our moral sight.
That which the soldier would have said to the stranger has
been repeated to satiety for a week past. The history of Will-
iam I. has been given in summary in all the papers, given in de-
tail in books which are in everybody's hands. There is nothing
for us to add; and if there were, should we have the power to
do it? To dwell upon certain pages, the most necessary, the hand
would tremble and the eye no longer see with clearness. A few
words will suffice to recall the events of that long life, before we
essay to judge it. Born in the decline of the other century,-
days already so far distant from us that they are already the days
of our ancestors,- a little cadet in a little State, this child of
feeble health grew up on the steps of a crumbling throne. His
eyes opened to see increasing upon the country and upon the
world the oppressive shadow of Napoleon; they learned to weep
over his country cut into pieces, over the agony of a mother a
fugitive and mendicant in her own domains; his cradle is tossed
about among the baggage of defeated armies: upon leaving this
cradle he is dressed in the clothes of a soldier, to replace those
whom the incessant war around him has mowed down; hussar,


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MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
15443
Uhlan, cornet, his little uniforms change as do the swaddling-
clothes of other children; as soon as he can hold a weapon, at
fifteen
years
of
age, he is thrown into the conflict: and this is
at the hour of fortune's turn against us; the reflux of Europe
throws him upon France with the pack of kings and princes
called together for the quarry: he fights — this living one of a
week ago - amid those phantoms vanished into the depths of
history; at the side of Blücher, Schwartzenberg, Barclay; against
Oudinot and Victor: he enters Paris, and he probably dreams
one of those foolish dreams of first youth, as did every officer
of Napoleon's time; he sees himself — the Prussian captain, sud-
denly promoted generalissimo — taking as his share the glorious
city, deciding upon the fate of the captive Emperor: and no
doubt he laughs over his dream on waking; for the world is
tired of war,- universal peace condemns the soldier to repose.
William re-enters obscurity for a long time; his life disappears
like those long rivers whose course we ignore between their
source and their mouth, where they change name: he reappears
a half-century later; at the moment where all generally ends
with old men, he takes up the crown from the altar of Königs-
berg, and finding it too narrow for his head, he reforges it by
sword-strokes over the fire of battles for seven prodigious years;
he extends his kingdom as quickly and as far as the tenfold
increased reach of his shells; he makes of his puny hereditary
guard-house the vastest barracks that exist on the globe. After
trying his strength on a defenseless neighbor, he fells with one
hand the Holy Roman Empire, with the other the French power.
He no longer counts his victories,- armies taken in nets, kings
swept away before him: a second Napoleon, prisoner at the door
of his tent, recalls to him the fall of the first which happened
under his eye; and the old dream of the young captain is sur-
passed, when, encamped before a Paris surrounded by his troops
and bombarded by his cannon, in the palace of Louis XIV. , where
his camp bed is placed, the princes of Germany bring the impe-
rial crown to the new Cæsar. It would seem that this septuage-
narian needs only to end in this apotheosis. But long days of
glory and happiness are still reserved for him; while below him
all other thrones change occupants, he remains incontestably the
chief and patriarch of all kings, dictating to them his wishes,
calling them by a nod to his court. His gorged eagle soars
tranquilly above all reach; God protects him, he is invulnerable;
-


