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Dante once prepared to paint an angel:
Whom to please ? You whisper “Beatrice. ”
While he mused and traced it and retraced it,
(Peradventure with a pen corroded
Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for
When, his left hand i' the hair o' the wicked,
Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma,
## p. 2590 (#150) ###########################################
2590
ROBERT BROWNING
Bit into the live man's flesh for parchment,
Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle,
Let the wretch go festering through Florence) -
Dante, who loved well because he hated,
Hated wickedness that hinders loving,
Dante standing, studying his angel-
In there broke the folk of his Inferno.
Says he - "Certain people of importance
(Such he gave his daily dreadful line to)
«Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet. ”
Says the poet - «Then I stopped my painting. ”
You and I would rather see that angel
Painted by the tenderness of Dante -
Would we not ? -- than read a fresh Inferno.
You and I will never see that picture.
While he mused on love and Beatrice,
While he softened o'er his outlined angel,
In they broke, those people of importance ;
We and Bice bear the loss forever.
What of Rafael's sonnets, Dante's picture ?
This: no artist lives and loves, that longs not
Once, and only once, and for one only;
(Ah, the prize! ) to find his love a language
Fit and fair and simple and sufficient
Using nature that's an art to others,
Not, this one time, art that's turned his nature.
Ay, of all the artists living, loving,
None but would forego his proper dowry.
Does he paint ? he fain would write a poem;
Does he write ? he fain would paint a picture:
Put to proof art alien to the artist's,
Once, and only once, and for one only,
So to be the man and leave the artist,
Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow.
Wherefore? Heaven's gift takes earth's abatement !
He who smites the rock and spreads the water,
Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him,
Even he the minute makes immortal
Proves perchance but mortal in the minute,
Desecrates belike the deed in doing.
While he smites, how can he but remember
So he smote before, in such a peril,
## p. 2591 (#151) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2591
When they stood and mocked—“Shall smiting help us? ”
When they drank and sneered—“A stroke is easy! »
When they wiped their mouths and went their journey,
Throwing him for thanks –“But drought was pleasant. ”
Thus old memories mar the actual triumph;
Thus the doing savors of disrelish;
Thus achievement lacks a gracious somewhat;
O’er-importuned brows becloud the mandate,
Carelessness or consciousness — the gesture.
For he bears an ancient wrong about him,
Sees and knows again those phalanxed faces,
Hears, yet one time more, the 'customed prelude —
“How shouldst thou, of all men, smite, and save us ? »
Guesses what is like to prove the sequel –
«Egypt's flesh-pots -- nay, the drought was better. ”
Oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant!
Theirs the Sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance,
Right-arm's rod-sweep, tongue's imperial fiat.
Never dares the man put off the prophet.
Did he love one face from out the thousands
(Were she Jethro's daughter, white and wifely,
Were she but the Æthiopian bondslave),
He would envy yon dumb patient camel,
Keeping a reserve of scanty water
Meant to save his own life in the desert;
Ready in the desert to deliver
(Kneeling down to let his breast be opened)
Hoard and life together for his mistress.
I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me;
So it seems: I stand on my attainment.
This of verse alone, one life allows me;
Verse and nothing else have I to give you.
Other heights in other lives, God willing :
All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love!
Yet a semblance of resource avails us —
Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it.
Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly,
Lines I write the first time and the last time.
He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush,
Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly,
## p. 2592 (#152) ###########################################
2592
ROBERT BROWNING
Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little,
Makes a strange art of an art familiar,
Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets.
He who blows through bronze may breathe through silver,
Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess.
He who writes may write for once as I do.
Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all, and use their service,
Speak from every mouth, — the speech a poem.
Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows,
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving:
I am mine and yours — the rest be all men's,
Karshish, Cleon, Norbert, and the fifty.
Let me speak this once in my true person,
Not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea,
Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence:
Pray you, look on these, my men and women,
Take and keep my fifty poems finished;
Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also!
Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things.
Not but that you know me! Lo, the moon's self!
Here in London, yonder late in Florence,
Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured.
Curving on a sky imbrued with color,
Drifted over Fiesole by twilight,
Came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth.
Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato,
Rounder 'twixt the cypresses and rounder,
Perfect till the nightingales applauded.
Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished,
Hard to greet, she traverses the house-roofs,
Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver,
Goes dispiritedly, glad to finish.
What, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy ?
Nay: for if that moon could love a mortal,
Use to charm him (so to fit a fancy),
All her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos),
She would turn a new side to her mortal,
Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman
Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace,
Blind to Galileo on his turret,
## p. 2593 (#153) ###########################################
ROBERT BROWNING
2593
Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats — him, even!
Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal —
When she turns round, comes again in heaven,
Opens out anew for worse or better!
Proves she like some portent of an iceberg
Swimming full upon the ship it founders,
Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals ?
Proves she as the paved work of a sapphire
Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain ?
Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu
Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest,
Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire.
Like the bodied heaven in his clearness
Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work,
When they ate and drank and saw God also!
What were seen ? None knows, none ever shall know.
Only this is sure — the sight were other,
Not the moon's same side, born late in Florence,
Dying now impoverished here in London.
God be thanked, the meanest of his cteatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!
This I say of me, but think of you, Love!
This to you — yourself my moon of poets!
Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder;
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you!
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you —
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.
But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.
Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas,
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno,
Wrote one song - and in my brain I sing it,
Drew one angel – borne, see, on my bosom!
R. B.
VI-163
## p. 2594 (#154) ###########################################
2594
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
(1803-1876)
was
KRESTES BROWNSON, in his time, was a figure of striking origi-
nality and influence in American literature and American
political, philosophical, and religious discussion. His career
an exceptional one; for he was connected with some of the
most important contemporaneous movements of thought, and passed
through several distinct phases: Presbyterianism, Universalism, Social-
ism — of a mild and benevolent kind, not to be confused with the
later fiery and destructive socialism of “the Reds”; afterward sym-
pathizing somewhat with the aims and
tendencies of the New England Transcend-
entalists; a close intellectual associate of
Ralph Waldo Emerson; then the apostle of
a «new Christianity”; — finally becoming a
Roman Catholic.
Coming of old Connecticut stock on his
father's side, he was born in Vermont, Sep-
tember 16th, 1803; and, notwithstanding
that he was brought up in poverty on a
farm with small opportunity for education,
contrived in later years to make himself
ORESTES BROWNSON
a thorough scholar in various directions,
mastering several languages, acquiring a
wide knowledge of history, reading deeply in philosophy, and devel-
oping marked originality in setting forth new philosophical views.
His bent in childhood was strongly religious; and he even believed,
at that period of his life, that he held long conversations with the
sacred personages of Holy Scripture. Yet while in manhood he
devoted many years and much of his energy to preaching, his
character was aggressive and his tone controversial, he however
revealed many traits of real gentleness and humility, and the
mixture of rugged strength and tenderness in his character and his
work won him a large following in whatever position he took.
He performed the remarkable feat, when the support of American
letters was slight, of founding and conducting almost single-handed,
from 1838 to 1843, his famous Quarterly Review, which was a power
in the land. He started it again in 1844 as Brownson's Quarterly
Review,' and resumed it thirty years later in still a third series.
## p. 2595 (#155) ###########################################
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
2595
He died in 1876 at Detroit, much of his active career having been
passed in Boston, and some of his later years at Seton Hall, New
Jersey.
His various changes of belief have often been taken as an index
of vacillation; but a simple and candid study of his writings shows
that such changes were merely the normal progress of an intensely
earnest and sincere mind, which never hesitated to avow its honest
convictions nor to admit its errors. This is the quality which gives
Brownson his vitality as a mind and an author; and he will be found
to be consistent with conscience throughout.
His writings are forceful, eloquent, and lucid in style, with a
Websterian massiveness that does not detract from their charm.
They fill twenty volumes, divided into groups of essays on Civiliza-
tion, Controversy, Religion, Philosophy, Scientific Theories, and Popu-
lar Literature, which cover a great and fascinating variety of topics
in detail. Brownson was an intense and patriotic American, and his
national quality comes out strongly in his extended treatise (The
American Republic) (1865). The best known of his other works is
a candid, vigorous, and engaging autobiography entitled “The Con-
vert) (1853).
SAINT-SIMONISM
From "The Convert )
I"
F I drew my doctrine of Union in part from the eclecticism
of Cousin, I drew my views of the Church and of the re-
organization of the race from the Saint-Simonians,-a philo-
sophico-religious or a politico-philosophical sect that sprung up in
France under the Restoration, and figured largely for a year
or two under the monarchy of July. Their founder was Claude
Henri, Count de Saint-Simon, a descendant of the Duc de Saint-
Simon, well known as the author of the Memoirs. He was
born in 1760, entered the army at the age of seventeen, and the
year after came to this country, where he served with distinction
in our Revolutionary War under Bouillié. After the peace of
1783 he devoted two years to the study of our people and insti-
tutions, and then returned to France. Hardly had he returned
before he found himself in the midst of the French Revolution,
which he regarded as the practical application of the principles
or theories adopted by the reformers of the sixteenth century
and popularized by the philosophers of the eighteenth. He
looked upon that revolution, we are told, as having only a
## p. 2596 (#156) ###########################################
2596
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
even
destructive mission - necessary, important, but inadequate to the
wants of humanity; and instead of being carried away by it as
were most of the young men of his age and his principles, he
set himself at work to amass materials for the erection of a
new social edifice on the ruins of the old, which should stand
and improve in solidity, strength, grandeur, and beauty forever.
The way he seems to have taken to amass these materials
was to engage with a partner in some grand speculations for the
accumulation of wealth, — and speculations too, it is said, not of
the most honorable or the most honest character. His
plans succeeded for a time, and he became very rich, as did
many others in those troublous times; but he finally met with
reverses, and lost all but the wrecks of his fortune. He then
for a number of years plunged into all manner of vice, and
indulged to excess in every species of dissipation; not, we are
told, from love of vice, any inordinate desire, or any impure
affection, but for the holy purpose of preparing himself by his
experience for the great work of redeeming man and securing
for him a Paradise on earth. Having gained all that expe-
rience could give him in the department of vice, he then pro-
ceeded to consult the learned professors of L'École Polytechnique
for seven or ten years, to make himself master of science, litera-
ture, and the fine arts in all their departments, and to place
himself at the level of the last attainments of the race. Thus
qualified to be the founder of a new social organization, he
wrote several books, in which he deposited the germs of his
ideas, or rather the germs of the future; most of which have
hitherto remained unpublished.
But now that he was so well qualified for his work he found
himself a beggar, and had as yet made only a single disciple.
He was reduced to despair and attempted to take his own life;
but failed, the ball only grazing his sacred forehead. His faith-
ful disciple was near him, saved him, and aroused him into life
and hope. When he recovered he found that he had fallen into
a gross error. He had been a materialist, an atheist, and had
discarded all religious ideas as long since outgrown by the
human race. He had proposed to organize the human race with
materials furnished by the senses alone, and by the aid of pos-
itive science. He owns his fault, and conceives and brings forth
a new Christianity, consigned to a small pamphlet entitled Nou-
veau Christianisme,' which was immediately published. This
## p. 2597 (#157) ###########################################
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
2597
done, his mission was ended, and he died May 19th, 1825, and I
suppose was buried.