## p. 15444 (#394) ##########################################

15444
MELCHIOR DE VOGÜÉ
4
twice assassins strike and twice he is healed, at an age when a
mere nothing kills. People grow accustomed to think him im-
mortal, like his predecessor Barbarossa. Death grows impatient
and prowls timidly about his chamber, but dares not strike; each
morning is seen again the familiar head straight and smiling at
the historic window, where he is interrogated to know whether
nations will be permitted to live that day in peace. He is said
to be ill: the following morning he holds a review; convokes a
congress; goes to his frontiers to preside at an interview of
sovereigns: he is said to be dead, and the world, told of his end,
refuses to believe it. It is hardly longer ago than yesterday that
the people were convinced that the Emperor of Germany, van-
quished at last, slowly overcome by the eternal sleep, had finally
submitted to the common law and consented to die.
At this hour the judgments of men are indifferent to him.
Their praise is worth just so much as those brilliant orders
pinned to the tunic of death; just so much as the wax, the flow-
ers, that die on his coffin. The Emperor is before his God. He
meets accusing witnesses, many and redoubtable. It would be
presumption to seek to divine the sentence of the Sole Judge,
who alone has the right to pronounce it. Let us hope for him
who sued for grace yesterday, as well as for all of us, that man
not
mean that there are many. There is but one: but being infi-
nite intelligence, he manifests himself under different aspects as
diverse as our needs; he measures himself to the extent of our
vision; being infinite justice and mercy, he holds a soul to ac-
count only for the manifestation made.
The Emperor has gone forth through the Brandenburg
gate; kings and princes have abandoned him, the people have
è
dispersed, his escort has broken ranks. The Emperor continues
alone through the Alley of Victory. He passes along the foot
of a tower. We know of what it is made, - this fateful tower of
bronze; the cannon still show their mute mouths jutting forth
over the periphery in symmetric crowns; their souls are prisoners
in the melted
They have waited long, these servitors
of death, for William; they knew that death loved to change his
trophies: they watch him as he passes. The horses hurry their
steps toward Charlottenburg. Do they fear that in the solitary
alleys of the forest, in the mournful fog of the winter's day,
another cortége will form to replace the princely escort which no
Armenia
mass.


## p. 15445 (#395) ##########################################

MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
15445
longer follows the car ? A cortège of phantoms waits its chance
in the shadow of the heavy pyramid from which it has come
forth. Innumerable spectres: young men mutilated, mothers in
mourning, every form of suffering and misery; and princes too,
but despoiled, without diadems, led by an old blind king, who
has gathered them up on all the roads of exile to come, the last
to testify — the last of all, on the edge of the imperial tomb-
to the other side of this glorious history. But why should we
call up imaginary phantoms? There was one only too real that
awaited the Emperor on the threshold of the mausoleum of Char-
lottenburg: destiny never devised a meeting more tragic. For
one instant he appeared behind the window-panes of the pal-
ace: for the first. and last time he saluted from afar the mortal
body of his father; his eyes followed it as it went to the bed
of rest of the Hohenzollerns. Then all vanished, - the fugitive
apparition which had reaped empire as it passed, and the dead
who slipped from the hands of his guards into the deep vault.
One last salvo from all the cannon around, dogs barking after
their masters, and the noise of his little day is finished.
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Grace King.
REALISTIC LITERATURE AND THE RUSSIAN NOVEL
City, in the great transports of passion; as the protagonist
, ;
in some very noble and very simple drama, in which the
actors divided among themselves certain rôles of virtue and
wickedness, happiness and suffering, - conformable to ideal and
absolute conceptions about a superior life, in which the soul of
man worked always to one end. In short, the classical man
was the one hero whom all primitive literatures considered alone
worthy of their attention. The action of this hero corresponded
to a group of ideas,— religious, monarchical, social, and moral,-
that furnished the foundation upon which the human family has
rested since its earliest attempts at organization. In magnifying
his hero for good or for evil, the classical poet was proposing a
model of what should or should not be, rather than an example of
what really existed. For a century, other views have insensibly
come to prevail: they have resulted in an art of observation more


## p. 15446 (#396) ##########################################

15446
MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
than of imagination,- an art which is supposed to represent life
as it is, in its entirety and in its complexity, and with the least
possible prejudice on the part of the artist. It takes man in the
ordinary conditions of life, characters from every-day routine,
small and changeable. Jealous of the rigorous logic of scientific
processes, the artists propose to inform us by a perpetual analy-
sis of sentiments and acts, much more than to move us by the
intrigue and spectacle of passions. Classical art imitated a being
who governs, punishes, rewards, chooses his favorites from a select
aristocracy, and imposes upon them his elegant conventions of
morality and language. The new art seeks to imitate nature in
its unconscious ableness, its moral indifferences, its absence of
choice; the triumph of the general over the individual, of the
crowd over the hero, of the relative over the absolute. It has
been called realistic, naturalistic; but would not democratic suffice
to define it ?
No: a view which stopped at this apparent literary root would
be too short-sighted. The change in political order (political
change) is only an episode in the universal and prodigious change
that is being accomplished in the whole world about us. Observe
for a century the work of the human mind in all its applications:
one would say that a legion of workmen had been busy in turn-
ing over, to replace upon its base, some enormous pyramid which
was leaning upon its apex. Man has begun again from the bot-
tom to explain the universe; and he perceives that the existence
of this universe, its greatness and its ills, proceed from an inces-
sant labor of the infinitely small. While institutions were return-
ing the government of the States to the multitude, science was
referring the government of the world to atoms. Everywhere
in the analysis of physical and moral phenomena, ancient causes
have been decomposed, or so to speak crumbled away: for the
simple sudden agents proceeding with great blows of power,
which once explained for us the revolutions of the globe, of his-
tory, of the soul, has been substituted the continual evolution of
infinitesimal and obscure life.
Is it necessary to insist
upon the application of these tendencies to practical life? Level-
ing of the classes, division of fortunes, universal suffrage, liber-
ties and servitudes on an equal footing before the judge, in the
barracks, at the school,- all the consequences of the principle are
summed up in this word Democracy, which is the watchword of
the times.
Literature, that written confession of society,