Saint-Simon, the preacher of a new Christianity, very soon
attracted disciples, chiefly from the pupils of the Polytechnic
School; ardent and lively young men, full of enthusiasm, brought
up without faith in the gospel and yet unable to live without
religion of some sort. Among the active members of the sect
were at one time Pierre Leroux, Jules and Michel Chevalier,
Lerininier, [and] my personal friend Dr. Poyen, who initiated me
and so many others in New England into the mysteries of ani-
mal magnetism. Dr. Poyen was, I believe, a native of the
island of Guadeloupe; a man of more ability than he usually had
credit for, of solid learning, genuine science, and honest inten-
tions. I knew him well and esteemed him highly. When I
knew him his attachment to the new religion was much weak-
ened, and he often talked to me of the old Church, and assured
me that he felt at times that he must return to her bosom. I
owe him many hints which turned my thoughts toward Catholic
principles, and which, with God's grace, were of much service to
me. These and many others were in the sect; whose chiefs,
after the death of its founder, were — Bazard, a Liberal and a
practical man, who killed himself; and Enfantin, who after the
dissolution of the sect sought employment in the service of the
Viceroy of Egypt, and occupies now some important post in con-
nection with the French railways.
The sect began in 1826 by addressing the working classes;
but their success was small. In 1829 they came out of their
narrow circle, assumed a bolder tone, addressed themselves to the
general public, and became in less than eighteen months a
Parisian mode. In 1831 they purchased the Globe newspaper,
made it their organ, and distributed gratuitously five thousand
copies daily. In 1832 they had established a central propagand-
ism in Paris, and had their missionaries in most of the depart-
ments of France. They attacked the hereditary peerage, and it
fell; they seemed to be numerous and strong, and I believed for
a moment in their complete success. They called their doctrine
a religion, their ministers priests, and their organization a
church; and as such they claimed to be recognized by the State,
and to receive from it a subvention as other religious denomina-
tions [did). But the courts decided that Saint-Simonism was not
a religion and its ministers were not religious teachers. This
## p. 2598 (#158) ###########################################
2598
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
(or the
decision struck them with death. Their prestige vanished. They
scattered, dissolved in thin air, and went off, as Carlyle would
say, into endless vacuity, as do sooner or later all shams and
unrealities.
Saint-Simon himself, who as presented to us by his disciples
is a half-mythic personage, seems, so far as I can judge by those
of his writings that I have seen, to have been a man of large
ability and laudable intentions; but I have not been able to find
any new
or original thoughts of which he was the indisputable
father. His whole system, if system he had, is summed up in
the two maxims «Eden is before us, not behind us
Golden Age of the poets is in the future, not in the past), and
“Society ought to be so organized as to tend in the most rapid
manner possible to the continuous moral, intellectual, and
physical amelioration of the poorer and more numerous classes. "
He simply adopts the doctrine of progress set forth with so
much flash eloquence by Condorcet, and the
the philanthropic
doctrine with regard to the laboring classes, or the people,
defended by Barbeuf and a large section of the French Revolu-
tionists. His religion was not so much as the Theophilanthropy
attempted to be introduced by some members of the French
Directory: it admitted God in name, and in name did not deny
Jesus Christ, but it rejected all mysteries, and reduced religion
to mere socialism. It conceded that Catholicity had been the
true Church down to the pontificate of Leo X. , because down to
that time its ministers had taken the lead in directing the intelli-
gence and labors of mankind, had aided the progress of civil.
ization, and promoted the well-being of the poorer and more
numerous classes. But since Leo X. , who made of the Papacy a
secular principality, it had neglected its mission, had ceased to
labor for the poorer and more numerous classes, had leagued
itself with the ruling orders, and lent all its influence to uphold
tyrants and tyranny. A new church was needed; a church
which should realize the ideal of Jesus Christ, and tend directly
and constantly to the moral, physical, and social amelioration of
the poorer and more numerous classes, - in other words, the
greatest happiness in this life of the greatest number, the
principle of Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarian school.
His disciples enlarged upon the hints of the master, and
attributed to him ideas which he never entertained. They en-
deavored to reduce his hints to a complete system of religion,
## p. 2599 (#159) ###########################################
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
2599
philosophy, and social organization. Their chiefs, I have said,
were Amand Bazard and Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin.
Bazard took the lead in what related to the external, political,
and economical organization, and Enfantin in what regarded doc-
trine and worship. The philosophy or theology of the sector
school was derived principally from Hegel, and was a refined
Pantheism. Its Christology was the unity, not union, of the
divine and human; and the Incarnation symbolized the unity of
God and man, or the Divinity manifesting himself in humanity,
and making humanity substantially divine,- the very doctrine in
reality which I myself had embraced even before I had heard
of the Saint-Simonians, if not before they had published it. The
religious organization was founded on the doctrine of the pro-
gressive nature of man, and the maxim that all institutions
should tend in the most speedy and direct manner possible to
the constant amelioration of the moral, intellectual, and physical
condition of the poorer and more numerous classes. Socially
men were to be divided into three classes, - artists, savans, and
industrials or working men, corresponding to the psychological
division of the human faculties. The soul has three powers or
faculties, - to love, to know, and to act. Those in whom the
love-faculty is predominant belong to the class of artists, those
in whom the knowledge-faculty is predominant belong to the
class of savans, the scientific and the learned, and in fine, those
in whom the act-faculty predominates belong to the industrial
class. This classification places every man in the social category
for which he is fitted, and to which he is attracted by his nature.
These several classes are to be hierarchically organized under
chiefs or priests, who are respectively priests of the artists, of
the scientific, and of the industrials, and are, priests and all, to
be subjected to a supreme Father, Père Suprême, and a Supreme
Mother, Mère Suprême.
The economical organization is to be based on the maxims,
“To each one according to his capacity,” and “To each capacity
according to its work. ” Private property is to be retained, but
its transmission by inheritance or testamentary disposition must
be abolished. The property is to be held by a tenure resembling
that of gavel-kind. It belongs to the community, and the priests,
chiefs, or brehons, as the Celtic tribes call them, to distribute it
for life to individuals, and to each individual according to his
capacity. It was supposed that in this way the advantages of
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2600
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
man.
both common and individual property might be secured. Some-
thing of this prevailed originally in most nations, and a reminis-
cence of it still exists in the village system among the Slavonic
tribes of Russia and Poland; and nearly all jurists maintain that
the testamentary right by which a man disposes of his goods
after his natural death, as well as that by which a child inherits
from the parent, is a municipal, not a natural right.
The most striking feature in the Saint-Simonian scheme was
the rank and position it assigned to woman. It asserted the
absolute equality of the sexes, and maintained that either sex is
incomplete without the other. Man is an incomplete individual
without woman. Hence a religion, a doctrine, a social institution
founded by one sex alone is incomplete, and can never be ade-
quate to the wants of the race or a definite order. This idea
was also entertained by Frances Wright, and appears to be
entertained by all our Women's Rights folk of either sex. The
old civilization was masculine, not male and female as God made
Hence its condemnation. The Saint-Simonians, therefore,
proposed to place by the side of their sovereign Father at the
summit of their hierarchy a sovereign Mother. The man to be
sovereign Father they found; but a woman to be sovereign
Mother, Mère Suprême, they found not. This caused great em-
barrassment, and a split between Bazard and Enfantin. Bazard
was about marrying his daughter, and he proposed to place her
marriage under the protection of the existing French laws. En-
fantin opposed his doing so, and called it a sinful compliance
with the prejudices of the world. The Saint-Simonian society,
he maintained, was a State, a kingdom within itself, and should
be governed by its own laws and its own chiefs without any
recognition of those without. Bazard persisted, and had the
marriage of his daughter solemnized in a legal manner, and for
aught I know, according to the rites of the Church.
scandal followed. Bazard charged Enfantin with denying Christ-
ian marriage, and with holding loose notions on the subject.
Enfantin replied that he neither denied nor affirmed Christian
marriage; that in enacting the existing law on the subject man
alone had been consulted, and he could not recognize it as law
till woman had given her consent to it. As yet the society was
only provisionally organized, inasmuch as they had not yet found
the Mère Suprême. The law on marriage must emanate con-
jointly from the Supreme Father and the Supreme Mother, and
A great
## p. 2601 (#161) ###########################################
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
2601
it would be irregular and a usurpation for the Supreme Father
to undertake alone to legislate on the subject. Bazard would not
submit, and went out and shot himself. Most of the politicians
abandoned the association; and Père Enfantin, almost in despair,
dispatched twelve apostles to Constantinople to find in the Turk-
ish harems the Supreme Mother. After a year they returned
and reported that they were unable to find her; and the society,
condemned by the French courts as immoral, broke up, and
broke up because no woman could be found to be its mother.
And so they ended, having risen, flourished, and decayed in less
than a single decade.
The points in the Saint-Simonian movement that arrested my
attention and commanded my belief were what it will seem
strange to my readers could ever have been doubted, — its asser-
tion of a religious future for the human race, and that religion,
in the future as well as in the past, must have an organization,
and a hierarchical organization. Its classification of men accord-
ing to the predominant psychological faculty in each, into artists,
savans, and industrials, struck me as very well; and the maxims
“To each according to his capacity,” and “To each capacity
according to its works,” as evidently just, and desirable if prac-
ticable. The doctrine of the Divinity in Humanity, of progress,
of no essential antagonism between the spiritual and the material,
and of the duty of shaping all institutions for the speediest and
continuous moral, intellectual, and physical amelioration of the
poorer and more numerous classes, I already held. I was rather
pleased than otherwise with the doctrine with regard to property,
and thought it a decided improvement on that of a community of
goods. The doctrine with regard to the relation of the sexes I
rather acquiesced in than approved. I was disposed to maintain,
as the Indian said, that “woman is the weaker canoe,” and to
assert my marital prerogatives; but the equality of the sexes was
asserted by nearly all my friends, and I remained generally silent
on the subject, till some of the admirers of Harriet Martineau
and Margaret Fuller began to scorn equality and to claim for
woman superiority. Then I became roused, and ventured to
assert my masculine dignity.
It is remarkable that most reformers find fault with the
Christian law of marriage, and propose to alter the relations
which God has established both in nature and the gospel between
the sexes; and this is generally the rock on which they split.
## p. 2602 (#162) ###########################################
2602
ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON
(
Women do not usually admire men who cast off their manhood
or are unconscious of the rights and prerogatives of the stronger
sex; and they admire just as little those strong-minded women
who strive to excel only in the masculine virtues. I have never
been persuaded that it argues well for a people when its women
are men and its men women. Yet I trust I have always honored
and always shall honor woman. I raise no question as to
woman's equality or inequality with man, for comparisons cannot
be made between things not of the same kind. Woman's sphere
and office in life are as high, as holy, as important as man's, but
different; and the glory of both man and woman is for each to
act well the part assigned to each by Almighty God.
The Saint-Simonian writings made me familiar with the idea
of a hierarchy, and removed from my mind the prejudices against
the Papacy generally entertained by my countrymen. Their pro-
posed organization, I saw, might be good and desirable if their
priests, their Supreme Father and Mother, could really be the
wisest, the best, — not merely the nominal but the real chiefs of
society. Yet what security have I that they will be? Their
power was to have no limit save their own wisdom and love, but
who would answer for it that these would always be an effectual
limit? How were these priests or chiefs to be designated and
installed in their office?
By popular election ?
By popular election ? But popular elec-
tion often passes over the proper man and takes the improper.
Then as to the assignment to each man of a capital proportioned
to his capacity to begin life with, what certainty is there that the
rules of strict right will be followed ? that wrong will not often
be done, both voluntarily and involuntarily? Are your chiefs to
be infallible and impeccable? Still the movement interested me,
and many of its principles took firm hold of me and held me
for years in a species of mental thraldom; insomuch that I found
it difficult, if not impossible, either to refute them or to har.
monize them with other principles which I also held, or rather
which held me, and in which I detected no unsoundness. Yet I
imbibed no errors from the Saint-Simonians; and I can say of
them as of the Unitarians, — they did me no harm, but were in
my fallen state the occasion of much good to me.