## p. 15447 (#397) ##########################################

MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
15447
could not remain a stranger to the general change of direction;
instinctively at first, then consciously, doctrinally, she adapted
her materials and her ideas to the new spirit. Her first essays
at reformation were uncertain and awkward: romanticism (we
must now acknowledge it) was a bastard production; it breathed
revolt. In reaction from the classical hero, it sought its sub-
jects by preference in the social depths: but, permeated still by
the classical spirit, the monsters it invented were its old heroes
turned wrong side out; its convicts, courtesans, beggars, were
even hollower windbags than the kings and princesses of earlier
times. The declamatory thesis had changed, but not the decla-
mation. The public soon grew tired of it. Writers were asked
for representations of the world more sincere, and more in con-
formity with the teachings of positive science, which was gaining
ground day by day: readers wanted to find some sentiment of
the complexity of life; beings, ideas, and the spirit of rationality
which in our day has replaced the taste for the absolute. Thus
realism was born.
Moral inspiration alone can make us
pardon realism for the hardness of its processes. When it studies
life with rigorous precision, when it unravels down to the mi-
nutest rootlets of our actions in the fatalities that cause them, it
responds to one of the exactions of our reason. But it deceives
our surest instinct when it voluntarily ignores that mystery which
subsists above and beyond rational explanation: the possible qual-
ity of the divine. I am willing that the realist should affirm
nothing of the unknown, but at least he should always tremble
on its threshold. Since he prides himself upon observing phe-
nomena without suggesting arbitrary interpretations of them, he
should accept this evident fact: the latent fermentation of the
evangelical spirit in the modern world. More than to any other
form of art the religious sentiment is indispensable to realism;
the sentiment that communicates to it the charity which it needs.
As realism does not recoil from the ugliness and misery of the
world, it should render them endurable by a perpetual pity.
Realism becomes odious the moment it ceases to be charitable.
Oh, I know that in assigning a moral end to the art of
writing I shall cause a smile among the adepts of the honor-
able doctrine of art for art's sake; I must confess that I do not
understand that doctrine.
To summarize my ideas of what realism should be: I seek
some general formula to express both its method and its power


## p. 15448 (#398) ##########################################

15448
MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ
(
of creation. I find only one: it is very old, but I do not know
a better or a more scientific one, or one that comes closer to the
secret of all creation: “God made man out of the dust of the
ground. ” See how just the word is, how significant,--the dust!
Without prejudgment or contradiction of detail, it contains all
that we guess about the origin of life; it shows us those first
thrills of humid matter in which was formed and perfected the
slow series of organisms. Made out of the dust of the earth:
that is all that experimental science can know.
Yes, but
there is something else than experimental science; the dust of the
ground does not suffice to account for the mystery of life;
the formula must be completed to account for the duality of our
being: therefore the text adds, "And he breathed into him the
breath of life, and man became a living being. This breath,”
” “
drawn from the source of universal life, is the mind, spirit, the
sure and impenetrable element that moves us, infolds us, frus-
trates all our explanations, and without which they are insuffi-
cient. The dust of the earth: that is the positive knowledge that
we can obtain in a laboratory, in a clinic, about the universe,
about a man; it goes very far, but so long as the breath does
not intervene, a living soul cannot be created, for life begins only
where we cease to comprehend.
C
Translated for (A Library of the World's Best Literature) by Grace King.