## p. 2603 (#163) ###########################################
2603
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
(1849-)
BY ADOLPHE COHN
ERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE, the celebrated French literary critic,
was born in Toulon, the great military Mediterranean sea-
port of France, in the year 1849. His studies were begun
in the college of his native city and continued in Paris, in the Lycée
Louis le Grand, where in the class of philosophy he came under
Professor Émile Charles, by whose original and profound though
decidedly sad way of thinking he was powerfully influenced. His
own ambition then was to become a teacher in the University of
France, an ambition which seemed unlikely
to be ever realized, as he failed to secure
admission to the celebrated École Normale
Supérieure, in the competitive examination
which leads up to that school. Strangely
enough, about fifteen years later he was,
though not in possession of any very high
University degree, appointed to the Profes-
sorship of French Literature in the school
which he had been unable to enter as a
scholar, and his appointment received the
hearty indorsement of all the leading edu-
cational authorities in France.
For several years after leaving the Lycée FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
Louis le Grand, while completing his liter-
ary outfit by wonderfully extensive reading. Ferdinand Brunetière
lived on stray orders for work for publishers. He seldom succeeded
in getting these, and when he got any they were seldom filled.
Thus he happened to be commissioned by the firm of Germer,
Baillière and Company to write a history of Russia, which never was
and to all appearances never will be written. The event which
determined the direction of his career was the acceptance by the
Revue des Deux Mondes, in 1875, of an article upon contemporary
French novelists. François Buloz, the energetic and imperious founder
and editor of the world-famed French bi-monthly, felt that he had
found in the young critic the man whom French literary circles had
been waiting for, and who was to be Sainte-Beuve's successor; and
François Buloz was a man who seldom made mistakes.
## p. 2604 (#164) ###########################################
2604
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
a
man
French literary criticism was just then at
very low ebb.
Sainte-Beuve had been dead about five years; his own contempo-
raries, Edmond Schérer for instance, were getting old and discouraged;
the new generation seemed to be turning unanimously, in conse-
quence of the disasters of the Franco-German war and of the
Revolution of September, 1870, to military or political activity. The
only form of literature which had power to attract young writers
was the novel, which they could fill with the description of all the
passions then agitating the public mind.
That a
of real
intellectual strength should then give his undivided attention to pure
literature seemed a most unlikely phenomenon; but all had to
acknowledge that the unlikely had happened, soon after Ferdinand
Brunetière had become the regular literary critic of the Revue des
Deux Mondes.
Fortunately the new critic did not undertake to walk in the foot-
steps of Sainte-Beuve. In the art of presenting to the reader the
marrow of a writer's work, of making the writer himself known by
the description of his surroundings, the narrative of his life, the
study of the forces by which he was influenced, the illustrious author
of the Causeries du Lundi remains to this day without a rival or a
continuator. Ferdinand Brunetière had a different conception of the
duties of a literary critic. The one fault with which thoughtful
readers were apt to charge Sainte-Beuve was, that he failed to pass
judgment upon the works and writers; and this failure was often,
and not altogether unjustly, ascribed to a certain weakness in his
grasp of principles, a certain faint-heartedness whenever it became
necessary to take sides. Any one who studies Brunetière can easily
see that from the start his chief concern was to make it impossible
for any one to charge him with the same fault. He came in with a
set of principles which he has since upheld with remarkable stead-
fastness and courage. In an age when nearly every one was turning
to the future and advocating the doctrine and the necessity of
progress, when the chief fear of most men was that they should
appear too much afraid of change, Brunetière proclaimed time and
again that there was no safety for any nation or set of men except
in a stanch adherence to tradition. He bade his readers turn their
minds away from the current literature of the day, and take hold of
the exemplars of excellence handed down to us by the great men
of the past.
Together with tradition he upheld authority, and there-
fore preferred to all others the period in which French literature
and society had most willingly submitted to authority, that is, the
seventeenth century and the reign of Louis XIV. When compelled
to speak of the literature of the day, he did it in no uncertain
tones. His book "The Naturalistic Novel' consists of a series of
## p. 2605 (#165) ###########################################
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
2605
articles in which he studies Zola and his school, upholding the old
doctrine that there are things in life which must be kept out of the
domain of art and cannot be therein introduced without lowering the
ideal of man. Between the naturalistic and the idealistic novel he
unhesitatingly declares for the latter, and places George Sand far
above the author of L'Assommoir. '
But the great success of his labors cannot be said to have been
due solely or even mainly to the principles he advocated. Other
critics have appeared since Messrs. Jules Lemaître and Anatole
France, for instance, — who antagonize almost everything that he de-
fends and defend almost everything that he antagonizes, and whose
success has hardly been inferior to his. Neither is it due to any
charm in his style. Brunetière's sentences are compact, indeed,
strongly knit together,— but decidedly heavy and at times even
clumsy. What he has to say he always says strongly, but not grace-
fully. He has a remarkable appreciation of the value of the words
of the French language, but his arrangement of them is seldom free
from mannerisms. What, then, has made him the foremost literary
critic of the present day? The answer is, knowledge and sincerity.
No writer of the present day, save perhaps Anatole France, is so
accurately informed of every fact that bears upon literary history.
Every argument he brings forward is supported by an array of
incontrovertible facts that is simply appalling. No one can argue
with him who does not first subject himself to the severest kind of
training, go through a mass of tedious reading, become familiar with
dates to the point of handling them as nimbly as a bank clerk
handles the figures of a check list. And all this comes forward in
Brunetière's articles in the most natural, we had almost said casual
way. The fact takes its place unheralded in the reasoning. It is
there because it has to be there, not because the writer wishes to
make a display of his wonderful knowledge; and thus it happens
that Ferdinand Brunetière's literary articles are perhaps the most
instructive ones ever written in the French language. They are
moreover admirably trustworthy. It would
to this
author's mind to hide a fact that goes against any of his theories.
He feels so sure of being in the right that he is always willing to
give his opponents all that they can possibly claim.
Of late years, moreover, it must be acknowledged that Brune-
tière's mind has given signs of remarkable broadening. Under the
influence of the doctrine of evolution, he has undertaken to class all
literary facts as the great naturalists of the day have classed the
facts of physiology, and to show that literary forms spring from each
other by way of transformation in the same way as do the forms of
animal or vegetable life. Already three works have been produced
never
come
## p. 2606 (#166) ###########################################
2606
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
by him since he entered upon this new line of development: a his-
tory of literary criticism in France, which forms the first and
hitherto only published volume of a large work, The Evolution of
Literary Forms'; a work on the French drama, «The Periods of the
French Theatre'; and a treatise on modern French poetry, (The
Evolution of French Lyric Poetry during the Nineteenth Century
The second and last of these were first delivered by their author
from the professor's chair or the lecturer's platform, where he has
managed to display some of the greatest gifts of the public speaker.
Most of M. Brunetière's literary articles have been collected in
book form under the following titles: — Questions of Criticism'
(2 vols. ), History and Criticism? (3 vols. ), Critical Studies on the
History of French Literature (6 vols. ), 'The Naturalistic Novel
(1 vol. ).
At various times remarkable addresses have been delivered by
him on public occasions, in which he has often represented the
French Academy since his election to that illustrious body. Unfor-
tunately his productive literary activity has slackened of late. In
1895 he was called to the editorship of the Revue des Deux Mondes,
and since his assumption of this responsible editorial position he has
published only two or three articles, bearing upon moral and educa-
tional questions.
To pass final judgment upon a man whose development is far
from completed is an almost impossible task. Still it may be said
that with the exception of Sainte-Beuve's Causeries du Lundi and
Nouveaux Lundis,' nothing exists that can teach the reader so much
about the history of French literature as Brunetière's works. The
doctrinal side, to which the author himself undoubtedly attaches the
greatest importance, will strike the reader as often very questionable.
Too often Brunetière seems in his judgments to be quite unconsciously
actuated by a dislike of the accepted opinion of the present day.
His love of the past bears a look of defiance of the present, not
calculated to win the reader's assent. But even this does not go
without its good side. It gives to Brunetière's judgments a unity
which is seldom if ever found in the works of those whose chief
labors have been spent in the often ungrateful task of making a
hurried public acquainted with the uninterrupted stream of literary
production.
Adolphe are
## p. 2607 (#167) ###########################################
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
2607
TAINE AND PRINCE NAPOLEON
F
OR the last five or six months, since it has been known that
a prince, nephew, cousin, and son of emperors or kings
formerly very powerful, had proposed to answer the libel,
as he calls it, written by M. Taine about Napoleon, we have
been awaiting this reply with an impatience, a curiosity which
were equally justified, -- although for very different reasons, - by
M. Taine's reputation, by the glorious name of his antagonist,
by the greatness, and finally the national interest of the subject.
The book has just appeared; and if we can say without flat-
tery that it has revealed to us in the Prince a writer whose
existence we had not suspected, it is because we must at once
add that neither in its manner nor in its matter is the book
itself what it might have been. Prince Napoleon did not wish
to write a Life of Napoleon,' and nobody expected that of
him,- for after all, and for twenty different reasons, even had he
wished it he could not have done it. But to M. Taine's
Napoleon, since he did not find in him the true Napoleon, since
he declared him to be as much against nature as against history,
he could, and we expected that he would, have opposed his own
Napoleon. By the side of the “inventions of a writer whose
judgment had been misled and whose conscience had been ob-
scured by passion,” — these are his own words, — he could have
restored, as he promised in his Introduction, “the man and his
work in their living reality. ” And in our imaginations, on which
M. Taine's harsh and morose workmanship had engraven the
features of a modern Malatesta or modern Sforza, he could at
last substitute for them, as the inheritor of the name and the
dynastic claims, the image of the founder of contemporary
France, of the god of war. Unfortunately, instead of doing so,
it is M. Taine himself, it is his analytical method, it is the
witnesses whom M. Taine chose as his authorities, that Prince
Napoleon preferred to assail, as a scholar in an Academy who
descants upon the importance of the genuineness of a text, and
moreover with a freedom of utterance and a pertness of expres-
sion which on any occasion I should venture to pronounce decid-
edly insulting.
For it is a misfortune of princes, when they do us the honor
of discussing with us, that they must observe a moderation, a
## p. 2608 (#168) ###########################################
2608
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
reserve, a courtesy greater even than our own. It will therefore
be unanimously thought that it ill became Prince Napoleon to
address M. Taine in a tone which M. Taine would decline to use
in his answer, out of respect for the very name which he is
accused of slandering. It will be thought also that it ill became
him, when speaking of Miot de Melito, for instance, or of many
other servants of the imperial government, to seem to ignore that
princes also are under an obligation to those who have served
them well. Perhaps even it may be thought that it poorly
became him, when discussing or contradicting the Memoirs of
Madame de Rémusat,' to forget under what auspices the remains
of his uncle, the Emperor, were years ago carried in his city of
Paris. But what will be thought especially is, that he had some-
thing else to do than to split hairs in discussion of evidences;
that he had something far better to say, more peremptory and
to the point, and more literary besides, than to call M. Taine
names, to hurl at him the epithets of Entomologist, Material-
ist, Pessimist, Destroyer of Reputations, Iconoclast,” and to class
him as a "déboulonneur” among those who, in 1871, pulled
down the Colonne Vendôme.
Not, undoubtedly, that M. Taine — and we said so ourselves
more than once with perfect freedom -- if spending much patience
and conscientiousness in his search for documents, has always
displayed as much critical spirit and discrimination in the use he
made of them. We cannot understand why in his Napoleon
he accepted the testimony of Bourrienne, for instance, any more
than recently, in his Revolution, that of George Duval, or
again, in his Ancien Régime,' that of the notorious Soulavic.
M. Taine's documents
as a rule
not used by him as
foundation for his argument; no, he first takes his position, and
then he consults his library, or he goes to the original records,
with the hope of finding those documents that will support his rea-
soning But granting that, we must own that though different
from M. Taine's, Prince Napoleon's historical method is not
much better; that though in a different manner and in a differ-
ent direction, it is neither less partial nor less passionate: and
here is a proof of it.