## p. 15449 (#399) ##########################################

15449
VOLTAIRE
(1694-1778)
BY ADOLPHE COHN
OLTAIRE, whose real name was François Marie Arouet, is cer-
tainly the most influential of the numerous writers that
have been produced by France. He was born in Paris on
November 21st, 1694, and died in the same city on May 30th, 1778.
At the time of his birth Louis XIV. was still the absolute ruler of
France; no one dared to question his divine right to the crown, or to
resist his clearly expressed will. When he died, public opinion had
become so irresistible a power that King Louis XVI. had been com-
pelled, much gainst his desire, to assist the revolted colonies of North
America in their struggle against the English King; and that eleven
years later the French also determined to begin a revolution, the
object of which was to establish free and equal government over the
ruins of the old system. Of the transformation which had taken
place between the dates of 1694 and 1778, Voltaire had been the chief
artisan.
His family, like that of most of the great writers of France, be-
longed to the ranks of the middle class. His father had, as a notary
and as the confidential legal adviser of numerous influential families,
amassed a comfortable fortune; and occupied late in life an hon-
orable official position, which connected him with the highest court
of law in France, – the Parliament of Paris. His mother, Catherine
Daumars, was connected with several families of the nobility. He
received the best education which a French bourgeois could then
give to his son. His chief educators were the Jesuit Fathers,— in
whose best college, the College Louis-le-Grand, he received all his
early schooling - and a certain Abbé de Châteauneuf, a worldly abbé
of aristocratic birth, to whose care he had been intrusted by his
mother, whom he lost when only seven years of age. The abbé
made it his business to introduce his young charge into the most
aristocratic and witty, but withal, dissolute circles of French society.
The young man's wit and inborn charm of manners, his ease in com-
posing pleasing and light verses, his close attention whenever older
people spoke of whatever important events they had acted in or wit-
nessed, made him at once a very great favorite.


## p. 15450 (#400) ##########################################

15450
VOLTAIRE
Louis XIV. died in 1715, when young Arouet was just coming of
age. He had not published anything yet, but had already determined
to make a name for himself as a man of letters, and not simply to
increase the family's fortune as a law practitioner, according to his
father's desire. He already possessed more worldly experience than
a great many older men. A journey in Holland, which he had made
as secretary to the French ambassador there, Marquis de Château-
neuf,— and which had come abruptly to an end on account of a
somewhat pathetic love affair with a Protestant maiden, Mademoiselle
Olympe Dunoyer,— had enabled him to acquire a knowledge of what
was perhaps most interesting in Europe at that time: the republican
government of the Netherlands, and the society of Huguenot refugees
who had left France twenty or thirty years before rather than aban-
don their faith.
He was then ready to present to the public whatever ideas of his
he deemed sufficiently matured for publication. But he was soon to
discover, at his own expense, what is the meaning of absolute power,
and what a disturbing force it becomes in the hands of incompetent
rulers. The duties of royalty were then performed by the Duke
of Orleans, regent of France during the minority of his child cousin,
King Louis XV. Able and witty, but without any principle of mo-
rality, the regent laid himself open to criticism of the sharpest kind;
and young Arouet was not the most merciful of his judges. Twice
the young man, on account of his freedom of utterance, received
peremptory orders to leave Paris and reside at some spot designated
by the government; a third time, for a Latin inscription which he
had written, and some French verses, the authorship of which he
was erroneously credited with, he was arrested and sent as a State
prisoner to the Bastille, where he remained nearly a year (1717-18).
A few months after the end of his imprisonment he suddenly became
famous. His tragedy of Edipus' had been performed with the great-
est success, and he was hailed as the legitimate syccessor of Corneille
and Racine (1718).
Several years followed of intense literary activity, during which
he gave a number of plays and composed numerous poems, two
of which for the first time presented some of the ideas with which
his name has become identified, — the 'Epistle to Urania,' which sets
forth some of the principles of natural religion, and the epic poem
which later, when more developed, became the Henriade. ' The lat-
ter work, of which King Henry IV. of France is the hero, is from
beginning to end an eloquent plea for religious toleration, and a no
less eloquent denunciation of religious fanaticism. Its most celebrated
passage is the narrative of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's
night, related by Henry of Navarre to Queen Elizabeth.
>