Prince Napoleon blames M. Taine for quoting "eight times »
Bourrienne's Memoirs,' and then, letting his feelings loose, he
takes advantage of the occasion and cruelly besmirches Bourrienne's
Does he tell the truth or not? is he right at the bottom ?
are
a
name.
## p. 2609 (#169) ###########################################
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
2609
I do not know anything about it; I do not wish to know any.
thing; I do not need it, since I know, from other sources, that
Bourrienne's Memoirs' are hardly less spurious than, say, the
'Souvenirs of the Marquise de Créqui? or the Memoirs of Mon-
sieur d'Artagnan. But if these so-called Memoirs' are really
not his, what has Bourrienne himself to do here? and suppose the
former secretary of the First Consul to have been, instead of the
shameless embezzler whom Prince Napoleon so fully and so use-
lessly describes to us, the most honest man in the world, would
the Memoirs' be any more reliable, since it is a fact that he
wrote nothing?
And now I cannot but wonder at the tone in which those who
contradict M. Taine, and especially Prince Napoleon himself,
condescend to tell him that he lacks that which would be needed
in order to speak of Napoleon or the Revolution. But who is
it, then, that has what is needed in order to judge Napoleon ?
Frederick the Great, or Catherine II. , perhaps, – as Napoleon
himself desired, “his peers ”; or in other words, those who, born
as he was for war and government, can only admire, justify, and
glorify themselves in him. And who will judge the Revolution ?
Danton, we suppose, or Robespierre,—that is, the men who were
the Revolution itself. No: the real judge will be the average
opinion of men; the force that will create, modify, correct this
average opinion, the historians will be; and among the historians
of our time, in spite of Prince Napoleon, it will be M. Taine for
a large share.
THE LITERATURES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND GERMANY
TER
WICE at least in the course of their long history, it is known
that the literature and even the language of France has
exerted over the whole of Europe an influence, whose uni-
versal character other languages perhaps more harmonious, -
Italian for instance,- and other literatures more original in cer-
tain respects, like English literature, have never possessed. It
is in a purely French form that our mediæval poems, our Chan-
sons de Geste,' our Romances of the Round Table, our fabli.
aux themselves, whencesoever they came, - Germany or Tuscany,
England or Brittany, Asia or Greece,- conquered, fascinated,
charmed, from one end of Europe to the other, the imaginations
VI-164
## p. 2610 (#170) ###########################################
2610
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
our
of the Middle Ages. The amorous languor and the subtlety of
courteous poetry” are breathed no less by the madrigals
of Shakespeare himself than by Petrarch's sonnets; and after
such a long lapse of time we still discover something that comes
from us even in the Wagnerian drama, for instance in ‘Parsifal’
or in "Tristan and Isolde. ) A long time later, in a Europe belong-
ing entirely to classicism, from the beginning of the seventeenth
to the end of the eighteenth century, during one hundred and
fifty years or even longer, French literature possessed a real
sovereignty in Italy, in Spain, in England, and in Germany.
Do not the names of Algarotti, Bettinelli, Beccaria, Filengieri,
almost belong to France? What shall I say of the famous Gott-
schedt ? Shall I recall the fact that in his victorious struggle
against Voltaire, Lessing had to call in Diderot's assistance ?
And who ignores that if Rivarol wrote his Discourse upon the
Universality of the French Language, it can be charged neither
to his vanity nor to our national vanity, since he was himself
half Italian, and the subject had been proposed by the Academy
of Berlin ?
All sorts of reasons have been given for this universality of
French literature: some were statistical, if I may say so, some
geographical, political, linguistic. But the true one, the good
one, is different: it must be found in the supremely sociable
character of the literature itself. If at that time our great
writers were understood and appreciated by everybody, it is
because they were addressing everybody, or better, because they
were speaking to all concerning the interests of all. They were
attracted neither by exceptions nor by peculiarities: they cared to
treat only of man in general, or as is also said, of the univer-
sal man, restrained by the ties of human society; and their very
success shows that below all that distinguishes, say, an Italian
from a German, this universal man whose reality has so often
been discussed, persists and lives, and though constantly changing
never loses his own likeness.
In comparison with the literature of France, thus defined and
characterized by its sociable spirit, the literature of England is
an individualistic literature. Let us put aside, as
should be
done, the generation of Congreve and Wycherley, perhaps also
the generation of Pope and Addison, - to which, however, we
ought not to forget that Swift also belonged; — it seems that an
Englishman never writes except in order to give to himself the
## p. 2611 (#171) ###########################################
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
2611
external sensation of his own personality. Thence his humor,
which may be defined as the expression of the pleasure he feels
in thinking like nobody else. Thence, in England, the plente-
ousness, the wealth, the amplitude of the lyric vein; it being
granted that individualism is the very spring of lyric poetry, and
that an ode or an elegy is, as it were, the involuntary surging,
the outflowing of what is most intimate, most secret, most pecul-
iar in the poet's soul. Thence also the eccentricity of all the
great English writers when compared with the rest of the nation,
as though they became conscious of themselves only by distin-
guishing themselves from those who claim to differ from them
least. But is it not possible to otherwise characterize the litera-
ture of England ? It will be easily conceived that I dare not
assert such a thing; all I say here is, that I cannot better
express the differences which distinguish that literature from
our own.
That is also all I claim, in stating that the essential character
of the literature of Germany is, that it is philosophical. The
philosophers there are poets, and the poets are philosophers.
Goethe is to be found no more, or no less, in his Theory of
Colors' or in his Metamorphosis of Plants,' than in his “Divan'
or his Faust'; and lyrism, if I may use this trite expression,
is overflowing” in Schleiermacher's theology and in Schelling's
philosophy. Is this not perhaps at least one of the reasons of
the inferiority of the German drama ? It is surely the reason
of the depth and scope of Germanic poetry. Even in the mas-
terpieces of German literature it seems that there is mixed some-
thing indistinct, or rather mysterious, suggestive in the extreme,
which leads us to thought by the channel of the dream. But
who has not been struck by what, under a barbarous termi-
nology, there is of attractive, and as such of eminently poetical,
of realistic and at the same time idealistic, in the great systems
of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer ? Assuredly noth-
ing is further removed from the character of our French litera-
ture. We can here understand what the Germans mean when
they charge us with a lack of depth. Let them forgive us if we
do not blame their literature for not being the same as ours.
For it is good that it be thus, and for five or six hundred
years this it is that has made the greatness not only of European
literature, but of Western civilization itself; I mean that which
all the great nations, after slowly elaborating it, as it were, in
## p. 2612 (#172) ###########################################
2612
FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
their national isolation, have afterwards deposited in the common
treasury of the human race. Thus, to this one we owe the sense
of mystery, and we might say the revelation of what is beautiful,
in that which remains obscure and cannot be grasped. To
another we owe the sense of art, and what may be called the
appreciation of the power of form. A third one has handed to
us what was most heroic in the conception of chivalrous honor.
And to another, finally, we owe it that we know what is both
most ferocious and noblest, most wholesome and most to be
feared, in human pride. The share that belongs to us French-
men was, in the meanwhile, to bind, to fuse together, and as it
were to unify under the idea of the general society of mankind,
the contradictory and even hostile elements that may have existed
in all that. No matter whether our inventions and ideas were,
by their origin, Latin or Romance, Celtic or Gallic, Germanic
even, if you please, the whole of Europe had borrowed them
from us in order to adapt them to the genius of its different
races. Before re-admitting them in our turn, before adopting
them after they had been thus transformed, we asked only that
they should be able to serve the progress of reason and of
humanity. What was troublous in them we clarified; what was
corrupting we corrected; what was local we generalized; what
was excessive we brought down to the proportions of mankind.
Have we not sometimes also lessened their grandeur and altered
their purity? If Corneille has undoubtedly brought nearer to us
the still somewhat barbaric heroes of Guillem de Castro, La
Fontaine, when imitating the author of the Decameron, has made
him more indecent than he is in his own language; and if the
Italians have no right to assail Molière for borrowing somewhat
from them, the English may well complain that Voltaire failed
to understand Shakespeare. But it is true none the less that in
disengaging from the particular man of the North or the South
this idea of a universal man, for which we have been so often
reviled, - if any one of the modern literatures has breathed in
its entirety the spirit of the public weal and of civilization, it is
the literature of France. And this ideal cannot possibly be as
empty as has too often been asserted; since, as I endeavored to
show, from Lisbon to Stockholm and from Archangel to Naples,
it is its manifestations that foreigners have loved to come across
in the masterpieces, or better, in the whole sequence of the his-
tory of our literature.
## p. 2613 (#173) ###########################################
2613
GIORDANO BRUNO
(1548-1600)
ILIPPO BRUNO, known as Giordano Bruno, was born at Nola,
near Naples, in 1548. This was eight years after the death
of Copernicus, whose system he eagerly espoused, and ten
years before the birth of Bacon, with whom he associated in Eng-
land. Of an ardent, poetic temperament, he entered the Dominican
order in Naples at the early age of sixteen, doubtless attracted to
conventual life by the opportunities of study it offered to an eager
intellect. Bruno had been in the monastery nearly thirteen years
when he was accused of heresy in attacking some of the dogmas
of the Church. He fled first to Rome and then to Northern Italy,
where he wandered about for three seasons froin city to city, teach-
ing and writing. In 1579 he arrived at Geneva, then the stronghold
of the Calvinists. Coming into conflict with the authorities there on
account of his religious opinions, he was thrown into prison. He
escaped and went to Toulouse, at that time the literary centre of
Southern France, where he lectured for a year on Aristotle. His
restless spirit, however, drove him on to Paris. Here he was made
professor extraordinary at the Sorbonne.
Although his teachings were almost directly opposed to the philo-
sophic tenets of the time, attacking the current dogmas, and Aris-
totle, the idol of the schoolinen, yet such was the power of Bruno's
eloquence and the charm of his anner that crowds Aocked to his
lecture-room, and he became one of the most popular foreign teach-
ers the university had known. Under pretense of expounding the
writings of Thomas Aquinas, he set forth his own philosophy. He
also spoke much on the art of memory, amplifying the writings of
Raymond Lully; and these principles, formulated by the monk of the
thirteenth century and taken up again by the free-thinkers of the
sixteenth, are the basis of all the present-day mnemonics.
But Bruno went even further. He attracted the attention of King
Henry III. of France, who in 1583 introduced him to the French am-
bassador to England, Castelnuovo di Manvissière. Going to London,
he spent three years in the family of this nobleman, more as friend
than dependent. They were the happiest, or at least the most rest-
ful years of his stormy life. England was just then entering on
the glorious epoch of her Elizabethan literature. Bruno came into
the brilliant court circles, meeting even the Queen, who cordially
## p. 2614 (#174) ###########################################
2614
GIORDANO BRUNO
welcomed all men of culture, especially the Italians. The astute
monk reciprocated her good-will by paying her the customary tribute
of flattery. He won the friendship of Sir Philip Sidney, to whom
he dedicated two of his books, and enjoyed the acquaintance of Spen-
ser, Sir Fulke Greville, Dyer, Harvey, Sir William Temple, Bacon,
and other wits and poets of the day.
At that time — somewhere about 1580- Shakespeare was still serv-
ing his apprenticeship as playwright, and had perhaps less claim on
the notice of the observant foreigner than his elder contemporaries.
London was still a small town, where the news of the day spread
rapidly, and where, no doubt, strangers were as eagerly discussed as
they are now within narrow town limits. Bruno's daring speculations
could not remain the exclusive property of his own coterie. And as
Shakespeare had the faculty of absorbing all new ideas afloat in the
air, he would hardly have escaped the influence of the teacher who
proclaimed in proud self-confidence that he was come to arouse men
out of their theological stagnation. His influence on Bacon is more
evident, because of their friendly associations. Bruno lectured at
Oxford, but the English university found less favor in his eyes than
English court life.