## p. 15451 (#401) ##########################################

VOLTAIRE
15451
one
9
He was
soon sent to the Bastille again (1726), on account of a
quarrel with a disreputable young nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan,
who had had Voltaire beaten almost to death by his servants. He
was released, however, a few days later, on a promise that he would
at once set out for England, where he resided a little over two years
(1726–28). These were for him years of study. He managed to
acquaint himself with the language, literature, institutions, and social
life of England, as few travelers have ever done in so short a time.
Before he left the country he succeeded in writing English very
creditably; as is shown by two essays that he published while there,
on the civil wars of France, the other on epic poetry. Their
object was to prepare the English public for the issuing of a new
and enlarged edition of his poem on Henry IV. , which was dedicated
to the Queen of England.
He carried back to France a small volume, the effect of which on
the reading public of continental Europe, but especially of France,
cannot be overestimated. It is a collection of twenty-four letters,
which were first published in an English translation with the title of
(Letters concerning the English Nation, and afterwards in France
under a different title, — Philosophical Letters. His object in this
work was to show to his countrymen that national peace, happiness,
and power, were not dependent upon the existence of such a gov-
ernment as they were living under. The main points to which he
called their attention were individual liberty, as protected by the
habeas corpus act; political liberty, as secured by the Magna Charta;
religious toleration, as demonstrated by the existence in the country
of numerous Christian denominations, living at peace with each other;
respect for men of letters, as shown by the high positions filled in
the State by such men as Joseph Addison and Matthew Prior; the
existence of an English literature, then all-but unknown in France,
which heard from him for the first tim the name of Shakespeare;
the existence of English philosophy with Locke, and of English
science with Sir Isaac Newton, whose theory of universal attraction
he popularized through years of untiring efforts; etc. No wonder
such a book was not very acceptable to the autocratic government of
France. Its publication was not authorized; an unauthorized edition
however appeared in 1734, and Voltaire, as the writer had come to
call himself since the performance of Edipus,' came near being sent
to the Bastille for the third time.
He was then a rich man. Influential friends had helped him to
invest his share of his father's estate partly in speculative ventures,
partly in military contracts. He lived in a somewhat grand style in
the château of Cirey, in Lorraine; which was the property of a great
admirer of his, the Marquise du Châtelet, who translated Newton's
Principia into French. He composed there a number of plays.


## p. 15452 (#402) ##########################################

15452
VOLTAIRE
(
(
He had already had, however, his greatest dramatic triumph with
(Zaire); a play in which, even more than in his Brutus,' we can dis-
cern the influence of Shakespeare. Among the plays that followed,
the most remarkable were Mahomet,' a plea against fanaticism,
which he dedicated to Pope Benedict XIV. ; and Alzire,' a new plea
for religious toleration, hardly less eloquent than the Henriade. He
had also published his first historical work, a history of Charles XII.
of Sweden; a marvelous piece of narrative, in which the philosophi-
cal historian already appears in many a reflection upon the folly of
war and the sufferings it entails upon the people. The ideas he
stood for were more clearly expressed, however, in such works as his
philosophical poems; Discourses upon Man,' an imitation of Pope's
Essay on Man’; and his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton. '
His increasing popularity compelled even the court to grant him
recognition. In 1745 he was appointed historiographer of France, in
1746 he was elected a member of the French Academy, and in the
same year made by the King a gentleman of his bedchamber. This
constituted him a member of the nobility.
His favor at court lasted but a short time, however. He had soon
to hide in the residence of his friend, the Duchesse du Maine, where
he wrote his first philosophical tales, Zadig' and Micromegas);
new vehicles for the ideas that had already been expressed in the
(Henriade,' the Philosophical Letters,' the Charles XII. ,' etc.
Madame du Châtelet's death (1749) brought about a great change
in his life. After a short stay in Paris he accepted an invitation
from King Frederick II. of Prussia, who had since 1736 been one of
his regular correspondents, and who had for years begged him to
take up his residence at the Prussian court. Voltaire lived at Berlin
and Potsdain about three years, the most important event in which
was his publication of the Age of Louis XIV. ? ; a historical work
which he had been perfecting for upwards of twenty years, and
which was received by the public as no historical work had ever
been. Even to-day it retains its rank as one of the most interest-
ing and one of the broadest books of history ever written.